This month in Artforum:
GRAPHIC CONTENT: ART AND ANIMATION
At least since Lichtenstein appropriated a comic-strip Benday dot, Duchamp riffed on Mutt and Jeff, or Eisenstein admired a Mickey Mouse cel, art has had a love affair with animation, comics, and cartoons. Artforum invites fifteen contributors to survey this unruly romance, which embraces everything from CGI rendering to Sunday funnies to gaming networks: Curator Fabrice Stroun and critic Stephen Burt take on the intertwined histories of art, comics, and literature; artist Cory Arcangel unearths Andy Warhol’s never-before-seen 1980s computer graphics; cartoonist Art Spiegelman curates a selection of comics from the Bronze Age to the 1980s; Lele Saveri delves into a compendium of zines; and Julien Ceccaldi, Jordan Wolfson, Jim Shaw, Kerry James Marshall, Douglas Wolk, Hillary Chute, Ida Applebroog, Nick Zedd, Ed Halter, and Ian Cheng examine practices that oscillate between and within the genres of drawing, film, video, writing, coding, and animation.
“Comics from the start carried in their very DNA an anarchic power, a drive to circumvent or undermine social and artistic rules.”
—Stephen Burt
“Did Andy Warhol really have an Amiga computer in the ’80s, as I had long heard rumored? If so, what had happened to his disks, and had anyone ever looked at them?”
—Cory Arcangel
“There’s a gap between the CGI animators and me, and I like it—it helps.”
—Jordan Wolfson
“Equating comics with ‘high art’ is not as odd as it may sound. Both deal with the abstract transformation of information into another form without a fixed set of rules.”
—Ida Applebroog
“Every time I work in the realm of comics, I discover a whole raft of artists who have done it better—and for miserable pay, with no respect outside the field.”
—Jim Shaw
1000 Words: Scott Reeder talks about his first feature-length film, Moon Dust:
“It’s easy to tell who a scene is about and what their status is, because everything is clearly organized by color. It’s like Albers meets the army.”
—Scott Reeder
Patrick Rumble probes the cinematic vision of Paolo Gioli:
“Gioli draws attention to the paradox of the cinema: that the legibility of the motion picture depends on rapid alternations of light and darkness, that the visibility of the filmic image carries a debt to blindness.”
—Patrick Rumble
Openings: Sarah Nicole Prickett appraises the process and pictures of photographer Sandy Kim:
“If Kim can seem indiscriminate, it’s only when you are not waiting long enough; lovers in spirit, her pictures give exactly as much as you have decided they’re worth.”
—Sarah Nicole Prickett
· Plus: Summer Reading: Laurie Simmons, Chris Stein, Simon Denny, Svetlana Alpers, Darby English, and Mark Flood share the books they plan to take to the beach.
· And: Emma Wilson pays tribute to Alain Resnais; Marlene Dumas and Dieter Roelstraete remember curator Jan Hoet; George Lewis visits “The Shadows Took Shape“ at the Studio Museum in Harlem; Joel Snyder surveys Christopher Williams‘s first retrospectiveat the Art Institute of Chicago; Martha Buskirk explores digital photography, social networks, and copyright; James Quandtcatches Joaquim Pinto‘s What Now? Remind Me; Amy Taubin reviews Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood; and Melissa Anderson takes a ride on Bong Joon-ho‘s Snowpiercer.
· Also: Matt Saunders on the paintings of George W. Bush; John Harwood on Phantasmal Media, Johanna Fateman on Pussy Riot; Jennifer Josten on “Cruzamentos: Contemporary Art in Brazil“; Saloni Mathur on Mumbai’s“Aesthetic Bind“; and Kim Stanley Robinson‘s Top Ten.