(Artbreak.)

The flip book gets its first comprehensive exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf from May 7 through July 17: "The main focus of the exhibition is upon flip books by contemporary artists and filmakers, such as John Baldessari, Robert Breer, Tacita Dean, Elliott Erwitt, Julia Featheringill, Jårg Geismar, Volker Gerling, Gilbert & George, Douglas Gordon, Keith Haring, Sabine Hecher, William Kentridge, Sigrun Köhler, Eric Lanz, Jonathan Monk, Bruce Nauman, Stephanie Ognar, Tony Oursler, Dieter Roth, Miguel Rothschild, Jack Smith, Beat Streuli, Andy Warhol and Janet Zweig amongst others."

"If there is a Thai equivalent of Gesamtkunstwerk, [Apichatpong] Weerasethakul's cinema is it," writes James Quandt in Artforum. It's a wonderful piece. Besides his unpacking of that statement and the Q&A beginning on the third page, here's Quandt on the "modus" of a filmmaker steeped in "Bruce Baillie and Andy Warhol... Thai soap operas and ghost stories, love songs, talk shows, children's tales, and Buddhist fables":

... to turn everyday objects and images into the ineffable and enigmatic, inhabitants of a phantom zone where the hard, "real" world of cars and bodies and buildings cedes dominion to a magical realm of reverie and desire. There, all is fleeting, elusive, and mutant: Stories morph, change course, or start over; genre slips moment to moment from fiction to fantasy to documentary; characters shift shape, male to female, human to animal, extraterrestrial to earthling, and what they report is often unreliable; time becomes suspended, and setting ebbs from landscape into dreamscape.

Also in Artforum: TJ Demos on the exhibition, "Slide Show," at the Baltimore Museum of Art through May 15.

Posted by dwhudson at May 3, 2005 9:27 AM