Philip Auslander

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  previews January 2008

  Trisha Brown

  Dubbing this the “Year of Trisha,” the Walker will celebrate the doyenne of postmodern choreography with an exhibition that charts a course from Brown’s fabled days with the Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s to the present. Stage works will be complemented by pieces like Man Walking down the Side of a Building, 1970—which is just that—and those that involve interaction with installations housed in the galleries, where forty-five of the works on paper Brown has made throughout her career will also be shown. Initially, Brown used drawing as a means of working

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  previews September 2007

  Performa07

  In keeping with the philosophy of Performa’s founder and director, RoseLee Goldberg, author of the standard history of art-world performance, the second edition of this biennial focuses on live works by more than seventy artists, most known primarily for their work in other media.

  For three lively weeks in November, performances will be popping up all over New York at some thirty venues, including the Judson Church, historic home of the Judson Dance Theater; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In keeping with the philosophy of Performa’s founder and director, RoseLee Goldberg, author of the standard history of art-world performance, the second edition of this biennial focuses on live works by more than seventy artists, most known primarily for their work in other media. Expect to see events juxtaposing film,

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  print September 2007

  Genevieve Arnold

  Genevieve Arnold (1928–2005) was the kind of person for whom terms like doyenne and grande dame were invented. Little known outside the Southeast, she was an important presence on the Atlanta art scene for more than fifty years. A recent retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia reflected her cosmopolitan perspective and her implicit refusal to be labeled a “southern” or “regional” artist. It also chronicled the struggles of a midcentury painter to reconcile the twin poles of modernism: figuration and abstraction.

  Arnold’s first canvases, from the late ’50s and early ’60s, look

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  print March 2007

  Matt Bryans

  Robert Rauschenberg has said of his Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953, that he initially erased his own drawings but “figured out that the erased drawing had to be from a real work of art” to have significance. Matt Bryans’s drawings, produced by erasing images printed on pieces of newspaper recovered from the streets of London, suggest an opposing principle: that erasure can serve as a means of transfiguring humble found material into art.

  The way Bryans erases is notably different from Rauschenberg’s approach: Whereas the latter sought to eradicate de Kooning’s marks, Bryans does not so much

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  print October 2006

  Kalup Linzy

  So, anyway, rich and hunky Harry proposes to Taiwan . . . you know, Taiwan, the gay African-American lip-synch performance artist? And poor Taiwan doesn’t know what to do. He loves Harry, but he’s not sure he can commit. He’s not sure what his family will think, what his church will think. He talks to his sister on the phone, he calls a psychic, he calls his mother, who calls her mother. . . . He just can’t decide!

  These are the days of our lives. Actually, this is one day in the life of Taiwan, a character that artist Kalup Linzy portrays on video and in live performance. In Conversations wit

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  print April 2006

  Joe Sola

  Jacques Lacan once observed, “In the human being, virile display itself appears as feminine.” The title of Joe Sola’s recent exhibition, “Taking a Bullet,” first mounted at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, hints at a similar paradox. Sola evokes memories of Hollywood genre films, suggesting that the person offering up the ultimate sacrifice is most likely to be either a man’s male buddy or a femme fatale. The gesture itself—the refusal to get out of harm’s way—combines stereotypically masculine action with stereotypically feminine passivity, and this dialectic is at the heart of Sola’s

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  print October 2005

  David Haines and Joyce Hinterding

  Standing before a dazzling projected image of a placid alpine scene disrupted by an avalanche, I am aware of two mysterious presences above me to the left and the right, spotlit to cast elaborate linear shadows on the floor. Looking up, I see two very large television antennae that seem perfectly capable of pulling in live signals from a camera trained on a distant mountain to cover this newsworthy event.

  This isn’t what was really going on, of course. The “photorealist” image in David Haines and Joyce Hinterding’s installation Purple Rain, 2004, first shown at that year’s Bienal de São Paulo,

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  print March 2005

  Claire Corey

  The digital images on my computer’s desktop are not reproductions of paintings by Claire Corey but rather examples of the templates from which her canvases are produced. Corey composes her images by forcing various design software packages to do things they were not intended to do: Many elements of her visual vocabulary originated as glitches and errors. The resulting digital compositions become “paintings” when she prints them in ink on canvas. The artist has said she is engaged in “a dialogue with the history of painting” by means of technology. In particular, she reexamines the tenets of

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  print January 2005

  John Largaespada

  Minneapolis-based photographer John Largaespada works in the traditional genres of landscape and portraiture. But since his images are constructed from appropriated and invented sources digitally sutured together, neither the places nor the people he depicts really exist. With apologies to Walter Benjamin, the work of art has now entered the Age of Photoshop. Largaespada explores his medium’s liminal state by looking back to what photography once was and forward to what it may yet become.

  In this large exhibition, Largaespada showed four untitled series of works. One was made up of landscape

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  print November 2004

  Chris Verene

  Raised and educated in Atlanta, Chris Verene found his voice in the late 1980s on the city’s bohemian gender-bending scene. Verene exhibited photographs and appeared in other guises: as a drummer with the Rock*A*Teens and a drag performance artist. “From Galesburg to Atlanta, 1986–2004,” organized by the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, showed that his sensibility as a photographer is rooted in performance.

  Verene’s photographs from the mid-’90s to the present in which he portrays Cheri Nevers, his female alter ego, and “The Baptism Series,” 2002 (produced in collaboration with Christian Holstad),

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  print November 2004

  Hussein Chalayan

  At the start of Hussein Chalayan’s video installation place to passage, 2003, a small, futuristic vehicle zips down the ramp of a deserted London underground parking garage, hovering just above the pavement. The vehicle’s sole occupant is a thin, lithe woman wearing a white unitard and skullcap. Traveling from London to Istanbul at hyperspeed, she eats, meditates, and rests, the pod providing her with nourishment and waste disposal. En route she passes through a bleak wintry landscape and an equally dismal urban environment dominated by billboards. At the end of her trip she whisks exhilaratingly

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  print May 2004

  Anne Truitt

  The American artist Anne Truitt, who was included in “Black, White and Gray” (1964), “Primary Structures” (1966), and other exhibitions that helped define Minimalism, is best known for her pillarlike wooden structures, which she continues making to this day. This exhibition, cocurated by Margaret Shufeldt, the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s associate curator of works on paper, and Emory art-history professor and frequent Artforum contributor James Meyer, draws attention to Truitt’s early works on paper—a portion of her oeuvre that has seldom been seen in public—and argues for its centrality to her