 11/01/05 Artforum
This month an Artforum doubleheader tackles the bold new work of cover artist Isa Genzken. First, in All Things Being Equal, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, author of a seminal early text on the artist, traces the shifts in Genzkens diverse practice from her arrival on the scene in 70s Germany to her most recent show in New York this year. Characterizing her initial ambition to confront the challenges presented by American Minimalism as herculean, Buchloh argues that the artists current practice exists (happily) in a psychotic state marked by the dissolution of all previously established criteria. Then, in the latest installment of Artforums In Conversation series, Genzken talks with her friend and fellow artist Wolfgang Tillmans, about the current state of their work, their lives, and the intersection between the two. Last summer was really liberating because of my spontaneous decision to spend it in Berlin. Suddenly I had the feeling that a new time in my work had started. Its not that I changed something radically, but continuing had become possible. --Wolfgang Tillmans And: In Shapes of Things to Come, artist Carroll Dunham surveys the work of Elizabeth Murray on the occasion of her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Situating Murrays distinctive idiom within the context of painting from the mid-60s to today, Dunham explores a body of work whose singularity makes it difficult to categorize but likely to reverberate far into arts future. Murrays exhibition at MoMA should resonate deeply with the legions of artists-in-formation who are positioned to grasp her relevance for our elusive cusp of a moment, sifting out what of the twentieth century is useful in the twenty-first. --Carroll Dunham Plus: In on the Ground Floor: Avalanche and the SoHo Art Scene, 19701976 Short-lived but massively influential, the New York art magazine Avalanche made every issue count. Much more than a straightforward document or newsletter, it was an active part of the nascent downtown alternative scene, an artists magazine that aimed to empower its subjects and politicize the reception of their work. Gwen Allen revisits the journal that Robert Pincus-Witten called, back in its heyday, more interesting than Artforum. Also: In the latest 1000 Words, Scott Rothkopf introduces artist Josiah McElhenys discussion of his ambitious new works An End to Modernity and Conceptual Drawings for a Chandelier, 1965, both currently on view in Part Object Part Sculpture at the recently re-opened Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. McElheny describes his reimagining of the Sputnik-glam lighting fixtures at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, a project in which specific theories about the birth of the universe meet more abstract notions of pure style--all within a monumental sculpture comprising roughly six thousand parts. Also in Artforums December issue: History Channel: The Art of Mathias Poledna Pamela M. Lee examines the Los Angelesbased, Austria-born artists interrogation of the discontinuity of sound and vision in popular music and cinema. Poledna, she writes, repeatedly draws on such diverse strands of political and pop-cultural materials to investigate the multilayered and polyvalent dimensions of cultural representation, specifically those that assume the status of official history. And, in A Gesture and a Pose: The Cinema of Mikio Naruse, Audie Bock assesses the long and influential career of this iconoclastic Japanese master, the director of more than eighty films, many of them distinguished by their celebration of the challenges of everyday life. All that, plus Bruce Hainley introduces the art of Patrick Hill; Norman Bryson reviews W. J. T. Mitchells new book What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images; and Malcolm Turvey rates two new DVD anthologies of early avant-garde film. In addition, Greil Marcus discusses MAD magazine founder Harvey Kurtzman; Tom Vanderbilt surveys pixelated architecture; Matthew Stadler assesses the state of time-based art at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts recent festival, T:BA:05; Jennifer Allen meets Buenos Airesbased architectural collective m7red; and Margarita Tupitsyn visits Russia! at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Visit Artforum online at http://www.artforum.com To subscribe, visit http://www.artforum.com/subscribe Visit artguide--Artforums free directory to the international art world, listing art fairs, auctions, and current gallery and museum shows in over 400 citiesat http://artforum.com/guide |
