| Abstract |
May 2004 / No 276
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba Towards the Complex - For the Courageous, the Curious and the Cowards 2001 video still
FEATURES
Rock/Art
Martin Patrick on Chris Burden, Iggy Pop and the aesthetics of early 70s Performance Art.
‘Certain parallels are clear here, but what determines whether these performative feats are considered art or mere showmanship? What audience seeks out these types of spectacle? How do these artists, spawned out of the era of the Vietnam war and marked by violence and alienation, protest and complacency, use the male body as a site for their actions? How do the masculine poses of preceding movements in art and music become subverted and twisted along with the bodies of these performers?’
Pop/Art
Art offers pop music a stamp of legitimacy, pop music offers art a whisper of cult status argues Mark Prince.
‘According to Raymond Pettibon, you should not assume from the album covers and flyers, which he designed for LA punk bands in the 70s, that the music can tell you much about the art or vice versa: ‘‘It’s a knee-jerk response to the company I happen to keep. It just shows the obsession that society has with rock culture, nowhere more so than in art.’’ His exasperation qualifies the recent eagerness to use pop music and art as mutual justification. Exhibitions, such as ‘‘Sonic Process’’ at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, map correspondences between the two media, positioning them at convenient ends of an axis that supposedly enriches both. The current Berlin Biennale, with its recurring theme of assimilating music subcultures within a gallery mould, demonstrates how problematic this recontextualising can be.’
Forced Entertainment
Graham Parker on rock, ritual and repetition.
‘When I think of Forced Entertainment’s British peers I think less of the tabloid friendly vernacular of the yBas and more perhaps of Mark E Smith and The Fall. The erratic Mr Smith has been chronicling his own experience of a provincial landscape since the late 70s and has pursued a willful outsider’s role (when it has suited him) in contemporary British music.’
EDITORIAL
Ça Ira (It's going to be fine)
Artists from the new EU member countries might hope that older richer members of the EU such as the UK will set their governments an example in terms of funding for artists but the reality is rather different: ‘despite their huge contribution to the Exchequer, not to mention to London’s image as a cultural nexus, artists living and working in London do not enjoy any of the tax benefits or subsidies that other member states (not to mention non-member states) such as Ireland, the Netherlands or Germany offer.’
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
The Sound of the Crowd
Ritter/Zamet
Gilda Williams
Apopalyptical
Houldsworth Gallery, London
David Barrett
Matt Wand
La gallerie dans ma poche, Manchester/London/Amsterdam
Martin Vincent
At the Still Point of the Turning World
FACT, Liverpool
Martin Herbert
Lucas Samaras
Waddington Galleries, London
Alison Green
Collage
Bloomberg Space, London
Eliza Williams
Simon English
Rhodes+Mann, London
Pablo Lafuente
Raoul De Keyser
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
Andrew Wilson
Attila Csörgö
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge
Morgan Falconer
ARTISTS’ BOOKS
Sally O’Reilly: ‘Besides being a detective yarn, a travel guide and recipe cards, 3 Found Fonts is also a design book. Tilson explains the processes behind developing fonts from a limited number of letters and demonstrates cultural diasporas of type design.’
Bruce Haines reviews Anyway by Tom Morton and Catherine Patha.
‘AnywayÕs title is taken from a line in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, in which the female lead, stuck with a mysterious revolutionary in the desert says: ‘‘So anyway, so anyway É so anyway should be one word, the name of a place’’. The book is a collaboration between nine artists and eight writers playing a game of consequences. After a drawing was made, it was subsequently passed to a writer, annotated, and then passed on to another artist, and so on.’
BOOKS
Dave Beech reviews After Theory by Terry Eagleton and Maria Walsh reviews Vampire in the Text: Narratives of Contemporary Art by Jean Fisher.
NETWORKS
Neen Today
Michael Gibbs reports from www.whitneybiennial.com
‘Go to www.whitneybiennial.com but donÕt expect to see any of the art displayed at the renowned Whitney Biennial. The painter and net artist Miltos Manetas had discovered that the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York had failed to register a convenient internet domain name for its Biennial, so he claimed it himself and used it for an exhibition of his own and his friends’ net art, mostly consisting of Flash animations accessible from an online interface resembling a museum space.’
REPORT
Artist and curator of the Sydney Biennial 2003 Richard Grayson sends Art Monthly a Letter from Berlin
‘To somebody from the UK the low cost of space here in Berlin is extraordinary: you are transported back to a prelapsarian and mythic time, pre-80s, pre-yuppy and almost beyond memory; a flash-back where (maybe) glamorous and definitely poor young artists occupy the centre of a city ‘‘doing their thing’’.’
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