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Decades ago, Earth artists went into the remote landscape to escape the traditional circulatory infrastructure linking studio, gallery, museum, and even magazine. But is such physical and conceptual terrain available to artists today, when the international art world reaches to points all over the globe? How should we think about projects by contemporary artists working in far-flung places around the worldfrom Pierre Huyghe in Antarctica and Andrea Zittel in Joshua Tree to Rirkrit Tiravanija in northern Thailand?
Its the electric whisper bleeding from earphones in subway cars, and its the disarming experience of believing for a minute that the well-dressed guy talking to himself on the street is crazy – until you see his headset. These are the symptoms of a new spatial order: a space in which the virtual and the physical are absolutely coextensive, allowing a person to travel in one direction through sound or image while proceeding elsewhere physically. David Joselit in Navigating the New Territory: Art, Avatars, and the Contemporary Mediascape
Plus: Remote Possibilities, a roundtable on Land arts changing terrain with Claire Bishop, Lynne Cooke, Pierre Huyghe, Pamela M. Lee, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel; Tacita Dean imagines a journey to Tristan da Cunha, called the remotest island on earth; Zittel writes a magnum opus with Lisa Anne Auerbach on the duos High Desert Test Sites; and the Association for Freed Times takes readers on a journey to the end of the worldthe thawing ice fields of Antarctica.
One of the most redeeming things about the events is that everyone gets lost.Andrea Zittel in A Text About High Desert Test Sites
Also in this issue: J. Hoberman looks at the work of Chinas leading independent filmmaker Jia Zhangke. And Harry Cooper investigates the recent spate of exhibitions uncovering connections between visual and aural composition, including Sons & Lumières at Pariss Centre Pompidou and Visual Music, co-organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.
Greenberg believed that abstraction entailed the self-purifying separation of painting from all other genres. But he had a small problem: Kandinsky, Mondrian, and just about every other pioneer of abstraction was inspired by music.Harry Cooper, from An Eye for an Ear
And: Daniel Birnbaum remembers Harald Szeemann; Mel Bochner reviews the Complete Writings of Donald Judd; Johanna Burton catches Tracy the Plastics onstage at The Kitchen in New York; Matt Saunders weathers the chaotic storm of Jonathan Meeses quasi-Wagnerian performance Mother Parsifal; Mark Godfrey talks to Catherine Yass about filming the West Bank Wall; Chris Marker appears at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Robert Lumley looks at Turins new Fondazione Merz; and Alison M. Gingeras introduces artist Roberto Cuoghi.
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