Artforum. Feb 08.

Throughout the 70s it was heresy for an artist to insist on the primacy of his or her subjectivity," writes David Salle. "When Julian [Schnabel], along with other artists of a similar age, emerged at the end of the decade, the collective attitude amounted to one big Bronx cheer for the pieties and anemias of a generation drifting out to sea on a leaky raft of 'conceptual' precepts. In 1978, he took a hammer to a box of china to make a ground for his painting, and, believe me, that blow made a big echo, at least all along West Broadway.... Julian's aesthetic has always been about the freest and most surprising juxtaposition of images and an ability to see images and pure form as part of the same continuum. What set his work apart was his use of a fragmented, physically demanding surface, which gave his version of free association a kind of flickering, tentative quality that insists on the materiality of the painting. In [The Diving Bell and the Butterfly], we can feel the same aesthetic impulses at work.... Subjective experience and narrative come together in his movie's astringent and luscious gaze."

"Since the late 1990s, [Omer] Fast has established himself as one of the most active of a number of practitioners, including Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Aernout Mik and Clemens von Wedemeyer, who use film and video installation to reflect and rearticulate the truth regimes regulating contemporary image production," writes Tom Holert. "Fast's practice might indeed be characterized as being 'designed to handle certain kinds of problems,' namely, the malleability of meaning in the interstices within and between recorded image and recorded speech. In this regard, The Casting is probably his most accomplished work to date. Over the course of its fourteen minutes, he succeeds once more at 'unsettl[ing] the elements that make moving pictures move, from the sound to the subtitles' (to cite an article on Fast by critic Jennifer Allen that appeared in these pages in 2003)."

Mike's World: Michael Smith & Joshua White (and other collaborators) is a retrospective recently on view at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin and now headed to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in April. And Smith, by the way, has been selected for this year's Whitney Biennial. Among the thoughts the work has sparked in David Joselit: "If Warhol is right that sex and parties are the only social events that still require physical attendance, then every other interpersonal activity can in theory be phoned in or, in the mode of our present moment, conducted online, via 'social networks' such as Facebook and MySpace. Even before the advent of virtual twenty-four-hour-a-day sociality, Warhol and Smith both recognized that parties (and perhaps sex, too, though on this subject both are reticent) sustain a public sphere on life support—one suffocated by the mediation that characterizes most ordinary interactions."

And check out the Top Ten from Raqs Media Collective.

Posted by dwhudson at February 1, 2008 12:53 PM