Love, longing and performance art are best experienced in their natural habitats of dark venues on the edges of civilization. “UNTOUCHABLE,” curated by Italian performance artist Franko B, proved just that in November at The Flying Dutchman pub in Camberwell, London...
Juan Capistran
“White Riot…be the beacon, be the light. KO’d by love” seduces with its elegance then simultaneously puts one off and seduces a second time with its literary and other cultural presumptions. Not pretensions: we can see that Capistran is intimate with these literary...
Michael Light
Michael Light has been shooting photographs of the western U.S. landscape for over 20 years. They are generally taken from a small light airplane that he flies himself, and explore the majesty of these vast and variegated lands, creating dense patterns akin to...
Kerry Tribe
In her current work, Kerry Tribe appropriates content from Hollywood films, specifically those shot at the Greystone mansion in Beverly Hills, piecing together dialogue culled from over 60 films. “There Will Be ” features the 30-minute original film Greystone, as well...
Ed Moses
In the city of the dubious “angel” we all embrace our icons, whether dead or alive, real or imagined. And if not all the time, then certainly when they deliver to us a newly birthed, risky body of work. Ed Moses has done just that with “New Works: The Crackle...
Marfa Girl
For a man who had just won the grand prize at the Rome film festival last month, Larry Clark was in a cranky mood. As he took to the stage to receive the Best Film award for Marfa Girl, his acceptance speech veered into a rant: “I’ve been fucked by everybody in...
The Low Road
The downtown art scene in New York City has a long and illustrious history that can hardly be contained in any one exhibition. Yet the New Museum’s “Come Closer: Art Around the Bowery 1969–1989” makes it possible to say a great many things. Organized by Ethan Swan,...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers, In this issue of Artillery we’re featuring three stories on film. To tell you the truth, it wasn’t planned that way, but things just fell into place. Oddly enough, the three filmmakers represent a microcosm of hierarchical filmmaking. From acclaimed...
Mark Wallinger
YOU CAN TELL A GOOD DEAL ABOUT AN ARTIST FROM his studio. After I arrive at Mark Wallinger's, in the buzzing heart of London's Soho district, he pops out to buy a couple of cappuccinos before we settle down to do the interview, giving me a chance to nose around. His...
Gallery Girls
IF ANY OUTLIER SLEEPER CELLS OF AL QAEDA need further evidential motivation to make another terrorist strike against the decadent West, they need look no further than Bravo's new so-called reality series Gallery Girls. In a desperate ploy to further capitalize on the...
CINDY SHERMAN AND LEE MILLER
NARCISSISM MAY BE AT THE CORE OF SOME ARTISTIC PRACTICE, but rarely is it flaunted so grandly as in the work of Cindy Sherman. She has denied that her photographs are self-portraiture, but despite her assumption of various guises—sometimes so laden with prosthetics...
LAURA LONDON
Laura London often channels celebrities through her photography, but not necessarily in ways that you’d expect. She doesn’t document musicians, models or actors onstage or off, or portray them in surreal situations like say, Annie Liebovitz does. Instead, she asks...
Editor’s Letter
Dear Readers, I’m sitting in a media booth at an art fair on a sweltering late August afternoon writing this editor’s letter. It’s not working because I keep getting interrupted, but there’s air conditioning, so I’m not complaining. Even though fair-goers tend to have...
THE POETS HOUSE
A quivering grid of afternoon sunlight shifts across the polished hardwood floor of a long narrow room. But for the drowsy hum of the air conditioner, all is silence and stillness, an ambience ideally conducive to the reception and refinement of clear thought....
Prizes and Politics
Nights CAN BE long in Moscow. But come spring, as the light fades ever more slowly, the evenings get off to a late start. Which may be why I inadvertently kept a driver waiting on the evening of April 3rd to ferry me and another journalist to the sprawling Artplay...
Daniel Martinez
TRANSFORMATION CAN BE PERILOUS TERRITORY FOR AN ARTIST TO navigate, and to be authentic necessarily involves pain, either psychic or physical. Daniel Joseph Martinez' newest exhibition, the first in Los Angeles in five years, displays a fiercely compelling and...
Nothing to Buy Documenta 13
More than 30 venues—166 international artists within a few square miles—a forum for ideas rather than conspicuous consumption: it’s Documenta 13! Held every five years in Kassel, Germany, and founded in 1955 by Arnold Bode, an art professor and designer from Kassel,...
THE ROAD TO DOCUMENTA
I’ve been warned that Llyn Foulkes is preparing furiously for “Documenta 13” and as I get in touch to arrange a meeting, I’m wary, in part, due to his reputation for fractious soliloquies regarding fellow artists, critics, art magazines, and in general, the art world...