Frieze. June - August 08.

With Euro 2008 in full swing, perhaps the most pertinent way into the new issue of Frieze is Jennifer Doyle's piece on the "art of football," with an emphasis on film and video. Her paragraph on Fußball wie noch nie is particularly fine.

"The 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (BEFF) opened amidst controversy, with Thailand's Censorship Board demanding cuts to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's acclaimed Sang Satawat (Syndromes and a Century, 2006)," writes Brian Curtin. And yet: "Lack of artistic merit and purportedly negative images of Thailand were everywhere and nowhere in the festival. Therein lies the rub, so obvious as to be hardly worth mentioning: how can decisions be made in these terms and as a condition for censorship?"

"Over the past decade [Javier Téllez] has worked with 'invisible' populations: the disabled, the poor and those institutionalized for metal illness," writes Steven Stern. "That the concept of ‘working with' is linguistically - and politically - ambiguous is precisely the point. These marginal communities are, essentially, Téllez' medium. At the same time his film, video and installation-based pieces grow out of and encompass extended collaborative work with his subjects. He walks a tricky, often unsettling line. He flirts with - and yet avoids - the twin perils of exploitation and do-gooder-ism, deriving ethics and aesthetics from the situation in which he finds himself."

Vivian Rehberg's monograph on Loris Gréaud, "something of an art/science/technology wunderkind, as fluent in the languages of conceptualism as he is at navigating the complexity and plurality of 'the post-medium condition,'" is accompanied by an intriguing short film, Bucky. Stick with it.

"[Klara] Lidén's spiky videos, few of which run to more than four minutes, are all attuned to how routines can be performed and disrupted," writes Sam Thorne.

Dan Kidner on Boris Groys: "Tentatively proposed as films, his artistic output constitutes a conscious attempt at mining (or undermining) the interstices between disciplines."

This issue's "Life in Film" column is, unfortunately, not available to non-subscribers.

Posted by dwhudson at June 9, 2008 12:10 PM