Benjamin Liu, Part I

by Michelle Millar Fisher, September 2011. Thursday, September 1, 2011. 5:30pm. Artwrit‘s Michelle Jubin sat down with Benjamin Liu, an oral history archive unto himself, in his New York apartment. “I think everything that happened to me is an accident,” Liu says. In Part I, they discuss his arrival in the city and the fortuitous early…

I Am Still Alive at MoMA, New York

by Ian Wallace, September 2011 What can be called drawing in post-conceptual art? This is one question posed, whether deliberately or coincidentally, in MoMA’s I Am Still Alive: Politics and the Everyday in Contemporary Drawing, organized by associate curator of drawings Christian Rattemeyer and closing on September 19. In an art practice that is still smitten…

Speaking with the Artists of Double Dutch at Victory Gallery, Portland

by Sarah Vaeth, September 2011 Yvonne Lacet and Gijs van Lith are the two young artists selected for Victory Gallery’s debut exhibition Double Dutch. The new gallery, under the direction of Jane Kate Wood, will focus on contemporary international artists, filling a unique niche in Portland. Lacet and van Lith’s parallel responses to the urban landscape…

Xavier Le Roy at Festival d’Avignon

by Julie Solovyeva, September 2011 There has been much discussion of a particular situation-ism with respect to the visual, time-based and performing arts. Established categories of conceptual art, performance or dance can become burdensome, but artists and critics alike bravely qualify these works as none other than situations. As creative practices have become increasingly fragmentary, splitting…

Ed Ruscha at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

by Sandra Orellana Sears, September 2011 Ruscha’s interpretation of the American landscape has always relied on images seized from roadside scenery. The exhibition at the Hammer combines Ruscha’s fixation with the open road and his keen ability to construct empty landscapes using only words. Instead of stripping text of its semantic worth—often the case with his renowned…

Cosima von Bonin at MAMCo, Geneva

by Benjamin Snyder, September 2011 Zermatt! Zermatt! Z…ermattet!—third of the four “loops” of Cosima von Bonin’s currently rotating Lazy Susan Series—slid into Geneva’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCo) in June, eroding the otherwise purposefully drowsy works of a woman hailed frequently as one of the most influential artists working in Germany today. The first…