 03/01/05 Artforum
This month in Artforum: Critic, activist, novelist, filmmaker, Susan Sontag exceeded even that elastic and amorphous category of "public intellectual" so often linked to her name. To mark Sontag's passing last December at the age of seventy-one, Artforum asked Arthur C. Danto, Hal Foster, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Wayne Koestenbaum to reflect on her achievements and legacy, which challenge us to reconsider the role of the critic today. "Move on, Sontag urged. Leave the field untilled. Switch projects. Change hemispheres. Make a film. Direct a play. Fly to Hanoi. Nonspecialist, she refused restriction, scorned the limiting identity of expert."--Wayne Koestenbaum in "Perspicuous Consumption" Also in March: Art historian Michael Fried further develops his critical application of "Art and Objecthood" to contemporary photography--this time with a sustained examination of German photographer Thomas Demand's disquieting images, the subject of a survey exhibition this month at New York's Museum of Modern Art. "Demand's photographs depict places and things absolutely devoid, indeed systematically purged, of all traces other than those pertaining to the physical making of the models of those places and things by the artist. The question, however, is why Demand has sought to do this--what the point of so labor-intensive and in obvious respects so bizarre an endeavor has been."--Michael Fried in "Without a Trace" Plus: Known for his painting and sculpture, Thomas Scheibitz, who appears in the German Pavilion at this summer's Venice Biennale, reveals his private photographic practice in a new portfolio for Artforum. Collaborative team Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla discuss their work on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, the site of long-contested bombing drills by United States and NATO forces. And Carroll Dunham looks at the consistently "self-referential and self-complicating" output of unapologetically enigmatic artist Barry Le Va, whose retrospective is currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. "I imagine Le Va operating at the quiet center of a raging storm of data, but emphatically not the digital kind. His work isn't so much predigital as it is part of another continuum: artifacts of an imaginary society where people send rockets to the moon using the abacus rather than the computer." --Carroll Dunham in "Black Whole: The Art of Barry Le Va" And: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remembers friend and colleague Jacques Derrida; Yve-Alain Bois visits the Yves Klein retrospective at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt; Diedrich Diederichsen casts his eye on the Hamburger Kunstverein's "Formalismus," finding not a return to abstraction's purist past but its thoroughly muddied life in the present; Branden W. Joseph traces the diverse inspirations of Australian sound artist Michael Graeve; Michael Almereyda interviews filmmaker Jem Cohen on the occasion of the imminent release of his new feature Chain; Jack Bankowsky introduces fugitive "recording artist" Anthony Burdin; and Bob Nickas and Jutta Koether remember the godfather of goth art, Steven Parrino. 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 |
