| Abstract |
Kirsty Bell on Kirsten Pieroth
Past histories, alternative identities and subtle alterations are concealed beneath the ordinary-looking surface of Kirsten Pieroth's objects and installations, sometimes hinted at only by a title.
In the Flesh
Jennifer Higgie on Carol Rama
'I discovered that painting freed me from the anguish at everything that society loosely indicated as transgression. I can't deny that I was fond of this game and took it to extremes. Always. Wherever I was. When I sang ... when I painted. When I associated with the aristocracy. Or the horse-racing set. Or that of painting. I was outside. Against. Never aligned.'
A Different Drum
Dominic Eichler on David Zink Yi
In the video of his performance La Cumbia (1999) David Zink Yi's reclining and manly, but by no means monstrous, naked body is a shrill shade of Chromakey, Incredible Hulk-like, green. Maybe the Berlin-based artist was feeling like a real alien the day he thought about doing this. Only two of his fingers on one hand are left unpainted, like a poignant if coincidental inversion of Douglas Gordon's one black finger tattoo Three Inches (Black) (1997). All the action in the video involves Zink Yi giving his digits a life of their own.
Private Eye
Tom Morton on Alan Michael
'I hate quotations' Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) Alan Michael paints the densest paintings I've ever seen. They're not dense with pigment, or with theory (or at least not in a prêt-á-porter, picked up from a primer sense). Rather, their density is the density of a moment of extreme self-consciousness, in which one feels so present in the world, and yet so apart from everything else in it, that one's body or speech or thoughts become as heavy as a neutron star.
Dimensions variable
Mark Godfrey on 'A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-68' at MoCA, Los Angeles
'Bleak, numb, severe, hollow, morbid, programmatic, deductive, anti-compositional, not enough art, not enough work, neutral, redundant, austere, static, frozen, deathly, endgame, capitalistic, reductive, comatose Dimensions variable
Mark Godfrey on 'A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-68' at MoCA, Los Angeles
'Bleak, numb, severe, hollow, morbid, programmatic, deductive, anti-compositional, not enough art, not enough work, neutral, redundant, austere, static, frozen, deathly, endgame, capitalistic, reductive, comatose ... ' At the conference marking the occasion of the exhibition 'A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-68' at MoCA, Los Angeles the pioneering dealer Virginia Dwan read out the stream of adjectives and phrases on the previous page, which she culled from various 1960s critical accounts of minimal art.
Space oddity
Bert Rebhandl on Erik Steinbrecher
Without a doubt the most surprising element in a recent exhibition of works by Swiss artist Erik Steinbrecher is the boldly titled Dong (2004). The long, smooth, pale column, which juts out from a white wall, is suggestively phallic and so heavy it requires the support of a wooden trestle, cushioned by a piece of foam rubber. Hung next to it is Beutel (Bags, 2004), which look like two more drooping examples from the realm of Dong (although their source material is soft, the actual objects are made of acrylic resin and therefore solid).
World in Motion
Jan Verwoert on new Modernisms
An aesthetics that seemed contaminated by stale historical dogmatism has emerged looking as fresh and relevant as ever. How did this paradigm shift come about? One thing is obvious: the new sensibility marks a distinct break with the Postmodernist strategy of invoking modernity as a metaphorical authority figure and then turning it into an object of scorn and ridicule. Today this Oedipal struggle with the avant-garde no longer seems necessary. Artists such as Sigmar Polke and Martin Kippenberger have done a good job - their mission has been accomplished.
Earth is the Alien Planet
Doug Aitken talks to Ed Ruscha
Doug Aitken has interviewed a range of creative practitioners including Claire Denis, Olafur Eliasson, Rem Koolhaas and Ed Ruscha, on the topic of non-linearity. He intends to publish the conversations in a collection entitled The Broken Screen . His conversation with Ruscha ? whose drawings and photographs are the subject of two major surveys at the Whitney Museum of American Art this summer ? extends from Ruscha's films to Aitken's attempt to take a boat up the artificial Los Angeles River, and sheds light on the ways these two LA artists from... |