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December 2009
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Notes from Christmas Windows
by Lauren DiGiulio December 26, 2009
This fantasy aesthetic of glitter and decadence feels uncomfortably familiar. One wonders if we haven’t become so accustomed to work re-appropriating this particular ultrakitsch style (as in Koons, say, or Murakami) that we forget when we are viewing the real thing. If this is the case, then we have Debord’s image transition performed twice: first in the traditional sense, with commodity becoming image – which Bloomingdale’s reenacted so efficiently – and then a second time as the seemingly ubiquitous artistic parody of this process evaporates, itself, into image.
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2009 at White Columns
by Stephen Squibb December 18, 2009
As it is, the only piece here that really seems to reflect the specificity of the selector is a three-dollar zine compiling every negative review run by the Times over the previous year. It’s a maddening document, frequently illegible and ultimately quite compelling. Partly an exercise in determining the moment a review moves from reportage to criticism, and then again towards negativity, either implicit or otherwise, it is most definitely a delightfully unique take on the past year. Cynically emblazoned with a photocopied ARTFORUM title across the back, the zine fully justifies whatever remains of the Annual’s initial instinct towards subjectivity.
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The Apparatus as Artist and Spectator
by Greg Afinogenov December 15, 2009
Not the buildings but the whole impersonal network of social relationships that sustains the Party; carving out the tracks along which the passersby are always so determinedly marching.
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Darcy Lange at Cabinet
by Hong-An Truong December 14, 2009
The effect echoes the earnestness of the teachers – a shared desire of wanting to really get it right. In each of the post-class interviews, Lange asks the teacher and the students for feedback on the video – about whether the camera’s presence affected them, and what they thought of the videotape of the lesson – responses which guided the subsequent sessions. In Lange’s approach, then, the videos also serve as a kind of record, rather than a representation, of its own making.
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Brody Condon at the New Museum
by Stephen Squibb December 8, 2009
The separation implied by Sterling’s ‘period notion’ of virtual cyberspace is itself as mythical as the artificial intelligence whose inhuman laughter inhabits it. Certainly the gamelan ensemble is there to underline Gibson’s archaic, exotic rendering, but the parody, by dint of the performance, extends to encompass the artistic process itself. Gamelan, which is of profound importance in Javanese rituals, sets off not only Gibson’s cyberspace as mythical, but Condon’s performance of art-making as well, as he slyly lampoons his own confessed obsessions with transcendence and projection.
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The First/Last Newspaper at Port Authority
by Jessica Loudis December 4, 2009
Ultimately, though, TF/LN succeeds in a far more important regard—by publishing writing that’s highly intelligent and equally entertaining. Sidestepping punchy headlines and stale ledes (a typical headline is “They Came to See Who Came”) the writers are given space to wander across subject and genres, and usually to the reader’s benefit. In this sense, the real success of the project isn’t in staging the birth and death of a newspaper (there’s no shortage of that these days) but in reminding readers how content should carry a publication beyond its form.
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Hay and Rainer, After PERFORMA
by Hong-An Truong December 2, 2009
The dancers’ queer movements and nonsensical gibberish, all dictated by a sense of jouissance, reflect the unintelligible, undisciplined body hovering dangerously at the edge of pre-linguistic consciousness. Clearly transacting emotions within themselves, to each other, and to us, If I Sing to You is about the body coming into language, and all the gender disciplining (bodily or otherwise) that goes along with it. And through our kinetic familiarity with the performers’ everyday actions, the performer / spectator binary is recast, our subjectivities splayed out as raw as the bodies thrusting in front of us.
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