Summer 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
Summer 2007 in Artforum
This summer in Artforum: “Who Is Guy de Cointet?” A childhood friend of Yves Saint Laurent? The descendant of a general in Napoleon’s army? Studio-mate to Viva and, later, a fabricator of Larry Bell’s glass boxes? In truth, Guy de Cointet was all of these things. And from the late ’60s until his death in 1983, he was an active member of the Los Angeles art scene whose encrypted works on paper and theatrical productions were often as enigmatic as the Frenchman himself. Looking back on the life and work of this quintessential artist’s artist are curators Marie de Brugerolle and Connie Butler, writer Jay Sanders, artists Mike Kelley and Matthew Brannon, and Cointet colleagues and collaborators Larry Bell, Mary Ann Duganne Glicksman, William Leavitt, and Jeff Perkins. These new assessments and reminiscences are followed by a facsimile manuscript of a 1976 play by Cointet, At Sunrise . . . a Cry Was Heard.
“Cointet made theatrical performances that defy categorization and yet are absolutely central to a largely unmined history of Conceptual performance art.” —Connie Butler
Also this summer: the expanded stage. A number of writers and conversants consider the increasing role of performativity in both contemporary art and culture. In “The Beggar’s Pantomime,” artist and critic Melanie Gilligan examines the present tangle of politics and performance as artists restage historical works while economic forces restage experience itself. Elsewhere, art historian Rachel Haidu revisits Décor: A Conquest by Marcel Broodthaers, a 1975 artwork (recreated this spring at Galerie de France, Paris) in which a bourgeois interior is staged as a battlefield—suggesting the ways in which the spectator’s relationship to war and imperialism can be subtly domesticated. Finally, cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha and Artforum editor Tim Griffin speak with architectural historian Beatriz Colomina about her new book, Domesticity at War, taking up her consideration of the inscriptions of military technologies in the home environment during the Cold War in order to sur
mise our own situation today amid an “endless” and “borderless” war on terror.
“Until now, identity at the frontier, border, customs area—all the flash points of what is inside and outside a nation—was basically a matter of documentation. Your identity documents proved you were who you said you were. But now there is a search for an identity that seeks to find out what your intentions are. At the borders, there is a new biopolitics afoot.” —Homi K. Bhabha
And: “A Kind of True Living.” On the occasion of Beijing-based artist Ai Weiwei’s much-anticipated contribution to Documenta 12—Fairytale, for which 1,001 Chinese will be flown to Kassel—critic Philip Tinari looks at the grand arc of the agent provocateur’s practice, from his salad days in New York in the ’80s to his pivotal role in contemporary Chinese art now.
Plus: Francesco Vezzoli talks to Artforum senior editor, Scott Rothkopf, about his contribution to the new Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Democrazy, which pits Sharon Stone against Bernard-Henri Lévy in a race for the American presidency.
“Election campaigns are so glamorous, so powerful, so precise, and so cruel that they themselves become the object of debate. The campaign is the object of desire. It’s the handbag of the political world.” —Francesco Vezzoli
In addition: Briony Fer travels to Roni Horn’s Library of Water in Iceland; artist Glenn Ligon sits down with the Julie Ault–edited book of texts on and by Felix Gonzalez-Torres; artist Matt Saunders appraises the restoration of Fassbinder’s epic Berlin Alexanderplatz, and James Quandt discusses 12:08 East of Bucharest and the Romanian New Wave as well as the films of Hong Sang-soo; author Lynne Tillman introduces pages from Stephen Shore’s road-trip journal; Artforum contributing editor Daniel Birnbaum studies the art of education; Artforum editor-at-large Jack Bankowsky considers the intersection of mink and the market at David Hammons’s recent Upper East Side excursion; poet Tan Lin records Seth Price and Kelley Walker’s Freelance Stenographer; Richard Meyer covers the “WACK!” catalogue dust-jacket dust-up; T. J. Demos investigates the art of Gerard Byrne, who will represent Ireland at the Venice Biennale; Michael Ned Holte looks at the work of Los Angeles artist Aaron Cur
ry; Claire Moulène explores Lothar Hempel’s retrospective in Grenoble; Ann Reynolds surveys “Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color” in Houston; Eda Cufer critiques a new collection of essays on collectives, Collectivism After Modernism; Diedrich Diederichsen muses on the documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man; Paulina Olowska counts off her Top Ten; Mel Bochner and John Baldessari reflect on the life and art of Sol LeWitt; and Sylvère Lotringer remembers Jean Baudrillard.
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