Artforum. April 07.

Carroll Dunham on the films of Kara Walker: "They internalize what we customarily regard as public cultural history while exposing the deepest imaginings of the consensually private self.... The films are scary and depressing yet weirdly innocent, as if a saucy but traumatized ten-year-old were playing with her parents' old movie camera. The touch is very specific, not the knowing ham-handedness familiar as a signifier of avant-garde intentions but rather something evocative of much earlier movies. The rough film quality and use of silence or extremely dated sound, even the embrace of the slavery/plantation genre, all contribute to the sense that these are artifacts, warmly comforting in their hazy familiarity but, like recovered memories, disturbing to any status quo of shared mythology."

Also in the new issue of Artforum: "A take on All About Eve, on Persona - or, as Färgfabriken curator Jan Åman suggests, on the role-playing of Lonelygirl15?" Jennifer Allen introduces a collaborators' conversation: Miriam Bäckström and Kira Carpelan.

"Who will be the producers, and who the consumers, of our media future?" asks Caroline A Jones. "As David Joselit's new book, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, pushes us to ask, will we be able to direct our networked and new-media productions toward more-inclusive democratic practices and away from privatization?"

Pamela M Lee on A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through April 15: "In sharp contrast to the notion of 'global Conceptualism' that has floated around the art world of late - a riposte to the sense that art historians have effectively limited Conceptual art's purview to the United States and Western Europe - [curator Constance M] Lewallen stakes a claim for Nauman's decisively local practice, a kind of West Coast Conceptualism of the Northern California variety. The trick, it seems, would be to reconcile the broad sweep of his famously wide-ranging practice with the relatively narrow optic of the exhibition's argument."

Unfortunately not online: J Hoberman on Robert Frank and James Quandt on Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Posted by dwhudson at April 2, 2007 5:38 AM