Parkett Vol. 83 - 2008 | Robert Frank, Wade Guyton, Christopher Wool

Editorial

Black prevails in this issue of Parkett. It is the gloomy, melancholy, existential black of Robert Frank’s photographs and films; it is the cool, urbane, subterraneously agitated black of Christopher Wool‘s paintings; and it is the black of Wade Guyton’s inkjet printer that seeks to link new and old. The black-and-white photocopy on the cover, an updated trompe l’oeil created by Guyton and Wool together, ironically plays to an antique gray.

The photocopy symbolically underscores reproduction as a self-made product, especially since the key to this kind of reproduction is not industrial multiplication. Instead, the artists presented here investigate different forms of slow, self-reflecting reproduction: mental and manual work that is related to the machine and to recent picture-making tools (cameras, standard stencils, screens, computers, printers). Guyton and Wool, incidentally, both cultivate a distinctive relationship to books and book-making that not only underlies their collaborative project for the cover but also provides the point of departure for Liz Kotz’s essay, “The Treachery of Images”. The hand and doing things by hand also play a role in the photograph that introduces the pages devoted to Robert Frank. Hands conjure and invoke but they also hold things at bay. The photographer’s largeformat pictures reproduced in this issue are film stills. Frank selected them specifically for Parkett and requested that no other works be reproduced alongside the texts. How many people are aware that the first edition of Robert Frank’s extraordinarily influential photo essay, The Americans, which is half a century old this year, was not published in United States but in Paris as Les Américains? The climate of the Cold War in those days was not conducive to finding an American publisher. Analyzing Frank’s significance today, in the light of the presidential campaign, Pamela M. Lee observes that “the book reads like an allegory of a lost highway, where the road is an endlessly shadowed one and each turn a leap of faith”.

In Christopher Wool’s and Wade Guyton’s art, painting has the appearance of being fraught with memory. The way in which Wool handles his work is, on the whole, ambivalent; it is evocative and yet also distanced, artfully plying the byways of authenticity between true and false. But a hint of truth keeps trickling out along the edges and through the cracks engendered by the tools of his art.

On the surface of things, Wade Guyton’s approach might appear to be more detached since he feeds the images and their supports directly into his Epson printer. The act of observation, the perception of the evolving work, and the potential of its evocative power are revealed with fascinating precision in Scott Rothkopf’s study of Guyton’s new “monochrome” works. Sculpture also features prominently in Guyton’s oeuvre. Mirrors, steel tube chairs, parquet cubes, and U-shaped steel objects reflect space, stretching it and compressing it to extremes, while also directly addressing, if not even attacking viewers with a clearcut YOU. This volume also features an Insert project by Kerstin Brätsch.

Is the fact that the collaboration artists in this issue are three male New Yorkers even worth mentioning? Yes, it is, inasmuch as the next issue of Parkett will be devoted to three women. As always, the collaborating artists for the next issue are listed on the inside flap of the back cover

Table of Content

Trembling Before Time: On the Drawings of Paul Sharits by Paul Chan

Robert Frank
Fifty Years Down the Road by Pamela M. Lee
Reunion by Eileen Myles
You Can’t go Home by Tacita Dean

Wade Guyton
The New Black by Scott Rothkopf
Double Negative by Suzanne Cotter
Pictures Eating Pictures: Notes for Wade Guyton by Daniel Birnbaum

Christopher Wool
Syntax for Minor Mishaps by Fionn Meade
Wool Gathering by Richard Flood
Aequacy No! by Jutta Koether
The Treachery of Images, Christopher Wool and Wade Guyton by Liz Kotz

The End of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Susan Philpsz’ Sound Pieces in Space by Burkhard Meltzer

Kerstin Brätsch, Insert

Cinema, Messianism and Crime, Les Infos du Paradis by Thomas Eaton

Immaculate Conceptualism, Balkon by Victor Tupitsyn