Volume 30, No. 2, Jun 2007
Art Reader
New York Times Magazine for 3 June contained an article on Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag’s graphic design as a professional duo known as M/M (Paris). In that same issue is an amazing photograph of Damien Hirst’s platinum skull set with 8,601 high-quality diamonds.
ARTnews for February 2007 features Feminist Art: The Next Wave with an essay by Linda Nochlin on Great Women Artists, a story about the Dinner Party and lots more.
The New York Times has had a series of “book” oriented articles:
- “Deconstructing Meaning by Truly Mincing Words” by Roberta Smith reviewing the work of Simryn Gill which was on view at Tracy Williams Gallery through 6 January. Her major show is on at the Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC through 29 April.
- “Defending the Printed Page as the New China Stirred” by Bridget L. Goodbody which reviews “Shu: Negotiating History and Memory at the China Institute through 24 February.
- “How I Spent My Summer Vacation: Now a Major Motionless Book” by Alina Tugend re: online photo albums.
- “Can’t Judge an E-Book by Its Screen? Well, Maybe You Can” by Charles McGrath.
Art Papers for January-February 2007 includes a review of Harrell Fletcher’s series of work, Veda’s Bibles, about a homeless woman living in a church’s doorway in San Antonio, who highlighted Bibles, imposing a code of her own device upon page after page of scripture. The artist commissioned the woman to create new works providing her with Bibles and highlighters, 15 pages of which were chosen, photographed, and reproduced for a “collaborative” exhibition.
Harper’s Magazine for February 2007 includes an article “On the Rights of Molotov Man: Appropriation and the art of context” by painter Joy Garnett and photographer Susan Meiselas.
Art on Paper for July/August 2007 is devoted to Artists’ Pages by William Anastasi, Marco Breuer, Claude Closky, Kota Ezawa, Tony Feher, Pablo Helguera, Emily Jacir, Jo Jackson, Chris Johanson, Mary Josephson, Matt Keegan, Susan Morgan, Shaun O’Dell, Matthew Sharpe, and Gregory Sholette. This is an amazing issue, so well designed, so well conceived, so dear to my heart of what an art journal should be.
Smithsonian for March 2007 features Phyllis Diller’s archive held in a file cabinet, c. 1955 on wheels, which contains 50,000 or so jokes or punchlines. An article about “Reading Between the Lines” tells about scientists using high-tech tools to decipher lost writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes.
The April 2007 issue includes an article about a set of sculptural flowers created by Futurist Giacomo Balla, a painter and sculptor of powerful originality, on exhibit at the Hirshhorn, because Joseph Hirshhorn had bought an edition of them, which had been created posthumously ten years after the artist died.
In the same issue, there is an article about Dale Chihuly’s glass plants set in a Florida garden.
Art Papers for July/August 2007 is a kind of “user’s guide to impossibility.” Included is a conversation of Thomas Lawson with Lauri Firstenberg about his new paintings in History/Paintng, his recent solo show in Los Angeles which contains impossible world maps with skewed perspectives and vulgar coloration. Each map is accompanied by an intimate portrait, rendering mythological and recent historical events.
Art in America for June/July 2007 has a remarkable reminiscence of the late Sol LeWitt by Lucy Lippard, citing a 50-year friendship. It also contains Lippard’s lecture and keynote talk that opened MOMA’s “The Feminist Future” in January, revised for the WACK show at MOCA in Los Angeles in April, and slightly revised for publication. It’s a great read, and it was a great talk too! Called “No Regrets” it is a must read. It also has an overview of feminist art shows! Reviews of Wack! and the Brooklyn shows, as well as “A Painter’s Progress” by Tom Phillips, which is a review of a large Hogarth exhibition.
Art Journal for Spring 2007 features The Exquisite and Urgent Importance of Art, with several articles touting the role of publications as alternate sites for artsits’ practices, including advertisements by Adrian Piper in The Village Voice, Lynda Benglis’ advertisements in Artforum, and much more.
NY Times Magazine for 1 July has an article about Wikipedia and how it is being policed for neutrality. Its 20 May issue is dedicated to the theme of “Eco-Tecture”, designing and building with the environment in mind.
Artforum for Summer 2007 has on its cover “books” created by Guy de Cointet for his installation in 1981 “Making Things with Words” which were in his retrospective at Languedoc-Roussillon a Sete, France, followed by a major article about Guy by many curators. There is an homage to Sol Lewitt by mel Bochner and John Baldessari; an article by Briony Fer on Roni Horn’s Library of Water; an article about Broodthaers, an article on art of WeiWei, a lyric article by Lynne Tillman on Stephen Shore’s Road Trip Journal, and much much more advertising than I have ever seen in any art journal!
Harper’s for May 2007 has a fascinating article about “A World in Three Aisles: Browsing the post-digital library” by Gideon Lewis-Krause. Rick and Megan Prelinger are located in a converted factory at the corner of Eight and Folsom, in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco. They are experimental amateur librarians, who have around 30,000 books and periodicals, and 20,000 pieces of ephemera, maps and charts and brochures and errant scraps of paper. They envision their small library as the small public-private library as an “intellectual preserve”. Fascinating reading.
Artlink for June 2007 features The South Issue: New Horizons with contemporary art without frontiers featuring South Africa, South America, Australia and New Zealand with the art of Juan Davila, Pat Hoffie, Jim Allen, Matthew Ngui and James Geurts. This issue is not just a geographical idea but all who seek to extend the intellectual, social and geographic boundaries of contemporary art through dialogue, collaboration and exchange.
ARTnews for Summer 2007 has an article on “Messaging is the Medium” where BlackBerries, iPods, playstation portables, and cell phones are being used by contemporary artists, such as Xu Bing, Cory Arcangel, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and many more.
