 03/01/06 Artforum
This month: A Newer Orleans. Even by the criteria of realism, we will have to be visionary, architect and historian Denise Scott Brown wrote last year of rebuilding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Prompted by Browns words to wonder what an art magazine might do to stimulate possibilities for such visionary realism today, Artforum teamed up with Reed Kroloff of the Tulane University School of Architecture and Aaron Betsky of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, to ask six prominent architectural firms--MVRDV, Huff Gooden, UN Studio, Morphosis, West 8, and Hargreaves Associates--for proposals to revitalize this city whose predicament is singular yet forces a reconsideration of urbanism, social exchange, and environmentalism well beyond the Big Easy. Can the art of building solve problems not created by nature alone but by the very ways in which we have historically tried to conquer its potent forces? And can architecture provide structures that are more logical, just, and useful than those seemingly ordained by the economic and political powers that be? --Aaron Betsky, Sites Unseen Plus: Robert Rauschenberg at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Art historian Yve-Alain Bois and painter Carroll Dunham take a walk through the most comprehensive exhibition ever of Rauschenbergs Combines, in which intricate patchwork surfaces and avian appendages continue to pose baffling riddles more than a half century after their inception. Rauschenberg declared that there is no fundamental difference between a collage element and a painted one. In his work, any atom--whether industrially, mechanically, or manually produced--is, as it were, in quotation marks. --Yve-Alain Bois And: The Peace Tower at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Regular Artforum contributor Jeffrey Kastner speaks at length with artists Irving Petlin, Mark di Suvero, and Rirkrit Tiravanija about the Peace Tower project--originally conceived and made by Petlin and di Suvero in 1966 to protest US involvement in Vietnam--resurrected this month in the Whitney Museum courtyard as part of the institutions grandest show. I hope the new tower will be as controversial as the old one was back then. Because, you know, indifference is almost worse than hostility. --Irving Petlin Plus: Isabelle Graw on Jutta Koether, a cult figure and outsider all wrapped up in one; David Joselit on Thomas Hirschhorns confrontational exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, and the Gladstone Gallery, New York; Michael Fried on the panoramic images of post-journalistic French photographer Luc Delahaye; Matthew Stadler on mercurial art group Red76; Barry Schwabsky on Daria Martin; Bruce Hainley on Liza Minnelli; Amy Taubin on Peter Watkinss Punishment Park; and David Antin on the early poetry of Vito Acconci. 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 more than 400 cities--at http://www.artforum.com/guide |
