September 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
September 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
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This month in Artforum: “The Grand Tour.” This summer, for only the fourth time ever, three major European shows engaging the global conditions of contemporary artmaking took place simultaneously: the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Skulptur Projekte Münster. To take stock of the once-in-a-decade constellation of events, Artforum asked a number of regular contributors, as well as past curators, to offer their views: Okwui Enwezor, curator of Documenta 11, opens the suite of essays with a broad reflection on the continental trek and the implied fate of the globally minded show; contributing editor Katy Siegel, Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan, and 2003 Venice Biennale curator Francesco Bonami consider the current version of the venerable Italian exposition, while Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey and art historian Sven Lütticken look at two of its satellite shows, “Artempo” at the Palazzo Fortuny and Thomas Demand’s “Processo Grottesco” at the Giorgio Cini Foundati
on; contributing editor Daniel Birnbaum and critics Tom Holert and Claire Bishop survey Documenta 12; and, finally, Barbican director Kate Bush and Artforum editor Tim Griffin gain vantages on the art and public spaces of Münster.
“Does the money-drenched condition of contemporary art spell the end for the kind of curatorial irreverence and ingenuity that transformed the art world in the ’90s into a truly global affair? Do the mordant and even hostile responses to this year’s Venice Biennale, Documenta, and Skulptur Projekte Münster on the part of professionals and general audiences alike signal that the paradigm of the large-scale show has hit an iceberg and is about to sink?” –Okwui Enwezor
And: Artist Charles Ray talks to Rachel Kushner about Hinoki, 2007. Recently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, the carved-wood sculpture re-creates a found (and then stolen) thirty-two-foot-long fallen tree. The artist recounts the decadelong creative process, from the initial inspiration to the traces of “all these different people’s hands” left on the final work.
“People talk about architecture, placement in a room, but I think the artfulness of a work is how it’s spatially embedded. There are some great David Smiths whose spatial embedment makes you feel that if you were to turn them, the whole world would turn with them. Maybe the tree is like that.” –Charles Ray
Also in September: “Testing Your Patience.” Scott MacDonald interviews filmmaker James Benning, whose practice grows out of structural film. Benning discusses his recent works, including casting a glance, a 16-mm film about Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty that debuts at Documenta 12 this month.
“It always pleased me when people would tell me they’d almost left my film but instead had stayed and felt that the experience had taught them to look differently, to become more proactive as a viewer.” –James Benning
In addition: Martin Herbert and Daniel Birnbaum have an entertaining time at Philippe Parreno and Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s “Il Tempo del Postino,” at Manchester’s Opera House; Philip Tinari considers the latest overview of contemporary Chinese art, Tate Liverpool’s “The Real Thing”; Pamela Kort enters the colorful world of Anton Henning at SMAK in Ghent, Belgium; Bob Nickas remarks on the three-part Steven Parrino retrospective “La Marque Noire” at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Diana Baldon takes a seat at Tobias Rehberger’s deconstructed cinema at the Fondazione Prada, Milan; Artforum contributing editor Bruce Hainley is moved by Robert Rauschenberg’s boxes in “Cardboards and Related Works,” at the Menil Collection, Houston; Sven Lütticken reviews philosopher Gerald Raunig’s Art and Revolution; P. Adams Sitney discusses Robert Beavers’s new film, Pitcher of Color Light; and Pamela Kort remembers artist Jörg Immendorff.
Plus: Artforum looks ahead to the fall season with previews of almost sixty shows opening worldwide, from Takashi Murakami in Los Angeles and Richard Prince in New York to Louise Bourgeois in London and Mark Manders in Hannover, with first glimpses of the new New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York and Edward Krasinski’s studio in Warsaw.
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