Issue #25
September October 2010
In issue 25:
_Richard Jackson is like the circus. His wall paintings come and go. Dennis Szakacs joins the artist to retrace a long career and a singular practice that has reformulated Action Painting and reinterpreted more or less venerable works of art history as eccentric performance tableaux.
_Jonathan Griffin has been roaming Los Angeles for a couple of months, discovering the city’s liquid essence. A material that Aaron Curry, Matthew Monahan, Patrick Hill, Thomas Houseago and Sterling Ruby have managed to solidify.
_For PART OF THE PROCESS Kirsty Bell approached Matthew Buckingham with the question “what is a moral community?”, in relation to the artist’s project Subterranean Pass Way.
_Following the thread of a German collective of medical patients that rejected doctors and medicine in the 1960s, and of the texts of Franco Basaglia, Dora García has developed a tentacular project on marginal status as an artistic position.
_Mark Morrisroe left an extraordinary legacy: portraits of a community based on desire. This universe of tormenting beauty – that dissolves on film with the same languid inevitability as the existence of its creator – gets revisited by Isla Leaver-Yap for PORTFOLIO.
_Dieter Roelstraete admits to having an uncontrollable love for poetry. American poetry, offspring of the philosophical pragmatism of the new world, concentrates on everyday life: entire poems about sinks, thriving on open spacing. And art criticism? Like poetry, it manages to unearth metaphors and references in those “spaced” objects known as artworks…
_The refraction, duplication aÓnd inversion of objects in unusual perspectives trigger a new vantage point on everyday life, transforming it into an extraordinary experience. While the Berlin-based artist Kathrin Sonntag writes new formal principles of organization of the real, Fionn Meade helps us to decipher this parallel, specular universe.
_ In HARK! Jennifer Allen reflects on the “love of hate” through which different artists play an apparently sadistic role that engages the viewer in identification between the author and the work.
_Ana Teixeira Pinto meets Renzo Martens to understand the idea of poverty as a generator of wealth that lies behind his film Episode 3.
_Jessica Morgan opens the first of ten dossiers of the project “Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating” edited by Jens Hoffmann, supported by Fiorucci Art Trust together with Mousse Publishing. Reflection that investigates the multifaceted physiognomy of the curator. The illustrations were selected by Urs Fischer.*
_While most cultural products symbolize a political commitment, freeing the viewer of the urgency to “do”, the recent work by Massimo Grimaldi “does”. Alessandro Rabottini examines the reasoning behind a very costly work, the tomb of realism and cradle of a new type of artistic research, involving pragmatism, the readymade and love.
_Luigi Fassi met with Alejandro Cesarco, the New York-based artist who investigates the creative possibilities of classification and translation.
ARTIST PROJECT: Linder converses with Martin Clark
Reporting from…
NEW YORK: Cecilia Alemani talks with Erika Vogt about the film Secret Traveler Navigator, recently shown at the Whitney Biennial, and the processes behind the creation of her videos.
LONDON: Many works by Amalia Pica make use of instruments of public communication; with the artist, Michele Robecchi explores our need to talk.
BERLIN: Esperanza Rosales converses with Michael Stevenson, an artist from New Zealand, halfway between an investigator and a historical researcher.
PARIS: Ziad Antar, the Lebanese artist, divided between ancient Sidon and Paris, brings out the link between food and conflict. Francesca di Nardo met with him during the making of his new project that investigates the representations of power.
LOS ANGELES Andrew Berardini finds it impossible not to see the works of Mateo Tannatt as true sets where the remains of sculptures that have survived the minimalist feast are coopted in new narratives.
Plus…
_Bart Van Der Heide talks with Tobias Madison about his method that combines artistic capital with business acumen to identify unexpected complexities of contemporary art production.
_Starting with the Conceptual, a kind of artistic intention has taken form that operates starting with reflections on the contractual, economic and social relationships that regulate the mediation of art. Daniel McClean explores this “legal movement” of artistic production.
_Claire Fontaine has selected texts on the idea of autonomy for REPRINT.
_For LOST & FOUND Elena Volpato has recovered a fundamental work of The Art Workers’ Coalition.
_Carmen Antelo enters the home of Dorothy Iannone for SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET.
_Michael Krebber & Ruri O’Connell conversed amidst the hovels of western ghost towns and the remains of a child’s torero costume headed toward new political battles.
_Andrea Viliani invites Kitty Scott to talk about the idea of curatorial “unprofessionalism” for CURATOR’S CORNER.
* In the international edition of Mousse and for subscribers.
New books are out from Mousse!
Mousse Publishing is happy to present new titles together with recent publications at the next London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery, 23-26 September.
_The X Initiative Yearbook. Cecilia Alemani, ed. Part anthology, part diary, the book comes as a testament of one of the most important and original initiatives that came to embody and define a new approach to art exhibiting and fruition during the recent recession, one that certainly did not spare the contemporary art world. The X Initiative Yearbook is essential reading to browse retrospectively one dense year of art at 548 22nd West St, and to know more about some of the most significant artists who are shaping the current panorama.
_Isa Genzken Letizia Ragaglia, ed.
With special contributions by Monica Bonvicini, Simon Denny, Jutta Koether, Mark Leckey, Nick Mauss, Elizabeth Peyton, Lawrence Weiner, Cerith Wyn Evans.
This volume takes a radical depart from the standardized format of the retrospective catalogue. While being still lavishly illustrated and offering an in-depth look at the quest for the modern which has informed the radical and diverse Genzken’s oeuvre for four decades, it also gives a sense of the tremendous inspiration and influence of her body of work for three generations of artists.
_From Basaglia to Brazil. Mad Marginal. Cahier #1. A book curated by Dora García
This publication is part of a broader research project, originating from the writings by Franco Basaglia, the Italian psychiatrist who promoted the Law 180 and made Italy one of the first countries to shut down mental hospitals, and a pioneer in alternative mental health care. This tradition of anti-psychiatry and the “Basaglia revolution” are for García an occasion and an opportunity to investigate forms of artistic production that consciously decided to stay at the periphery of the mainstream.
Cover: Mark Morrisroe, “Self-portrait,” 1982. © The Estate of Mark Morrisroe (Collection Ringier) at Fotomuseum Winterthur.