October 2007 in Artforum
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The fabrication workshop Carlson & Co., which has collaborated for decades with artists from Claes Oldenburg to Rodney Graham, portends a moment when there is absolutely no standardization, because everything is made to order; but this is a postindustrial dream perpetually deferred. –Michelle Kuo
On the theme of production, art historian and critic Michelle Kuo provides a survey of art fabrication sites from the 1960s through today; Caroline A. Jones pays a visit to the Berlin studio of Olafur Eliasson, whose collaborative practice produces not only objects but knowledge, traversing the boundaries of diverse disciplines, including architecture, design, and engineering; Josiah McElheny proposes a taxonomy of faking, borrowing, and stealing to classify contemporary artists relationships to the readymade and its underlying industrial processes; and Pamela M. Lee looks beneath Takashi Murakamis Superflat surfaces to locate the digital technics subtending his experiments in mass and niche marketing. Finally, writer Philip Tinari navigates Chinas Dafen Oil Painting Village, the worlds largest site of painting production and reproduction. In addition, eleven artists–Sam Durant, Urs Fischer, Sherrie Levine, and Bridget Riley among them–offer their personal experiences in fabrication.
I sense there is now a post-Koons cult of extreme production values developing, in which the expense of the production overshadows the content of the work. –Jeffrey Deitch
Also in October: David Joselit visits Richard Serras retrospective at MoMA and weighs the dangers of society against the dangers of sculpture; Lisa Turvey considers Frank Stellas move into architecture; senior editor Elizabeth Schambelan reads artist Luca Freis translation of The So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg by Albert Meister, about a 70s art commune beneath the Pompidou; Julia Bryan-Wilson analyzes the resistance to mainstream accounts of the Iraq War that is central to 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, recently on view at Documenta 12; Rosalind Krauss argues for time taken in Invisible Colors at Marian Goodman, Paris; Maria Morris Hambourg remembers influential MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski; Thomas Struth and Blake Stimson pay tribute to photographer and teacher Bernd Becher; and artist Rosalind Nashashibi lists her Top Ten.
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