Parkett’s 20 Years
Parkett
Franz West, Special Anniversary Edition for Parkett 70, 2004 Parkett vol. 70
Starting A Year of Anniversary Celebrations with
Christian Marclay, Wilhelm Sasnal, Gillian Wearing and Franz West
Parkett’s core objective since its inception 20 years ago, has been to work closely with contemporary artists. They, in turn, have consistently demonstrated their commitment in collaborations that contribute fundamentally to the quality and renown of Parkett.
For the 70 volumes published since 1984, the collaborating artists have designed and created some 150 editions and 62 inserts. An international roster of eminent writers has played an equally substantial role in defining the character of Parkett. Well over 1000 essays, translated from a variety of languages into English and German, testify to a sustained and dynamic transcontinental exchange.
To celebrate the 20 years, Parkett is publishing three booklets which are bound into each of the three anniversary issues. Entitled (IM)MATERIAL?, they debate the current concept of material in art, beginning in the new vol. 70 with Johanna Burton’s discerning essay on the “Ur “Material” Urge”.
Franz West follows suit, discussing not only his archaic relationship to materials but also their ability to embody or even define linguistic and psychological content. He deliberately stretches the concept of material to include not only matter that can be touched. What could be more appropriate, then, but Franz West’s Special Edition for this anniversary: a bookshelf with room for 20 years of Parkett, past and future.
It is a pleasure to imagine what it would be like to listen, with a similar, well-trained meta-view, to a birthday serenade by Christian Marclay while studying the contributions to this new volume of Parkett. Music as absence, but also as potential, is a salient aspect of Marclay’s work. Physical existence, along with the masks and clothing that disguise its vulnerability, is the stuff of Gillian Wearing’s oeuvre. Her masks are indeed frightening instruments whose existential tones bear witness to the shrill dissonance of identities. As Gordon Burns puts it, “We are all creatures of the electronic limbo”, a comment that might also be applied to Wilhelm Sasnal. Sasnals’s painting shows such an intense and uninhibited commerce between imagery, media and styles that the question of origin fades into distant obscurity. Wanting to trace his motifs or modes of representation to specific sources is, therefore, an antiquated enterprise. Nothing is fixed; everything flows into the darkly forbidding beauty of painting which is a law unto its own.
For more details on the content and the artists editions made for this new issue go to www.parkettart.com