April 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
April 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
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This month in Artforum: “Mass Appeals: The Art of Thomas Bayrle.” Art historian Christine Mehring presents an in-depth exploration of this German artist whose activities during the ’60s and ’70s ranged from making Maoist broadsides to engineering advertising campaigns for the cherry-and-liqueur-filled candy Mon Cheri. Tracing Bayrle’s artistic origins in industrial weaving and letterpress typesetting, Mehring examines his seemingly self-contradictory practice and implicit yet challenging assertion that the tactics of Communism and capitalism in the wake of World War II were more similar than those at either end of the political spectrum would care to admit–an assertion that has interesting implications for artists working today.
“Do the likes of Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami address popular and consumer culture critically or affirmatively–or do they want to have their cake and eat it too? Given his superior bona fides as both a workaday shop owner trying to make ends meet (working within industry rather than offering any Warholian performance of it) and a committed political activist (taking his oppositional stance to the streets rather than simply hanging it on a wall), Bayrle presses Pop’s seemingly inherent dichotomy more forcefully than the best of his peers.” –Christine Mehring
And: “Piece Movement.” Artforum contributing editor Yve-Alain Bois visits Tate Britain to see Mark Wallinger’s new installation, State Britain, an exact replica of the assemblage of posters, slogans, photographs, and antiwar protest banners that peace activist Brian Haw maintained for five years outside Parliament, until it was dismantled by the police in May of last year. Hearing by happenstance one pearl-necklace-wearing viewer ask, “Is this for real?” Bois explores the ramifications of this question: the authenticity of the objects comprising Wallinger’s protest barricade, the piece’s status as an artwork, and the reality of the atrocities in Iraq depicted in the installation’s imagery.
“Although American museums generally rely far less on public funding than the Tate, it is nearly impossible to imagine a single one staging an installation as politically inflammatory as this.” –Yve-Alain Bois
Also in April: “Film Noir.” Artist Carroll Dunham discusses the films of Kara Walker, currently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, suggesting that three short works made by the artist since 2004 brilliantly weave together the various threads of her practice.
“Walker’s films display a dizzying inclusiveness, in which her activities come home to roost in a kind of ur-form, both self-evident, when seen in this context, and unnerving in their potential.” –Carroll Dunham
Plus: Hannah Feldman looks at the “painterly locus where reality and spectacularity collide” in Rudolf Stingel’s current survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Rike Frank takes stock of “Wieder und Wider” at Vienna’s MUMOK, a ten-day exhibition and series of performances and lectures considering artists’ representations and appropriations of historical artworks; Caroline A. Jones changes frequency with her reading of David Joselit’s Feedback: Television Against Democracy; Amy Taubin views the anything-but-frigid films of Inuit director Zacharias Kunuk; Artforum associate editor Michael Wilson considers Goshka Macuga’s questioning of both museological display and the occult; Frances Richard finds an expanded palette on view in “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975” at New York’s National Academy Museum; Pamela M. Lee looks at Bruce Nauman as a local artist in “A Rose Has No Teeth” at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; T. J. Demos sees
an important precursor of contemporary art in the retrospective of the Black Audio Film Collective at FACT, Liverpool; and Michael Fried remembers Color Field painter Jules Olitski.
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