Parkett : The Parkett series with contemporary artists. (Zürich : Parkett-Verlag, 2006)
﻿As radiantwith promise as the water appears on the cover, as curious is its effect on the drifting boat.The scene is of a theatrical artificiality: the cavernlike space imparts a sense of security and creates the magic of a blue grotto, yet also implies, however faintly, the possibility of being trapped. It seems as though the navigation of uncharted waters is the force driving not only the rowers on the cover, but also the three artists in this issue:Yang Fudong, Julie Mehretu, and Lucy McKenzie. They probe a world in flux, trawling for ideas that have yet to take shape and plumbing the depths of conflicting desires. Their inquiry into fundamental and familiar questions of cultural, intellectual and artistic identity produces startling results. The picture of the boat stems from the work of Yang Fudong, who creates films full of suspended and condensed moments, in which joy, sorrow, and hope seem merely to confirm the conviction that the artifice of art is truer than life. The objectives that inform the abstraction of Julie Mehretu’s images are demonstrated by the words of the writer Chris Abani: “When Julie says, ‘I am interested in the multi-faceted layers of place, space, and time that impact the formation of personal and communal identity,’ does she mean that she wants to explore the melancholic discontent of displacement? Or the displacement of melancholic discontent?” (editorial by publisher)
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Keywords: Fudong, Yang; Mehretu, Julie; McKenzie, Lucy