March 2008 in Artforum
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This month in Artforum: “Mirror Displacements: The Art of Zoe Leonard.” On the occasion of the artist’s recent retrospective at Fotomuseum Winterthur—and on the heels of Documenta 12’s presentation of Analogue, 1998–2007, her archive of some four hundred pictures depicting small independent shops, the likes of which are disappearing from urban centers throughout the world—Mark Godfrey looks at a body of work that is traditional in method, materiality, appearance, and iconography even while it challenges artistic orthodoxies.
“Leonard’s sculptures can now be seen to relate to her most recent body of images—not just because the sculptures use obsolete objects, but because they stage the desire to hold on to what is everywhere being lost. Considered in light of this genealogy of mourning, it becomes even clearer that Analogue is one of the major photographic projects of the past thirty years.” —Mark Godfrey
And: “Music of the Spheres.” When Karlheinz Stockhausen died last December, his fame as a composer of startlingly original and uncompromising music—groundbreaking experiments in electronic sound, innovative manipulations of traditional instrumentation, unorthodox approaches to the human voice—had long since peaked, and his work was perhaps spoken of more eagerly than it was performed. Yet he figures among the most influential composers of the postwar era. Offering reflections on Stockhausen’s legacy is a diverse group with deep ties to his work: composers Robin Maconie, La Monte Young, Morton Subotnick, and Maryanne Amacher; violinist Irvine Arditti and pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard; and singer-songwriter Björk.
“For Stockhausen, the issue was not just how art in the modern world can respond to the presence of evil but whether art deserves to survive.” —Robin Maconie
“i remember very well sitting in his studio in cologne , surrounded by twelve speakers ( four in the four top corners , four in the middle , and four in the bottom corners ) , him creating a current traveling up and down , swirling around us as the force of nature electricity is . god of thunder .” —Björk
Plus: “Signs of the Times.” Theorist Boris Groys and art historian and curator Margarita Tupitsyn look at La Maison Rouge’s “Sots Art: Political Art in Russia from 1972 to Today” and consider the strategies and legacies of this movement’s paradoxical intermingling of the iconography of Soviet socialist realism and Western consumer fantasy.
“Contemporary post-Soviet culture is an effect of the profanation and secularization of the Communist past—not of its disappearance. And it is precisely this secularization that was anticipated and effectuated … by Sots art.” —Boris Groys
Plus: Pamela M. Lee introduces a portfolio of images assembled by Willem de Rooij based on his work with Jeroen de Rijke; Paul Sietsema discusses his latest film, Figure 3, which premieres at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this month; Sarah K. Rich revisits the postwar artistic clash between France and America in “Be-Bomb” at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; Martin Herbert compares “The World as a Stage” at Tate Modern, London, with “A Theatre Without Theatre” at Lisbon’s Berardo Collection; Amy Taubin discusses Gus Van Sant’s latest film, Paranoid Park; Sven Lütticken encounters Werner Herzog’s cool, comedic eye in Antarctica; Damon Krukowski plumbs the depths of UbuWeb; Brian Sholis reports on US regional nonprofit art spaces operating outside the glare of New York and Los Angeles; Virginia Rutledge takes up the case of Christoph Büchel v. Mass MoCA; Michael Archer considers the sculpture of Karla Black; and Nick Mauss and Ken Okiishi count down their Top Ten.
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