February 2006 in Artforum
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Majeruss production of images and visual environments represents one of the very few recent approaches to painting that cannot be understood in terms of a return to anything from the past.–Daniel Birnbaum
Plus: Catherine Sullivan discusses her brilliant new work, The Chittendens, recently on view at Tate Modern in London and Metro Pictures in New York. In this series of films, mostly comprised of superimposed dissolves, actors follow disjointed, Fluxus-inspired choreographies rendered in cinematic styles of film noir and nineteenth-century period dramas–creating a kind of schizophrenic allegory for the economic unconscious of contemporary America.
While The Chittendens draws together many marks of the past, it should provide a way of looking at a mismanaged, overly idealized, and dangerously nostalgic political present.–Catherine Sullivan
And: Claire Bishop surveys todays remarkable proliferation of socially engaged art practice–ranging from that of Jeremy Deller and Atelier van Lieshout to Artur Zmijewski and Oda Projesi–examining the borders of aesthetics and ethics when it comes to critical valuation.
Friendship–its costs, its joys, and the loss of it–is a theme explored in every one of Debords films. For the bonds of friendship, whether they endure or endure but a short while, offer the only alternative to the institutionalized isolation of the spectacle.–Keith Sanborn
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