January 2008
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This month in Artforum: “Phil Collins: Man with a Movie Camera.” On the occasion of Collins’s completion of the world won’t listen–a trilogy of videos in which youths from Bogotá, Istanbul, and Jakarta sing Smiths songs–art historian Helen Molesworth reflects on the artist’s entire practice up to his exhibition as a 2006 Turner Prize nominee. For that show, he created an office in the museum called shady lane productions and allowed visitors to watch him conduct interviews with reality-TV veterans.
“In shady lane productions, Collins took up his own challenge: By making himself the subject of the situation, he engaged in a kind of perverse karaoke marathon in which he performed the role of the nomadic global artist in the poststudio environment.” –Helen Molesworth
And: Artists Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn talk to Rachel Kushner about the video All Together Now, 2008, slated to screen at the Whitney Biennial in March. Re-imagining Los Angeles as a postdisaster zone, the artists create a nonnarrative zone that is barren and abandoned but for wildlife and clans of survivors–the cast includes Kahn herself and poet Eileen Myles.
“The time is ambiguous–a now, or just after, in which many of the habits and accoutrements of contemporary life are gone, and yet our characters still have both the means and the residual drive to video one another. There’s no television, nothing left to watch; maybe the characters don’t feel real until they see themselves on-screen.” –Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn
Also in January: Paolo Virno. In anticipation of the first English publication of Virno’s 2005 book, Jokes and Innovation, Artforum offers an exclusive excerpt, in which the Italian theorist suggests that a “logic of change” resides even in the tossed-off witticisms of everyday speech. Philosopher Gerald Raunig introduces the text, placing its arguments within the greater continuum of Virno’s writing, which has been increasingly (if sometimes questionably) employed in discussions of contemporary art.
“Whereas Adorno and Horkheimer described the cultural field as society’s last area of retreat in the face of industrialization–accordingly regarding the culture industry as an obstinate latecomer in the Fordist transformation–Virno sees it as an anticipation of the post-Fordist paradigm.” –Gerald Raunig
Plus: Artforum looks ahead to the winter season with previews of fifty shows opening worldwide, from Trisha Brown in Minneapolis and Cai Guo-Qiang in New York to Peter Doig in London and Eija-Liisa Ahtila in Paris, with first glimpses of the 5th Berlin Biennale and Liam Gillick’s year-long project, “Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario.”
In addition: Martin Herbert scopes the negative spaces of Mungo Thomson; Joseph Leo Koerner anticipates “Dutch Primitives” in Rotterdam; Julia Bryan-Wilson considers the politics of reenactment with Kirsten Forkert and Mark Tribe; Damon Krukowski enters the vibrating world of David Tudor’s Rainforest IV; Sabeth Buchmann and Achim Hochdörfer comment on the merger of the Generali and Bawag foundations; Amy Taubin discusses Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu; Daniel Birnbaum takes the measure of André Cadere at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden; Hal Foster reflects on art and social change in “Forms of Resistance” at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; Kate Bush loses herself in lists at the Biennale de Lyon 2007; Rob Storr responds to the critics of last summer’s Venice Biennale; Robert Pincus-Witten, Jeff Koons, and Haim Steinbach remember influential gallerist Ileana Sonnabend; and artist Heather Rowe counts off her Top Ten.
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