All material in the Artforum Archive is protected by copyright. Permission to reprint any article from the Artforum archive must be obtained from Artforum Magazine.
"Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art"
12.19.06
AUTHOR: LARA TAUBMAN
12.06.06-02.18.07 CIFO – Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation
This exhibition, curated by CIFO director Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, queries—and occasionally makes light of—defeat and nothingness. Using classification systems as the unexpected framework for a meditation on the central place loss and absurdity hold in everyday life, the show proves surprisingly evocative.The J Street Project, 2002–2005, an installation by Susan Hiller, uses photographs to document 303 streets throughout Germany officially named for the Jews who inhabited them before the Holocaust. It is paired with Rescue Archaeology (Lockers), 2005, by Mark Dion, which preserves slices of urban history by amassing refuse from three renovated and/or destroyed Manhattan building sites (one of which is the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden). The combination proffers an uncanny, eerie solicitation to consider the ghosts that haunt these locales. Mathilde Ter Heijne’s Women to Go, 2005, displays 180 postcards that feature black-and-white images of anonymous women. Viewers are invited to browse and take the cards, which feature thumbnail biographies of yet another 180 women, easily identifiable by the events in their distinguished lives. Conflating known with unknown female identities, Ter Heijne scrutinizes the criteria by which the former becomes the latter. The inevitable nod to Bernd and Hilla Becher is made by the inclusion of Winding Towers, 1968–97/2005. Yet Jimmie Durham’s farcical performance returns viewers to less cerebral realms: The artist stars as a crabby bureaucrat inSmashing, 2005, a video in which he maniacally destroys every decorative object handed to him by an attractive secretary before dutifully noting it in a ledger.
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All material in the Artforum Archive is protected by copyright. Permission to reprint any article from the Artforum archive must be obtained from Artforum Magazine.
Sanford Biggers
12.01.06
AUTHOR: LARA TAUBMAN
10.28.06-12.06.06 Mary Goldman Gallery
In Sanford Biggers’s latest exhibition, histories of cultural deception inform the artist’s meticulously created objects. Deliberately taking up themes of decentralism and extinction, the artist shrouds his work in intricate historical and personal associations, many with African-American culture. The stunning centerpiece Ghettobird Tunic, 2006, acts as an organizing device through which the other works speak. Densely covered in exotic feathers, the floor-length, puffy coat is filled out but conspicuously empty, as if vainly soliciting a body to flesh out the histories that Biggers wants to tell. Biggers’s installation offers a critique of African-American mass culture by questioning whether the system enables or entraps its audience. Jocko, 2006, three bronze, chrome–plated lawn jockeys copied from an infamous commemorative sculpture once located at Mount Vernon, lacks a certain necessary irony; the piece resurrects the story of Jocko Graves, the heroic black assistant to George Washington, whose honorable though forgotten history has often been occluded by racist accusations. Each statuette has been melted to a different degree, gesturing toward the transitory nature of our collective memories. The strategic, unassuming placement of a few charged objects creates a sense of unpredictability, bringing together dangling narratives in an expression of the artist’s fascination with unresolved histories.
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All material in the Artforum Archive is protected by copyright. Permission to reprint any article from the Artforum archive must be obtained from Artforum Magazine.
"New American City: Artists Look Forward"
11.22.06
AUTHOR: LARA TAUBMAN
09.09.06-01.27.07 Arizona State University Art Museum
How much can artists mine their communities as a resource for art? “New American City: Artists Look Forward” takes this issue head-on, inviting twenty-three Phoenix artists from every discipline to envision the future of their city. Urban Garden, 2005–2006, a video by Mayme Kratz and Helen Raleigh, documents the activities of neighbors and homeless people who live around Kratz’s studio in downtown Phoenix. The artists’ good intentions fall flat, however, as Kratz and Raleigh’s aesthetic framework only permits a perfunctory examination of their subjects. On the other hand, Randy Slack’s light without giving off light, 2006, is a smart, heartfelt installation that uses a large mural and objects such as an inherited golden, plaster Buddha to reproduce the living room of his deceased grandparents as it appeared in 1969. Elsewhere, Wellington Reiter’s prescient narrative “Flight City”—a series of twelve drawings—maps out a creepy future focused on an international-travel hub where airport security dominates daily life.
Some of the pieces suffer from odd grouping and arrhythmic installation, though perhaps this was merely curatorial commentary on a city victimized by poor planning and urban sprawl. Despite any potential oversights, “New American City” is an innovative exhibition, presenting the relevance of regional art beyond the borders of Phoenix.
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All material in the Artforum Archive is protected by copyright. Permission to reprint any article from the Artforum archive must be obtained from Artforum Magazine.
Rirkrit Tiravanija
10.27.06
AUTHOR: LARA TAUBMAN
09.23.06-11.11.06 1301PE
In this exhibition, Rirkrit Tiravanija presents over one hundred small graphite drawings in basic but well-groomed MDF frames. They are organized on two adjoining walls into loose, unassuming grids that call to mind installations of Allan McCollum’s “Surrogates,” but closer inspection discloses myriad black-and-white scenarios. Appending a recent trend of community- and group-based art, “Demonstration Drawings” is a project for which Tiravanija commissioned his fellow Thai artists to reproduce charged, tense photographic evidence of current international political demonstrations lifted from the International Herald Tribune. Raw, faulty lines and imperfect shading destabilize the sterile conventions of journalism and journalistic photography, inciting suspicion of reportage and its capacity for truth telling. Questions about false representation and subverted intentions surge through the drawn reproductions. Which documentation is more honest to the spirit of the event depicted? A localized, craft-based quaintness attends to these hand-drawn reproductions, sharply contrasting with monolithic notions of "the global” perpetuated by the press. Tiravanija’s piece has effectively scaled politics down to human size, turning uncontrollable world events into manageable stories told by ordinary citizens who just happen to be artists.
