October 2010 in Artforum

Oscar Tuazon’s large-scale constructions—with their rough materiality, crushing scale, and literal precarity—overturn centuries of architectural and sculptural ideas about structure and expression. Critic and designer Julian Rose maneuvers through Tuazon’s tensions and contingencies.

« Amid the current craze for gravity-defying architecture, there is an uncanny power in Tuazon’s visceral acknowledgment of gravity’s force, a tectonic return of the repressed. » —Julian Rose

On the unveiling of his new piece Idee di pietra (Ideas of Stone), 2010, presented as the inaugural work of Documenta 13, Arte Povera father figure and Artforum cover artist Giuseppe Penone talks to Elizabeth Mangini about the relationship between the artist as animator and the natural world.

« What one constructs over time is a work in the process of being: a work in emergence, projected into the future. » —Giuseppe Penone

And: Claire Bishop looks anew at the consequences of the Artist Placement Group, spearheaded by artists John Latham and Barbara Steveni in the early 1970s. Embedding artists in corporations and government institutions, APG launched a social experiment—investigating the possibilities of interdisciplinary research and the demystification of the artistic process.

« APG’s activities go straight to the core of contemporary debates about the functionality of art and the desirability of art’s having social goals. » —Claire Bishop

Also: Julia Bryan-Wilson infiltrates Carey Young’s sharp new synthesis of Conceptual art with commercial culture.

« Young’s practice could be termed occupational realism—a form of performance in which a job becomes the art and the art becomes a job. » —Julia Bryan-Wilson

Plus: Legendary director Monte Hellman (of The Shooting [1965] and Two-Lane Blacktop [1971]) talks with Haden Guest about Hellman’s minimalist approach, his love of the western, and his first feature film in over twenty years, Road to Nowhere; and Michael Lobel zooms in on the practices of Laurie Simmons and Anne Collier to reveal resonances among generations, memories, and photographic issues of scale.

And: In an occasional new series, for which Artforum asks critics to home in on one single work, Mignon Nixon excavates the cycles of interring and unearthing, recalling and repressing, found in the Jerusalem burial sites depicted in Nira Pereg’s video Kept Alive, 2010.

Also this month: Bice Curiger and Michael Krebber remember the life and work of the great Sigmar Polke; Harry Cooper takes Philip Guston at his word, as recounted in the artist’s newly published collected writings; Prita Meier and Bibiana Obler survey the postcolonial tussles in Berlin’s city-sprawling show « Who Knows Tomorrow »; Michael Ned Holte enters the excess and delirium of Stephen G. Rhodes’s installations; Jeff Kelley toasts Cai Guo-Qiang’s inaugural exhibition for the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai; Christopher Bollen takes up the challenge in Bravo’s recent reality competition Work of Art; Rachel Haidu unpacks the Reina Sofia’s exhibition « New Realisms »; and Branden W. Joseph parses the hybrid media of Brion Gysin, presented at the New Museum in the artist’s first US retrospective.

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