September 2008
This month in Artforum: “Because We Must: The Art of Michael Clark.” Grounded in classical ballet but informed by London’s post-punk art and music scenes, English choreographer Michael Clark has been subverting performance’s orthodoxies for more than three decades. Following the New York debut of Clark’s three-part magnum opus, “Stravinsky Project,” this past summer—his company’s first US appearance since 1986—Artforum asked curator Catherine Wood; artists Jonathan Horowitz, Jutta Koether, Silke Otto-Knapp, and Cerith Wyn Evans; as well as longtime Clark dancer Kate Coyne to discuss his importance.
“Grown from the language of ballet during the discordant 1980s, Clark’s compelling, asymmetrical aesthetic is haunted by the ranked ghosts of fascist militarism—uncomfortably echoed in television images of civil unrest—and injected with the energy of music video and the period’s flamboyant androgyny.” —Catherine Wood
And: A tribute to Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). Arguably the most influential figure in postwar American art, Robert Rauschenberg worked at the intersection of media new and old, and touched the practices of many—artists, musicians, dancers, and even engineers. In this issue, art historians Thomas Crow, Branden W. Joseph, and Barbara Rose join Trisha Brown, Merce Cunningham, Brice Marden, and Robert Whitman in celebrating the life and work of the artist, who died in May at the age of eighty-two.
“In judging the worth of an artistic idea, one useful rule of thumb, to this day, is to ask oneself whether Rauschenberg had already thought of it.” —Thomas Crow
Plus: Artforum looks ahead to the fall season with previews of fifty shows opening worldwide, from Elizabeth Peyton in New York and Martin Kippenberger in Los Angeles to Francis Bacon in London and Christoph Büchel in Kassel, with first glimpses of curator Okwui Enwezor’s 7th Gwangju Biennale and Sol Lewitt’s unprecedented wall-drawings retrospective at Mass MoCA.
Also in September: Kenneth Anger talks with Thomas Eaton about his new film, Ich Will! (I Want!), a “poetic, ironic reverie of Hitler Youth”; and scholar Eric Rentschler revisits the films of seminal New German Cinema director Alexander Kluge.
In addition: Michel Houellebecq adds final thoughts on the late French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet; Richard Deming reviews avant-garde film scholar P. Adams Sitney’s new book, Eyes Upside Down; reporting from China, Jeff Kelley finds dissent in artist Ai Weiwei’s post-earthquake photographs; Steven Henry Madoff fleshes out “service aesthetics”; Graham Bader sees socialist realism in Jeff Koons’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Colin Lang weighs in on Imi Knoebel’s 1977 suite of paintings, 24 Farben, at Dia:Beacon, New York; Sarah K. Rich muses on couplings in Amy Sillman’s recent drawings and paintings; Rachel Churner surveys “Life on Mars” at the 55th Carnegie International; Ann Temkin pays tribute to Anne d’Harnoncourt; and artist Josef Strau counts down his Top Ten.
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