-
November 2009
-
Paul Chan’s Sade for Sade’s Sake
by Chris Reitz November 30, 2009
Still thrusting and convulsing, they start to disintegrate, flickering into their smallest recognizable parts—arms, legs, torsos, penises. Now voided of both the violent and the erotic, these constituent parts act like sexual graphemes, the basic elements of a visual language in which images of both depraved sexual violence and overwhelming carnal ecstasy can be written.
-
Hart and Drew at Light Industry
by Lauren DiGiulio November 24, 2009
The patterns and shapes that emerge from the activated powder are at once microcosmic and monumental. We feel as if we are looking at an ambiguous primordial image that could simultaneously represent the Big Bang, volcanic activity, or the frantic choreography of subatomic quarks. By allowing the sound of the projector to initiate, Hart and Drew celebrate the rude mechanics of the film’s instrumentation, and subvert the traditional hierarchy that places image before sound within its presentation.
-
Farber on Film
by Jessica Loudis November 21, 2009
Against these white elephants – which include Truffaut, Antonioni and Welles – Farber celebrates termite art, which has no “object in mind other than eating away at the immediate boundaries of art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Grounding his criticism in a kind of highbrow populism, Farber recognizes the blood in the medium, and reserves his highest praise for films that evoke a visceral, as well as intellectual, response.
-
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen at Sculpture Center
by Lauren DiGiulio November 19, 2009
The performance consists of Rasmussen’s physical interpretation of seven poems, written by the early modernist poet Mina Loy, and by the artist herself. Loy’s words underscore the work with rich symbolic imagery, while Rasmussen’s sharper tone brightens and provokes. By bringing these distinct voices together in dialogue, Rasmussen celebrates the influence of Futurism on her work while using it as a point of reference to orient herself within the landscape of feminist performance.
-
Speed Reading at Definitions
by Alice Gregory November 16, 2009
Ambling on the central machine, Sina Najafi, Cabinet’s Editor-in-Chief, flanked on either side by matching treadmills, played the MC, or, as he preferred “Speed Demon,” summoning each reader from the audience by blowing a whistle. Hands in trouser pockets, strolling leisurely – indoors on a forever-repeating non-course – Najafi was a walking – ha! – parody of the flâneur. The gym, perhaps the paragon of a certain sort of urban renewal, and this one located only blocks from Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs’s most frequently cited neighborhood, was a particularly loaded setting.
-
Erratic Anthropologies at Art in General
by Stephen Squibb November 12, 2009
Having been plied with cheap champagne and terrible, terrible live muzak, we were now offered further refreshments, namely water, whiskey and meatballs. This last combination was a particularly deft touch. It’s an impressive installation, most notably in the presence of a small, manufactured pond in the corner of the gallery behind a wall of fake plants. The pond is lit intermittently by a light linked to a sound installation that alternates between jungle cats mating and ‘the dying market calling out desperately the features and amenities that once made it great.’
-
Bruce High Quality at X
by Alice Gregory November 10, 2009
Orson Wells was quoted on Switzerland; Marilyn Monroe was quoted on Hollywood. The resumes of First Ladies were listed, as were all of the artists that Peggy Guggenheim is said to have slept with. The audience was bombarded with the words and images of Basquiat, Warhol, Becket, Oprah, James Frey, Hitler, Josephine Baker and Adolf Loos. What began as skepticism on my part melted into an appreciative transfixion. Within minutes, I began attempting to anticipate the images that would correspond with the narration.
-
Signs Taken for Wonders
by Stephen Squibb November 6, 2009
The last method is graffiti, venerable and true. Graffiti has the advantage of puncturing the surface of the ad, while preserving the democratic immanence of the response: everybody usually has a pen. Significant is that both the second and third methods frequently focus on facial mutilation: cutting out eyes or filling them in, adding mustaches, freckles and the like, or otherwise revealing the inherent monstrosity of the image. This disfiguration has as its target the very performance of humanity that lies at the heart of print advertising. Take out the eyes, soil the mouth and the truth of the image suddenly coincides with its appearance.
-
Paul McCarthy at Hauser & Wirth
by Stephen Squibb November 4, 2009
This misrecognition is especially striking in the documentary images of his performances; here the mind, confronting one his signature tableau, immediately leaps to the most breathtaking and unsavory conclusions. For a moment, we find ourselves looking at an image of unimaginable horror, but then the slow reconstruction of what one is actually seeing. No, that is not a person, it’s a doll, and that is not some terrible mixture of fluid and excrement, but mustard and chocolate. And on and on until we can actually see both images at once, the one we thought we were looking at and the one we actually are. Who, we ask ourselves, taught us to see such things?
-
