What's Out There? A Whitney Biennial Preview

Since 1932, the Whitney Museum of American Art's biannual survey of contemporary art has been one of its most reliably exciting shows, due to its patronage of young talentand yearbook effect of collective memory. Sometimes sheltered under an umbrella curatorial, sometimes not, the biennial always seeks to identify important American art now—in other words, its proposition is as baldly general as a US institutional exhibition can get.
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Dramatic Witness: The Art of Omer Fast

It would not be amiss to think Omer Fast's work a touch Jungian, by way of Freud. The subject matter of his interview-based video work broaches the collective unconscious of cultural memory, and ranges from the politically potent to the more or less banal: the Iraq War, the Holocaust, Colonial Williamsburg (VA), the talking heads on cable news television. Unlike many documentary filmmakers (whose methods he appropriates, to documentary-aberrant ends), Fast is uninterested in distinguishing reality from favorable reenactment, per se. And anyway, "media-critical" is a too easy, and far too obvious tagline for his work.
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Modernism After Marinetti

On American Thanksgiving last week, a number of leading British intellectuals gathered under the aegis of the Tate Britain to discuss a different sort of historical legacy to which contemporary culture is indebted, if ambiguously grateful for. Two months after the Tate Modern's centenary Futurist exhibition, Terry Eagleton, Simon Critchley, Kate Soper and Eyal Weizman considered postmodernism's future, in the wake of Futurist poet F.T. Marinetti.
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In Conversation: Danica Dakic Takes Off Masks

When Danica Dakic (abandoned her architectural studies in Bosnia to focus on art, it wasn't the last time she would engage in producing spatial experiences. A former student of Nam June Paik, Dakic's complex film, media, and material installations layer variable temporalities and linguistic tones to create rich, tapestry-like theatrical textures. Her work explores the formation of identity-especially among marginalized populations, sometimes in exile-with the intention to render the poetic dimension of human existence visible. Fraught content makes for difficult material, and Dakic does not shy away from  the political, with results that are often too easily read as didactic. But her film treatments have as much to do with the bodies of her non-professional actors as with the environments and landscapes through which they drift. Location is essential in Role-Taking, Role-Making (2004-05), which features live theatrical performances recorded in Cologne, Germany, and scenes staged with inhabitants of Preoce and the Plementina refugee camp in Kosovo. As the émigré director of the Romani acting troupe insists, "Theater is born from its architecture." And if all the world's a stage, Dakic plays with framing scenes and specific spaces of reality to real dramatic effect. The largest, most comprehensive retrospective of Dakic's work from the last decade is currently on view at Düsseldorf's Kunsthalle.
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