Courtesy the artist

Guido van der Werve, still from "Nummer Acht (#8) everything is going to be alright" (2007). 16mm film to DVD, 10 min.

March 2009 Field Guide

Paris: The Jazz Century

Interview: Second Trienal Poli/Graficá de San Juan

New York, Paris and Stockholm: Survey of Surveys

London: Focus on Forsythe

Minneapolis: The Quick and the Dead

North Adams, MA: These Days: Elegies for Modern Times

Nuremberg, Germany: Katinka Bock

Ghent, Belgium: Dara Birnbaum

Marina Abramovic Guido van der Werve Love Hurts Let Them Eat Art PLOT: This World and Nearer Ones Marina Abramović Presents... ShContemporary on Solid Footing, Despite Setbacks Fall Forecast

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The Romantic sublime meets Buster Keaton slapstick in Guido van der Werve’s enchanting short films. The 32-year-old Dutch artist has filmed himself rotating slowly clockwise for 24 hours at the North Pole, in The Day I Didn’t Turn with the World (2007), deliberately falling out of sync with the earth’s rhythm as it turns counterclockwise beneath him. In Nummer Acht (#8) everything is going to be alright (2007), he trips merrily along on the frozen Gulf of Bothnia, in Finland, while being trailed by a mammoth ice-breaking ship several yards behind him. This is endurance art following in the footsteps of Bas Jan Ader and Marina Abramović, but with a much lighter tread.

hirshhorn.si.edu "Guido Van Der Werve" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' April 2009 Table of Contents.