Pier Luigi Tazzi

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  print May 1991

  OUTSIDE IN THE STORMS OF SPRINGTIME: THOMAS SCHÜTTE

  ARE WE SO CERTAIN THAT what the world, what “reality,” consists of is defined by its representations?

  And are we then so sure that those representations—linked to each other in systems that form in their turn a global supersystem into which all the smaller systems are integrated, and to which they all refer—are we sure that those representations are so determining that to omit them from one’s account of the world is to step outside “reality” into a void without substance or direction?

  Every organization of culture seems to have leaned toward an absolute system within which the world is inscribed,

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  print September 1990

  ROMANCING THE STONE: ULRICH RÜCKRIEM

  Sculpture is not science but extremely mechanical art, for it generates sweat and bodily fatigue for its maker; and simple measurements suffice for this artist. . . and thus in itself it ends up demonstrating to the eye that which it is, and on its own doesn't provide a sense of amazement to the contemplator.
  —Leonardo da Vinci, Quaderni (Notebooks)
  

  I BELIEVE THAT, from a historical distance, one of the legacies of the artists of the 1970s might be defined as education: education primarily in living and feeling, but also education in the practice of language and of expression. The 1960s saw

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  print Summer 1990

  Louise Bourgeois

  Louise Bourgeois is one of those artists for whom art is not the central concern of their endeavor. Many such artists have little to do with the history of art, with those rhythms by which we define movements and period styles, for they have already stepped outside history, and yet they endure it in various ways. It can touch them, wound them, or pass them by at a distance. They remain subjects, whose objects are bound to their subjectivity. Their efforts do not enjoy that autonomy from their author, which would allow their passage into history, as impersonal, absolute signs, as symbols of a

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  print December 1989

  Reinhard Mucha

  I have often seen Reinhard Mucha’s work as a built place to which one sometimes returns, over intervals of time. Just as one goes back to the same city, each time finding one’s experience of the place changed because of alterations that have taken place there, different itineraries chosen, or imponderable factors that have come into play—so, too, I have ventured through the streets of the “places” Mucha has created. For this reason, each time I document my reactions to the work, it is more a question of where I have been than what I have seen.

  The same is true now, two years after Mucha’s glorious

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  print September 1989

  MOTHERS AS A MOUNTAIN, A PROJECT FOR ARTFORUM

  There is no roar as mighty, unless it be that of the tempest-tossed sea, when with redoubled blows the north wind comes beating the waters’ foam between Scylla and Charybdis; or that of Stromboli, or Montgibel, when the sulfur flames enclosed within the earth burst forth and rip open the great mountain, blasting rock and earth into the air in a melee of vomited flames; or when the burning grottos of Montgibel give forth that element which in pain they held, and which wildly gives chase to every obstacle that defies its impetuous furor.

  Thus is my desire, and drawn by the force of it, eager to

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  print May 1989

  IF YOU GO DOWN IN THE WOODS TODAY: FORTUYN/O'BRIEN

  THE LANDSCAPE, THE TERRITORY, the earth, like a plane always extending beyond view, offer up to us an infinite and variegated expanse: a universe studded with infinite dispersed points. Or something like one of those great ancient narratives, in which each individual tale is a small precious stone mounted in a large piece of jewelry; or a vast library composed of many, many volumes, some of which contain secret knowledge and others exquisite delights—in the end, the book of the world, in which everything is written and in which no word is ever the last word. Therefore, it will always be a question

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  print March 1989

  Alfredo Pirri

  The installation of Alfredo Pirri’s Gli Effeminati Intellettuali (The effeminate intellectuals, 1988) at the Scuola di Guerra Aerea (School of aerial warfare) consisted of two monitors showing a videotape of an inventory of materials, while actor Sandro Lombardi read a passage written by Yukio Mishima. The whole thing lasted for only 20 minutes. The piece was decidedly minimal, not so much in terms of its compositional simplicity, but in terms of its carefully calibrated effect.

  First of all there was the site, which was excellent. The Scuola di Guerra Aerea, which occupies a vast area of the

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  print November 1988

  Marie-Jo Lafontaine

  Uprooted from their original supporting structures, Marie-Jo Lafontaine’s video sculptures showed a certain weakness here, to use the artist’s own terminology. Yet in a distinctive way, these works again touched a sensitive cord of emotions even though they were reduced to fragments and multiple filmic units. Certain pieces, especially Le rêve d’Héphaistos (Hephaistos’ dream, 1982) and Le métronome de Babel (Metronome of Babel, 1984–85), suffered from their missing environments, and A las cinco de la tarde (At five in the afternoon, 1984) was less persuasive here than in its original form, which

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  print November 1988

  Gino de Domicicis

  Italy is the land of saints, poets, and navigators. The saint is a model of salvation. The poet celebrates the beauty of the world through art. The navigator discovers terrae incognitae. Gino De Dominicis plays all these roles at the same time.

  In this display of the artist’s work, a single spotlight, placed in the middle of a supporting structure, provided the only illumination. The light was turned toward the spectators, who entered near a wall upon which a huge drawing had been rendered. The drawing is a variation on one from 1980, Urvasi e Ghilgamesh: two profiles facing each other, one

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  print October 1988

  Ettore Spalletti

  The light of Rennes has the hardness and the transparency of a diamond. Nearly every day, sudden, brief showers of rain cleanse the atmospheric impurities that appear as white zones, alternately polished or padded. People move about in this light like small, utterly discrete bodies, without auras, dry with the fragile and rigid essence of insects encased in boxes. The substantial sentimentality of this picture—à ce cadre—possesses the quality that is attributed to kitsch. The province of Europe is kitsch, and kitsch is one face of a medal, a medal which is used as money; art is the other,

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  print September 1988

  DEAR HARRY . . .

  I visited the Hamburger Bahnhof in West Berlin on a clear April morning, accompanied by Harald Szeemann and by Jan Vercruysse, who was there to take a look at the space he had been assigned in this ghost of a train station. The building was empty, except one area where some workers were preparing an installation for I don’t know what event. The evening before, Szeemann had gone over the plan of the building with me in great detail, walking me through his vision of the richly varied show; it was a sumptuous story, but at the same time crossed by veins of nostalgia. Nostalgia for what, I wasn’t

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  print Summer 1988

  SEDUCTIVE LURES: SHIRAZEH HOUSHIARY

  WE'RE GLIDING, AIRBORNE, OVER a nomadic encampment in the desert: now the tents are royal, now barbaric, now small and elegant, now vast and multipartite. Or are we above a valley of temples dedicated to alien divinities? Or are we gazing down at the flowering of plants on the mirroring surface of a still pool? Or maybe some subterranean fire has provoked eruptions through the earth, thrusting matter upward into chance formations, now cooled by the air into marvelous crystals. Or are these objects strange machines of war left scattered behind by a mysterious army marching toward another victory,