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This month in Artforum:
Lost and Found: Artforum presents here, for the first time anywhere, a forgotten cache of photographs documenting the making of Robert Rauschenbergand Susan Weil‘sseminal blueprints (1949–51):
“The blueprints were a way of making cameraless photographs that could compete with the scale of contemporary painting, yet still keep the cost of materials viable for two young artists living on a shoestring.”
–Michael Lobel
“In Akomfrah’s new productions, the ocean functions as a reservoir of memory, a place where stories of the past, present, and future are suspended and preserved.”
–Nora M. Alter
“Justin Bieber—a pop god made flesh—now wants to be recognized for the complicated person he has become.”
–Cat Kron
Stephen Squibb on Laura Poitras, whose exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art opens on February 5:
“We should be careful when battling spies, Poitras warns us, lest we become spies.”
–Stephen Squibb
Michael Ned HolteonLA-based exhibition platformPublic Fiction:
“One thing you should know about Public Fiction is that it is never just one thing: It’s a shape-shifter, a museum, a publisher, a church, a secret restaurant, a comedy club.”
–Michael Ned Holte
Lynne CookeonKasper König‘s “The Shadow of the Avant-Garde: Rousseau and the Forgotten Masters“:
“The dense congeries had the makings of a revisionist survey of early modernism’s tentative embrace of self-taught painters.”
–Lynne Cooke
“Stella was never afraid of prettiness in his art—and so has presented a puzzle since the turn of this century by largely divesting his work of that quality.”
–Thomas Crow
“Rama was a real troublemaker more than a troubled mind.”
–Anne Dressen
Stuart Liebman onthe films of Jean Epstein:
For Epstein, the camera and its related techniques were not simply tools to create art as paintbrushes were for painters. Rather, the camera’s ‘metal brain’ was an instrument of revelation.”
–Stuart Liebman
Openings:Kate Suttonon Taus Makhacheva:
“Makhacheva’s work is an exercise in extreme art handling.”
–Kate Sutton
And: Kerstin Stakemeier on Ulrike Müller, Katy Siegel on Joan Mitchell,Hiroko Ikegami on Takashi Murakami, Martha Buskirk on Data Drift,Prudence Peifferon Francine Prose‘sPeggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern, and Alena J. Williamson The World of Charles and Ray Eames
Plus: J. Hobermanon Walkers: Hollywood Afterlives in Art and Artifact,Siona Wilson on Mark Fell and Luke Fowler‘sTo the Editor of Amateur Photographer,Linda Rodriguezon Kongo: Power and Majesty,and Hanne Mugaas, director of Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger, shares her Top Ten
