print September 1993

Bobbies and Buddhists and Boone, Oh My!

MADE BY ARTISTS for other artists as a creative act, classic art magazines like the Blaue Reiter Almanac and Documents offered rich verbal and visual resources and satisfied a perennial need. Today, with large-scale marketing as the aim, even the smallest of art magazines demands quite a different structure. Names suggest an ideal viewing space: Parkett, Frieze, the defunct Spanish Arena (with its overtones of bullfighting), the equally extinct Wolkenkratzer (Skyscraper). Others denote meetings, like Artforum itself, or the Belgian Forum. Combined, they offer a scenario of vision and judgment.

print May 1990

English Drag

WHEN ALASTAIR SIM WAS APPROACHED to play two roles instead of one in the 1955 Ealing comedy The Belles of St. Trinian’s, he hesitated. One was Clarence Fritton, an unscrupulous racehorse owner. The other was his sister Millicent, the headmistress of a girls’ boarding school. Thankfully, the hesitation was short-lived. Heavy-busted, broad-shouldered, Sim minced his way through the movie wearing an elaborately marcelled wig, pince-nez, buckled shoes, drop earrings, any amount of pearl and jet chokers, fur everywhere, and a skirt that looked like a converted hammock. “I suppose I’m just a foolish,

print October 1987

THINGS THAT GO BUMP

LISA LIEBMANN

Discombobulated and cacophonous, with a populist bent, Documenta 8 was almost entirely free of the lofty airs that surrounded its elegant, smug predecessor in 1982, and that to some degree hovered over many of the more ambitious and large-scale international exhibitions in the five years since. Absent, for instance, was any sense of highbrow intellectualism or formalism, and gone as well the sense of giddy congruence with recent commercial, critical, and promotional dicta. Painting, for one, seemed relatively scarce, and while classicism and mannerism, minimalism and expressionism,

print September 1987

Neil Bartlett And Robin Whitmore, A Vision Of Love Revealed In Sleep

“Poor little devil, what will become of him?” asked Dante Gabriel Rossetti about Simeon Solomon, in his youth a celebrated painter and socialite, later the forgotten man of Pre-Raphaelitism, an alcoholic who sold matches, worked as a sidewalk artist, and died in a London workhouse. After the police caught him having intercourse with a man twice his age in a public urinal, Solomon’s circumstances grew steadily worse until his death 32 years later, in 1905. “My behavior has been perfectly disgraceful,” he admitted cheerfully when he was sentenced. Yet nothing resembling an apology ever passed his

print May 1987

SOMETHING MAGIC

THE VERY MENTION OF Robert Mapplethorpe’s name evokes powerful images and issues—the expressions on faces prepared to meet the faces that they meet, the white man’s choice of the black male as model, the woman bodybuilder, the foregrounding of the phallus, the tableau of sexual ritual in which needs are formally laid out but left unexplained. In the reactions they cause, these presentations practically divide the world. By now the compliments have all been paid, the objections voiced. They slipped quickly off our tongues. But now that we’re used to Mapplethorpe’s iconography, now that our system

print February 1987

Julian Opie

In his famous driving-instructor monologue, Bob Newhart was intrigued when his new pupil told him she had already been taught the two ways of stopping a car. Overcome with curiosity, he asked her about the second way. Yes, he had to admit, throwing the car into reverse is another way of stopping it.

Julian Opie may be too young to remember the joke, but he has certainly grasped the principle. He has stopped working in his old manner by contradicting as many of its previous characteristics as possible. Brushy painting has been replaced by spraying, primary colors have mutated into cosmeticized

print October 1986

THE LEAP OF FAITH

EARLIER THIS YEAR, A VISITOR to the National Art Gallery of New Zealand, in Wellington, would have seen Colin McCahon’s Practical Religion: the Resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha, 1970, hanging in the entrance hall. Because McCahon’s paintings remain in museums or private collections in New Zealand; because almost all the published criticism of his work has emerged from within his own country; even, perhaps, because he has rarely ventured beyond his native land, the canon of “world art" never includes him, and his greatness is acknowledged only there. But if even a reputation supported

print October 1986

Pablo Picasso

“Later he used to say quite often, paper lasts quite as well as paint and after all if it ages together why not, and he said, further, after all, later, no one will see the picture, they will see the legend of the picture, the legend that the picture has created, then it makes no difference if the picture lasts or does not last. Later they will restore it, a picture lives by its legend and not by anything else.” The discovery of so many “lost” sketchbooks by Pablo Picasso only confirms that what he told Gertrude Stein about masterpieces applies equally well to the reputations of the people who

print September 1986

Richard Wentworth

Richard Wentworth’s work depends on two positions about our relationship to objects. First, that it is governed by an acknowledged grammar of small moves performed unconsciously with things near to hand; second, that it is constantly modified by words. Each of his sculptures exists at an intersection of modes of communication, distinguished for convenience but mingled constantly in daily life. Though Wentworth may draw on it, he is not trying to imitate the vernacular. Indeed, one of his recurring scenes is the rift between high and low, art and life, function and use. These may be contrasted,

print Summer 1986

“Antidotes to Madness?”

When John Cleese kicked and hit his own car in the BBC series Fawlty Towers and ripped a public telephone off the wall in Clockwork, we laughed while secretly admiring his courage. Machines designed to extend our sensoriums have a stubborn streak of their own. The trouble is, they are here to stay, and we have no choice but to learn to live with them. Ree Morton, whose drawings (six of which were included here) suggested the title and the poetic underpinnings for the selection of installations in “Antidotes to Madness?,” regarded art as white magic. Can it help us control our living spaces?

print January 1986

Simon Lewty

In Simon Lewty’s new drawings the paper is so stained and ripped that it looks like old parchment. Near the edge of each sheet a “frame” has been drawn, and within it other black lines enclose irregular doodles. Perhaps they are bodies, since as they shift from cartographic projection to shallow three-dimensionality these blobs acquire a semblance of life. Baggy yet weightless, they occupy an equivocal, compartmentalized space where size, direction, and gravity no longer hold sway and images take precedence over (yet may be undermined by) language.

Invented words, which promise more meaning than

print December 1985

Terry Atkinson

Since leaving the Art & Language group in 1975, Terry Atkinson has devoted himself to becoming a contemporary version of a 19th-century history painter—in his case, a painter of the history of the working classes. By the early ’80s he was relying on increasingly complex methods. His “Postcards from Trotsky,” 1982, involved impossible scenarios, combining material from a variety of periods and employing titles so long they seemed to subvert the images themselves. The "postcards,” which had maps to explain them, were executed in what Atkinson called a “botched” style—his own visual equivalent of

Stuart Morgan