September 2006 in Artforum

September 2006 in Artforum

In Artforum’s September 2006 issue: Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane, a 21st Century Portrait. Artists have long navigated the visual territory shared by art and cinema, but few have brought these spheres together as grandly as this filmic collaboration, which debuted at Cannes in May before its presentation this past summer at Art Basel. Art historian Michael Fried and Artforum editor Tim Griffin provide two views of a project that--by following the soccer player Zidane for the duration of a single ninety-minute match--reaches back to eighteenth-century portraiture and forward to contemporary spectacle culture.

“Zidane’s dazzling and unerring footwork, his astonishing control of the ball, his instantaneous decision making all exemplify his seemingly unremitting focus on the game even as they combine to keep the viewer perceptually on edge. [But] a major part of the conceptual brilliance of Zidane consists in the fact that its protagonist’s sustained feat of absorption is depicted as taking place before an audience of eighty thousand spectators, with millions more watching via TV.” --Michael Fried on Zidane

Also in September: Hal Foster pens the first in a series of occasional essays for Artforum, “New Fields of Architecture.” Beginning this month with a discussion of Zaha Hadid’s retrospective (currently on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York), Foster considers the ways in which architecture today, more than art, might focus urgent questions about new kinds of representations and media, materials and technologies--affording us the best opportunity to grasp the look of modernity.

“As much as any architect, Hadid has responded to the Futurist call for an opening of structure onto space, an interpenetration of interior and exterior, an intensification of ‘figure’ and ‘environment’ alike.” --Hal Foster on Zaha Hadid

And: Artforum looks ahead to the coming season with a survey of more than fifty shows opening worldwide. Get a first glimpse of Fischli & Weiss at Tate Modern, London; Brice Marden at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; General Idea at the Kunsthalle Zürich; Neo Rauch at the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsberg, Germany; the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art; the Asia-Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia; and many more.

Plus: Mel Bochner reveals all the secrets behind “The Domain of the Great Bear,” his subversive collaboration with Robert Smithson concerning the Hayden Planetarium at New York’s Museum of Natural History, on the fortieth anniversary of its original publication; Helen Molesworth finds Lee Lozano anything but prudish at the Kunsthalle Basel; James Quandt and John Kelsey consider the guerrilla poetics of Jean-Luc Godard’s “cut-and-paste” multimedia installation at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Martin Herbert finds a “complex ethics of framing” in the art of Marine Hugonnier; T. J. Demos introduces the Otolith Group; Christoph Cox eavesdrops on “Sonambiente” in Berlin; and David Joselit assesses Jenny Holzer’s recent work and “Consider This . . . ” at LACMALab, Los Angeles.
And: Liam Gillick reviews the circumstances around curator Chris Gilbert’s recent resignation from his post at the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive; Jeffrey Kastner reinvestigates the cancellation of Manifesta 6; Thomas Lawson finds a home away from home in “Los Angeles 1955–1985” at the Centre Pompidou; Mark Godfrey revisits the roles of sculpture and photography in Thomas Demand’s work at the Serpentine Gallery, London; and Matias Faldbakken runs down his Top Ten.

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