Artforum. Nov 08.

Why is R Buckminster Fuller on the cover of the new issue of Artforum? Because, as editor Tim Griffin explains, the "issues in play" now - "energy-related, economic, environmental - are enmeshed in questions of sustainability, ephemeralization, and cross-disciplinary negotiation that Fuller took as his fundamental subjects more than four decades ago." Selections from the cover package online: Sean Keller, Thom Mayne and Michael Wang.

Manny Farber's "combination of media was unique not only in that the writing and the painting were equally important to him, but that there were so many similarities of approach and subject and preoccupation between them, although they were quite separate pursuits," writes Luc Sante. "For one thing, the paintings give clear instructions to anyone perplexed as to the way to read the essays: You start anywhere and end up anywhere."

Hartmut Bitomsky, "who is currently working in grimy Berlin after a long stretch teaching cinema in sunny California, has created a work engineered to feast on the anxieties of tidy-minded Teutons," writes Bruce Sterling. "Dust is his meditative, polymorphous essay on the pulverized: that which remains formless, invasive, unprunable, and uncategorizable. Bitomsky's dust is not mere meaningless bits of fluffy gray trash, but an itchily anal Freudian antisubstance that pours in through every crack in the German psyche."

"As scholar Ivone Margulies has argued, '[Chantal] Akerman's boldness as a filmmaker lies in her charging the mundane with significance,'" writes Malcolm Turvey. "In Akerman's films, as in Alfred Hitchcock's, drama is to be found everywhere beneath - indeed on - the surface of quotidian reality if one only looks closely enough, and her use of space and time forces the viewer to pay careful attention to the commonplace. She is thus heir to the tradition of dedramatization pursued by directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Dedramatization does not mean the absence of drama."

And you'll have to turn to the print issue for Greil Marcus on Mad Men, Amy Taubin on Waltz With Bashir, Steven Nelson on Djibril Diop Mambety and James Quandt on Lisandro Alonso.

Posted by dwhudson at November 2, 2008 3:14 AM