Courtesy Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Solmaz Shahbazi, Untitled (2005). Lambda slide on light box, 24 x 34 x 6 in.

December 2008 Reviews

Street Art, Street Life

Third Guangzhou Trennial

Charles Avery

Swoon

Martin Ramirez

Richard Kern

Colin Chillag

Bending the Word

Robert Motherwell

I Am Never At Home

Mr.

Larry Clark Martha Rosler Sophie Calle Colin Chinnery on the Future of ShContemporary Daughters of the Revolution ShContemporary on Solid Footing, Despite Setbacks Stalking Collectors Sophie Calle

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In television parlance, the "greenroom" is where staff and guests exchange pre- and post-programming conversation — and as a title, "The Greenroom" is apt in its suggestion of the current state of contemporary documentary practice. Art produced in a documentary mode is often like an off-the-record conversation in a space between public and private productions of meaning, with the potential to be tedious or revelatory. Fortunately, this collection of historically contemplative, self-reflexive artworks tends to the latter.

Accordingly, the exhibition is billed as the catalyst for an even broader conversation: a three-year public research campaign headed by curator Maria Lind in collaboration with the artist and theoretician Hito Steyerl. It intends to reassess both the body of work produced in the wake of the recent "documentary turn" and its photographic predecessors (including Martha Rosler, Sophie Calle, Larry Clark, and others).

Video most readily accommodates the discursive demands of contemporary documentary, and for that reason video works predominate, such as Steyerl's November (2004), a postrevolutionary paean to the artist's childhood friend Andrea Wolf, a German assassinated in Eastern Anatolia for her association with a Kurdish revolutionary group. The work shifts between deeply personal imagery (the two shot a feminist martial-arts movie together as teenagers) and media constructions of her disappearance. Olivia Plender's Newsroom (2008) occupies the show's physical and conceptual heart, as its sole commission. Resembling a TV station circa 1970, the installation serves as the site for the exhibition's forthcoming lectures, performances, and panel discussions. The message is clear: deconstructing the rhetorics of truth is not the task of this show — it is ours.

"The Greenroom" originally appeared in the December 2008 / January 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' December 2008 / January 2009 Table of Contents.