November 2010
What do an OMG necklace and a nineteenth-century bird of paradise have in common? Cover artist Ryan Gander leaves a trail of photographic clues in a special project for Artforum. The artist previews a group of new works, tethering his far-flung inspirations and free associations within the worlds of natural history, design, language, and advertising. Alongside concurrent exhibitions for the Guggenheim Museum and the Public Art Fund in New York, here Gander spins a story in pictures and in puzzles.Also: Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones plunge into the hidden links between imaging technologies and the political visibility of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. We must reconsider representations of the event, they argue, in order to address deeper, unseen damages below the surface of such disasters.
“The ‘spillcam’ offered a continuing announcement of our ability to picture but not stop the flow… . Watching these images became a form of environmental torture that we have not yet theorized or adequately examined.” —Peter Galison and Caroline A. Jones
And: Michelle Kuo interviews experimental filmmaker and kinetic sculptor Robert Breer. Touching on his investigations of aviation, atheism, and automation, Breer discusses his relationship to the postwar environment of mechanized motion, his collaborations with Jean Tinguely and E.A.T., and the animation of the art object.
“[My sculptures] were autonomous and aleatoric; they were independent of external control. I didn’t want them to have animal intelligence but to behave independently.” —Robert Breer
Plus: Isabelle Graw tests the tension between minimal forms and public personas in the work of Michaela Meise.
“Just as celebrity culture tends to treat works of art as if they were human beings, all artists must cultivate a persuasive persona, and this, in turn, lends them objectlike features.” —Isabelle Graw
Also in the new issue: T. J. Demos traces the limits of perceiving and sensing in the haptic films of Dutch artist Manon de Boer. With an introduction by Sharon Lockhart, artist Jennifer Bolande unveils the logic of the double take behind her new public project Plywood Curtains. Martin Herbert surveys the delicate and shape-shifting material propositions of Bojan Sarcevic. Revisiting the work of Marlene Dumas with a sharp close-up, Leora Maltz-Leca plumbs the political and painterly depths of the artist’s Liberty, 1993.
Plus: Inspired by three new Roland Barthes translations, Bruce Hainley revels in the author’s liberation of genre and his Proustian investment in desire, daily life, and the diaristic. Tom McDonough finds poetic rigor in Iñaki Bonillas‘s resurrection of photographic archives. Amy Taubin reflects on avant-garde filmmaker Michel Auder‘s oneiric assembly of cinematic moments. Curator Ekaterina Degot reports on the thrills and growing pains of Moscow’s contemporary art scene. David Velasco propositions A. L. Steiner and A. K. Burns‘s womyn-centered cinema in their new porn sensation, Community Action Center. Hua Hsu tours the wild histories of Indonesian pop in the 1960s. James Meyer takes a walk through Francis Alÿs‘s retrospective at Tate Modern. Jaleh Mansoor evaluates the power of abstraction in Mark Bradford‘s survey at the Wexner Center for the Arts. And Christian Holstad tallies an enticing Top Ten.
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