Download the January issue of Artforum, available now on the iTunes newsstand. And get the mobile app for artguide—the art world’s most comprehensive directory of exhibitions, events, and art fairs in more than 500 cities. To download artguide on your Android device, click here; for your iPhone, click here.
This month in Artforum:
SPRING PREVIEW: 50 shows worldwide—Robert Mapplethorpe, Fischli/Weiss, Marcel Broodthaers, Kerry James Marshall, the 20th Biennale of Sydney, Digging a Hole in China, and more.
“Burning Man“: We still don’t fully understand the lush yet ruined pictures of Alberto Burri, whose singular attack on—and revivification of—painting remains on view in a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York this month. Art historian Anthony White probes the cover artist’s incendiary impact on Arte Povera and postwar art at large:
“Burri’s blowtorch creates a violent erasure—a mutilation that eradicates surface, and a mark that is its own removal.”
–Anthony White
In honor of groundbreaking filmmaker Chantal Akerman, five of her collaborators, colleagues, and critics—Kathy Halbreich, Nicola Mazzanti, Babette Mangolte, J. Hoberman, and Amy Taubin—reflect on the artist’s cinematic achievements.
“The slow-moving, almost amatory pace of Akerman’s films suggests she was prepared to use her camera to patiently probe every crack in modernity’s facade.”
–Kathy Halbreich
1000 Words: LA-based artist Max Hooper Schneider talks about his post-apocalyptic “ecology of neglect”:
“I see what I do in terms of the uncanny. It’s about the possibilities that come out of uncouth taxonomies.”
–Max Hooper Schneider
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Christopher Williams, and Candida Höfer on Hilla Becher:
“The Bechers showed that the artist could engage with a larger cultural dialogue from a position of critical distance rather than as an expression of self.”
–Christopher Williams
“The Mirror and the Vamp“: David E. James on Andy Warhol‘s opus of lost stardom, Lupe:
“In Lupe, Warhol allowed Edie to be a Hollywood star but then subjected her to a cruelly punitive and degrading death.”
–David E. James
David Joselit on International Pop and The World Goes Pop:
“Any exhibition seeking to ‘decolonize Pop’ must acknowledge both the indispensability and the inadequacy of Pop’s dominant narratives.”
–David Joselit
David J. Roxburgh and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie on Walid Raad at the Museum of Modern Art:
“Raad’s works oscillate between fact and fiction in a cycle of avowal and disavowal, affirmation and negation, assertion and prevarication.”
–David J. Roxburgh
Openings: Alexander Scrimgeour on David Raymond Conroy:
“Conroy focuses on that uniquely contemporary subject who produces and consumes at once.”
–Alexander Scrimgeour
Plus: Alex Kitnick on Greater New York; Greil Marcus on Asger Jorn and Jacqueline de Jong; Sarah Wilson on Kiki Kogelnik; Beau Rutland on Kerstin Brätsch; Erika Balsom on Omer Fast‘s Remainder; Irene V. Small on Videobrasil; Brian Dillon on Wayne Koestenbaum‘s Pink Trance Notebooks; Annie Godfrey Larmon on UnREAL; Lauren O’Neill-Butler on Museum of Stones; and producer and songwriter Dev Hynes shares his Top Ten.
