April 2007 in Artforum
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Do the likes of Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami address popular and consumer culture critically or affirmatively–or do they want to have their cake and eat it too? Given his superior bona fides as both a workaday shop owner trying to make ends meet (working within industry rather than offering any Warholian performance of it) and a committed political activist (taking his oppositional stance to the streets rather than simply hanging it on a wall), Bayrle presses Pops seemingly inherent dichotomy more forcefully than the best of his peers. –Christine Mehring
Although American museums generally rely far less on public funding than the Tate, it is nearly impossible to imagine a single one staging an installation as politically inflammatory as this. –Yve-Alain Bois
Also in April: Film Noir. Artist Carroll Dunham discusses the films of Kara Walker, currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, suggesting that three short works made by the artist since 2004 brilliantly weave together the various threads of her practice.
Walkers films display a dizzying inclusiveness, in which her activities come home to roost in a kind of ur-form, both self-evident, when seen in this context, and unnerving in their potential. –Carroll Dunham
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