March April Issue 2011
Flash Art International is out with two covers: a special project by James Franco and Francesco Vezzoli, and Natalie Portman wearing Rodarte‘s Black Swan costume.
Highlights from the news section: interviews with Rasha Salti and Haig Aivazian—respectively curator (with Susan Cotter) and associate curator of Sharjah Biennial 10—and with the curatorial team of “Open House,” 3rd edition of the Singapore Biennale; curator Lauren Ross and Alexander Ferrando on the opening of the second segment of Manhattan’s ‘open-air museum,’ The High Line; Nicola Trezzi and Amy Mackie on her recent appointment, and plans, as Director for Visual Art at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center; Director Mark Sladen interviewed by Maria Kjær Themsen on the re-opening of the Copenhagen’s Kunsthal Charlottenborg and its spring program; Michele Robecchi on the competition for the acquisition of the 880-square-meter munition depo, finally won by The Serpentine Gallery; Antonella Massari talking to Giancarlo Politi about Unicredit Group‘s involvement with contemporary art; Paul Chan discussing his endeavors in the publishing realm; Carsten Höller in an interview by Alessandra Olivari that locates his recent project JapanCongo within the artist’s latest artistic production; the first of Donatien Grau’s series of interviews with gallerists, this time devoted to Yvon Lambert.
Features:
“Art and show business are organized around differing cores of transparency and opacity.” (David Robbins)
David Robbins’ “High Entertainment” introduces this issue’s leitmotiv, analysing how differently the media culture’s star model performs within the two contexts.
In “Going to the Oscars” Francesco Vezzoli meets and talks to James Franco in a conversation that brings to the fore their common interest in a “contemporary practice that seems to once again embrace fictionalized realities and to realize complex fictions,” as Klaus Biesenbach, in his brief introduction, emphases.
Donatien Grau discusses Lady Gaga‘s definition of her own practice as one of “pop performance art” via connections to—and cross-references with—personalities such as Terence Koh and Francesco Vezzoli, Marina Abramovic and Andy Warhol.
Maurizio Cattelan meets Laura and Kate Mulleavy of Rodarte in an interview that recounts Californian atmospheres, stirs family memories and pays homage to the designers artistic collaborations and inspirations.
Also featured:
“The Responsive Eye,” where Carsten Nicolai revisits the 1965 Museum of Modern Art exhibition that appeared to have set the “perfect conditions to explore and share a type of art that engaged audiences in optical reactivity,” and became known as the “height of the Op Art wave.”
Karlyn De Jongh, initiator of “Personal Structures: Time-Space-Existence,” contributing a feature on Keith Sonnier that is structured around the two key components of his work since his start in the late ’60s: light and space.
The vocabulary of classical modernism (Constructivism, Suprematism, Minimalism) that permeates the art of Katja Strunz, as the subject of an interview with the artist by Gesine Borcherdt.
Alejandra Aguado in an interview with Argentinian artist Jorge Macchi about the relationships of his practice to literature and journalism as well as on the abundant presence of references to religion and Christianity.
Teheran-born, The Hague-based artist Navid Nuur, who speaks to Christine Macel about the layered and modular nature of his work that, often at a very late moment in time, assembles ideas and “archived” material that find its precise and final meaning in a found context’s specificity.
This issue’s “Spotlights” are: “Move: Choreographing You” by Eliza Williams; “Katarzyna Kozyra: Casting” by Kamila Wielebska; and “Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception” by Pierre-Yves Desaive.
This issue’s “Brand New” artists are: Petrit Halilaj, interviewed by Laura Cherubini; Aki Sasamoto, interviewed by Mary Rinebold; Paloma Polo, interviewed by Emma Brasó; and Dor Guez, interviewed by Galit Mana.
This issue’s reviews include: Stephen G. Rhodes, Jesse McCloskey, Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor, Nigel Cooke, Alex Mirutziu, Never The Same River, Mat Collishaw, Martin Creed, You and Now, Ėtienne Chambaud, Stephen Shore, Josephine Pryde, Those Ghosts, The Nose of Michelangelo, Pablo Pijnappel, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Sara Ramo, Vangelis Gokas, Tobias Zielony, Mimmo Jodice, Claire Fontaine, Ravi Agarwal.
Flash Art International is at The Armory Show, New York, Pier 92, stand L4.
