previews May 2003

Robert Filliou

“I have never joined any group. I dislike -isms. In art, in life, I reject theories. Manifestoes bore me. The spirit in which things are done is what interests me,” wrote Robert Filliou to George Maciunas in 1970, providing a road map for his own myriad productions.

“I have never joined any group. I dislike -isms. In art, in life, I reject theories. Manifestoes bore me. The spirit in which things are done is what interests me,” wrote Robert Filliou to George Maciunas in 1970, providing a road map for his own myriad productions. Filmmaker, “action poet,” sculptor, and Happenings maestro, the Europe-based Filliou (1926–87), for all his avowed independence, also collaborated with the likes of Marcel Broodthaers, Dieter Roth, and Daniel Spoerri. Organized by independent curator Sylvie Jouval for the three cosponsoring institutions, this large retrospective

print April 2003

Haim Steinbach

TIM GRIFFIN: In that famous 1986 Flash Art roundtable, “From Criticism to Complicity,” you distinguished yourself from the “Pictures” generation with respect to your interest in “desire.” How did you mean that?

HAIM STEINBACH: First of all, that panel came out of nowhere. The Flash Art people picked a few artists and set up the symposium at Pat Hearn Gallery. Maybe a week before it happened, somebody at the magazine, or at the gallery, called me and said they were organizing this discussion and asked if I were interested. I said a lot of things that evening I still believe; but there are some

print April 2003

THICK AND THIN: A ROUNDTABLE

As the 1970s gave way to the ’80s, the slogan “return to painting” was as often heard in the discussion around contemporary art as the counter-mantra, the “death of painting.” In the last issue of Artforum, a group comprising mostly critics and art historians opened our two-part examination of painting in the ’80s and beyond with a look back at the death-of-painting debate that raged at the beginning of the decade. For this month’s pendant discussion introduced by ROBERT STORR, we assembled a second panel, largely made up of painters and curators—and asked them to tell us where painting has

print February 2003

OPENINGS: ALEKSANDRA MIR

To get a sense of New York–based artist Aleksandra Mir’s ongoing project HELLO, recall the final scene of Fellini’s 8 1⁄2. The film’s narrative unhinges in front of the camera, as all the characters walk onto an abandoned set and join hands in a long celebratory chain, every one of them connected: friends, enemies, passing acquaintances—figures large and small, having inhabited scene after scene or having appeared only for an instant—a moving frieze of players who made each other possible.

Exhibited in numerous incarnations since 2000, HELLO is so many of these chains. Mir collects thousands of

print January 2003

“Drawing Now”

Drawing has a genealogy, suggests MoMA guest curator Laura Hoptman: Variously appreciated and dismissed in different periods, the medium has played a changing role for artists and audiences to go along with the changing contexts of art production. For example, she asserts that Florentine connoisseurs prized the Renaissance masters’ primi pensieri, while “presentation drawings” were highly valued in the eighteenth century. Fast-forwarding a couple centuries, she tells us we’ve witnessed another significant shift in just the past few decades. When Conceptualism and Minimalism came to the fore,

previews January 2003

Robert Whitman

Robert Whitman is freshest in museumgoers’ minds for his film of a woman projected into a running shower in the Whitney’s traveling “Into the Light” exhibition. His first major retrospective gives a fuller view of the artist, who helped found Experiments in Art and Technology with Robert Rauschenberg during the ’60s. Works with lasers, film, and performance appear alongside more traditional pieces, including Whitman’s suite of “Dante Drawings.” Accompanying publications are similarly multifaceted: A catalogue includes essays by David Joselit and curator Lynne Cooke on Whitman’s multimedia and

previews January 2003

Micropolitics: Art and the Quotidian, 2001–1968

While globalism is often a key word for curators describing changes in today’s social landscape, “Micropolitics” takes a more personal approach, looking at the everyday formation of subjectivity. Curators Juan Vicente Aliaga, María Corral, and José Miguel G. Cortés have organized the exhibition in three parts linked to historical moments; the first covers the years 1989 through 2001. (Subsequent portions backtrack to span 1980–89 and 1968–80.) Among fourteen artists dealing with all things intimate are Chantal Akerman, Ann-Sofi Sidén, and Ilya Kabakov—whose bathroom installation alludes to the

previews January 2003

I Moderni/The Moderns

Was postmodernism merely a parenthetical blip within the continuing arc of modernism? That’s the big question raised by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in her ambitious curatorial debut at Castello di Rivoli. She has selected twenty-five contemporary artists who, she says, revisit utopian ideological tenets of modernism or who are concerned with themes of perception and formal composition resembling those considered during the technology boom at the beginning of the twentieth century. If the artists are mostly familiar—included here are Tacita Dean, Liam Gillick, Julie Mehretu, Sarah Sze, and Piotr

print January 2003

Tim Griffin

WADE GUYTON HAS REFERRED TO HIS SCULPTURES AS drawings in space. No doubt this assertion has something to do with his three-dimensional works’ frequent status as studies. (Indeed, in the past couple of years Guyton has made a number of pieces individually titled Fragment of Sculpture the Size of a House, each corresponding to a structural component of the suburban home the artist intends to construct and paint completely black, sometime in the future.) Yet his statement has as much to do with the physical character of the objects, which can seem crudely superimposed on space, at once underscoring

print January 2003

Eddo Stern

Among the more provocative essays published after September 11 was Slavoj Žižek’s “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” which suggested that Americans would have to renegotiate their relationship with spectacular culture after Al Qaeda attacks forced the rupture of our seamless, unbearably light, endlessly entrancing mediascape. Whatever has happened along these lines in mass culture, it’s worth asking whether any such shift has taken place in New York art production, particularly in pieces most obviously inflected by today’s agitated political climate. For example, Thomas Hirschhorn’s stunning

print December 2002

Doug Aitken

Much has been made, in recent criticism, of the significance of placing photographic images on sculptural objects. But what sort of potential exists for artists making images as sculptural objects? Doug Aitken’s installation on, 2002, seems to do something along those lines, establishing a situation in which projections border on assuming physical presence in three dimensions. Four circular screens are mounted along a central axis in a darkened mirrored room: Two are placed on opposite ends of the gallery while two others sandwich a column in the middle of the space. The same moving image appears

print November 2002

“Ironic/Iconic”

Likening an artist’s work to Chagall’s is hardly most people’s idea of a compliment. Yet it’s hard to ignore a positive connection when looking at Easter Realness, 2002, a painting by Kehinde Wiley, one of three artists in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem featured in the exhibition “Ironic/Iconic.” The majestic canvas is turned forty-five degrees so that its corners touch the floor and ceiling. Two men, one wearing a pink and the other a yellow suit, seemingly drift across a decorative green-and-red ground strewn with roses. Both men float upside down while looking directly at the viewer,