September 2014 in Artforum
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This month in Artforum:
Fall Preview: Artforum takes a sneak peek at forty shows opening around the world this fall, from the Gwangju Biennale to Chris Ofili at the New Museum in New York.
“American Idol“: On the occasion of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s major survey of the work of Jeff Koons, the first that the artist has enjoyed in his adopted hometown, Artforum asked art historian and critic Thomas Crow to assess the exhibition’s synoptic view, while fellow artists Cory Arcangel, Carol Bove, Rachel Harrison, Margaret Lee, Josiah McElheny, and Laura Owens reflect on Koons’s outsize impact:
“To embark on the exhibition’s itinerary is immediately to be gripped by a sight line as spare and locked down as Alberti’s model of linear perspective.”
–Thomas Crow
“Koons was not merely cooperating with the commercial system and embracing it—he was using cooperation as a form of aggression.”
–Carol Bove
“Was there ever a critical edge locked inside the breath of the bunny?”
–Rachel Harrison
Hal Foster lands in Qatar to take stock of Richard Serra‘s latest monumental commission, East-West/West-East, 2014:
“On the one hand, East-West/West-East addresses its physical setting eloquently; on the other hand, it is silent on the social, economic, and political environment around it. This is as it must be, according to Serra.”
–Hal Foster
Rosalyn Deutsche confronts the new National September 11 Memorial Museum:
“The memory the museum constructs conceals a massive forgetting.”
–Rosalyn Deutsche
Sylvia Lavin sizes up the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale:
“Rem Koolhaas’s Biennale is the first architectural exhibition that must be considered not just a single work but a single work of art.”
–Sylvia Lavin
Erika Balsomcontemplates film without film, or cinema as performance:
“Though the live-cinema piece takes place within a stable set of parameters, it will never be the same twice; it will always be a re-presentation rather than a repetition—and it will never be able to be downloaded from Karagarga or streamed on UbuWeb.”
–Erika Balsom
Historian of science Jimena Canales takes on beauty, truth, and the Anthropocene in Eliot Porter‘s postwar pictures:
“Nothing is less natural than Porter’s nature photographs.”
–Jimena Canales
Huey Copeland sees the specters of history in Carrie Mae Weems‘s five-part narrative projection Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me, 2012:
“Weems’s work underlines how projections, absences, and the shapes we give to them remain central to the rescripting of the historical past and to the workings of the modern imagination itself.”
–Huey Copeland
· And: Bruce Hainley, Claude Wampler, and Peter Eleeypay homage to Sturtevant; Kobena Mercerremembers Stuart Hall; Charles Ray commemorates Hudson; James Meyer takes on Carl Andre at Dia:Beacon; Graham Bader assesses Sigmar Polke at MoMA; Tom McDonough shares an Openings on Agnieszka Polska; J. Hoberman journeys into the lost paradises of silent film; and James Quandt puts on 3-D glasses for Jean-Luc Godard‘s new film, Goodbye to Language.
· Plus: John Elderfield on The Letters of Paul Cézanne; Bruce Sterling on The Mind’s Eye: The Art of Omni; Fred Bernstein on the architecture of Kulapat Yantrasast; Alastair Wright on “Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs“; Lynne Cooke on James Benning; and LA-based artist Liz Craft divulges her Top Ten.
