Artforum. June 08.

The centerpiece of Artforum's new issue is a symposium: "With the passing of French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet this winter, the world of postmodern literature lost one of its first (and last) great innovators—one whose influence extended irrevocably into the realms of theory, film, and art (and particularly its Conceptualist and Minimalist strands). Yet if the author was lauded at the very outset of his career by preeminent critics such as Roland Barthes, his near-programmatic commitment to both experimentation and provocation was such that his final legacy in life remains, perhaps, as enigmatic as the kaleidoscopic narratives he constructed on the page and on the screen."

"What, then, happens when the overturning that defined modernism is itself overturned, with the result that past moments are never done away with, their residues instead seeming to accrue?" asks editor Tim Griffin. "When, to put it another way, the critical models of previous eras do not, or cannot be asked to, function as they once did? Should we understand this conundrum as yet another iteration of a weary 'I can't go on, I'll go on'? Or might there, in fact, be some unexpected terrain to mine in the inability to get past, or to overturn, what came before? The latter scenario suggests an unexpected, changed relevance for Robbe-Grillet, particularly as Barthes saw the author 'opening up a space where humans and things, narration and description, would finally... coexist peacefully in mutual indifference.'"

Ken Jacobs's Razzle Dazzle: The Lost World is scheduled for a run at Anthology Film Archives from June 27 through July 3, leading Amy Taubin to consider his "dedication to history as it is inscribed in the photographic image; rescue and redemption through an art of detritus - recuperating not only 'valueless' cultural objects but human beings as well...; the exploration of the act of seeing in all its optical/neurological/psychological complexity and, correspondingly, of the properties of the filmmaking and exhibiting apparatus and the film material itself; and the desire to up the ante on the illusionary three-dimensionality of movies to create images that are as head butting and immersive as they are ephemeral."

"[T]he fact that [Hito Steyerl] counts as crucial to her development individuals ranging from Harun Farocki to Marguerite Duras, from Hara Kazuo to the British group Black Audio Film Collective, also allies her to Jacques Rancière's argument that 'the political importance of documentary forms does not primarily reside in their subject matter, but in the ways in which they are organized. It resides in the specific distribution of the sensible...,'" writes TJ Demos. "In Steyerl's artistic practice, in other words, the documentary genre is still rich in historical reference, but is characterized as well by a heightened consideration of video's formal organization, built on a keen awareness of the uncertain status of truth and meaning."

Posted by dwhudson at June 1, 2008 8:28 AM