Photo by Bruno Lopes

Anton Vidokle, installation view of "Exhibition as School" at Arte Contempo. Materials and dimensions variable.

November 2009 Reviews

Target Practice

The Audio Show

Dorothy Iannone

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Walid Raad

Richard Long

Song Dong

Rirkrit Tiravanija Anton Vidokle Guggenheim Announces Hugo Boss Finalists Rirkrit Tiravanija Celebration or Send-Up? The Art of Eating A Berlin Building in Flux When in Basel for... Art Basel

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Anton Vidokle’s "Exhibition as School," from June 25 to July 18, was really an exhibition as exhibition. It displayed evidence of the artist’s work of the past decade — a panel discussion as mock trial, a gallery as pawnshop, a print-on-demand art journal, among other things — and framed his practice as a series of experiments with social form.

At times one suspected that these exercises were motivated largely by their eventual documentation. New York Conversations (2009) records a discussion Vidokle organized with Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nico Dockx as an artist project for A Prior magazine. The scratchy black-and-white 16-millimeter film creates an artificial historical distance from the event, endowing both the gathering and its named participants with an aura of intellectual significance that is hardly justified by the textual evidence on offer. At their weakest, Vidokle’s projects seem less experiments than gestures of nostalgia for the experimentalism of a bygone avant-garde.

The best work both eludes and transcends documentation. E-flux, the art world e-mail announcement service that Vidokle founded in 1999, is modestly represented here by a book cataloguing a selection of past announcements and a brief but lovely video interview with the artist by his longtime collaborator, Julieta Aranda. Neither supplies a distinct image of what, finally, e-flux is: archive, cipher, business model? Both are titled The Best Surprise Is No Surprise (2006). The medium is the surprise. This is Vidokle’s work at its strongest: art as organizational postulate that reveals its own form and its social context, continually, as it operates.

"Anton Vidokle" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2009 Table of Contents.