Parkett Vol. 62 - 2001 | Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, John Wesley

Browse Selected Texts and more on the Collaboration Artists

Artist Insert

Editorial

“Delighted at making new friends, Gerda lifts them up and Jörg takes pictures of them.” This comment accompanies the photographs in our Insert, taken by Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger on their journey around the world in 1998–1999. They are light-hearted pictures of people laughing in surprise at having just been lifted off the ground. “Lifting” has metaphorical implications and we notice that a simple, childlike, infectiously spontaneous act rises above cultural difference and the marks of conformity—and does so with disarming ease.

The essentially unfiltered immediacy of the Insert stands in contrast to the work of our collaboration artists in this issue: John Wesley, Tacita Dean, and Thomas Demand. Here we enter realms of enigma, absence, memory, exchange, artificiality, and stylization. Yet a uniting constant might be found in the keyword, ‘journey’. The artists’ journeys through time and space do not take us to people but to events and places of mental reverberation. Deserted and inhabited only by ghosts is a phrase we have heard before. Or the idea is nurtured of objects with ominous stories to tell if only they could speak.

While working on this issue, someone remarked that the editions conjure a sense of wanderlust. We actually see a figure left behind on shore gazing at two men in a rowboat. A postcard sent to Zurich from Africa shows the mythical “rayon vert,” the phenomenon of the green ray that joins the sunset on the ocean horizon upon the rare convergence of certain climatic conditions. And finally visions of faraway lands are evoked by the carrier, its hatch invitingly open prior to take-off. Not until we espy the emblem indicating that this is a picture or rather a reconstruction of the American President’s Air Force One vehicle do we return to the solid terrain of everyday facts.

Table of Content

Pictures and Score of Kaprow’s HOUSEHOLD by Philip Ursprung

Tacita Dean
Genius Loci by Jeremy Millar
Sound as Duration in the Films of Tacita Dean by Paula Carabell
Teignmouth Electron by Dieter Schwarz

John Wesley
Passive Expressive by Linda Morden
A conversation about John Wesley by Kasper König & Marianne Stockebrand
Débordement de vie by Bruce Hainley

Thomas Demand
Doubt the Day by Adrian Searle
Memoryscapes by Andreas Ruby
The Neutron Bomb Effect by Jörg Heiser

Gerda Steiner & Jörg Lenzlinger, Insert

Glen Wilson – Will the Circle Be Unbroken by Russell Ferguson

The Veil of the Liminal. Mike Parr’s Brides by Edward A. Scheer

Illuminations, The Drawings of Patti Smith, Les Infos du Paradis by David Greenberg

San Keller: Art as a Public Service, Cumulus from Europe by Giovanni Carmine

Incunabula, Cumulus from America by Steve Dietz