December 2012–January 2013
The work specially created by Werner Herzog for the Whitney Biennial gives Jens Hoffmann the opportunity to enter into a conversation with the great German film director on the relationship between art, both contemporary and otherwise, and the cinema.
It is unusual for a filmmaker at the height of his powers to announce his retirement in his mid-50s, as Béla Tarr did a few years ago, but the stark finality of The Turin Horse (2010) suggests he means it. Dennis Lim met Tarr to see where the filmmaker has focused his energies since then.
Thomas Bayrle’s world consists of a reality similar to what we see recorded on holographic film, in which each detail contains the whole. The conversation between Bayrle and the young Oliver Laric reveals how repetition lies at the base of both artists’ practice, as well as a remarkable affinity of thought.
100 YEARS OF READYMADE:
Mousse celebrates the centenary of the birth of the readymade with a symphony of authoritative voices which bring to light some crucial issues concerning the mechanisms that govern the relationships between use value and exchange value. Today as yesterday.
Walking us through some of the less obvious of Duchamp’s works, Julia E. Robinson seeks to shed new light on the first case of post-medium art, which changed the very definition of the work of art.
What do Nietzsche and Duchamp have in common? Is it just their revaluation of values which, for the German philosopher, coincides with the will to power? Boris Groys traces out an intense analysis of Duchamp’s most famous artistic practice, arriving at stunning conclusions.
The It is what it is. Or is it? exhibition curated by Dean Daderko takes stock of the readymade and the changes it has been through as it nears its 100th anniversary. Here, Daderko traces the path of the readymade from a formal and conceptual provocation to one that addresses a diversity of social, temporal, and political issues.
Like all of us, Haim Steinbach has been choosing and arranging objects for his entire life. However, he also makes sculptures that interfere with the order of things. Here, with Anthony Huberman, he talks about why his objects are not “readymades.”
Jessica Morgan examines two moments of the readymade. Firstly, its aesthetic indifference and criticism of the bond between art and economics. Secondly, the way the readymade acted as a fuse for the explosion of art into the countless fragments of the post-avant-gardes and subsequent developments.
Alexander Nagel places the readymade into a wider conceptual and historical framework. What, he asks, do relics and readymades have to do with one another? The point of asking this question is not to reduce one to the other, but to learn to see both afresh.
Andrea Lissoni and Filipa Ramos rethink the readymade as an approach that has cropped up throughout the history of filmmaking and film theory, since the dawn of the medium. The appropriation, reuse, recycling, and reworking of footage all play an important role in its cinematic and artistic rendering.
Luther Price first became known in the late 1980s for his Super 8 films and performances, and in the past decade has been making new 16mm films out of old footage, heavily reworking the original images and optical soundtracks. He tells Ed Halter about his most recent handmade slides, created by arranging scraps of film, hair, dust, insects and other detritus between glass plates.
Xavier Le Roy and Bojana Cvejić met in Paris in October to discuss the re-staging of Retrospective for the Musée de la Danse in Rennes. They examine how aspects of exhibition and choreography make this new work, originally conceived for visual arts spaces, transform the experience in theatre and museum alike.
In NICE TO MEET YOU: Steve Bishop tells Laura McLean-Ferris about his work, which plays with the senses in a volume of air; Adam Carr examines with Meriç Algün Ringborg the meaning of linguistic translation, identity and the notion of self in her practice; Ian Cheng speaks to Ruba Katrib about the digital translation of events and information in his work.
REPORTING FROM:
NEW YORK – The Romanian artist Andra Ursuta reformulates the identity of the Balkans in a complex manner, mixing folklore and tradition with conflictual visions of female identity. In a conversation with Cecilia Alemani, the artist talks about the hostility of her sculptures.
PARIS – Anna Colin explores with artist Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc the theme of absence, and the obsession and representation of violence as examined in his work, which uses a process of extraction and excavation to bring forgotten personalities and cultural materials back into the realm of popular history.
LONDON – Masculinity and sexuality, as investigated by the Surrealists in their conversations, lie at the heart of Gerard Byrne‘s complex installation in Kassel this year. The artist tells Tirdad Zolghadr about his methodology of selecting sources on the basis of the inherent potential of language.
BERLIN – Bart van der Heide, the Berlin-based artists Simon Denny, AIDS-3D (Nik Kosmas and Daniel Keller), and Timur Si-Qin set up a virtual roundtable to talk about the artistic use of social media, leading to some interesting considerations including turning an online community into their studio.
For LOST AND FOUND Andrew Berardini retraces the artistic journey of Robert Overby who, originally a successful designer, came to art relatively late in life and attempted to capture the emotional aspect of art, which appeared to elude the Minimalists of his day, or which they themselves appeared to elude.
Andrew Hunt hosts a conversation with Scott King and Jeremy Deller on the subject of popular public art, the gigantism of public projects, the ability to revitalise so-called cold spots with popular actions, and the power of collaboration with other artists to work out these ideas to the full.
British artist Keith Arnatt (1930–2008) is mostly associated today with either late 1960s, early 1970s conceptual practices concerned with the dematerialization of the art object, or loosely with British documentary photographers. Pavel S. Pyś traces the notions of erasure and disappearance underscoring the artist’s practice.
In their work, Magali Reus and Nicolas Deshayes are both attracted to a state of liquidity that causes their works to waver between representation and abstraction, and desire for contact and repulsion. The artists enter into conversation about the relationship of their work with the body.
Bouchra Khalili explores a series of questions about the way reality is experienced by political minorities. As the artist explains to Adnan Yildiz, these ways vary, becoming complex and stratified, as in Speeches, where five émigrés recite fragments from different authors, as though they were their own, selecting pieces that are close to their own ideas.
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