May 2010
This month in Artforum: “The Next Act: Issues in Contemporary Performance.” On the occasion of major New York exhibitions of artists Marina Abramovic and Tino Sehgal at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Artforum asked art historians Carrie Lambert-Beatty and Caroline A. Jones, as well as artist Joe Scanlan, to reflect on this striking pairing of ephemeral actions and established institutions—all while taking stock of performance in the public sphere.“More interesting than whether reenactments are art-historically correct is what they are asked to do—whether they close down or open up the potentiality of performance.” —Carrie Lambert-Beatty
“The current aesthetics of experience has yet to work out the balance between curatorial or artistic scripting and the ethics of public participation—between knowing and being duped.” —Caroline A. Jones
“It was fun, but I have vastly more rewarding conversations on a daily basis with my wife.” —Joe Scanlan
Also: Piktogram‘s Michal Wolinski lends historical context to Monika Sosnowska’s site-specific use of space—which often tests our experience of time—and interviews the Polish artist about her most recent work: an installation design for “The Promises of the Past, 1950–2010: A Discontinuous History of Art in Former Eastern Europe,” currently on view at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
“The construction itself is not so much architecture as it is a stand-alone sculpture. We wanted it to be like an island, because the idea is that we’re transferring a lost fragment of history into the space.” —Monika Sosnowska
Plus: Light Industry’s Ed Halter takes a look at the work of Kevin Jerome Everson, whose latest film opens this month’s Migrating Forms festival at Anthology Film Archives in New York; Robert Pincus-Witten compares notes with Annie Cohen-Solal, reviewing her keenly researched biography of Leo Castelli, Leo & His Circle, out this month from Knopf; John Kelsey finds a jeune fille adrift in the CGI netherworld of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland; Martin Herbert gives an entrée to the work of Belgian tricksters Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys; art historians Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson take time to consider Terry Smith’s book What Is Contemporary Art?, recently published by the University of Chicago Press; Cameron Martin reviews the recent major survey of Dike Blair at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; Alan Licht traces the geometric forms bridging Iannis Xenakis’s output, from architecture to music, as seen at New York’s Drawing Center earlier this year; MACBA curator Chus Martínez takes a close look at the 2010 Whitney Biennial; and Ligia Dias counts down her Top Ten.
Also this month: An international selection of scholars and critics preview forty shows opening this summer worldwide, including Jaleh Mansoor on Yves Klein at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Jay Sanders on Brion Gysin at the New Museum, New York; Catherine Taft on Paul McCarthy at the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan; and George Baker on Knut Asdam at the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway.
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