Issue 137
March 2011

In the March issue of frieze, Peter Schjeldahl examines the use of pronouns, cites a good example of writing in Wallace Stevens and even makes a case for his profession: ‘Attention Artists! Perhaps you employ language in your work. You may be highly literate. But you don’t have to say what your art means or even is about. Furthermore, don’t do that. It’s my job. You make the stuff. Let critics talk about it. Making is superior to talking, so you have the better end of the deal.’

Dan Fox finds a new model for an institutional operation in south east Brazil: ‘Visiting Instituto Inhotim is quite unlike any other art experience I have had; there is a walking trail through paradisical gardens, where, hidden in palm groves or setting serenely by the side of a lake, the visitor can find Modernist-style pavilions housing works by Brazilian artists and high-profile international names.’

Negar Azimi asks whether so-called socially engaged art can really effect change; Sam Thorne considers the seductive deception of the work of Daniel Sinsel and, following a major commission from the Louvre, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang talks to Erik Morse. Jennifer Bornstein considers the photography of curator Sam Wagstaff, who not only collected, supported and promoted other people’s photography but produced over 7,000 photographs of his own.

From this issue

The artist lists the books that have influenced him

The world’s first Arab Museum of Modern Art and Qatar’s plans for its cultural future

BY Sarah-Neel Smith |

Globetrotting curators and anxious artists; the trials of aviation and placelessness

What do you like the
look of?

Powder-coated anything. 

Following a major commission from the Louvre, Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang talks about how music, his father and the responsibilities of filmmaking have informed his 20-year career

Childhood possessions, assembled tableaux, secret stories and studio walls

BY Andrew Berardini |

Consumerism, spatial confusions and dislocated images; volume, solidity and lobsters

BY Lizzie Carey-Thomas |

Art has a long history of engagement with politics. Does recent so-called socially engaged or political art really effect change?

BY Negar Azimi |

Gilles Barbier speaks about his work in progress that will be shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris later this year.

BY Vivian Sky Rehberg |

Peter Schjeldahl questions whether we can speak sensibly about art 

BY Peter Schjeldahl |

The little-known photographs of a pioneering photography collector; an artist’s project

Moving between concealment and display, the work of Daniel Sinsel treads a fine line between seduction and deception

BY Sam Thorne |

A 21st-century update of psychedelia and a new generation of American lo-fi musicians who channel the 1980s sounds of mainstream radio rock, New Wave mtv pop, sedative New Age and the peppy synth-driven soundtracks of Hollywood blockbusters 

Ventriloquism, collaboration and translation in recent poetry publications

BY Quinn Latimer |

Why the Smithsonian Institution has failed the basic tenets of a nation

Does Instituto Inhotim, a 240-hectare art park and botanical garden in south-east Brazil, represent a new kind of institutional operation?

BY Dan Fox |

The disputed legacy of a South African painter

The ramifications of ‘Globish’ – global English

Mexico City’s self-appointed ‘Savage Vanguard’ unmask the hypocrisy of contemporary art through a 'montage of plastic moments'

BY Gabriela Jauregui |

Where next for art education in an increasingly professionalized art world?

BY Carol Yinghua Lu |