Artforum. Jan 08.

"According to [Cristian] Mungiu, he learned how to make movies by working on crews for foreign productions shooting in Bucharest. It is a classic instance of mastering the rules in order to better break them," writes Amy Taubin in the new issue of Artforum. "Just as [4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days] makes us hyperattentive to the choices its characters make, so, too, does it focus our attention on the choices Mungiu has made in representing them.... The scene in which Mr Bebe negotiates his price with Otilia and Gabita (perverse foreplay for him, slow torture for them) is as amazing a piece of ensemble acting as I've ever seen - no matter that the actors seem to be doing no acting at all."

The films in Heather Rowe's "Top Ten": Buster Keaton's One Week, Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth's The Five Obstructions, Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster and Trent Harris's Beaver Trilogy.

"Even as [Julia Meltzer and David Thorne's It's not my memory of it: three recollected documents, 2003] records actual historical events, the video proposes that history is made contingent as much by its representation as by its occurrence, and that facts remain partially dependent upon an investment of belief," writes Alan Gilbert:

One could argue that the cultural context for such work has changed in recent years, as a desire to possess the future (more than the past) has destabilized our cultural sense of time and history - something evidenced, for instance, by the Bush administration's doctrine of preemption, which creates the context for a borderless and unending "global war on terror," where the rationale for action is based on possible rather than past events. Accordingly, Meltzer and Thorne... have begun to engage with this newly embattled territory as it is manifested globally - as a struggle not only over the form the future has taken and will take in both reality and representation but also over the hubristic and ultimately impossible attempt to defer it indefinitely.

"Forms of Resistance: Artists and the Desire for Social Change from 1871 to the Present is not an exhibition one is likely to see in a major venue in the United States, given how politically restrained and financially driven our big museums are today," writes Hal Foster. The exhibition, on view at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven through Sunday, "is as much seminar as it is show, one that explores, selectively and polemically, the relations between modernist art and leftist politics in Europe and America as punctuated - put into crisis, the curators would say - by five events: the Paris Commune in 1871, the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Popular Front in the early 1930s, the May Revolts in 1968, and the fall of the Wall in 1989."

And on a somewhat related note, the centerpiece of this issue, introduced by editor Tim Griffin, is a selection from Paulo Virno's 2005 treatise Jokes and Innovative Action: For a Logic of Change, appearing here for the first time in English and contextualized by Gerald Raunig and Jason Smith.

Posted by dwhudson at January 1, 2008 5:23 AM