C: International Contemporary Art articles from June 2008

C: International Contemporary Art archives from June 2008

The art system.(Editorial)(Editorial)
June 22, 2008... While browsing in my local big box book retailer recently, I noticed that there were numerous books on offer about the mechanisms of our impending doom--environmental and American--none of which I particularly wanted to read. The cultural...

Fabrique en Canada: Heyd Fontenot and Patrick DeCoste at Pouch Cove Gallery, Newfoundland.(Views)
June 22, 2008... For awhile, the shed was going to be part of the show. Then, the shed was going to be the show. The shed was an 8 x 12 green-shingled thing behind the small green-shingled house where we were staying. Since there was nowhere to sit in the house...

Montreal's DHC/Art and the changing climate of arts patronage in Canada.
June 22, 2008... Philanthropy, the donation of money to good or worthy causes to the benefit of all, is alive and well in Canada, though almost invisible in the world of visual arts. As our relatively affluent society continues to grow, putting more strain on...

Objects on stage (notes from pre-and post-): in this context 'object' should be understood in relation to the concept of 'fractionality'; i.e., the contemporary condition under which most of our experiences are neither real nor imaginary.
June 22, 2008... To begin, I will focus on the Law of Unity and Conflict of Opposites as applied to a variety of constructs, including totality and incompleteness, androgyny and hermaphroditism. (1) These terms should not be confused with one another: whereas...

Art and politics: on the critic Hal Foster: do the ideas of the avant-garde still make sense in a multi-polar artworld?
June 22, 2008... The last ten years have witnessed an extraordinary boom in the art market. An emphasis on money or spectacle overshadows all other types of conversations about the value of contemporary art. For those in search of a different approach, Hal...

The elephant in the room: a brief excursus on avant-garde and community art: Marc James Leger makes a case for avant-gardism as the repressed underside of service-oriented community art projects.
June 22, 2008... We had escaped the unbearable weight of being artists, and within the specialization of art we could separate ourselves from site-specific artists, community artists, public artists, new genre artists, and the other categories with which we had...

Artist centrefold & big picture.
June 22, 2008... In response to instructions by The Critical Art Ensemble to commit a crime with a humanitarian outcome, I stole a selection of flowers from my neighbour's garden. When I finally accumulated a nice combination of colours and varieties of...

Props to the fairy people: Jon Davies on the autarkic art practice of FASTWURMS.
June 22, 2008... Active since the early 80s, the Creemore, Ontario-based couple FASTWORMS (Dai Skuse and Kim Kozzi) have evolved an art/life cosmology that unites every creature, scrap of cultural detritus and social scene into one harmonious and hedonistic...

Cat thinks people not living life to the full: but I think we still need each other.
June 22, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the book Recording Conceptual Art (University of California Press, 2001), a series of interviews with key conceptual artists all conducted in 1961 but unpublished until 2001, Robert Barry speaks about his now...

Brice Marden.
June 22, 2008... BRICE MARDEN Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin The surest way to spot a bullshitter in an art museum is to look for someone standing roughly three feet away from an art object, sliding their hands alternately back and forth, and using phrases...

Pablo Bronstein.
June 22, 2008... PABLO BRONSTEIN Paternoster Square, Herald St., London Pablo Bronstein's most recent solo exhibition, Paternoster Square, continues the artist's dialogue with the formal vocabularies of dance and architecture. Bronstein's books,...

The 2008 Whitney Biennial.
June 22, 2008... THE 2008 WHITNEY BIENNIAL Whitney Museum, New York To walk through the 74th Whitney Biennial was to experience the somewhat schizophrenic nature of contemporary American art, a situation that curators Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M....

Oscar Munoz: Imprints for a Fleeting Memorial, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art in association with YYZ Artists' outlet.
June 22, 2008... Imprints for a Fleeting Memorial revealed glimpses of both inevitable death and the everlasting modernist quest for attempts at commemoration. Curated by Jose Roca, the exhibit includes 12 of Colombian artist Oscar Munoz' celebrated works....

Rightfully yours, Wendy Coburn, Steven Cohen, Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan, Alicia Framis, Alison S.M. Kobayashi, Mingering Mike, Mattias Olofsson, The Yes Men, Carnille Turner, Sislej Xhafa, Your personal viewing of Borat, Ali G, and Bruno, Curated by Tejpal Singh Ajji, Justina M Barnicke Gallery, Toronto.
June 22, 2008... Rightfully Yours, was an intellectually thrilling and politically provocative exhibition mounted by young curator Tejpal Singh Ajji. Through a wide range of Canadian and international performance-based work--very broadly defined--Ajji created a...

Exponential Futures: Tim Lee, Alex Morrison, Isabelle Pauwds, Kevin Schmidt, Mark Soo, Corin Sworn, Althea Thauberger and Elizabeth Zvonar, Morris and Helen Bdkin Art Gallery, Vancouver.
June 22, 2008... In preparing to write this review, I discovered a reservoir of information about each of the works in the exhibition, which is only indirectly accessible but nonetheless integral to the functioning of the show. For example, I learned of Althea...

Reconstitutions/re-Enactments: Nancy Davenport, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ann Lislegaard, Paul Pfeiffer, Kerry Tribe, DHC/Art, Montreal.
June 22, 2008... The past several years have seen major international survey exhibitions devoted to the vast and varied subject of re-enactment in contemporary art. C magazine looked at the phenomenon in its previous issue, albeit in the more expanded context...

Valerie Blass: Parisian Laundry, Montreal.(The Quebec Triennial)
June 22, 2008... While visiting the Darling Foundry studios in Montreal, I came across Valerie Blass' new artistic production. At the time, she was working on the pieces she will present this summer at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal's Quebec...