Artforum. November 07.

Seymour Chatman remembers Michelangelo Antonioni: "Here was a director who was not only a serious student of form, color, and mise-en-scène but perhaps the medium's most visionary practitioner. Antonioni's striking frames and at times astonishingly beautiful shots, however, do not distract from but rather intensify his principal preoccupation - the depiction of the human condition. His art is like Goya's: often sad and unpleasant in content, yet gorgeous in appearance."

Also in the new issue of Artforum, Douglas Crimp talks with Yvonne Rainer about RoS Indexical:

Not surprisingly, she changes the rules of the choreographic game, and she does it, again, with television. The Rite of Spring is famous for all sorts of reasons - Stravinsky's rhythmically pulsating polytonal score, Nicholas Roerich's primitivist sets and costumes, Nijinsky's pigeon-toed, thumping dance steps. But Rite is more famous still for the scandal it caused. It has become the cliché of the avant-garde work as shocking to its audience, such a cliché that the BBC made a docudrama about Rite's sensational opening night replete with jitters backstage and jeers out front. Rainer's substitution of the TV program's sound track for Stravinsky's music as RoS Indexical's score signals her intention to mock the hallowed status the scandal bestowed on the ballet.

"[Bonnie] Camplin and [Paulina] Olowska envision their joint projects as a kind of open dialogue. Rather than represent a consistent shared sensibility, the pair engage in a process of mutual exploration, skipping between imaginative identification with representations of femaleness and an awareness of their own capacities for self-staging," writes Catherine Wood. "Thus, in their 'shadow play' (which debuted in May at the Wiels Center in Brussels), they literally inhabit the film medium, effectively transposing the ordinary activities of friendship into the realm of art."

Posted by dwhudson at November 1, 2007 10:41 AM