Parkett Vol. 85 - 2009 | Maria Lassnig, Beatriz Milhazes, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Josh Smith

Browse Selected Texts and more on the Collaboration Artists

View Artist Insert by Markus Uhr

Editorial

Twenty-five years ago, on April 1, 1984, Parkett presented its first issue to the public in the small music pavilion of a park in Zürich. Of course, the image of Parkett spreading out into the world like sound waves is not entirely applicable. From the outset, the very essence of the project has always been transatlantic, being conceived in two languages as a bridge between the continents of Europe and North America.

The main theme of our three issues this year, the rich potential of transatlantic exchange, is launched by a conversation between our New York editor, Bettina Funcke and Bice Curiger: “Transatlantic and Beyond.” In-depth contributions will further analyze Parkett’s “face-to-face” exchange—to borrow the title of Jean-Luc Mylayne’s Edition —be it across the Atlantic or the face-to-face relationship we have with the collaboration artists.

To celebrate our anniversary year, we are inviting a special guest for each issue from among those who have collaborated with us before. Mylayne, our first special guest, is an artist without a fixed domicile, who creates his work largely in Texas and France. Birds take centerstage in his photographs but looks deceive, for the crucial concern in his work is the encounter between bird and human being. The fact that he “transforms the camera into an instrument of slow, philosophical examination,” as described by Josef Helfenstein, is indicative of the complexity that gradually surfaces the more one studies his pictures.

Although our other three collaboration artists—Maria Lassnig, Beatriz Milhazes, and Josh Smith—are all painters, it is not the shared medium that motivated the decision to juxtapose them. Like Mylayne, they too are self-willed, driven by unwavering passion and single-minded purpose.

Resonant in the liberating abandon of the cover is the reconquest of a much abused terrain—one that is marked by gestural energy. It is the work of Josh Smith, born in 1976 and the youngest in our quartet of collaborating artists. His positively carefree exploitation of modern painting’s vocabulary stands in contrast to that of an earlier generation, like Kippenberger or Wool, who, as Anne Pontégnie explains, “were necessarily more focused on liberating themselves from a stifling modernist orthodoxy”.

We have the privilege of enjoying an even greater contrast in the inexhaustible freshness and youth of the paintings made by 90-year-old Maria Lassnig. Her attention to the body has anchored the energies of gestural painting and symbolism in what Rob Storr calls science-fiction, inasmuch as she fuses “bodies and hardware as a device for describing humanity’s supernatural adaptations.”

While Lassnig has staked out a transatlantic territory with stops in Vienna, Paris, New York and back to Vienna, Beatriz Milhazes, a native of Rio de Janeiro, charts the relationship between Brazil and the West. As she says in her conversation with musician Arto Lindsay, “Western culture is determined by Europe and North America”, an observation which in turn relates to anthropophagy or cultural cannibalism. In their contributions, Tanya Barson and Barry Schwabsky trace the references that resonate in Milhazes’s oeuvre, taking us on a challenging journey not only from Brazil to Mexico but also to Matisse, Emilio Pucci, and Roy Lichtenstein. Also in this issue is an Insert by Markus Uhr, the spine has been designed by Josh Smith. In Parkett’s 25th year, we realize once again—along with Ben Vautrier—how inescapably mutable the notion of the “center of the world” has become!

Table of Content

Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break by Mark Godfrey

Transatlantic – 25 Years Parkett

Transatlantic and Beyond by Bettina Funcke & Bice Curiger

Tansatlantic Statements

Jean-Luc Mylanye
Understanding Life by Josef Helfenstein
Angle of Repose by Fionn Meade
Side by Side by Jean-Luc Mylanye

Maria Lassnig
Hard Labor: The Forte of Women by Ludmila Vachtova
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? by Robert Storr
Be Aware, Be Aware, Be Aware . . . of Maria Lassnig’s Films by Manuela Ammer

Beatriz Milhazes
Painting Mutability by Tanya Barson
Musical Expression by Arto Lindsay
From Painting to the Book & On Meu Bem by Barry Schwabsky

Josh Smith
Josh Smith Is Not Afraid by Ira G. Wool
Painter Without a Pausse by Anne Pontégnie
Painting Stripped Bare by Christophe Chérix

Markus Uhr, Insert

Part Against the Whole: Participation and and/as Institution, Cumulus from America by Andrew S. Weiner

Starting from Scratch, Cumulus from Europe by Rainer Michael Mason