 02/03/05 Artforum
This month in Artforum: "The New MoMA." For many, MoMA will always be the Museum of Modern Art, indisputably worthy of the definite article preceding its name. And so the museum's reopening on its seventy-fifth anniversary invites renewed consideration not only of architect Yoshio Taniguchi's renovation and expansion but also of curating and collecting today. At stake is the very way in which the story of modern art is told. Providing readers with the most thorough analysis to date of the rebirth of the grand dame of modernist museums, architectural critics Mark Wigley and Cynthia Davidson join art historians Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh to consider the institution's redesign and the reinstallation of its permanent collection. Plus, artists Todd Eberle and Louise Lawler offer visual perspectives of the museum in a striking series of photographs unlike any seen elsewhere. "With the new building, the issue is not the usual one in museum design of whether the architecture competes with the artworks, but rather how the building contributes to the narrative that the curators wish to convey. The only artwork that really matters here is the institution itself."--Mark Wigley, from "425 Million Steps from Intimacy to Elegance" "It has become more difficult to identify what, in that moment of sublime distinction that the encounter with a work of art supposedly provides, our 'love of art' actually loves most."--Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, from "Our Own Private Modernism" Also in February: Two authors shed light on Dan Flavin. Caroline A. Jones explores the passions underlying the cool surface of Flavin's work in her take on the artist's retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, while Hal Foster offers his reflections on the master of the "hot rod," wondering whether Flavin's legacy contritbuted to the "catastrophe" of Minimalism in contemporary art. "Sentiment, longing, grief, and ecstasy are packaged with an almost brutal reductiveness, an aggressive compaction of feeling that is nowhere more savage than when it is directed at the artist himself."--Caroline A. Jones, from "Light Speed" And: Jennifer Allen introduces Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno's discussion of their new animated cartoon series on art and copyright law, "Briannnnnn and Ferryyyyyy," while Mark Godfrey considers emergent complexities in photography's shifting partnership with sculpture, taking on artists from Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, and Douglas Huebler to Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney, Giuseppe Gabellone, Shirley Tse, and Simon Starling. "Photography and sculpture have entered a more complex phase of their relationship, folding over each other, reversing positions, flipping back and forth, the one becoming the other."--Mark Godfrey, from "Image Structures: Photography and Sculpture" Plus: Lynne Cooke remembers the late Agnes Martin, Daniel Birnbaum reports on the turmoil whipped up by German theatrical provocateur Christoph Schlingensief, Tom Vanderbilt fights the power with media pranksters the Yes Men, and Jeff Rian reports on the aggressive media and governmental reactions to Thomas Hirschhorn's "Swiss-Swiss Democracy" project at the Swiss Cultural Center (CCS) in Paris. And don't miss Sven Lutticken on Rirkrit Tiravanija at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, or T.J. Demos on "Experiments with Truth" at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia. Visit Artforum online at http://www.artforum.com To subscribe, visit http://www.artforum.com/subscribe Visit our free online directory of international museums at http://www.artforum.com/museumfinder |
