Tim Griffin

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  print May 2022

  MAKE HISTORY

  PROBABLY THE OBSERVATION by Virginia Overton cited most often by writers came on the occasion of her 2013 exhibition at Switzerland’s Kunsthalle Bern. Wishing to tease out the artist’s thoughts on the found objects used for her sculpture, the exhibition’s curator, Fabrice Stroun, asked a relatively straightforward—if historically loaded—question: Is “a piece of wood looked at in a space consecrated for art . . . no longer the same piece of wood found on the side of the road”? It’s a reasonable line of inquiry, particularly given that Overton’s work suggests some nominal underpinnings, if only

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  print February 2022

  SYLVÈRE LOTRINGER (1938–2021)

  No one did theory like Sylvère Lotringer. Many recall his role in staging the watershed 1975 Schizo-Culture conference at Columbia University in New York, marking the arrival of that perverse chimera, “French theory,” on American shores. (Speaking at the symposium, Michel Foucault—then a young scholar largely unknown in the States—famously called Schizo-Culture “the end of the ’60s.”) He also presented the similarly outrageous Nova Convention in 1978, which made William S. Burroughs its cynosure. But mostly Lotringer, who died November 8 in Baja California, is remembered as the legendary instigator

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  print February 2022

  TIM GRIFFIN

  IF THERE WAS ONE THING Sylvère Lotringer despised, it was a professional. Or so I fully grasped once over breakfast in spring 2019, when we found ourselves at his Los Angeles home discussing the continuing “Yellow Vest” demonstrations in France—which, until the pandemic’s onset, had the uniquely alchemical capacity to bring together factions both far left and far right.

  “The Jacobins return,” I remember Sylvère saying quietly, a sly smile betraying his conviction that the distant past’s populist radicals never actually departed but had only been slumbering for a while. His wry visage didn’t

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  print October 2021

  MORE REAL THAN REAL

  THE IMAGE IS EPIC, iconic, alien: Massive rings of singed-orange fire belch from boiling waves that menace nearby drilling platforms, the conflagration dwarfing the vessels en route to douse its flames. And although the cause of the sublime blaze is concrete enough—a gas leak from an underwater pipeline in the gulf off the Yucatán Peninsula—the scene’s elemental yet unreal appearance would nevertheless prompt the New York Times to turn to cinematic description, opening its coverage by noting how the inferno “drew comparisons to Mordor, the volcanic hellscape from ‘The Lord of The Rings.’”

  Any

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  print Summer 2021

  NOTES ON NONPROFIT

  WHEN ARTFORUM generously invited me to contribute to the present issue considering the state of museums today, I suggested, as an alternative, a series of notes written from my perspective as director of the Kitchen, New York, a smaller nonprofit organization. While all arts institutions provide useful windows onto society more broadly—figured as they are within the latter’s contradictions, both economic and cultural—smaller institutions often embody such qualities in living proximity. Certainly, many prescient questions about how institutions may be oriented differently, and with an eye toward

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  print December 2020

  Tim Griffin’s top ten highlights of 2020

  Tim Griffin is executive director and chief curator of the Kitchen. In 2021, he will depart the organization after nine years and join the Ohio State University as a visiting professor in the departments of art history and English. Griffin is a contributing editor of Artforum.

  1
  JOHN BALDESSARI, IN MEMORIAM
  

  For me, even now, Baldessari is an artist hidden in plain sight. I remember visiting his retrospective at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna fifteen years ago and being staggered by the sheer volume of great unknown (to me) works he produced but left others to pursue: here a

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  books July/August 2020

  REALITY TESTS

  What Comes After Farce?, by Hal Foster. New York: Verso, 2020. 224 pages.

  SURVEYING OUR CULTURAL LANDSCAPE through the prepositional prism of after is hardly a new approach among critics and historians writing on art during the past quarter century. Yet, as articulated in the title of Hal Foster’s new book, the premise is newly intriguing for being tethered to—and eclipsed in blunt rhetorical force by—the sad comedy of “farce.” Here Foster borrows the term from Marx’s famous adage regarding the French bourgeoisie’s willingness in 1851 to cede democratic values to a second Bonaparte emperor some

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  print January 2020

  THE HERE AND NOW

  RECENTLY, I was in conversation with a film-studies professor who expressed consternation over her unanticipated difficulty convincing an incoming class of students of Dogme 95’s importance during the 1990s. More precisely, this professor was finding it nearly impossible to render for a younger generation just how transgressive this Lars von Trier–led group had been when it eschewed the staid conventions of studio camerawork in their films for an unfixed point of view. For these students, as she observed to me, it was simply proving hard to grasp how such technical shifts might ever have been

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  print Summer 2019

  OKWUI ENWEZOR

  FOR ME, few things in art have ever been so enjoyable as a conversation with Okwui—no doubt because however benignly one of our discussions began, it would inevitably end up, as he told me once while bursting out in laughter, “really trying to get to the bottom of things.” In part, I am certain, this pleasure arose just by virtue of a good relationship between editor and author; we worked together on different texts at Artforum and elsewhere for the better part of ten years. Yet the beauty of Okwui’s exhibitions was always underlined and enhanced by how their sweeping ambition—whether to “crack

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  passages September 2017

  Vito Acconci

  I FIRST MET VITO ACCONCI sometime late in the year 2000. By happenstance, a couple of local galleries had organized secondary-market exhibitions of his performance photography from the 1970s, and as a young writer then working for Time Out New York, I thought of going directly to the artist for comment. Acconci had recently forgone—or lost, depending on whom you asked—all gallery representation, having publicly declared his departure from the field of art for the disciplines of architecture and design. In light of such bold pronouncements (perhaps, I surmised, a polemical holdover from

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  print February 2017

  HBO’s The Young Pope

  NEAR THE BEGINNING of The Young Pope, Pius XIII—the freshly elected pontiff played by Jude Law in this new HBO series directed by Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino—is asked to meet with the Holy See’s chief marketing strategist, who expresses her deep alarm that the church has not yet begun production on its greatest piece of merchandise: the pope himself, whose likeness would generate billions in income through its appearance on everything from plates and ashtrays to key chains. Pius, however, refuses to allow his image to be exploited, suggesting that it cannot harbor such significance

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  print December 2016

  Tim Griffin

  IF ROLAND BARTHES had a standard practice when it came to his theoretical writings, it was to engage an earlier period’s cultural production whenever he sought critical perspective on the culture of his own time—utilizing the distance afforded by considering, say, Racine’s ideation of literature in order to gain a fuller sense of the prejudices hidden within (and the historical debts owed by) contemporary formulations of writing. Such a contrapuntal approach would afford a new generation of theorists and scholars a genealogical grasp of their chosen discipline—as well as of its