March 2012
This month in Artforum:
We can’t get enough. We love to rediscover Sturtevant, her replications and recombinant logic. But if her recent lurid, hyperspeed videos and theatrical environments seem unprecedented, they actually echo her little-known engagement with performance in the 1960s. On the eve of the artist’s new survey show at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Artforum asked contributing editor Bruce Hainley to unearth her long-obscured work with live action, choreography, and Happenings—revealing a tale of missed encounters, epistolary exchanges, kinetic reenactments, and dances of dances, and giving us that strange Sturtevant thrill—all over again.
“Sturtevant was always already dancing, as Nietzsche said everyone must—always already thinking not across the art of the 1960s but into the structures that make such art, such thinking, possible.”
—Bruce Hainley
· Lynne Cooke and Larry Bell pay tribute to the late John Chamberlain, whose iconic and extraordinarily elastic oeuvre is currently surveyed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
“Fit was Chamberlain’s preferred term for describing the way he composed. As both a verb and an adjective, it could be a tactic and a quality (unquestionable, inevitable, organic).”
—Lynne Cooke
· In the age of social networking, new algorithms of taste proliferate. Critic Michael Sanchez profiles contemporary websites reviving the dot-com dream of marketing, organizing, and curating art—and sensibility—online, from Art.sy to Paddle8.
“If looking-at (the museum experience) has been collapsed into purchasing (the gallery), Art.sy purports to overlay these experiences with those of the link and the suggestion.”
—Michael Sanchez
· Also: Curator Dieter Roelstraete takes in German painter Konrad Klapheck‘s imposing machine aesthetics; choreographer Boris Charmatz walks us through his current performance-cum-exhibition at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany, with an introduction by Catherine Wood; and Tony Pipolo recounts the trials attending a full-scale restoration of Abel Gance‘s legendary 1927 Napoléon.
· Plus: Alex Kitnick pens an “Openings” on the dismantled designs and haptic projections of Rey Akdogan; Sarah K. Rich tours the many eras of Willem de Kooning at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Martha Buskirk sees Sherrie Levine for herself at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Anna Lovatt decodes the Alighiero Boetti retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; David Velasco heads to the Ozarks to glimpse Alice Walton’s long-awaited Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; renowned Conceptual-art gallerist Seth Siegelaub unveils his surprising collection of textiles, with an introduction by Lauren O’Neill-Butler; J. Hoberman salutes the courage of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi; Eric Santner follows the scriptures of Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory; and artist and filmmaker Loretta Fahrenholz tallies her Top Ten.
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