Fillip

Rebuilding the Pantheon / Ingrid Chu and Slavs and Tatars

The following interview coincides with the Pantheon of Broken Men and Women, a special poster insert by Slavs and Tatars produced for Fillip 8. The interview took place over e-mail after a preliminary conversation in January 2008 during their exhibition A Thirteenth Month Against Time (23 January to 1 March 2008) at the Newman Popiashvili Gallery, New York.

Re: Staging the Labyrinth / Mark Clintberg

Organized by curator John Zeppetelli, Re-Enactments is the second show at DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, a gallery opened in Montreal in the fall of 2007. The show’s curatorial thesis proposes that artists draw from antecedent forms and histories for the development of their work, including performance, popular film, and television. The show includes works by Harun Farocki, Paul Pfeiffer, Ann Lislgaard, Nancy Davenport, and Stan Douglas, among others.

Living the Image: Looking at Yam Lau’s Scapeland / David Court

What Is a Participatory Practice? / David Goldenberg and Patricia Reed

This conversation between David Goldenberg and Patricia Reed probes into models and the development of participatory practices. Fragments of the discussion have been culled and elaborated from issues raised during a series of online debates between practitioners experimenting in participatory practices in the Post-Autonomy chat room, November 2007 to February 2008. The question “What is a participatory practice?” is a continuous thread linking the start of Goldenberg’s Post-Autonomy project with the following set of concerns.

The Second Situation: Looking Back on the History of Chinese Contemporary Art / Joni Low

There is no doubt that Chinese contemporary art has had a positive effect on China’s international image. But beyond celebrating and commemorating the past as it relates to national identity and prestige, revisiting the experimental art practices of the 1980s raises other questions. For instance, which art history or histories are recorded and who participates in that process? Which artists are recognized, and which artists are given the most attention due to the epic scale and spectacular quality of their work?

Oh, Inverted World / Fionn Meade

Meade poses a pointed question about the blurred line between fact and fiction or document and imagination in the “Other Europe”—has the process of “making strange” effectively woven its way into the fabric of a wider contemporary aesthetic discourse? What has influenced what Okwui Enwezor, Mark Nash, and Catherine David termed “the documentary turn” in contemporary art of the past fifteen years?

I Dream of Drella / Joseph Mosconi

Joseph Mosconi examines’s Saul Anton’s dialogical art-novel Warhol’s Dream, in which Andy Warhol is an inquisitive interlocutor to Robert Smithson.

Thwarting the Royal Road / Alison Rajah

Hold this Thread While I Walk Away / Tyler Russell

Just Here to Help: Global Art Production and Local Meanings / Matthew Stadler

Matthew Stadler examines how many high profile artists’ careers are advanced or sustained by applying an easily transferable, global mode of production to any one of countless locations around the world, anywhere that local will and funding has built the infrastructure to commission or host new art work.

Looking Glass Noir and the Ongoing Significance of Steel and Flesh / Jeremy Todd

Art about Life Is Better than Art about Art / Emily Vey Duke

In a review of Jacob Wren’s conceptually ambitious book called Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Emily Vey Duke states that as a whole, the book posits a pathology as a form of political radicalism.