Flirting with Disaster

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR…

With a touch of dramatic irony, this year’s installment of the annual SITAC conference, at the Teatro Julio Castillo in Mexico City, centered on the “Theory and Practice of Catastrophe” and began with the circulation of two competing, contradictory program schedules. The resulting bafflement, however, was quickly forgotten as the bone-chilling coldness of the poorly designed lecture hall lulled guests into a state of torpor that would come to characterize the next three days of the conference.

On Thursday, day one of the colloquium, the first speaker was the hotly

print September 2010

“Greater New York”

AT THE PRESS CONFERENCE for “Greater New York,” organizers Klaus Biesenbach and Connie Butler (Neville Wakefield, the third organizer, was not present) admitted that it was a challenge to fill MOMA PS1’s large, awkward space on such a small budget. Their solution? To invite the artists to “move in and take it over,” in Butler’s words, thereby showcasing the “process of creation and the generative nature of the artist’s studio.” Whatever space remained would be used to stage complementary exhibitions—a cinema program in the basement, a “five-year review” of primarily performance-based work and