Contemporary

Modern and Post Modern

A simplified understanding posits any art with grand reformist and universalist or novelty pretensions as modernist, and art offering itself as a re-signification of and intervention into the preceding (whether trends or canons) as postmodernist. Foster shows that both what is described as ‘modern’ and what is described as ‘postmodern’ can contain avant-gardist tendencies, but neither will necessarily have this…

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Contemporary

Critics analyze art

If Joan Copjec analyzes in the work of women visual artists the formations and failures of the closure of the notion of woman (or to put it in Lacanian vulgate, that complexity of existing women undermines the Woman and therefore whatever its patriarchal oppressive aspects as well), Hal Foster focuses on the working of masculinity in the early and late…

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Contemporary

Boom in the art market

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 Foster has always been a voice to heed. In his articles in the Big Art Ideas, Artforum and The Nation,…

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Contemporary

Mike Nelson A Psychic Vacuum

Once I’d poked my head into the filthy walk-in freezer, carefully pulled the latch handle and stepped inside–far enough to be in but not so far that the door could close–I felt my heart rate rise and my skin tingle. I recognized this feeling. I had experienced it before, crawling under chain-link fences into abandoned lots or wandering the floors…

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Interviews

On the other side of the couch

In 2004, I met a young man at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, where I was studying as an exchange student. Upon finding out that I was interested in philosophy, he mentioned that his mother was a former mental patient of Felix Guattari, and added eagerly that Felix had even introduced her to Gilles Deleuze as his mother.…

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Exhibitions

Belgian bigwig Carsten Holler’s first Canadian solo show

Belgian bigwig Carsten Holler’s first Canadian solo show was a work of pure spectacle in search of an audience. Approaching the massive Shawinigan Space, it was impossible to shake the impression that the National Gallery of Canada‘s satellite venue for blockbuster annual summer exhibitions was in fact a towering white elephant: the sprawling parking lot was virtually empty on a…

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Interviews

Team interview with Brian Joseph Davis & Steve Kado

Brian Joseph Davis does art and lives in Toronto. He has published a book with Coach House Books, Portable Altamont (2005), shown all kinds of art, made multiples and has done a number of different audio performances ranging from laptop DJing to synchronizing every song from Whitney Houston’s greatest hits using up to 10 CD players. Canvas Art Pictures also…

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Contemporary

Congenitally opposed to the macho tone

Congenitally opposed to the macho tone of so many avant-garde polemics, suspicion of the manifesto comes naturally to feminism. And yet, as the credibility of the manifesto declined over the past 40 years, feminist skepticism informed numerous landmark appropriations of the genre: Valerie Solanas’ “SCUM Manifesto (1968), Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969) and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg…

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Exhibitions

Dolphin Gallery, Glasgow

The life of a submariner is very much a hidden one; manifestations of their curious crafts are more like UFO sightings. Rarely do we get the movie image of the inquisitive periscope turning this way and that. In the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine the Mersey mariners have a winking eyeball residing in the aperture of the periscope’s body: the sub as…

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Contemporary

The trope of woman as nature

Though the trope of woman as nature (or vice versa) had been a conventional one long before the various Interwar artists took it up, Brassai’s use of this trope is unique. He presents us with an eerie landscape that, within the historical context of World War I, seems at once precise and vague. He offers us a body of water…

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