Between Flight and Flux If you have the feeling that someone scribbled in your issue of Parkett before it was delivered to you, you may rest assured—the effect is intentional. Gregor Muir describes how artist Gary Hume makes drawings on acetate sheets laid on top of magazine images as the basis of his large-format lacquer paintings. When we were talking with the artist about the layout for his collaboration, these films ended up back on the pages of a magazine, as if to return to their own point of departure, coming to rest again on their passing journey through countless layers of art and reality. Gary Hume’s paintings force art historians to resort to a new terminology. If paint evokes ice-cream and licorice instead of brush and canvas, it is not surprising for a visceral analogy to make striking sense, even in serious analytical studies. Thus, Douglas Fogle sees Gary Hume’s art primarily as a “skin job”.
In this issue of Parkett, certain artistic canons have gently loosed their moorings. From Nancy Spector’s observations on Pipilotti Rist’s art, one might be led to discover an aesthetics of fluidity. Our cover is also in gentle flux with a luminous parachute-flower, an ephemeral, sculptural hybrid. Gabriel Orozco staged and captured this phenomenon, demonstrating one of his favorite motifs: his fascination with dissection and transformation. The segmented white shape is both flower and parachute, picture and sculpture, image and event, but it is also a piece of silk with visible cuts and seams blowing in the wind —quintessential symbol of transience. Video artist Pipilotti Rist has put herself in purgatory and begs her audience for help through a crack in the floor. This piece, titled SELFLESS IN THE LAVA BATH, hotly undermines the idea of electronic media as a cold stream of images. Similarly, for a fugitive moment, her FLYING ROOM, suspended in the lobby of a bank, transforms the television set into the harbinger of a social utopia. Waiting customers whose gaze wanders will discover a selection of topsy-turvy furnish¬ings that seem to be floating off to nowhere high above their heads. And to top it off, the people cavorting overhead as stars of Rist’s video clips are down below on the ground as well, serving clients.
It so happens that all three collaboration artists were born in 1962 —in Kent (England), Jalapa (Mexico), and Grabs (Switzerland). Could that have anything to do with the fact that they share a certain preoccupation with things that flow?
