ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: August 1999

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Winifred Griffin (Minneapolis) ·

Laibach: The Instrumentality of the State Machine

Laibach and NSK analyze nationalism through the aesthetic dimension. By placing “national and subnational” symbols alongside each other, we demonstrate their “universality”. That is, in the very process of one nation defining its difference against the other, it frequently uses the same, or almost the same, kind of symbols and rhetoric as the other.

(–Laibach, from on-line interviews)

Laibach is a musical group that first began performing in the mining town of Trbovlje in central Slovenia in 1980. With Tito’s death that year, the future of Yugoslavia became uncertain, and throughout the 1980s youth subcultures engaged in agitation in the … Read more

20th / ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Ken Lum (Vancouver) and Adam Szymczyk (Warsaw) ·

Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art – Experiences of Discourse: 1965-1975

Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art – Experiences of Discourse: 1965-1975, Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw. May 31 – September 5, 1999

Conceptual Reflection in Polish Art. Experiences of Discourse, 1965-1975, exhibiting at Center for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw from May 31 until 5 September, 1999, is the most comprehensive review of the achievements of Polish conceptual art until now. It features works created between the end of the 1960s and the first half of 1970s. The exhibition attempts to sum up an artistic tendency which still exerts a considerable influence on the development of art … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Evgeny Shklovsky (Moscow) ·

From Internet to InteLnet: Electronic Media and Intellectual Creativity – An Interview with Mikhail Epshtein

Mikhail Epshtein, a specialist in Russian culture, is also a philosopher, literary critic, essayist, and author of twelve books. His new book “Transculural Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication” (with Ellen Berry) is forthcoming from St.Martin’s Press (Scholarly and Reference Division), fall 1999. Epshtein lives in Atlanta (Georgia) and teaches at Emory University. He runs an internet site called “InteLnet” (English, new site, English, archival site, Russian. The site contains what he calls the Book of Books (Book 2), or Interactive Anthology of Alternative Ideas, a work that consists of virtual books (titles and … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Stephan Küpper (Berlin) ·

Between Hope and Fear: Ilya Kabakov: The Sixties – the Seventies… Notes on Inofficial Life in Moscow

II’ya Kabakov: 60-e – 70-e… Zapiski o neoficial’noy zhizni v Moskve. Ed. Wolfgang Weitlaner. Vienna 1999 (Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 47)

Ilya Kabakov: The Sixties – the Seventies… Notes on inofficial life in Moscow. Vienna 1999

In the early eighties, with the endless period of stagnation under Brezhnev drawing to an end, conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov wants to come clean with his past. On the eve of Gorbachev’s Perestroika (that would eventually make possible his own emergence onto the international art scene), Kabakov takes stock of the inofficial Russian art scene, as well as his own role in … Read more