previews January 2006

Juergen Teller

His first major show in France comprises some eighty photographs. Expect to find iconic images of Yves Saint Laurent and Kate Moss alongside prints of weeds poking out of Albert Speer’s Nuremberg ruins.

To fashion consumptives, Juergen Teller is best known for his Marc Jacobs–inspired collaborations with the likes of Cindy Sherman and Charlotte Rampling. And while Teller is not alone in raising the stakes in the conceptual project of disguising art as commerce, his ability to create images whose brutality, tenderness, humor, and seriousness endure regardless of context signals a unique and singular vision. His first major show in France comprises some eighty photographs. Expect to find iconic images of Yves Saint Laurent and Kate Moss alongside prints

print October 1998

OPENINGS: JANE AND LOUISE WILSON

Though identical twins Jane and Louise Wilson grew up wanting to be artists, when it came to choosing schools they opted to go their own ways: Jane remained in Newcastle, while Louise was off to Dundee. Years later, with graduation approaching, the sisters each mounted the customary degree show. The results: identical to the detail. Less the pure product of the telepathic simultaneity sometimes attributed to twins than willful artistic gesture, their mirror shows animated the dilemma at the core of their work. Both of and not of a single mind, the Wilsons share much, including their practice as

print February 1997

FLASH TRACK: JUERGEN TELLER PHOTOGRAPHS VIVIENNE WESTWOOD

STYLE-MAKING IMAGES HAPPEN WHEN VISIONARY DESIGN MEETS INNOVATIVE PHOTOGRAPHY. EACH MONTH IN THIS SERIES, ARTFORUM PRESENTS A COLLABORATION BETWEEN A PHOTOGRAPHER AND A DESIGNER WHO SHARE A SPECIAL AFFINITY.

REVISIONING THE SANITIZED BODY of commercial fashion, Juergen Teller’s images suggest a postcoital aesthetic, the messy pleasures of a sexuality with consequence. A recent series for the magazine supplement of Suddeutsche Zeitung shows a naked Kristen McMenamy, her shoulder bruised from dislocation, her flesh as mottled and pale as an anemic Soutine. In one shot a tampon string peeks from between her thighs; the name “Versace” scrawled across her behind is framed by a sloppy red-lipstick heart. In another, our attention is drawn to a fringe of undepilated hair breaking out from an unflatteringly

print November 1996

FLASH TRACK: NAN GOLDIN PHOTOGRAPHS MATSUDA

Nan Goldin once declared her “aspiration was to be a fashion photographer”; her goal, “to put the queens on the cover of Vogue.” Denizens of the other side, Ivy, Misty, Colette, Bea, Crystal never did make it to the cover. Theirs may have been a theater of affect, of lip gloss and excess, but the glamour was real: it rode shotgun with them in the backs of cabs, in foil sachets, in the exotic accoutrements of a third sex. And for a generation of photographers sick of overlit and unattainable ideals, these were indelible images. The gender game may have veered the other way—toward the liminal

print November 1995

Jim Dow

What taxonomical photography has in common with lepidopterology, poisonfrog collecting, and train spotting is that it, too, can be a means of nurturing an idiosyncratic obsession. It combines the scientism of typological investigation with the more or less obvious charm of an eccentric interest cultivated over time.

Jim Dow’s recent photographic series of British storefronts, “Corner Shops of Britain,” 1983–93, offers a glimpse into this kind of obsession nurtured over a decade. Forty 8-by-10 color contact prints depict the façades of family-run businesses, once keystones in the social and

print October 1995

OPENINGS: TOBA KHEDOORI

ANNOUNCED WITHOUT FANFARE OR disclaimer, Toba Khedoori’s immense but delicate works join the art party as reluctant guests enticed out of solitude. Her slow deliberations, inscribed as they are on empty expanses of paper, take uneasy position within the throng and jostle, where intimacy comes protected by the thick prophylactics of in-talk and irony. Standing aside from the slippery prattle of “discourse” and the quips of gallery-opening repartee, their allure is that of the lone stranger glimpsed from across a crowded room. Familiar in imagery yet emotionally distant, they are the conversations

print September 1995

Felix Gonzalez-Torres

It seems that everyone—with the exception of the vain and the nakedly ambitious artist—hates the midcareer retrospective. The origins of the age of prematurity can be traced to exhibitions such as the one mounted by Jane Livingston and Marcia Tucker in 1972 at the L.A. County and Whitney museums documenting the career of then-31-year-old Bruce Nauman. Since then, the increasing emphasis by art dealers on "judicious placement”—a euphemism for thrusting the work of younger artists onto those collectors who sit on museum committees—coupled with the expanding ranks of art administrators, has firmly

print December 1995

Neville Wakefield

☝ CHELSEA PEARL

Tucked away at Dia, some distance from the stirrings of Soho sediment (or do I mean sentiment?), GERHARD RICHTER’s Atlas was, it seems, too distant, too big, too complex, or perhaps, one suspects, too German, to attract the attention it deserved. Certainly, with more than 4,000 images amassed over 31 years it taxed the attention spans and retinal capacities of those of us fattened on predigested platitudes cased in singular images. But Atlas realized, as the United Nations has not, that there is no representation without taxation. A prism through which perception has been splintered

print December 1995

Keith Edmier

For Keith Edmier’s recent show, the window of the gallery had been altered to accommodate a single form, Nowhere (Insideout) (all works 1995), convex on the inside, concave on the outside, which consisted of an acrylic cast that pushed forward into the gallery, ulcerating the interior space with a gorgeous, incandescent amethyst glow. The diagonal fissure across its center could, in the psychosexual reading that finds a phallus in every protrusion and a vagina in every concavity, have suggested a wound, but the central fissure’s spiky, crystalline structure soon laid such interpretative impulses

print May 1995

Sarah Lucas

If nothing else, Sarah Lucas’ sometimes abrasive, invariably funny art puts paid to the myth of British decorum. Delivered with the visual equivalent of a belch, Lucas’ work turns the tables on her American audience, placing the dainty tea cup in the hands of those who espouse the politically correct. Though the “fuck off” quotient that previously afforded her work its Doberman bite may be somewhat diluted in her recent show, this in no way signals that she has surrendered to the protocols of identity politics. Rather, in redirecting attention from the expletive to the sculptural, this latest

print April 1995

Cindy Sherman

For more than a decade, Cindy Sherman has delivered what many have regarded as one of the most sustained and eloquent disquisitions on the morphology of the image and the structure of desire. By contrast, the response to Sherman’s most recent work has been nothing if not circumspect. Admittedly, as a group the latest series of photographs lacks a clear agenda; its language is polyglot and its subject matter elusive: Sherman draws on Christian iconography, the legacy of Surrealism, the cult of the grotesque, and horror-movie schlock. If Caravaggio is here, along with Hans Bellmer, and Joel-Peter

print March 1995

Tatsuo Miyajima

In its descent from science to popular culture, chaos theory has not fared particularly well. Coopted by a rave generation who like their ecstasy served on a bed of fractals, chaos has, for the vast majority, been virtually reduced to this graphic leitmotif. Greeted at first with wide-eyed wonder, fractal images now grab our attention with the force of someone else’s baby pictures. While the fractal-generating crowd aggresively promote their fuzzy paisleys as if they themselves had discovered DNA, the nontechno literati make do by rehearsing half-baked theories usually focused on the incredible