May 2006
350 Seventh Avenue, 19th Floor
New York, NY 10001
This month: Light It Up, or How Glenn Ligon Got Over. Critic and art historian Richard Meyer visits the mid-career retrospective of an artist who has worked for more than a decade to recast the logic of both contemporary art and race, using images and texts from sources as diverse as Robert Mapplethorpe, Malcolm X, the Million Man March, Gertrude Stein, and Richard Pryor.
A raunchy joke from an old Pryor album becomes, in Ligons hands, an intricately painted surface of stencils, strokes, and smudges, a microworld of colored incident and inscription. The picture pays its respects to the beauty of Pryors obscenity. –Richard Meyer on Glenn Ligon
In his memoir, Rubin describes Guitar as the first in a new race of constructed–as opposed to carved or modeled–sculptures and as an object more radical and influential in this history of sculpture than was Les Demoiselles dAvignon in the history of painting. As a sculptor, you gotta like this guy. –Richard Serra on William Rubin
Iles and Vergne featured many artists who are not from America, but Documenta-on-Madison is not what the duo was aiming to create. They were less interested in the artists nationalities than in the ways the artworks could inform a picture of the artifice of American culture, in all its complexity. –Daniel Birnbaum on Day for Night, the 2006 Whitney Biennial
Plus: Claire Bishop talks with Pawel Althamer about Fairy Tale, 2006, perhaps the most iconoclastic work in the Berlin Biennial; Jonathan Romney follows the fatalistic blacker-than-black narratives of the South Korean director Park Chan-wook; Mark Godfrey immerses himself in the latest work by Francis Alÿs; Michael Wilson discusses the quick-on-the-draw political imagery of Romanian artist Dan Perjovschi; Julia Bryan-Wilson introduces the charged reenactments and recitations of Sharon Hayes; Rhonda Lieberman enrolls in Terry Zwigoffs Art School Confidential, 2006; David A. Ross watches Stranded in Canton, 1974/2005, a new film composed from William Egglestons recently unearthed early video footage; Amy Taubin is seduced by Larry Clarks art-porn film; Linda Yablonsky attends Laurie Simmonss cinematic debut; Christopher Bollen swings by Christian Holstads site-specific store Leather Beach; and artist Friedrich Kunath runs down his Top Ten.
Also: A preview of fifty shows opening around the globe this summer, from Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi in New York and Anish Kapoor in Rio to Lee Lozano in Basel and Knut Åsdam in Oslo.
To subscribe, visit www.artforum.com/subscribe
