March 2010
This month in Artforum: “True Lies: The Art of Keren Cytter.” In just a few short years, the Berlin-based artist has produced a singular oeuvre comprising dozens of films, works of fiction, and, more recently, theatrical pieces created with her new company, D.I.E. Now (Dance International Europe Now). Curator, critic, and Artforum contributing editor Daniel Birnbaum takes stock of this prodigious figure—”one of the emblematic artists of our moment,” he writes—whose work is currently on view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and will appear this spring and summer at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm.“Cytter’s works are full of blatant conundrum and absurdity—a defining aspect of a sensibility that might be called kitchen-sink surrealism.” —Daniel Birnbaum
And: Assessing today’s widespread interest in photography and abstraction, curator Matthew Witkovsky proposes that we forge a new historical relationship between the medium and phenomenon, tracing a lineage that moves from early protagonists Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz and Vane Bor to contemporary artists Liz Deschenes and Moyra Davey.
“A new ‘short history’ of abstract photographs should form a counterpoint to the reigning emphasis on ‘pure photoreality’—paying emphatic attention to the body of the photographer and that of the viewer, each of which is animated by language, humors, and desires.” —Matthew Witkovsky
Plus: Since 2005, Kelly Nipper has been making and elaborating on her performance and video work Floyd on the Floor, whose components—some of which are included in the Whitney Biennial—and intensity are as expansive and volatile as the hurricane that first inspired her work. In this issue, Nipper discusses the project with Artforum.com editor David Velasco, who finds that it possesses both a freewheeling logic and “an air of the inexorable, even the apocalyptic.”
“The earth and the weather and the temperature keep going up. Things just keep getting hotter and hotter and eventually everything is going to start on fire.” —Kelly Nipper
And: Art historian Jeffrey Weiss examines with X-ray vision the Art Institute of Chicago’s upcoming “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917,” an exhibition using advanced technologies to gain new insights into this pivotal period of the artist’s career; Greil Marcus can’t take his eyes off Malcolm McClaren’s video Paris: Capital of the XXIst Century and its détourning of ads such as Jean-Luc Godard’s spot for Schick aftershave; curator Viktor Misiano contemplates the art of Olga Chernysheva against the backdrop of post-Soviet Russia; Jeff Kelley makes no apologies when reviewing Ai Weiwei’s “So Sorry,” the artist’s recent retrospective at the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Suzanne Hudson parses process and action in videos by Whitney Biennial artist Alex Hubbard; and James Quandt pays tribute to French New Wave filmmaker Eric Rohmer, who died at the age of eighty-nine this past January.
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