Publisher: The Studio Trust
Content: 304 pages, full colour
Language: English
ISBN: 0962514152 (Hardcover).
Dimensions: 11.0 x 8.7 x 1.0 inches
Price: Hardcover: US $29.99, UK £24.99
Editor: Michael Spens
Deputy Editor: Dr Janet McKenzie
Creative Director: Martin Kennedy
Vice-President: Miguel Benavides
To order your copy please contact studio@mwrk.co.uk
Introduction
Memories made
As the 5th century BC Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, ‘Everything flows and nothing stays’. Or put another way, one might add, ‘All years are the same, but each is different’. Viewed from the Studio International Editor’s chair, this year it was Asia that produced many surprises, as our contributors have made clear, from ‘Archilab’ (page 16) to ‘Chinese Cities’ (page 134) to Japan’s Chichu Art Museum (page 260), a subterranean location for showing five artists, including James Turrell, to advantage. Then the amazing range of Chinese work exhibited at the Mori Gallery, Tokyo (page 282) demonstrated the growing momentum of cross-fertilisation of ideas within Asia. By contrast, in ‘Yongle’ at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (page 110) came a reminder of the historic originality of medieval Chinese art. ‘The Elegance of Silence’ (page 66) explored the resilience of East Asian contemporary art and found that the sense of tradition which as much bedevils Western art as inspires it also recharges together the art of Korea, Taiwan, Japan and China. India’s MF Husain, one of the subcontinent’s best painters, was celebrated at the age of 90 by an exhibition at the Arts House in Singapore, where the artist dwelt on ‘lost human values’, as epitomised here by his painting, ‘Andy Warhol versus Marilyn Monroe’. Husain crossed global cultural frontiers, and yet across his long career his work remained unassailably Indian.
Still tradition permeates Western art in ways that can constructively lead to reappraisals, a preoccupation which currently seems to dominate curatorial thinking. For example, the paintings of Frida Kahlo at Tate Modern (page 86), reviewed by Janet McKenzie, reveal an artist struggling to break out of such constraints. If Kahlo was driven to suicidal despair in Mexico by her relationship with Diego Rivera, we also have to consider where she would have been without his compelling genius. In the self-portraits of Andy Warhol (page 62) his own inner struggle with an overweaning consumerist culture reveals the extent to which his creativity itself was threatened. Here too, Francis Bacon’s introspective self-portrait (1987; page 126) revealed a different seam of nihilism, on the edge of the abyss of all time. The optimistic nature of Jeremy Moon’s paintings, also reviewed here as a lost memory, stands as a reminder of the tragedy of his early death in a motorcycle accident in 1972, but also of that similar death almost two decades later of his brilliant advocate, the writer Peter Fuller. Moon had followed his Cambridge degree with ballet classes – so celebrating an intellectual release; something of that is revealed in the strength yet lightness of touch of his paintings reviewed here
(page 72). Our reviewer drew parallels between this and the work of Oskar Schlemmer in his ‘Triadic Ballet’ (1919). The Rocket Gallery in London is to be congratulated for returning Moon’s work to the public eye.
The Brooklyn Museum’s superb Basquiat exhibition (page 48) was reviewed as a major event: Basquiat was a child of Brooklyn, and a sense of deep roots ran through Basquiat’s work. He showed what an artist could achieve in a tragically truncated span of eight years in painting. New York City hosted three major events in particular in the year: first in importance, of course, was the star-studded relaunch of the Museum of Modern Art (page 292). The Whitney celebrated Robert Smithson’s career with a live replication of his famous ‘Floating Island to Travel Around Manhattan Island’ (page 122), which so tellingly preceded the global focus on the environment. In contrast, the Guggenheim Museum provided a détente in the form of ‘RUSSIA!’ (page 172), a blockbuster which perhaps may be the last such exchange.
Paris gave us, in the Pompidou Centre, ‘Big Bang: Creation and Destruction in 20th Century Art’ (page 116), typically focusing on ‘the creative destructiveness of Modern Art’. This was intended ‘to shatter existing values’. The cyclical impacting of art galaxies may again be on the dark edge of an even bigger bang. This controversial exhibition ran on into 2006. In London, Joseph Beuys’s work was well exhibited in a retrospective at Tate Modern, revealingly reviewed by Richard Demarco (page 28). ‘The Pack’, chosen for our cover, must now be acknowledged one of the great works of the last century.
A yearbook to the electronic version of Studio International can only hold a small selection of our reviews. The printed words give us back our memories more tangibly. It is a ‘palimpsest’ (a manuscript used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased). The printed articles stay here in palimpsest as though on parchment. Electronically, they may be wiped, and certainly swiped, by the student body. But that is the nature of our knowledge-based universe.
As Editor, I am pleased to acknowledge with thanks all the institutions and individuals who permitted Studio International to access and reproduce material from their hard-won endeavours, the product of an outstanding year. Also, thanks to our growing band of global contributors for their tireless investigations and prompt delivery on schedule. 2005 resulted in a brilliant, if unorthodox, editorial harvest. As Heraclitus also said, ‘You cannot step into the same river twice’.
To this end, the yearbooks now serve as a memento as they build up in sequence together.
Michael Spens
Editor
Contents
Antony Gormley – interview: ‘What is made here is a repositioning of t...
Probably the UK’s best-known contemporary sculptor, Antony Gormley has created a new ‘field’ o...
In his new paintings, the rising Iraqi-born artist Mohammed Sami makes ambiguity alluring...
This fabulous show is dedicated to Mingei, the influential folk-craft movement developed in Japan in...
Wayne Eager – interview: ‘In Central Australia, I was mesmerised by th...
A three-month stay in Central Australia with his partner, the artist Marina Strocchi, turned into a ...
Alex Ely – interview: ‘Ultimately the success of any building is how w...
What is the secret to making buildings that other architects admire and envy, but which are dedicate...
The Glass Heart: Art, Industry & Collaboration
This beguiling exhibition, which spans 170 years, reveals the impressive adaptability of glass in th...
With a mix of new and old works, Anselm Kiefer draws us into a world where good and evil are blurred...
Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood
With works covering pregnancy, birth and nursing through to caring for older children, as well as mi...
Saul Leiter: An Unfinished World
This major retrospective celebrates the work of a man whose atmospheric shots of New York street sce...
Paul Maheke: To be Blindly Hopeful
This show sprang from a journal the artist kept during the Covid lockdowns in 2020-21, a time of int...
Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort
Matthew Wong’s exuberant dreamscapes and imaginary worlds sprang from many influences, but his aff...
Sharjah March Meeting 2024: Tawashjuat
This year’s edition of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s March meeting focused on collectives, collab...
Martin Boyce – interview: ‘You’re both inside and outside. There’s...
Martin Boyce’s show at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, offers three distinctive, in-between spaces for exp...
Hanna Bekker vom Rath: A Rebel for Modern Art
This richly documented show does justice to the feisty Hanna Bekker vom Rath, a German art collector...
Infinite Variety: Harold Cohen and Cybernetics in the 1960s
On the occasion of a show of Harold Cohen’s work at Gazelli Art House in London, we consider the p...
Through his sensitive and thoughtful works, Issam Kourbaj ensures the plight of those in his native ...
The English eccentric William Blake meets his German peers in a treasure-strewn exhibition that make...
Chronorama: Photographic Treasures of the 20th Century
Highlights from the golden age of photography, produced for fashion magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair,...
Thea Djordjadze: Framing Yours Making Mine
In this comprehensive show, Georgian artist Thea Djordjadze’s spare sculptural works emanate a sen...
Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Alberta Whittle and other artists from the African diaspora consi...
A post-apocalyptic landscape or an abandoned toolshed? This compact exhibition, by ceramics sculptor...
This show looks at how John Singer Sargent styled his sitters, insisting they wore certain garments ...
Francis Picabia: Women: Works on Paper 1902-1950
A career-spanning exhibition of drawings and watercolours shows the elusive modernist Francis Picabi...
Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
The Royal Academy, founded at the height of the British empire, brings together more than 100 histor...
Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You
As poetic as it is urgent, Barbara Kruger’s text-based work packs a weighty punch. Her methods of ...
Moon/King: The Work and Friendship of Phillip King and Jeremy Moon – 195...
Phillip King and Jeremy Moon met as students at Cambridge and remained friends until Moon’s death ...
A flurry of museum and gallery exhibitions flags a surge of interest in Korean art. The most compell...
Through paintings, works on paper and projections, this exhibition traces the evolution of AARON, th...
Gayle Chong Kwan – interview: ‘I’ve made a connection between displa...
Gayle Chong Kwan talks about using sand and sugar to make historic and contemporary connections betw...
Spanning seven decades of Yoko Ono’s groundbreaking work, from the 1950s to now, some done with Jo...
Special issue 2004, Volume 203 Number 1026
Special issue 2004, Volume 203 Number 1026
Special issue 2006, Volume 205 Number 1028
Special issue 2006, Volume 205 Number 1028
Special issue 2007, Volume 206 Number 1029
Special issue 2007, Volume 206 Number 1029
Special issue 2008, Volume 207 Number 1030
Special issue 2008, Volume 207 Number 1030
Special issue 2009, Volume 208 Number 1031
Special issue 2009, Volume 208 Number 1031