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BOMB 108/Summer 2009
ON NEWSTANDS NOW
ON NEWSTANDS NOW
Carrie Mae Weems has a muse, an avatar, an alter-ego. Photographer Dawoud Bey and Weems discuss how her guide—this stand-in for history—bears witness to race, class, and migration.
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Dodge and Kahn’s comedy takes the form of high art in lowbrow drag with mythic accoutrements, fringe weirdos, and activist slants. They talked (off- camera) with fellow performer Michael Smith about charged fragility and being abducted by the moment.
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Artists Dike Blair and Joe Bradley set the record straight on irony and sincerity, kitsch and the sublime, anarchy and aestheticism.
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In her hometown of New Orleans, Humphries created silver and ghost paintings in an auto garage for the Prospect.1 Biennial. The artists on the beckoning mutability of Humphries’ paintings.
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Roxy Paine’s sculpture is now on view in the rooftop garden at the Met. Check out his interview from the current issue.
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Bartos photographs spaces redolent with a dearth of human presence. His is an architectural eye that reveals, as Homes states, “history passing, when culture is fading, when time has stopped.”
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In Chile and beyond, Guilisasti is known as both artist and co-founder of INCUBO. A proponent of the precarious, her recent work links Judd’s structures in Marfa to the Chilean phenomenon of short-term yet recurring summer beach squats.
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Painter Guillermo Kuitca has shown his work the world over, but his practice is deeply embedded in Buenos Aires. He speaks with artist Mathias Duville about provocation, his winter of discontent, and a nomadism of the mind.
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Buenos Aires–based visual artist Jorge Macchi’s experimentation with theatrical forms, music, and fiction feed the ephemeral and accidental substance of his artworks. He was interviewed by composer and frequent collaborator Edgardo Rudnitzky.
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Artists Nayland Blake and Rachel Harrison on art notions under threat of extinction in the 21st century: self-expression, art not for reproduction, and being engaged in the here and now.
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Through their loaded neon signs, lock picks, and bricks wrapped in book covers, the art duo Claire Fontaine prompt viewers to ponder the implications of both action and inaction.
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Rocket science: Roman Signer transforms familiar objects into elemental magic with earth, wind, fire, and water. Poet Armin Senser charts the alchemy.
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Peter Saul—painter of satirical and ribald images since the 1960s—on his recent move to New York City, assimilation into the art world, and his big, bad subjects.
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Sullivan’s film installations combine performance, dance, original scores, and song. With choreographer and dancer Stuart on misfire, the body politics, and controlling chaos in ensemble-based work.
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Well before it evolved into a 200-channel entertainment behemoth, Birnbaum was making now canonical avant-garde videos critiquing television’s celebration of passive consumerism and exploitation of human drama for mass consumption.
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WEB EXTRA! View an exclusive slideshow of images from Joseph Bartscherer’s Forest grid and read his conversation with photographer James Welling.
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Painters Steve DiBenedetto and David Humphrey on what mind-altering drugs have in common with Venturi, Cezanne, Catholicism, and heavy metal.
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Photographer Joseph Bartscherer with James Welling on the order of Things—from construction to agriculture to front-page obituaries. WEB EXTRA: View a slideshow of images from Bartscherer’s Forest.
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Mário Ramiro explores Lucia Koch’s work and the enigmatic animation Olinda-Celeste, a collaboration between Koch and Gabriel Acevedo Velarde. Watch the video here!
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Watch exclusive streaming video of Marilá Dardot’s playful verb experiment, Hic et nunc and read her conversation with artist Cao Guimarães.
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The artists discuss chance, the creative potential of drifting, and “distinguishing reality from fiction—as if that were possible!” WEB EXTRA: Watch Dardot’s Hic et nunc video!
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Muniz, master of turning life’s detritus back into life itself, speaks with the visionary design team known as the Campana Brothers on metamorphosis.
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Gomes reinvents beauty with insignificant things — precarious objects on their way to disappearing. In correspondence with the master builder of spirit, Ernesto Neto.
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The filmmakers emailed between London and Brussels, comparing notes on their working process, the high emotion of beginning a shot, and the theory underlying their projects, from anthropology and psychoanalysis to cinema verité.
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Pare’s symphonic photographs (on view at MoMA through October in The Lost Vanguard) celebrate the short-lived Russian experiment in modernist architecture and its utopian dream.
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As a child, Doig lived in Trinidad; he relocated there in 2000, followed soon after by Ofili. The old friends, both painters, met to discuss how a place and its history reinvents subject.
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The painters, friends from the old days, discuss craft and the American way—an oral history ranging from basketball to the nature of art.
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Brooklyn poet Christian Hawkey and Swedish painter Mamma Andersson begin this correspondence with a rumination on memory, architecture, and turtles.
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Walker’s charged antebellum imagery has engendered heated debate. Poet Matthea Harvey charts the personal and historical sources of its provocation.
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Mnemonics are the underlying force in Robert Polidori’s sumptuous photographs. With writer Michèle Gerber Klein, on Versailles, abandoned farms in North Dakota, and more.
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Heir to the American visionary tradition, Bill Jensen’s art evolves through an intuitive process grounded in the act of painting. Poet John Yau tracks a lifetime.
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The LACMA curator’s odyssey into the cosmology of the Maya, in Lords of Creation: The Origins of Ancient Maya Kingship, her latest blockbuster show to present the art and culture of ancient Mesoamerica.
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A Russian doll of spheres, oranges in teacups, and a suspended whale skeleton — remnants of the natural world and the everyday, re-imagined. An exhibit of Orozco’s recent work is at Marian Goodman Gallery through June 14th.
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Tod Papageorge’s photographs of Central Park in the ‘70s reclaimed street photography as an art form. His friendship with fellow photographer Garry Winogrand sealed the endeavor. Papageorge is back with a book, Passing Through Eden.
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Award-winning novelist Madison Smartt Bell instigates an epistolary exchange with Judith Linhares on dream theory, Emily Dickinson, and Linhares’s own legacy as one of America’s most seminal painters.
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Anthony McCall speaks with fellow artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone about his latest work, Between You and I.
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Multimedia artist Tony Oursler in conversation with musician and writer Alan Licht on Oursler’s spectacular sound, video and sculpture installations.
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Painter Jane Dickson speaks with her friend, Los Angeles sculptor Liz Larner about the metaphysical expressed in the always-bold physicality of Larner’s work.
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New York-based painter Joe Fyfe interviews Bernard Piffaretti about Piffaretti’s signature take on abstraction.
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At the early age of 40, British-born, Berlin-based artist Tacita Dean has accomplished a lifetime’s worth of work: each of her films, sound pieces, installations and drawings contains a world of references unto itself.
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Artist Harrell Fletcher has taken it upon himself to turn the spotlight onto others. With astounding generosity and a dedicated, empathetic intelligence, Fletcher surprises our expectations of what art and the figure of the artist can be.
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Violence and whimsy, satire and surrealism coexist in vibrant color on Dana Schutz’s large canvases. Writer Mei Chin talks with Schutz about her paradoxical mix of tenderness and detachment.
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Regina José Galindo’s intensely personal performances stem from her rage at the violence and corruption in Guatemala then and now. Novelist and former journalist Francisco Goldman talks with the 2005 Venice Biennale Golden Lion winner.
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Using principles of architecture, design and public sculpture, Pedro Reyes blends the realms of utopia and function in projects that truly do strive to improve the world. Rufino Tamayo museum curator Tatiana Cuevas sat down with Reyes in winter of 2005.
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Pablo Vargas Lugo’s bright, playful collages and installations explore dark subjects: from the entropic effects of time to traumatic events like the extinction of the dinosaurs and modern-day technological accidents.
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Critic and curator Downey queries the 2004 Turner Prize nominee about the excess of carnival and its inversion of power. Shonibare’s latest project, the film Odile and Odette, updates Swan Lake to reflect an ambiguous contemporary morality.
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