Artipedia - Arts News

Artforum

February 2008 in Artforum
Artforum
350 Seventh Ave, 19th Floor
New York, New York 10001
t: 212.475-4000 f: 212.529-1257

http://www.artforum.com

This month in Artforum: “Attention Span: The Art of Omer Fast.” Tom Holert looks at the film and video of the Berlin-based artist on the occasion of his recent exhibition at MUMOK in Vienna, which featured the artist’s latest work, The Casting, 2007—an endless hall of mirrors blending document and fiction, candor and performance, total recall and blatant fabrication. Seamlessly interweaving two narratives of military misadventure—one near a United States military base in Germany, the other in the Iraqi desert—together with a metanarrative of the “auditions” of the piece’s participants, Fast reflects on the ways in which war is mediated by memory and medium.

“If Fast’s works cast doubt on the entire enterprise of historical documentation, they do the same with notions of identity and personality and the very idea of presenting a ‘face’ to the world.” —Tom Holert

And: “Out of the Past.” One day in 1973, while doing research for a planned monograph on Eva Hesse, Lucy R. Lippard sat down with Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt to discuss their late friend and fellow artist. Now Artforum presents this never-before-published conversation, along with a postscript by contributing editor and art historian James Meyer.

“[With respect to Hesse’s work] I think it would be very fruitful to get into the psychology of bondage. It’s like having control over the objectness, when you have an object and you’re really binding it. It’s a kind of submission, the dominance of the object.” —Robert Smithson

Also in October: Alvin Baltrop, “Pier Photographs,” 1975–86. For roughly a decade, this largely unknown photographer obsessively documented the dilapidated industrial piers along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, which provided a home for artistic and sexual experimentation, utopian freedoms and terrible violence. Art historian Douglas Crimp introduces a portfolio of Baltrop’s pictures of men cruising and sunbathing; of corpses dredged from the river; of light pouring over the scene, through Gordon Matta-Clark’s Day’s End, 1975, on Pier 52.

Plus: Tom Burr talks to Joshua Decter about “Addict-Love,” his current show at New York’s SculptureCenter; Colin Lang lauds the Blinky Palermo retrospective in Düsseldorf; Miwon Kwon takes more than one look at Francis Alÿs’s repetitions in “The Politics of Rehearsal,” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Carroll Dunham visits “Jasper Johns: Gray,” the “shadow retrospective” at the Art Institute of Chicago; David Joselit tunes in to Mike Smith’s recent retrospective at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, in tandem with the exhibition “Air Kissing” at Brooklyn’s Momenta Art; Caroline Busta considers the work of Ei Arakawa; André Rottmann explores how Andreas Siekmann’s site-specificity challenges our notions of democratic public space; David Salle scopes out Julian Schnabel’s directorial vision in his latest film, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Jessica Morgan, Francesco Bonami, and Okwui Enwezor reply to Robert Storr; and Raqs Med
ia Collective count down their Top Ten.

Visit Artforum online at http://www.artforum.com

To subscribe, visit http://www.artforum.com/subscribe

Visit artguide—Artforum’s free directory of the international art world, listing art fairs, auctions, and current gallery and museum shows in more than four hundred cities—at http://www.artforum.com/guide

Kunsthalle Bern

Obliteration no. 4, 2006, white neon and
black Paint

Stefan Brüggemann
BLACK BOX
9.2. - 20.4.2008

Curator: Philippe Pirotte

Kunsthalle Bern
Helvetiaplatz 1
CH-3005 Bern
Opening hours:
Wednesday till Sunday 10 am - 5 pm
Tuesday 10 am - 7 pm
T: +41 (0)31 350 00 40
F: +41 (0)31 350 00 41
info@kunsthalle-bern.ch
http://www.kunsthalle-bern.ch

The works of Mexican artist Stefan Brüggemann (°1975) question the idea of transferring or mirroring information. For his first major institutional solo-exhibition, at Kunsthalle Bern, Brüggemann proposes a large, walk-in ‘black box’ located at the core of a retrospective presentation of his infamous wall-texts. The black box is ‘basically just output, with no input’, as Brüggemann observes. Yet it is, of course, something, which is not ‘nothing’, in spite of any effort to ensure that it might be otherwise. It is as abrasively insistent, contrarian and self-defeating in its address and effect.

His laconic vinyl and neon picture-signs act as memorials to “language that must be reactivated”. They create imaginary spaces or experiences for the audience invoked by words. These spaces are produced through the individual act of looking, and each look is always new, notwithstanding the familiarity of the statement. Indeed, it is precisely the intelligibility of the text, which allows the viewer to formulate an experience, since the artist intends no ambiguity. Brüggemann’s words are his, though the resulting images are not controlled by the artist, but by the viewer in the act of perceiving, remembering and creating anew for themselves. Language becomes a way of remembering, reflecting and
refracting events.

Stefan Bruggemann´s principal mode of operation is to inject pop sensibility into conceptualist strategies. The exhibition also features two works from a recent series called “Obliteration” (2006-2008). The scribbled neon text is analogous to the gesture of writing and un-writing. From the negative of the word and the event of writing, to the idea of denial as an absolute and autonomous power, the Obliterations feature the concept of ‘no’ as an empty, powerful, independent and fruitful source, that articulates in its various manifestations concepts such as rejection, non-conformity and absence. In their implicit denial of language these neon lights represent both the search for new grounds, and the impossibility of the very same. Charged with the destructive nature of punk, the Obliterations constitute a double negation.

In the movie Theater Cinématte, Brüggemann presents “A Production of Nothing” (2006), a short film that considers the condition of productivity and of un-productivity, as well as the meaning of the activity of doing nothing and its countless possibilities. This work, that has an awkward bi-polarity between what is seen and what is heard, establishes an almost contradictory relation between a strong cinematic imagery and the deeply conceptual and reflexive ideas expressed through the narrators voice. On one hand, the film depicts scenes that could belong to an element of mass culture, such as a video clip or an advertisement. One the other, it deals with deep philosophical concerns that could be related to Derrida’s deconstructive ideas on nothingness. The soundtrack, created by the Barcelona based dj and music producer Cristian Vogel, is made through the recording of the white noise produced when no sound instrument is connected to a mixing table. This is the same sou
ndtrack as the one heard inside the Black Box exhibited in the Kunsthalle. In dealing with these two elements at the same time, popular culture and intellectual reflections, Brüggemann uses a medium that is rarely seen in his praxis to explore similar ideas to the ones expressed in most of his work.

A book focussing on the recent work of Stefan Brüggemann, edited by Nicolas de Oliveira and with texts by Chris Kraus, Caomhín Mac Giolla Léith and Michael Bracewell will be published by JRP/Ringier

The exhibition is a collaboration of the Kunsthalle Bern and Frac Bourgogne in Dijon.

Events:

Friday February 8, 2 pm:
Conversation with the artist, Nicolas de Oliveira and Caomhín Mac Giolla Léith moderated by
Philippe Pirotte

With the generous support of: the City of Bern, the Donators of Club 15, the Mexican Embassy in Bern, the Movie-theatre Cinématte Bern and donators that wish to remain anonymous

The Events and Educational Program benefits the support of the Cultural Award of the
Burgergemeinde Bern

Tate Liverpool

Niki de Saint Phalle
Film Still — From Daddy 1972
Copyright: NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION.
All rights reserved 2007.

Niki de Saint Phalle
1 February 2008 - 5 May 2008

Tate Liverpool
Albert Dock, Liverpool,
L3 4BB, UK
+ 44 (0) 151 702 7400

http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool

Tate Liverpool will present the first UK exhibition of the work of Franco-American painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle since her death in 2002. The exhibition presents a comprehensive survey of the artist’s entire career and will include key examples from all phases of her work; from her early assemblages and paintings in the 1950s, her acclaimed Shooting Paintings in the early 1960s, her religious altars and bride sculptures in the mid 1960s, the Nanas and larger sculptural works, a wide selection of graphic work, to her late works including drawings and model sculptures from her
Tarot Garden.

Beautiful, flamboyant, daring, provocative and fiercely independent, Niki de Saint Phalle emerged in the 1960s as a powerful and original figure in the masculine international arts world centred around Paris. Yet despite her association with the Nouveau Réalistes, and a number of collaborations with many of the world’s leading artists and her marriage to Jean Tinguely, her work has been overlooked, or dismissed as merely playful. A believer in mythology and fairytales, her work is bright and colourful, demonstrating an exuberant love of life, at the same time revealing a certain darkness. This exhibition, a wide-ranging presentation of the work and exploration of her themes and concerns, will attempt to address this oversight and bring her work to a wider audience.

Supported by The Henry Moore Institute with additional support from the French Institute
Address Tate Liverpool, Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4BB, UK
Director Christoph Grunenberg
Curators Simon Groom and Kyla McDonald
Opening Hours - Tue - Sun 10.00 - 18.50