January 2005 in Artforum
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“Walead Beshty consistently pays attention to the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way, or the right places at the right time–as in his photographs of outmoded shopping malls, visited thirty years too late. Little by little, step by step, potted plant by potted plant, Beshty’s images zero in on the revelation of being confused.”–Joe Scanlan
And: In his cover essay, Barry Schwabsky takes stock of Carol Bove, whose retrofuturist variations on Haim Steinbach’s “shopping and shelves” aesthetic, as well as her sometimes barely decipherable drawings of yesteryear’s magazine fashion plates, make her an incisive critic of cultural and material history.
“The strikingly ingenuous yet imperious faces we squint to perceive in Bove’s drawings seem to be wondering why we, their future, have ended up even more fucked up than they were.”–from “Shelf Life: Barry Schwabsky on the Art of Carol Bove”
Plus: Michael Auping listens in on Bruce Nauman’s spoken-word installation at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, discovering a powerful fusion of individual and collective experience that he rates among the artist’s best work to date.
“Nauman has always been an artist who does the opposite of what you think he should, then somehow makes you think it was exactly the right thing to do. When he agreed to create a work for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, I thought he had clearly accepted an invitation to fail. The Turbine Hall is the Jaws of museum architecture.”–from “Sound Thinking: Michael Auping on Bruce Nauman at the Turbine Hall”
Also: Lars Bang Larsen talks to Yinka Shonibare about his first film, Un Ballo in Maschera, 2004, a lavish choreography based on the assassination of King Gustav III that also hints at contemporary geopolitics; Hilton Als ponders photographer Juergen Teller’s naked obsession with Charlotte Rampling; Dennis Cooper views Jessica Yu’s acclaimed new biopic on Outsider superstar Henry Darger; and Katy Siegel mingles with the crowd in contemporary art, parsing the social and political significance of public gatherings depicted in the art of the past decade, from the photographs of Andreas Gursky to Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment performance The Battle of Orgreave, 2001.
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