Frieze. 118.

Duncan Campbell writes the "Life in Film" column for the new issue of frieze: "Firstly, I'd like to pay my dues to John T Davis. Davis was born in Belfast. His first experience of filmmaking came via a chance encounter in 1966 with DA Pennebaker, who was on a Belfast street, camera on shoulder, recording Bob Dylan for his film Don't Look Back. Having previously considered a career as an art teacher, Davis decided there and then that filmmaking was for him."

Also in the October issue: Mary Ellen Bute "is today less well known than other early film animators such as [Len] Lye, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling or Oskar Fischinger," notes Melissa Gronlund, "and this exhibition of her early 35mm films at Sketch, transferred onto DVD and shown on 12 simultaneous projections in the gallery space, was a rare event.... Rather than painting or scratching directly on film, Bute used cartoon animation as well as the filming of a variety of inventively used household items - combs, coffee, colanders - to create her visual abstractions. She was particularly interested in mathematics and science, expressing their formal propositions in filmic form, in addition to her renderings of music."

"Even before you enter the Kunstverein Freiburg's large, darkened exhibition space housing the Bulgarian-born Turkish artist Ergin Çavusoglu's solo exhibition Place after Place, you are confronted by a the soundtrack of Midnight Express (2008), which sounds like it's from another era," writes Michael Hübl. "The show's central work, on the other hand, the video installation Point of Departure (2006), thrusts the exhibition into the modern age."

Hannah Feldman notes that critics tend to "lump" Julia Meltzer and David Thorne "into the recently fashionable genre of art that obsessively dwells on confusing the line between fact and fiction. This is too bad, as the work and the issues it addresses exceed this limited and limiting duality."

Lawrence Weschler's Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin "may be not just the best biography of an artist out there but also one of the best books on contemporary art-making, recording the transcendence and introspection of working in isolation and the foibles of collaboration," writes Eugenia Bell.

Seth Price's "work turns on a narrative reflecting in on itself," writes Polly Staple. "For all its up-to-the-minuteness, it becomes suddenly old-fashioned because America is strangely old-fashioned and nostalgic, reflecting in on itself, at once repressed, neurotic and primitive.... It's a fairly voracious but straightforwardly aspirational tale of free-market capitalism and cannibalism."

James Trainor talks with Barbara Bloom about her web-based project, Half Full - Half Empty and Dominic Eichler interviews Wolfgang Tillmans.

Posted by dwhudson at October 11, 2008 3:13 PM