New Artist Commission for The Curve, Barbican, London
French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates works by drawing on the rhythms of daily life to produce sound in unexpected ways. When stunning video work comes around, (more…)
February 3, 2010
October 21, 2009
Questions for Artists From Holland Carter
Framing the Message of a Generation by Holland Cotter
Published: May 29, 2009 in the NY Times
Alan Mccollum
“…Is same generation a useful basis for writing history? Obviously the answer is yes and no. For years now scholars have questioned the validity of viewing the cultural past and the present through the old apparatus of renaissances, dynasties and “periods.” They see these categories for what they are: packaging designed to sell an account of events that will go down smoothly and leave no spaces blank or questions unanswered. Generations could be added to the list.
Isn’t the point of art, though, to acknowledge that some questions can never be answered, but to ask them anyway? Isn’t part of the job of artists to refuse smoothness and to keep opening up space, formal, temporal, psychic, emotional, whatever you want to call it? In the end the generational model may be most useful for showing us the artists who don’t fit, who aren’t interested, who think old when they’re young and young when they’re old, to whom it may or may not occur as they walk past the hall of fame, “not me, not here, not yet.”
Read the entire article in the NY Times here: Framing the Message of a Generation.
August 10, 2009
Allan McCollum, Interviewed by Thomas Lawson
From Between Artists, Some Thoughts on Memory by Allan McCollum
Allan McCollum: 40 Plaster Surrogates
“It seems to me if we didn’t have artifacts to remind us about the past, everything would disappear. We would be living in the continual present all the time. The only way we have any sense of the past is through artifacts, or memories — if memories can be called artifacts. We either have inner representations or outer representations, but we don’t have any actual experience of the past. We can have wonderful representations of the past, voluptuous and emotionally charged representations of the past, but they’re always going to be just representations and stories.”
“The awareness of time falls into that category of other things that we push out of our consciousnesses, like sexuality, violence, death, and so forth. And we save objects which seem to me to allow us to dwell on this only when we feel like it. Or we create archives that we visit to look at these things on special occasions.”
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