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

Washingon, DC: Guido van der Werve

Nuremberg, Germany: Katinka Bock

Ghent, Belgium: Dara Birnbaum

Robert Taplin Sam Taylor-Wood Pawel Wojtasik Madrid Museum to Combine Condoms and Art Sam Taylor-Wood to Direct Lennon Biopic The Weeks That Were (September 19 – October 3, 2008) Jay Jopling and Sam Taylor-Wood Separate After 11 Years Lehman's Art Collecting Unit to Be Sold

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"I’ve been out walking/ I don’t do too much talking/ These days, these days." Nico’s husky, stilted lament made Jackson Browne’s song famous, and it has now inspired a new exhibition that strikes the same elegiac tenor. Sketched out as a series of six artistic "poems" that mourn our increasingly fraught present, Mass MoCA’s exhibition presents atmospheric works by a range of international artists — George Bolster, Chris Doyle, Micah Silver, Robert Taplin, Sam Taylor-Wood, and Pawel Wojtasik — that investigate religion, death, love; you know, the heavies. While a distinctly pre-Obama administration tone — fearful, apocalyptic — might be said to characterize the show, the works on view also look tentatively forward: Wojtasik’s video, with its images of New Orleans’s waterways and neighborhoods, alludes to cycles of both destruction and regeneration, slow and uncertain as that latter stage might be. In Sam Taylor-Wood’s videos, a perfect piece of fruit rapidly rots — via time lapse — while a series of self-portraits show the artist levitating, conjuring both extinction and ecstasy. In darker quarters, George Bolster’s cathedral-like installation helpfully hints at its themes by including the Radiohead song "Reckoner." Whether our day has come or not, we shall see.

massmoca.org "These Days: Elegies for Modern Times" 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.