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This month in Artforum:
Thomas Eggerer on painting after painting in the work of Monika Baer:
“Negation is the starting point of a complex and opulent process.”
–Thomas Eggerer
Ellsworth Kelly in retrospect—with Yve-Alain Bois, Richard Serra, Ann Temkin, Mary Heilmann, Molly Warnock, and Terry Winters:
“For Kelly, looking was serious work but also a kind of intoxication.”
–Ann Temkin
1000 Words: Maggie Lee talks about Mommy, 2015, a film-as-zine homage to the artist’s mother:
“Memories were more valuable than actual things when I was working.”
–Maggie Lee
Claire Bishop on Peter Fischli and David Weiss:
“Fischli and Weiss offer no grand critique of the conditions their art apprehends so presciently, and for that we should be grateful.”
–Claire Bishop
“I want to show how the homoerotic imagination found a form in Hollywood.”
–Thomas Beard
Manuel Borja-Villel on the crisis of cultural property:
“A contradiction inherent to neoliberalism explains why the free movement of goods and citizens in the 21st century is accompanied by its opposite—the raising of barriers against their circulation.”
–Manuel Borja-Villel
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen on sex and art from Fragonard to Manet:
“From bordello scenes of putti ministering torches to the ‘powder keg’ of the female sex to the listless fingering of an unlit cigarette—how far we have traveled toward an impoverished vocabulary for sexual desire and pleasure.”
–Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen
James Quandt on the return of the Academy ratio in contemporary cinema:
“Academy ratio has become a signifier of last-stand authenticity—though, ironically, digital formats make its use and the play with aspect ratio in general far easier.”
–James Quandt
Openings: Catherine Taft on Laeh Glenn:
“In spite of the velocity and immateriality suggested by these paintings, they are resolutely concrete things, created in a slow, considered manner.”
–Catherine Taft
And: Charlotte Birnbaum on The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, Tom Sellar on Forced Entertainment, and Nasser Rabbat on Artist and Empire
Plus: Tony Pipolo on Alexander Sokurov’s Francofonia, Alan Licht on Matmos’s Ultimate Care II, Joan Ockman on the writings of Josep Lluís Sert, and artist and vocalist Sahra Motalebi shares her Top Ten
