STEPHEN PRINA

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  print December 2015

  the Best of 2015

  TO TAKE STOCK OF THE PAST YEAR, ARTFORUM ASKED AN INTERNATIONAL GROUP OF ARTISTS TO SELECT A SINGLE IMAGE, EXHIBITION, OR EVENT THAT MOST MEMORABLY CAPTURED THEIR EYE IN 2015.

  YUJI AGEMATSU
  Silicone snake, West 42nd and Broadway, New York, July 29, 2015.
  

  RON NAGLE
  This picture was taken along the waterfront in San Francisco’s Mission Bay area. This area is extremely scenic, with old battleships and boats. I go there frequently to walk my dog, relax, and enjoy the fantastic views. The pier is used to store various components for seasonal parades or events. This grouping of floats for the Pride
  

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  print December 2009

  Stephen Prina

  STEPHEN PRINA

  1 Louis Andriessen, Workers Union (Ojai Music Festival at the Libbey Bowl, Ojai, CA) Beneath a canopy of stars, a small mixed ensemble begins a propulsive melody of fixed rhythm and approximate pitch. Gradually, more and more musicians come forward, until nearly everyone who’s taken the stage all weekend joins in a thunderous culmination of the festival, forcefully drifting off into the moist California deep.

  2 Scott Benzel, Blak Bloc for String Quartet and Feedback (Numero Deux) A pulse, the product of emphatic bowing, is the field across which small differences play out and weave

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  print October 2004

  A Roundtable

  “JEFF KOONS MAKES ME SICK.” The words are Peter Schjeldahl’s, and the occasion was a review in the SoHo weekly 7 Days, back in the ’80s, before Koons was quite the museum-certified star he is today. In the course of the write-up, Schjeldahl would turn his conceit around, explaining how undeniable, unstoppable, finally essential the experience of the artist’s work was for him. What makes Koons’s art simultaneously so toxic and so compelling? And why is it both institutionally embraced and yet seen by many as an art of diminishing returns, a symptom of all that is wrong with culture today? Koons

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  print February 2003

  THE HAPPY END OF KIPPENBERGER’S AMERIKA

  MARTIN KIPPENBERGER SPAWNED A WEALTH OF ART-WORLD legends in his truncated career. His practice seemed specifically designed to maintain a steady buildup of anecdotes, many of which continue to circulate today, six years after his death. On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Kippenberger’s birth, this month sees the opening of a major retrospective of his entire career at the Museum für Neue Kunst ZKM in Karlsruhe, with additional stops in Vienna and Eindhoven. Though his influence in Europe will be debated and discussed for a long time to come, there is no question that he is one of

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  print February 2003

  Stephen Prina

  It was taken as a given that Kippenberger was a prototypical German bad boy and that he was the eye of the storm. Upon closer examination, it’s much more systematic. I almost resist using that term because there are very rigid ideas about what constitutes the systematic these days. In a text I wrote on Kippenberger for the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, I refer to Piero Manzoni’s Base of the World. I think that Martin was engaged in a similar project. Everything was fodder for his work. This stance was not opportunistic; it was a profound aspect of his work that everything

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  print April 2000

  ROBERT BRESSON: 1901–1999

  On December 22, 1999, Robert Bresson, the director of thirteen lapidary feature films, died at the age of ninety-eight. Over the course of a career that spanned half a century, Bresson honed a laconic, intensely personal style that has influenced filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard to Jim Jarmusch. Here, novelists Gary Indiana and Dennis Cooper and artist Stephen Prina assess the significance of Bresson’s art in their own lives and work, while film historian David Bordwell discusses the French master’s place in the history of cinematic style.

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  print April 2000

  Devil’s Advocate

  What’s wrong? Open the door! I was scared. What happened? / What’s wrong? Open the door! I was scared. What happened? / You can’t lie underwater like on a bed and then just wait. / You can’t lie underwater like on a bed and then just wait. / It’s impossible. Wait for what? / It’s impossible. Wait for what? / Idiot! Do you know the mess you can get me into? / Idiot! Do you know the mess you can get me into?

  THESE WORDS ARE THE LYRICS to a song I wrote in 1997 entitled “The Devil, Probably.” A year earlier I had generated the text that would become those lyrics by isolating thirty-five frames of

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  print December 1999

  Stephen Prina

  1. Rodney Graham (“Verwandlungsmusik”) The provisional expanded to the scale of a monument.

  2. Cortical Foundation Especially its 1998 “Beyond the Pink” festival, which included works by Yves Klein, Emmett Williams, La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, and others.

  3. My Bloody Valentine (The Roxy, LA, 1992) When the locked-groove cadential chord of the penultimate number approached the duration of twenty minutes, it was clear that a new genre of popular music had been invented that evening.

  4. Gastr del Sol (Mirror Repair) My introduction to that loose confederation of musicians variously grouped