Summer 2014
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In this issue:
Art After Art Part B, The Art of Leadership, Than Hussein Clark, Counter-Memorials, Engineering Art, From Feminist to Vigilant Art, James Ferraro, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Robert Heinecken, Peter Hujar, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Magiciens de la Terre Redux, Otobong Nkanga, The Not-Spot, From Performance to Post-Performance, Selfie Poetics, Bunny Rogers, Mario Schifano, Jasper Spicero, Hannah Weinberger, Phillip Zach
Peter Hujar documented the gaze and way of life of the human universe of a by-now vanished New York, which in the 1970s and 1980s was burning with feverish desire. Stefan Kalmár draws a moving portrait of the photographer who—as Nan Goldin put it— “had an ability to inhabit another being’s flesh.”
In order to create the “new” and the “hot,” argues Nick Currie, the art world produces alienation, occluding and sublimating its own recent past. This creates a “not-spot,” a place where junk and treasures sit side by side.
The recent exhibition of the painterly production of George W. Bush offers food for thought to Alison M. Gingeras about the diplomatic management of power through art. What lies behind the amateur quality and the opacity of the ex-president’s portraits?
Andrew Durbin considers the recent rise of the selfie and poetry in the art world, rethinking how artist-poets self-image through language on the Internet. The “Selfie Poetic” revises our definition of the self-portrait as critically dependent on a network of bots that constantly threaten to write our poems for us.
Los Angeles: A former fighter pilot during World War II and later a Marine, as an artist Robert Heinecken was a “paraphotographer”: he liked existing pictures and scissors more than darkrooms. Andrew Berardini reinterprets his radical way of reassembling images and his provocative personality.
Jens Hoffmann asks himself about what is at stake in keeping the concept of “art” alive, when today it has become impossible to define the term from a stylistic viewpoint, and the systems of art distribution and reception have become too varied to pin down.
In 1989, the concept of an all-encompassing geographical survey of current work was revolutionary. That was the year Jean-Hubert Martin curated Magiciens de la Terre. As we approach the 25th anniversary of the exhibition, Chelsea Haines spoke with the curator about the show’s legacy and the increasingly blurred line between art and anthropology.
Jenny Jaskey and A.E. Benenson met with Tyler Coburn and Michael Portnoy to discuss the theme of engineering of artwork in the wider, facet-laden sense of the term: social engineering that offers viewer/participants the chance to play beyond their expectations, “professional whimsicalism,” outsider design of new worlds…
Raised in a universe where performance comes naturally, that of a native Nigerian, Otobong Nkanga investigates themes of absence, loss and amnesia through her practice. Hans Ulrich Obrist met with the artist to talk about her extended performances and her relationship with the audience.
Catherine Wood, Marie de Brugerolle and Marie Canet weave a discussion on the interpretation of the term performance that has also spread widely in commercial contexts as a synonym for success and efficiency. Is there a link between these two spheres of meaning in the output of younger artists? And if we can label the work of a new generation as “post-performance,” does the term indicate the end of an era, or rather the creation of link to the roots, to open up questions for the future?
Jennifer Allen takes a tour of the most interesting current artistic operations that maintain awareness of sexism, but also of the state of the art of feminism in general, from the birth of individual feminisms—nanofeminisms—to the resurfacing of “identity politics.”
Nice To Meet You:
Nikola Dietrich talked with Hannah Weinberger about her exploitation of the potential of music to grant every viewer a performative role within the work.
Bruce Chatwin meets the decorative arts in the work of Than Hussein Clark and of his Villa Design Group, as told to Simon Castets.
James Ferraro’s albums mine the space between music, muzak, and pop culture: Christopher Y. Lew catches up with the artist.
London: Sidsel Meineche Hansen situates her work around questions of nervousness and its potential as a strategy for institutional critique. Anna Gritz speaks with the artist about the agency of the nervous body, the ambivalence of criticality and complicity, and the role of radical subjectivity in her work.
Kevin McGarry talked to artist Jasper Spicero about his inspirations—prisons, video games, and other hermetic architectures both real and virtual—and his techniques, comprising 3D printing which he considers similar to the process of water freezing. Spicero’s tightly wound playgrounds trigger associative readings of his work and allow meanings to develop in unnaturally undisturbed ways.
Taking his cue from a look at the crisis of monumentality in public art in New York, Thomas J. Lax discusses the strategies and varieties of the memorial and the anti-monument in recent artistic production and the various turns that have oriented contemporary artistic practice toward historically inflected and participatory projects.
Known to most observers as Italy’s foremost Pop artist—with forays into film and pop music—Mario Schifano made art that was often tainted by the recklessness of his existence. Flavia Frigeri tells the story of the artist’s addiction to television and its ceaseless stream of images for Lost and Found.
New York: Bunny Rogers uses poetry as a versatile platform from which to evolve more complex works. The interview with Harry Burke analyzes her recent work on the social elaboration of the Columbine massacre, and her collaboration with artist Brigid Mason.
Sophie von Olfers discusses with Phillip Zach the “peculiar” originality of his work, its lack of routineness that lets him range from experiments with language to three-dimensional works with clear performative aspects.
Aliens having sex and deviant Japanese river imps are just a few of the images that populate Jamian Juliano-Villani’s paintings. Jonathan Griffin speaks with the artist about her exploration of the self, the ethics of appropriation, and the possibilities for contemporary painting.
The Artist as Curator—Available on iPad from September
Issue #3, an insert in Mousse Magazine #44
Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here…
Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography
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