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Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
Photographer Joseph Bartscherer with James Welling on the order of Things—from construction to agriculture to front-page obituaries. WEB EXTRA: View a slideshow of images from Bartscherer’s Forest.
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Painters Steve DiBenedetto and David Humphrey on what mind-altering drugs have in common with Venturi, Cezanne, Catholicism, and heavy metal.
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The artists discuss chance, the creative potential of drifting, and “distinguishing reality from fiction—as if that were possible!” WEB EXTRA: Watch Dardot’s Hic et nunc video!
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Gomes reinvents beauty with insignificant things — precarious objects on their way to disappearing. In correspondence with the master builder of spirit, Ernesto Neto.
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Muniz, master of turning life’s detritus back into life itself, speaks with the visionary design team known as the Campana Brothers on metamorphosis.
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The filmmakers emailed between London and Brussels, comparing notes on their working process, the high emotion of beginning a shot, and the theory underlying their projects, from anthropology and psychoanalysis to cinema verité.
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Pare’s symphonic photographs (on view at MoMA through October in The Lost Vanguard) celebrate the short-lived Russian experiment in modernist architecture and its utopian dream.
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Walker’s charged antebellum imagery has engendered heated debate. Poet Matthea Harvey charts the personal and historical sources of its provocation.
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Brooklyn poet Christian Hawkey and Swedish painter Mamma Andersson begin this correspondence with a rumination on memory, architecture, and turtles.
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Heir to the American visionary tradition, Bill Jensen’s art evolves through an intuitive process grounded in the act of painting. Poet John Yau tracks a lifetime.
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Mnemonics are the underlying force in Robert Polidori’s sumptuous photographs. With writer Michèle Gerber Klein, on Versailles, abandoned farms in North Dakota, and more.
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A Russian doll of spheres, socks stuffed with papier mâché, oranges in teacups, and a suspended whale skeleton—remnants of the natural world and the everyday, utterly re-imagined.
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Tod Papageorge’s photographs of Central Park in the ‘70s reclaimed street photography as an art form. His friendship with fellow photographer Garry Winogrand sealed the endeavor. Papageorge is back with a book, Passing Through Eden.
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Award-winning novelist Madison Smartt Bell instigates an epistolary exchange with Judith Linhares on dream theory, Emily Dickinson, and Linhares’s own legacy as one of America’s most seminal painters.
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Anthony McCall speaks with fellow artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone about his latest work, Between You and I.
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Multimedia artist Tony Oursler in conversation with musician and writer Alan Licht on Oursler’s spectacular sound, video and sculpture installations.
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New York-based painter Joe Fyfe interviews Bernard Piffaretti about Piffaretti’s signature take on abstraction.
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Painter Jane Dickson speaks with her friend, Los Angeles sculptor Liz Larner about the metaphysical expressed in the always-bold physicality of Larner’s work.
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Artist Harrell Fletcher has taken it upon himself to turn the spotlight onto others. With astounding generosity and a dedicated, empathetic intelligence, Fletcher surprises our expectations of what art and the figure of the artist can be.
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Violence and whimsy, satire and surrealism coexist in vibrant color on Dana Schutz’s large canvases. Writer Mei Chin talks with Schutz about her paradoxical mix of tenderness and detachment.
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At the early age of 40, British-born, Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean has accomplished a lifetime’s worth of work: each of her films, sound pieces, installations and drawings contains a world of references unto itself.
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Regina José Galindo’s intensely personal performances stem from her rage at the violence and corruption in Guatemala then and now. Novelist and former journalist Francisco Goldman talks with the 2005 Venice Biennale Golden Lion winner.
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Using principles of architecture, design and public sculpture, Pedro Reyes blends the realms of utopia and function in projects that truly do strive to improve the world. Rufino Tamayo museum curator Tatiana Cuevas sat down with Reyes in winter of 2005.
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Pablo Vargas Lugo’s bright, playful collages and installations explore dark subjects: from the entropic effects of time to traumatic events like the extinction of the dinosaurs and modern-day technological accidents.
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The two artists discuss Herrera’s significant contribution to the project of modernist abstraction, his use of profane materials—familiar, commonplace images—to “contaminate” the carefully circumscribed world of the abstract.
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Lincoln Perry’s mural at the University of Virginia re-envisions the building’s view of distant mountains as the acme of a kind of secular Pilgrim’s Progress.
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Elizabeth Murray and Jennifer Bartlett, painters and lifelong friends, reminisce about the ambitious New York art world of the 1960s and ‘70s.
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In conversation, Tuymans and Marshall—collaborating on an animation project scheduled to be completed in late 2007—alternately agree and disagree on the function of an artwork, its meaning and imperfection, and the frozen world within the painting.
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Julie Mehretu’s sprawling, layered paintings unravel the constructs and conventions of our often violent environment. Lawrence Chua talks with Mehretu about the interstices among geography, architecture, language and media that her work articulates.
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Born in Haiti and raised in the U.S., Vladimir Cybil juxtaposes culturally specific symbols and techniques to carve out an interstitial space. Scholar Jerry Philogene talks with Cybil about the visual bilingualism in her paintings and installations.
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Mexican artist Vargas-Suarez Universal is often mistaken for a collective, and indeed his practice—which uses sound, science and the archives of organizations ranging from the Queens Museum to NASA—is as varied as any many-authored project.
>>>Pierre Huyghe, winner of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, moves freely among different mediums, staging situations that while visually and conceptually complex, allow room for unexpected collaborations, both with other artists and with the viewer.
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Sound and music have always been a key component of Canadian artist Rodney Graham’s films, installations, even his recent paintings. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, also an artist, is used to traversing the worlds of both music and art.
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Ellen Phelan’s art evokes the experience of her singular vision: a remembrance of things past so firmly rooted in collective longing that no matter the medium she chooses, this longing becomes tangible and observable.
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Olafur Eliasson has evolved a body of “objectless” work ranging from discrete installations to museum-wide environments. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, his first comprehensive U.S. survey, is on view at MoMA through June 30th.
>>>Painter Shirley Jaffe started out under the influence of Abstract Expressionism and made a radical move in the 1960s toward a geometric vocabulary, yet her work defies categorization. Jaffe talks with Shirley Kaneda about what drives her work.
>>>Known for his frequent about-faces in format, subject, process and style, photographer James Welling has played a seminal role over the past two decades in bringing his medium to the center of the contemporary dialogue.
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Icon of cultural outrage and transgression, filmmaker John Waters has inspired a reverence in his admirers that few directors can claim. Less known but equally compelling, his photographs subvert art-world constructs of high concept and seriousness.
>>>Guyanese artist Stanley Greaves refers to himself as a maker of things, and it’s no coincidence that the people in his paintings are always holding objects. London-based researcher and writer Anne Walmsley has been in dialogue with Greaves for 10 years.
>>>The controversy over Santiago Sierra’s installations, in which hired laborers perform meaningless tasks, has gained in intensity. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles enjoys a similar notoriety: she finds tools for commentary on social unrest in the morgue.
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Brooke Alfaro’s figurative paintings were becoming increasingly grotesque visions of contemporary Latin American society. Four years ago he picked up a video camera and started recording the intimate lives of Panama City’s more impoverished denizens.
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A key figure of the ‘60s art world, Sol LeWitt bridged the gap between Minimalism and Conceptualism, foregrounding the disparity between the world of language and that of objects and actions.
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Vera Lutter’s camera obscura photographs trace a history of light and architecture in urban, industrial and transportation hubs. Traces of people, planes, blimps and clouds exist like ghosts in these panels of space and time.
>>>For over 20 years, Christian Marclay has been creating works that explore the intersection of the aural and visual. His early work in sampling and appropriation is now considered visionary—he has in large part pioneered the role of the dj in our culture.
>>>Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto are renowned for both built and unrealized projects, from the small to the very large. Their unique designs focus on the relation between architecture, territory and systems of distribution.
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Paul McCarthy’s radical approach has not been diluted over a lifetime of factory-like levels of production. The perverse psychosexual narratives he became known and admired for by fellow artists in the 1970s exploded the art world in ‘92.
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