film March 2008

Werner Herzog

WERNER HERZOG HAS SPENT decades deconstructing the ossified categories of documentary and fictional film, incorporating real feats into feature films (most famously, of course, hauling a ship over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo [1982]) and introducing fictional elements into documentaries. This would seem to make him of great interest to contemporary art circles, which have for the past decade and more been deeply invested in such endeavors. But although he has a large following among artists, Herzog’s status in the art world has always been shaky. He has never spoken a language, either verbal or

print November 2007

Mario Garcia Torres

The work of Mario Garcia Torres traces and restages half-hidden histories and lost moments. For example, the slide piece What Happens in Halifax Stays in Halifax (In 36 Slides), 2004–2006, explores the aftermath of a “secret piece” by Robert Barry, executed by students in Halifax in 1969; neither the black-and-white images nor the subtitles give direct clues as to the nature of this piece, which only exists, if at all, in the participants’ memories. Even while taking part in the current wave of reinvestigation, and sometimes fetishization, of historical Conceptualism, Garcia Torres is noteworthy

books September 2007

Gerald Raunig

REVOLUTIONS ARE SHORT-LIVED, ephemeral events that shatter the continuity of history yet persist in acts of remembrance—official or alternative, pro or contra, systemic or incidental. However, the recent surge in “revolutionary” pop-cultural iconography, from the ubiquitous Che to the imagery and slogans of May ’68 and the Red Army Faction, seems designed to sabotage, rather than perpetuate, remembrance. In contrast to the nostalgia culture of the ’70s and ’80s, as analyzed by Fredric Jameson, which focused on pilfering the popular culture of earlier decades, today’s nostalgia industry also

print September 2007

Sven Lütticken

THE TWO COMPONENTS of Thomas Demand’s exhibition at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini—part of the Venice Biennale’s ever-widening slipstream—constituted something of a study in contrasts. One presented a new photographic series, and the other combined a single photograph with documentation and, for the first time, one of the artist’s sculptural models.

The series, “Yellowcake,” 2007, is business as usual for Demand, whose methods are by now well known: Working from found images, the artist creates cardboard replicas of real-world settings, which he then photographs; he exhibits the photos but typically

print Summer 2007

“After Neurath”

The last few years have seen a growing interest in the work of Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath (1882–1945), who, after World War I, developed a system of “pictorial statistics” that he later dubbed ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education). In collaboration with the artist Gerd Arntz, who executed the graphic symbols as linocuts, Neurath devised a method for making complex statistical information more easily accessible. Neurath was convinced that statistics could help enlighten people as to their social conditions, and that they were an essential tool for progressive

print March 2007

“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni”

THE FIRST and until now only major retrospective of the Situationist International was organized by the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1989. Hotly contested, it was hindered by Guy Debord’s boycott and by the withdrawal of his films from circulation. Now, almost thirteen years after the strategist’s demise, a show currently in Utrecht and traveling to the Museum Tinguely in Basel next month brings to light some interesting new materials, courtesy of Debord’s old allies and his widow. The exhibition addresses the history of the SI with an assortment of objects, collages, printed matter, and a few

print March 2007

BLACK BLOC, WHITE PENGUIN: RECONSIDERING REPRESENTATION CRITIQUE

IN HELL FROZEN OVER, 2000, a video by the artistic collective Bernadette Corporation, images of fashion shoots replete with languishing, vacant-eyed models alternate with footage of Sylvère Lotringer—theorist and founder of the influential press Semiotext(e)—standing on the banks of a frozen lake and holding forth on Stéphane Mallarmé. Quoting from the poem “Le Vierge, le vivace, et le bel aujourd’hui” (The Virgin, the Vivid, and the Beautiful Today), with its evocation of flight arrested or frozen (“the lost hard lake haunted beneath the snow / by clear ice-flights that never flew away!”),

print March 2007

Aernout Mik

Aernout Mik’s exhibition “Raw Footage/Scapegoats” consisted of two projects. Raw Footage (all works 2006), a two-channel video installation, is the artist’s first work employing found footage. Mik edited material shot during the war in the former Yugoslavia, gathered from the archives of Reuters and Independent Television News (ITN), into a 39-minute double projection. We always see more or less related footage on both screens; in one segment, for instance, dead bodies are dragged and carried in different ways by one or more people, resulting in a perverse typology of corpse displacement. In

print March 2007

Barbara Visser

The title of this survey, “Vertaalde werken/Translated Works: Barbara Visser 1990–2006,” refers to the Dutch artist’s adaptation of her site-specific works to a new venue and format. Working with the Swiss designer Laurenz Brunner, Visser rethought the presentation of numerous photographs, videos, posters, installations, and ephemera from throughout her career. Perhaps the most eye-catching of these translations are the enormous black-and-white images that wallpapered one of the former Documenta 9 pavilions that house Museum De Paviljoens. One of these wallpaper blowups showed a poster from

books December 2006

THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

ELEVEN SCHOLARS, CRITICS, AND ARTISTS CHOOSE THE YEAR’S OUTSTANDING TITLES.

JOHN BALDESSARI

Kierkegaard once said that his goal in writing was to make life difficult for people. I read Edward Said’s On Late Style (Pantheon) because its title suggested that it might offer insights into my life’s pursuit of trying to understand art. The subtitle of the book is Music and Literature Against the Grain. The photo of Said on the back cover shows his shirt collar slightly askew, which I chose to understand as an unintended message.

There are no artists (in the narrow sense) discussed, but the book contains

print November 2006

Joep van Liefland

Since 2002, Berlin-based Dutch artist Joep van Liefland has installed more or less ephemeral franchises of his Video Palace in places ranging from parking lots to art galleries. Although no two incarnations are identical, they always include shelves of old VHS cases for films from a variety of exploitation genres, as well as monitors or projections that show either a montage of appropriated footage or an “original” Video Palace production, usually some sort of quasi-porn starring van Liefland. Each Video Palace is accompanied by posters and slogans that tirelessly proclaim the stunning quality

print September 2006

Ryan Gander

In much modern art, the beholder is “given” suggestive elements—such as a waterfall and illuminating gas—without much guidance toward an authoritative interpretation. Ryan Gander presents himself as a fervent proponent of this open-ended aesthetic: In a catalogue text accompanying his 2005 installation The Alpinist, Gander explained that the visitors were “given” a year (in the future), a character (an Alpinist), five hundred “completely alien” objects (seemingly made from concrete), and, lastly, moonlight. Gander closed his statement by asking “What would you give in return?” It is a question