Artforum back issues from July 2006:
On the Contrary
Jul 01, 2006; Eagleton, Terry; Rylands, John ... On the Contrary TERRY EAGLETON ON SLAVOJ ZIZEK'S THE PARALLAX VIEW THE PARALLAX WEW, BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK. CAMBRIDGE, MA: MIT PRESS. 2006. 448 PAGES. $25. "I LIVE IN TERROR of not being misunderstood," complains one of Oscar Wilde's characters. Shafts of wit like this reflect a peculiarly ...
LETTERS
Jul 01, 2006; Anonymous ... CONTESTED IMAGES We read with interest Frances Richard's review of the [Sean Kelly] gallery's recent Seydou Keïta exhibition, our second show of Keïta's work presented in collaboration with the artist and, subsequent to his passing, with the Seydou Keïta Foundation. While Ms. Richard ...
Dick Heads
Jul 01, 2006; Indiana, Gary ... Dick Heads GARY INDIANA ON RICHARD LINKLATER'S A SCANNER DARKLY LOQUACITY IS Richard Linklater's métier: Regardless of how much or little action occurs in the course of his films, his characters talk incessantly, sometimes brilliantly, about what flumes up from their brainpans ...
Make It New
Jul 01, 2006; Betsky, Aaron ... AARON BETSKY ON ATELIER BOW-WOW "TO CHANGE the Japanese government, you could begin by altering the seating arrangement in parliament," says Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, one of the partners, with Momoyo Knijima, behind the Tokyo-based Atelier Bow-Wow. Linking grand ambition to small-scale ...
Regarding the Torture of Dudes
Jul 01, 2006; Rimanelli, David; Liden, Hanna ... Regarding the Torture of Dudes DAVID RIMANELLI AND HANNA LIDEN ON HOSTEL LATE ONE NIGHT, bored aiul unsleepy, we dropped in At our favorite local twenty-four-hour video store-vim know, the kind that primarily trades in skin flicks but also stocks a large selection ot normal ...
Back to the Drawing Board
Jul 01, 2006; Armstrong, Carol; Stevens, Doris ... CAROL ARMSTRONG ON CATHERINE DE ZEGHER IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, Charles Baudelaire said art criticism should be "passionate, partisan, and political." For the poet and critic, these three words were synonymous-"political" meant "partisan" and "partisan" meant "passionate"-and without ...
Repetition and Difference
Jul 01, 2006; Bryan-Wilson, Julia ... JULIA BRYAN-WILSON ON LTTR "IT IS OUR PROMISCUITY that will save us," AIDS activist and art theorist Douglas Crimp asserted in 1988, defying the media's brutal vilification of gay sex-in which a devastating health crisis was portrayed as punishment for pleasure-by arguing that gay men's ...
Embedded in the Culture
Jul 01, 2006; Rothkopf, Scott ... Scott Rothkopf on the art of Paul Chan (ProQuest Information and Learning: ... denotes "strike-through" in the original text omitted.) THE ELEVATOR man is hassling me. I'm in a building in Chelsea trying to find Paul Chan's studio, but his name isn't listed in the directory and ...
Brain Trust
Jul 01, 2006; Gilmore, Jonathan ... JONATHAN GILMORE ON ART AND THE NEW BIOLOGY OF MIND THE DREAM of discovering a science of art once took the form of attempting to render systematically the variety and appearance of the visible world, an endeavor intimately entwined with Renaissance developments in mathematical ...
Monsieur Chat
Jul 01, 2006; Anonymous ... Monsieur Chat-known in the US as, simply, (C)-is a French graffitist and founder of the artists' collective CHAT (Harmonious Community of Taciturn Artists). Since 1997, the group has painted its signature yellow cat on buildings throughout Europe and more recently New York, garnering coverage in ...
Hot Trends
Jul 01, 2006; Sterling, Bruce ... BRUCE STERLING ON GLOBAL WARMING IN THE GLOSSIES CLIMATE CHANGE isn't a vogue, because vogues go away when they get boring. Vanity Fair, along with Vogue and Elle, discovered climate change this season. These are three very trendy magazines, hut climate change is no mere trend ....
The Revenge of the Eye
Jul 01, 2006; Horrigan, Bill ... A Portfolio by Chris Marker FOR SIX DECADES Chris Marker has borne witness to the great social upheavals of his day, memorializing through film the legacies of the Russian Revolution and the Great War, World War II, the end of colonialism, Vietnam, and May '68. No wonder, then, that he ...
Life Like Art
Jul 01, 2006; Rodenbeck, Judith; Samaras, Lucas; Griffin, Tim; Lacy, Suzanne; Et al ... Allan Kaprow's death this spring at age seventy-eight, a profound loss by any measure, is all the more impropitious given the recent upsurge of interest in his work and the growing awareness of his contemporary relevance. While his happenings gained widespread notoriety in artistic circles and ...
Desert of the Real
Jul 01, 2006; Feldman, Hannah ... Hannah Feldman on the art of Mai-Thu Perret THAT THE ART WORLD has something of a schoolgirl's crush on Utopia is yesterday's news-but the infatuation shows no sign of waning. Aesthetics, we keep being told, are either complicit or relational, never somewhere in-between, a formulation ...
Pattern Recognition
Jul 01, 2006; Pasquariello, Lisa ... Lisa Pasquariello on the art of Sergej Jensen IF "PAINTING" TODAY refers less to material or object than to practice ami action, then Denmark-horn, Berlin-based Sergej Jensen is a painter. His description of his medium as "painting without paint" suggests that we should forsake an ...
1000 WORDS
Jul 01, 2006; Kantor, Jordan ... TALKS ABOUT HIS PAINTINGS AFTER THE SISTINE CHAPEL MICHELANGELO IS A TOUGH ACT TO FOLLOW-and pinch-hitting for Andy Warhol probably isn't much easier-yet these were precisely the challenges presented to David Salle when Roman art collector Carlo Bilotti recently asked him to execute a ...
DOMENICK AMMIRATI ON JOSH SMITH
Jul 01, 2006; Ammirati, Domenick ... IN FALL 2005, when Josh Smith was invited to fill a sliver of the basement gallery at New York's SculptureCenter as part of that institution's In Practice series, he responded by moving more or less the entire contents of his Harlem studio into the space. This installation strategy, Smith told ...
David Smith
Jul 01, 2006; Fried, Michael ... David Smith SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK FOR YEARS-decades, really-when encountering a sculpture by David Smith in a museum or an art gallery, I've looked at it long and hard, from up close and far away. I've walked all around it and peered at it from every point of ...
"Frank Stella 1958"
Jul 01, 2006; Shiff, Richard ... "Frank Stella 1958" ARTHUR M. SACKLER MUSEUM, HARVARD UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUMS, CAMBRIDGE, MA "FRANK STELLA 1958" is a prequel. It extracts twenty-one works, some rarely or never before exhibited, from the genetic soup of a remarkable evolution. Your degree of interest may hinge on ...
JESSICA MORGAN ON ULLA VON BRANDENBURG
Jul 01, 2006; Morgan, Jessica ... UNLIKE MANY ARTISTS TODAY who scavenge from every last scrap of modernist production, Ulla von Brandenburg has leaped over that period of utopian experimentalism, alighting instead in the preceding century. Von Brandenburg is attracted to the sophistication, escapism, extreme aestheticism, ...
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Jul 01, 2006; Armstrong, Carol; Stevens, Doris ... Hiroshi Sugimoto HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN, WASHINGTON, DC OF ALL OF HIROSHI SUGIMOTO'S photographs, some 120 of which were recently on view in a retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, I like best the blankest and emptiest of ...
Georg Baselitz
Jul 01, 2006; Kort, Pamela ... Georg Baselitz LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, COPENHAGEN "GEORG BASELITZ: PAINTER," a brilliantly installed exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, is a real stunner-it's a pity it is not traveling to the United States. Cannily positioning older works beside newer ...
"Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne"
Jul 01, 2006; Rattemeyer, Christian ... "Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne" INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA FOCUSING ON ARTISTIC productions and provocations in Cologne from roughly the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, "Make Your Own Life" is an introduction to an ...
Jack Pierson
Jul 01, 2006; Pasquariello, Lisa ... NEW YORK Jack Pierson CHEIM & READ Jack Pierson has already made salvaged-sign-letter word sculptures spelling out ANGST, GONK, HELL, BETRAYAL, DESIRE/DESPAIR, and LOST, so maybe it was only a matter of time before he got around to MELANCHOLIA. Or perhaps it just took ...
Tim Lee
Jul 01, 2006; Wilson, Michael ... Tim Lee COHAN AND LESLIE "Party tor Your Right to Fight"-a mocking inversion of the hedonistic Beastie Boys rallying cry "Fight for Your Right to Party"-is the title of a key track on Public Fncmy's peerless 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In his ...
Fiona Banner
Jul 01, 2006; Pasquariello, Lisa ... Fiona Banner TRACY WILLIAMS, LTD. As if Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881) rewound, Fiona Banner's work of the past twelve years has generally begun with copying and ended with epistemological inquiry. The profusion of words in earlier projects-which have included voluminous ...
Scott King
Jul 01, 2006; Wilson, Michael ... Scott King BORTOLAMI DAYAN ANYWAY, I MUST DASH AS I'M GOING TO SET FIRE TO MY NEIGHBOURS HEDGE NOW. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELVES, AND HOPEFULLY I'LL SEE YOU SOON. I LOVE YOU BOTH VERY MUCH. YOUR SON, SCOTT, x. London-based artist Scott King seems to have a tiling about hedges. The ...
Al Hansen
Jul 01, 2006; Schambelan, Elizabeth ... Al Hansen ANDREA ROSEN GALLERY "I am not at all interested in having a retrospective exhibition of my work," artist Al Hansen (1917-1995) wrote toward the end of his life, adding that such a show "would take up at least an airplane hangar or two." Putting together an overview of ...
Sherrie Levine
Jul 01, 2006; Burton, Johanna ... Sherrie Levine PAULA COOPER GALLERY Since she came on the scene in the mid-1970s, Sherrie Levine has made art that couldn't exist without that which came before it. Levine's insistence on her project's inherent secondhandness has meant that her work is often understood as ...
Amy Sillman
Jul 01, 2006; Avgikos, Jan ... Amy Sillman SIKKEMA JENKINS & CO. In her recent exhibition of ten new paintings, Amy Sillman demonstrated that she continues to mine the edges of abstraction, meshing patches of color with bursts of chaotic line and weblike compositional scaffolding. Sillman balances dense ...
Saul Fletcher
Jul 01, 2006; Barliant, Claire ... Saul Fletcher ANTON KERN GALLERY "But what does the painter think about his work-which in itself appears to be unresolved-being framed, enclosed, placed in an interior?," a journalist wrote in 1920, after visiting Piet Mondrian's Paris studio. "His studio answers for him. The ...
Luisa Lambri
Jul 01, 2006; Sholis, Brian ... Luisa Lambri LUHRING AUGUSTINE GALLERY For her New York solo debut, Italian photographer Luisa Lambri presented a four-year minisurvey consisting of just seventeen photographs, and the restrained selection underscored the importance of editing to her practice. Lambri spends ...
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
Jul 01, 2006; Hall, Emily ... Jennifer and Kevin McCoy POSTMASTERS Two kinds of time-cinematic and oneinc-pass in Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's recent exhibition, "Directed Dreaming." In the show's centerpiece, the multimedia installation Dream Dream Sequence, 2006, two rotating platforms each contain a series ...
Frank Auerbach
Jul 01, 2006; Kuspit, Donald ... Frank Auerbach MARLBOROUGH There's not much left of mimesis in Frank Auerbach's new paintings and drawings. Where previously there was a balance-however uneasy-between the picture (usually a portrait or a London street scene) and the gestural handling that gave it dramatic ...
"Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980"
Jul 01, 2006; Ammirati, Domenick ... "Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980" STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM At first glance, this show appears to be a simple survey of the dominant modes of postwar abstraction. In one corner hangs Melvin Edwards's Cotton Hangup, 1965, an expressionist sculpture ...
Marco Neri
Jul 01, 2006; Frankel, David ... Marco Neri LUCAS SCHOORMANS GALLERY Marco Neri's cityscapes anil architectures are simultaneously spare and lush. Rendered in tempera, the pictures' matte black surfaces look plain hut act rich-the paint is thin and flat hut profoundly light-absorbent, dark with an unshowy ...
Daniel Johnston
Jul 01, 2006; Schwendener, Martha ... Daniel Johnston CLEMENTINE GALLERY Daniel Johnston first emerged in the mid-1980s with a series of self-distributed lo-fi audiocassettes filled with songs that sounded like a cross between vintage blues, music made for children, and Bob Dylan as interpreted by Edith Bunker. He ...
Andrew Sexton
Jul 01, 2006; Kastner, Jeffrey ... Andrew Sexton OLIVER KAMM/5BE GALLERY A series of wry inside jokes instantiated via improbable materials and processes, Andrew Sexton's recent solo debut was built around what at first seemed a similarly unlikely organizing principle: His drawings and multimedia conglomerations ...
Taylor Davis
Jul 01, 2006; Harris, Larissa ... BOSTON Taylor Davis SAMSON PROJECTS In Taylor Davis's recent exhibition at Samson Projects, low cratelike forms with peepholes and slightly gaping panels; objects resembling drawers fallen out of a dresser; an unsteady, solitary eight-loot plywood phallus; and hay hales ...
Philadelphia Wireman
Jul 01, 2006; Borum, Jenifer P ... Philadelphia Wireman MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY For the past decade and a halt, the small, wire-trussed assemblages made by an anonymous artist known only as the Philadelphia Wireman have circulated busily within the folk/outsider art world, but the mystery of their origin has ...
Frank DiPerna
Jul 01, 2006; Wennerstrom, Nord ... WASHINGTON. DC Frank DiPerna KATHLEEN EWING GALLERY Frank DiPerna's recent exhibition, "In the Studio: Frank Dil'erna," included fourteen photographs notable for their deceptively simple composition and saturated colors. The shots-mostly still lifes and tableaux-border on ...
Gary Hill
Jul 01, 2006; Yood, James ... CHICAGO Gary Hill DONALD YOUNG GALLERY Of the eight works in Donald Young Gallery's recent Gary Hill microretrospective-dating from 1978 to 1005-Accordions (The fielsnnce Recordings, Inly 2001), 2001-2002, is the largest. A room-tilling video installation, its five ...
Hedda Sterne
Jul 01, 2006; Merli, Melissa ... CHAMPAIGN, IL Hedda Sterne KRANNERT ART MUSEUM Throughout her long, distinguished career (now ninety-six, she only recently stopped making new work), painter Hedda Sterne has steadlastly refused to adopt a consistent style. That idiosyncratic approach might partially ...
Packard Jennings
Jul 01, 2006; Helfand, Glen ... SAN FRANCISCO Packard Jennings CATHERINE CLARK GALLERY In his recent solo exhibition at Catherine Clark Gallery, prankster interventionist Packard Jennings hurled small stones at mighty, if easy, targets-the corporation and the church. Jennings's interactive projects ...
Lorna Simpson
Jul 01, 2006; Hainley, Bruce ... LOS ANGELES Lorna Simpson MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART In the conclusion of his catalogue essay for Lorna Simpson's recent survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Okwui Enwezor writes: "A portrait of a black person hanging in a museum is usually disturbing to viewers." A ...
Anthony Hernandez
Jul 01, 2006; Holte, Michael Ned ... Anthony Hernandez CHRISTOPHER GRIMES GALLERY MAKE ME A LATE BREAKFAST: A T-shirt emblazoned with this decadent demand appears near the lop of Anthony Hernandez's photograph Beverly Hills #34, 1984, behind a wild-maned Raquel Welch wannabe posing in a gray, asymmetrical jersey ...
Dan Colen
Jul 01, 2006; Brooks, Amra ... Dan Colen PERES PROJECTS Dan Colen's secrets and Cymbals, Smoke and Scissors (My Iriend Dash's Wall in the Future), 2004-2006, is a life-size sculpture of a wall from a twentysomething's garage or studio. Based on a scene also pictured in a photograph by "Dash" (the artist Dash ...
Daniel Joseph Martinez
Jul 01, 2006; Miles, Christopher ... Daniel Joseph Martinez LAXART In new nonprofit gallery LAXART's inaugural show, Daniel Joseph Martinez revisited the straightforward presentation of text ami image that defined his early practice, one which often addressed the subject of polarization but was itself polarizing ....
Gianni Dessì
Jul 01, 2006; Panicelli, Ida ... ROME Gianni Dessì MACRO For Gianni Dessì, painting "is not a dead language that consoles and comforts, hut one that requires the repositioning of the viewer." And in this exhibition, an overview of his work from 1980 to the present, the artist allowed us to remain in the ...
Riccardo Previdi
Jul 01, 2006; Meneguzzo, Marco ... MILAN Riccardo Previdi GALLERlA FRANCESCA MININI Franceses Minini, daughter of Brescia gallery owner Massimo Minini, has opened a new gallery in Lambratc, the neighborhood that is becoming Milan's trendiest contemporary art district. Her inaugural show-thirty-one-year-old ...
Leonardo Drew
Jul 01, 2006; Drake, Cathryn ... SIENA Leonardo Drew PALAZZO DELLE PAPESSE-CENTRO ARTE CONTEMPORANEA "Existing Everywhere," Leonardo Drew's first major European exhibition, proves the New York and San Antonio-based artist to be a force ot nature. The show's thirteen installations (one per ...
Aleksandra Mir
Jul 01, 2006; Rian, Jeff ... PARIS Aleksandra Mir GALERIE LAURENT GODIN For her first solo exhibition in Paris, Aleksandra Mir-Polish-born, a Swedish citizen, and a New York City resident since 1989-festooned Galerie Laurent Codin with every variety of Mexican kitsch: paper flowers, salad howls of ...
Marco Poloni
Jul 01, 2006; Rosen, Miriam ... Marco Poloni CENTRE CULTUREL SUISSE There is always more than meets the eye(s) in Marco Poloni's photos, videos, performances, and the multimedia setups he calls "observation devices" (dispositifs d'observation): All serve to confront us with our perceptual and conceptual blind ...
"Images de l'Inconscient"
Jul 01, 2006; Bartelik, Marek ... "Images de l'Inconscient" HALLE SAINT-PIERRE Although "Iniiiges de l'Inconscient" presented 181 works by six artist-patients from the collection of the Museu de Imagens do Inconsciente in Rio de Janeiro, this exhibition paid homage to the work of its founder, Dr. Nise da Silveira ...
Al Taylor
Jul 01, 2006; Reust, Hans Rudolf ... ZURICH Al Taylor HAUNCH OF VENISON I vividly remember spending hours looking ont the window of Al Taylor's studio in Manhattan at the corner of Twentieth Street and Park Avenue. It was a privileged view. There was always a lot going on at the colorful intersection-a ...
Ernst Caramelle
Jul 01, 2006; Huck, Brigitte ... VIENNA Ernst Caramelle GALERIE NÄCHST ST. STEPHAN ROSEMARIE SCHWARZWÄLDER This show is a kind of commentary on what moves Ernst Caramelle in his life in art. Pigment on plaster, color on walls, sunshine on paper, a tolio of delicate drawings con brio-from these basics ...
Clemens von Wedemeyer
Jul 01, 2006; Wege, Astrid ... COLOGNE Clemens von Wedemeyer KÖLNISCHER KUNSTVEREIN Michelangelo Antonioni, as film critic Urs Richter once wrote, is the photographer among European directors: Image composition dominates montage and the moment wins ont over chronology. Clemens von Wcdemeyer's 55-mm ...
Wawrzyniec Tokarski
Jul 01, 2006; Smolik, Noemi ... HAMBURG Wawrzyniec Tokarski GALERlE VERA MUNRO They are not narrative images. Yet Wawrzyniec Tokarski's paintings tell stories-stories that wrap themselves like masks around the images, creep into the consciousness of the viewer and, above all, Jon't soon leave one in ...
Bojan Sarcevic
Jul 01, 2006; Allen, Jennifer ... BERLIN Bojan Sarcevic CARLIER | GEBAUER Dot's culture cvoKc like nature? Bojan Sarcevic seems determined to find out. His oeuvre reads like an attempt to test Darwin's theory of evolution on various cultural phenomena: clothing, music, design. Unlike the great naturalist, ...
Dick Bengtsson
Jul 01, 2006; Jones, Ronald ... STOCKHOLM Dick Bengtsson MODERNA MUSEET Dick Bengtsson painted his last swastika in 1971. It materializes in the four closing panels of the Domburg Suite, which he fashioned after Piet Mondrian's progressively abstract versions of a church facade in Domburg, Holland. The ...
Pablo Bronstein
Jul 01, 2006; Williams, Gilda ... LONDON Pablo Bronstein HERALD ST. GALLERY Pablo Bronstcm's enticing, elaborately detailed ink, gouache, and pencil drawings make no apology for the machismo which, in the longgone 'Sos, hideously spliced together retrograde postmodernism with Baroque and neoclassical ...
Paulina Olowska
Jul 01, 2006; Mears, Emily Speers ... Paulina Olowska CABINET GALLERY "Hello to You Too" seemed an appropriately coy title tor an exhibition that knowingly offered a come-on while making it seem as though the advance had been on the part of the viewer. Paulina Olowska's chic, tightly constructed show consisted of ...
Anthony McCall
Jul 01, 2006; Schwabsky, Barry ... Anthony McCall PEER / PEER AT THE ROUND CHAPEL The Round Chapel isn't really annul-elliptical is mure like it. Built in 1871, it is said to have been the most important Nonconformist church in East London. Although you can't see much of the place in the darkness that Anthony ...
Taiji Matsue
Jul 01, 2006; Matsui, Midori ... SHIZUOKA Taiji Matsue VANGI SCULPTURE GARDEN MUSEUM Going to the opposite extreme from the blurry vision of Daido Moriyama, his primary influence, Taiji Matsue asserts relentless visibility, dissolving perspective in the glare of sharp outlines and in the accumulation of ...
CORRECTION
Jul 01, 2006; Anonymous ... CORRECTION: In the May issue, Jan Avgikos's review of Agnes Martin's work at Pace Wildenstein, New York, was ...
