February 2005 in Artforum
350 Seventh Ave, 19th Floor
New York, New York 10001
T 212.475-4000
F 212.529-1257
“With the new building, the issue is not the usual one in museum design of whether the architecture competes with the artworks, but rather how the building contributes to the narrative that the curators wish to convey. The only artwork that really matters here is the institution itself.”–Mark Wigley, from “425 Million Steps from Intimacy to Elegance”
“It has become more difficult to identify what, in that moment of sublime distinction that the encounter with a work of art supposedly provides, our ‘love of art’ actually loves most.”–Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, from “Our Own Private Modernism”
Also in February: Two authors shed light on Dan Flavin. Caroline A. Jones explores the passions underlying the cool surface of Flavin’s work in her take on the artist’s retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, while Hal Foster offers his reflections on the master of the “hot rod,” wondering whether Flavin’s legacy contritbuted to the “catastrophe” of Minimalism in contemporary art.
“Sentiment, longing, grief, and ecstasy are packaged with an almost brutal reductiveness, an aggressive compaction of feeling that is nowhere more savage than when it is directed at the artist himself.”–Caroline A. Jones, from “Light Speed”
And: Jennifer Allen introduces Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno’s discussion of their new animated cartoon series on art and copyright law, “Briannnnnn and Ferryyyyyy,” while Mark Godfrey considers emergent complexities in photography’s shifting partnership with sculpture, taking on artists from Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, and Douglas Huebler to Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney, Giuseppe Gabellone, Shirley Tse, and Simon Starling.
“Photography and sculpture have entered a more complex phase of their relationship, folding over each other, reversing positions, flipping back and forth, the one becoming the other.”–Mark Godfrey, from “Image Structures: Photography and Sculpture”
Plus: Lynne Cooke remembers the late Agnes Martin, Daniel Birnbaum reports on the turmoil whipped up by German theatrical provocateur Christoph Schlingensief, Tom Vanderbilt fights the power with media pranksters the Yes Men, and Jeff Rian reports on the aggressive media and governmental reactions to Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Swiss-Swiss Democracy” project at the Swiss Cultural Center (CCS) in Paris. And don’t miss Sven Lutticken on Rirkrit Tiravanija at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, or T.J. Demos on “Experiments with Truth” at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia.
To subscribe, visit www.artforum.com/subscribe
Visit our free online directory of international museums at www.artforum.com/museumfinder
