Now on sale
Issue 104 Summer 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
The John Waters of YouTube, Linzy discusses his family’s southern history and the characters in his ongoing series of camp soap operas. WEB EXTRA: Watch the exclusive music video of Linzy’s Asshole Remix.
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WEB EXTRA! Watch the premiere of Kalup Linzy’s music video for Asshole Remix! Disclaimer: Intended for mature audiences only. Read Linzy’s interview with BOMB Managing Editor Nick Stillman.
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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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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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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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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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OUTTAKE! In the print issue, painters Steve DiBenedetto and David Humphrey discuss their studios as prosthetic rooms — extensions of the artists’ personalities. Read on about matters of faith.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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Anthony McCall speaks with fellow artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone about his latest work, Between You and I.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Lincoln Perry’s mural at the University of Virginia re-envisions the building’s view of distant mountains as the acme of a kind of secular Pilgrim’s Progress.
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The two artists discuss Herrera’s significant contribution to the project of modernist abstraction, his use of profane materials—familiar, commonplace images—to “contaminate” the carefully circumscribed world of the abstract.
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Elizabeth Murray and Jennifer Bartlett, painters and lifelong friends, reminisce about the ambitious New York art world of the 1960s and ‘70s.
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In conversation, Tuymans and Marshall—collaborating on an animation project scheduled to be completed in late 2007—alternately agree and disagree on the function of an artwork, its meaning and imperfection, and the frozen world within the painting.
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Julie Mehretu’s sprawling, layered paintings unravel the constructs and conventions of our often violent environment. Lawrence Chua talks with Mehretu about the interstices among geography, architecture, language and media that her work articulates.
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Mexican artist Vargas-Suarez Universal is often mistaken for a collective, and indeed his practice—which uses sound, science and the archives of organizations ranging from the Queens Museum to NASA—is as varied as any many-authored project.
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Born in Haiti and raised in the U.S., Vladimir Cybil juxtaposes culturally specific symbols and techniques to carve out an interstitial space. Scholar Jerry Philogene talks with Cybil about the visual bilingualism in her paintings and installations.
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Sound and music have always been a key component of Canadian artist Rodney Graham’s films, installations, even his recent paintings. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, also an artist, is used to traversing the worlds of both music and art.
>>>Pierre Huyghe, winner of the 2002 Hugo Boss Award, moves freely among different mediums, staging situations that while visually and conceptually complex, allow room for unexpected collaborations, both with other artists and with the viewer.
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Olafur Eliasson has evolved a body of “objectless” work ranging from discrete installations to museum-wide environments. Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, his first comprehensive U.S. survey, is on view at MoMA through June 30th.
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Ellen Phelan’s art evokes the experience of her singular vision: a remembrance of things past so firmly rooted in collective longing that no matter the medium she chooses, this longing becomes tangible and observable.
>>>Painter Shirley Jaffe started out under the influence of Abstract Expressionism and made a radical move in the 1960s toward a geometric vocabulary, yet her work defies categorization. Jaffe talks with Shirley Kaneda about what drives her work.
>>>Known for his frequent about-faces in format, subject, process and style, photographer James Welling has played a seminal role over the past two decades in bringing his medium to the center of the contemporary dialogue.
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Icon of cultural outrage and transgression, filmmaker John Waters has inspired a reverence in his admirers that few directors can claim. Less known but equally compelling, his photographs subvert art-world constructs of high concept and seriousness.
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