PARKETT vol. 78
New issue with Ernesto Neto, Olaf Nicolai, and Rebecca Warren, and more
Parketts unparalleled explorations and investigations of important international contemporary artists continue in vol. 78, featuring Ernesto Neto, Olaf Nicolai, and Rebecca Warren.
Also in this issue of Parkett: the changing strategies of Erwin Wurm, by Abraham Orden; Andro Wekuas world, by Tirdad Zolghadr; and Marjorie Perloff on the recent vogue of Vito Acconcis pioneering conceptual poetry. Cumulus texts by Kate Fowle and Simon Grant, insert by Anne Collier.
Ernesto Netos stretched-Lycra installations envelope the viewer in a fog of sheer fabriccushions for the gaze, droopy sacks suspended between abstraction and figuration, always animate, always erotic. Their milky pigmentation and skin-like surfaces leave children ecstatic and adults slightly hypnotized. Philip Ursprung, in the pages of this issue, refers to one of Netos springy biomorphic creations as a scenario where history is suspended and replaced by an eternal present, in which all spatial and temporal distinctions are dissolved. Other texts on Neto are by Yuko Hasegawa, and Paulo Herkenhoff.
Theres a touch of the baroque to Olaf Nicolais ever-blossoming conceptual work. Like much avant-garde art, his remains set on ideals of integrating art with the functionality and pragmatism of design. But with Nicolai, theres always a touch of the absurd if not interventionist. His perfume for trees; public park in the shape of Duchamps Three Standard Stoppages; his slyly indulgent ice skating platform cleverly installed upon the gallery floor; his publication of the pattern for a Prada suit (there for the taking); his very own postage stampall are deliberately distorted re-inventions of things that already exist. But a most remarkable recent piece goes one step further to explore the non-existent: a taxidermied unicorn peacefully seated in the middle of the gallery. It even has a built in thermostat and warms as you approach. Texts on Nicolai are by Anne von der Heiden, Charles Esche, and Vincent Pécoil.
With the hands-on rigor of Giacometti or Rodin, Rebecca Warren digs her hands into one of sculptures most classical materials, clay. But her results are anything but traditional. Her lumpy life-size figures in plasticine possess a fetishized sexuality and comic humor. As Neal Brown writes in the pages of this issue, Warrens clay sculptures are not only worked gently, lovingly, but fingered and improperly squeezed into something that is compulsively-chaotic-masturbatory-fat-ugly-disfigured-repressed-incontinent-excretory-bestial-bulemic His list, believe it or not, goes on. Other texts on Warren are written by Martin Herbert, and Catherine Lampert.
For more details and to view the new editions by these artists, as well as for subscriptions and back issues, please go to www.parkettart.com .
To view selected texts in Parketts signature design, please go to www.parkettart.com/texts.htm .
