October 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
October 2007 in Artforum
Artforum
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This month in Artforum: “The Art of Production.” What was once seditious is now ubiquitous. If ninety years ago Marcel Duchamp infamously claimed the products of industry as his own and a half century later Donald Judd furthered this scandal by directly co-opting the language of manufacture, today artists employ the hands and machines of others so commonly as to scarcely draw notice. Many artworks of our time involve outsourced labor, industrial processes, and custom fabrication. This special issue of Artforum aims to draw these varied approaches into sharp, if wide-angle, focus, momentarily shifting attention from finished pieces to the often unseen processes that bring them into being.
“The fabrication workshop Carlson & Co., which has collaborated for decades with artists from Claes Oldenburg to Rodney Graham, portends a moment when there is absolutely no standardization, because everything is made to order; but this is a postindustrial dream perpetually deferred.” –Michelle Kuo
On the theme of production, art historian and critic Michelle Kuo provides a survey of art fabrication sites from the 1960s through today; Caroline A. Jones pays a visit to the Berlin studio of Olafur Eliasson, whose collaborative practice produces not only objects but “knowledge,” traversing the boundaries of diverse disciplines, including architecture, design, and engineering; Josiah McElheny proposes a taxonomy of “faking,” “borrowing,” and “stealing” to classify contemporary artists’ relationships to the readymade and its underlying industrial processes; and Pamela M. Lee looks beneath Takashi Murakami’s Superflat surfaces to locate the digital technics subtending his experiments in mass and niche marketing. Finally, writer Philip Tinari navigates China’s Dafen Oil Painting Village, the world’s largest site of painting production and reproduction. In addition, eleven artists–Sam Durant, Urs Fischer, Sherrie Levine, and Bridget Riley among them–offer their personal exper
iences in fabrication.
To cap the issue, Artforum convenes a roundtable discussion including representatives from various fields, the interactions of which are directly responsible for so many artworks today.
“I sense there is now a post-Koons cult of extreme production values developing, in which the expense of the production overshadows the content of the work.” –Jeffrey Deitch
Also in October: David Joselit visits Richard Serra’s retrospective at MoMA and weighs the dangers of society against the dangers of sculpture; Lisa Turvey considers Frank Stella’s move into architecture; senior editor Elizabeth Schambelan reads artist Luca Frei’s translation of The So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg by Albert Meister, about a ’70s art commune beneath the Pompidou; Julia Bryan-Wilson analyzes the resistance to mainstream accounts of the Iraq War that is central to 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, recently on view at Documenta 12; Rosalind Krauss argues for time taken in “Invisible Colors” at Marian Goodman, Paris; Maria Morris Hambourg remembers influential MoMA photography curator John Szarkowski; Thomas Struth and Blake Stimson pay tribute to photographer and teacher Bernd Becher; and artist Rosalind Nashashibi lists her Top Ten.
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