February in Artforum
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“Although Simon Starling’s objects invariably have eye-catching qualities, the sculptural aspect is only one facet, and the pieces are always part of a larger economy that reaches far beyond what meets the eye.” –Daniel Birnbaum
Also in February: Introducing the “New French Extremity,” a crop of recent French movies packed with over-the-top spectacles of violence and hard-core sex. Tracing the “growing vogue for shock tactics,” film critic James Quandt catalogues the transgressions of a cadre that includes formerly restrained auteurs like Claire Denis and Bruno Dumont and congenital enfants terribles like Gaspar Noe and Francois Ozon.
“Does a kind of irredentist spirit of incitement and confrontation, reviving the hallowed Gallic traditions of the film maudit, of epater les bourgeois and amour fou, account for the shock tactics employed in recent French cinema?” –James Quandt
“Most of the participants [in the ISP] now have track records as artists. I had no career and neither did my peers; we were less professionalized… . Now, when I come into the studios the artists show me portfolios of work in galleries on laptops.” –Gregg Bordowitz
Also: Judith Butler and Gillian Wearing consider Diane Arbus, Homi K. Bhabha remembers Edward Said, Gary Indiana takes on Leni Riefenstahl, and Theresa Duncan compares and contrasts Lost in Translation and Kill Bill.
