Parkett Vol. 80 - 2007 | Allora & Calzadilla, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Mark Grotjahn

Browse Selected Texts and more on the Collaboration Artists

Artist Insert

Editorial

Our collaboration artists in this volume, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Mark Grotjahn, all share the same unbridled desire to break out of art and its genres and into other mental, social and political realities, while paradoxically reinforcing and, indeed, fueling our faith in art. Confrontation with their works makes manifest the extent to which they call for a special response, a nonspecific but profoundly receptive, open-ended subtlety that is, nonetheless, solidly anchored in the experience of this world.

The editions they have created for Parkett could not be more redolent of this attitude. Allora & Calzadilla’s film, DEADLINE, zeroes in on a very small slice of reality. We see a palm frond dangling between two palm trees, a formal reduction that banks on the power of suggestion. Nothing eye-catching happens that might lend a different trajectory to the tension. Only the constantly changing shape of the frond spurs associations ranging from buoyancy and wanderlust to death and helplessness. We find ourselves engulfed in the entire emotional universe of the postcolonial mindset of the West that involves an “archetypal” guilty conscience and feelings of impending catastrophe. The sense of peace and affirmation that fills the frame is hard to take, the intensity of the message being heightened by the very fact that the palms do not stand in a museum like those of Marcel Broodthaers (Wilfried Dickhoff writes about his Magie. Art et Politique).

No one can effect the leap into the future with such verve as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. She has created an exquisitely silkscreened calendar for Parkett, with images and dates that weave a flying carpet of such oneiric energy that we are catapulted into spaces of enchanting emptiness that are “not nothing,” but actually filled with “tempting forms of nothingness,” as conjured by our writers Pamela Echeverría and Daniel Birnbaum.

Mark Grotjahn’s “abstract” painting also breaks loose: it is tranquility and takeoff, maelstrom and spell, ecstasy and composure. His surfaces contain unmistakable signs of several “double lives.” Take, for instance, the allusion to the artist’s poker-playing past in his edition for this issue. It symbolizes the dark side of culture. His card guards bring male fantasies into play but also those variations on poker that emphasize the fetish, the archaic gesture of singling out and taking possession of the cards by placing an object on them.

The insert has been designed in the same spirit. Through a physical act of destruction—several pages have been torn out of each copy by hand, one by one—Ryan Gander has invested the publication with metaphysical added value: the entire run of Parkett 80 consists of 10,000 originals. The choice of color in these pages refers to Le Corbusier, not as veiled indication of connoisseurship but as a sign of Gander’s cease.

Table of Content

Joanne Greenbau, Infant Paradise by Lyle Rexer

Magie, Art et Politique / On the Nowtime of a Book by Marcel Broodthaers Published in 1973 by Winfried Dickhoff

Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla
Archipelago by Patricia Falguières
The Sediment of History, Yates McKee & Jaleh Mansoor in conversation with Allora & Calzadilla
Wake Up Call by Hamza Walker

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Enchanting Emptiness by Daniel Birnbaum
Are There Possibilities to Unify Dispersed Fragments in a Coherent Framework by Philippe Parreno
Space Escondido by Pamela Echeverría

Mark Grotjahn
In the Center of the Infite by Douglas Fogle
Within Blue by Gary Garrels
Splitting Impacts the Eye by Hans Rudolf Reust

Ryan Gander, Insert

Landscape and Model by Christian Rattemeyer

The Other Side fo the Gates of Hell, Les Infos du Paradis by Sascha Renner

Puzzling our Detroit, Cumulus from America by Lynn Crawford

The Romanians in Cabaret Voltaire, Cumulus from Europe by Adrian Notz