print September 1998

Tim Hawkinson

Tim Hawkinson seems like the kind of guy who builds robots in his basement out of whatever’s lying around—aluminum foil, mannequin limbs, pencils and pens, an old motor, wiring, whistles—and who works out names and even biographies for his mechanical beings. A guy who treats his creations like pets. Hawkinson’s obviously drawn to mutants, diagrams, and models. His historico-futuristic sensibility makes me think I wouldn’t mind seeing a sci-fi movie he directed, or playing a CD-ROM game he designed. Hawkinson also seems to have an attraction to narrative, highlighted in the paragraphs of explication

previews September 1998

Man Ray: Photographs

Undeterred by recent allegations that certain “vintage” Man Ray prints are counterfeit—charges that cooled plans for a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—the Getty is mounting a selection of some 100 of the artist’s 300 images from its collection. Curator Katherine Ware is taking a broad view of the American Dadaist-turned-expatriate Surrealist, sampling work from 1916 to 1951, including portraits, nudes, photograms, clichés verre, and solarized and hand-altered images. Did the spark go out when Man Ray left Paris for Los Angeles, as conventional wisdom has it? The photographs and

previews September 1998

Julia Margaret Cameron's Women

There are plenty of nineteenth-century photographs of women; few, though, were actually made by women. Of those that were, Julia Margaret Cameron’s stand out, as much for their self-conscious dramatization of identity (think ’80s tableau photography) as for their Pre-Raphaelite sensibility. According to Art Institute curator Sylvia Wolf, who selected the sixty prints on view, the aim is to demonstrate “what it meant to be a Victorian woman making pictures of women.” Another point that’s hard to miss is Cameron’s importance in establishing an art of photography beyond the bounds of pure documentation.

previews September 1998

Brassaï: The Eye of Paris

Seldom has a show been longer in the making: curator Anne Wilkes Tucker spent fifteen years readying this retrospective of the great photographer, outlasting colleagues at the Met, MoMA, and Art Institute of Chicago (all of whom ended up at odds with Brassaï’s contentious widow). Among the highlights of this triumph of perseverance: artfully arranged “candid” nightclub scenes, plenty of the signature romantically charged night views of Paris streets, underground shots in the city’s sewer tunnels, and close-ups of graffiti that seem to anticipate Abstract Expressionism—in all, some 140 black-and-white

print May 1998

Martin Kersels

In his recent show, Martin Kersels wrestled with questions about how we navigate the world, addressing complex issues of awkwardness, safety and danger, and fear and discomfort. With a vocabulary taken from Conceptual art, performance art, slapstick, and dance, he exaggerates the embarrassing racket we make bumping and stumbling through life housed in our own too, too solid flesh. The work owes its unique perspective to Kersels’ knowledge that we are both privileged and doomed to lumber through the world as blobs of thinking, breathing meat.

The show’s centerpiece, Loud House (all works 1998),

print April 1998

Jim Shaw

Given Jim Shaw’s penchant for treating his mental landscape as an archaeological dig, it’s not surprising that for the last few years he’s been mining his dreams. This show contained forty-five pieces based on images that Shaw has lugged back from his excursions into the Land of Nod. Executed in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, fake greeting cards, cartoons, models, photographs, and drawings in various mutations, the work reflected the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink quality of dreams. These souvenirs from far-flung psychic galaxies ran the gamut from tweaked cartoon pastiche,

print September 1997

Bruce Conner

Bruce Conner’s latest show conjured the ghosts of Edgar Allen Poe, William Blake, and Max Ernst. Spanning nearly a decade, the works (which ranged from 1987 to ’96) were divided, by methodology, into two categories: inkblot drawings and wood-engraving collages. The latter are elegant black and white cutups of fin-de-siècle engravings, which Conner scissored into surreal, absurd incarnations, full of mystical hints. One such piece, The Advance of Technology, 1996, is an altered biblical illustration. Gesturing energetically toward a shy Christ is a barefoot, robed figure whose head is covered by

print February 1997

Pina Bausch Tanztheatre Wuppertal

German choreographer Pina Bausch’s elegant, often absurd images vacillate between the intimate and the spectacular. Crouched in a niche gouged out of a huge fake tree, a man takes a leisurely cigarette break. A woman empties some sort of powder from her panties. Men scale walls like flies to sultry music. Assembled dancers of both sexes do backbends amid a shower of falling leaves. Nur Du (Only you, 1996), Bausch’s site-specific dance-theater work created during a short LA residency, was intended in part to reflect her take on the city. The varied score featured tangos, fados, jazz, and doo-wop.

print Summer 1996

Allen Ruppersberg

If Allen Ruppersberg has always had a severe case of bibliomania conceptualis so much the better for us. His most recent show investigated the secret lives of books—as admired and debased objects, embodiments of a zeitgeist, and repositories of laughter, value, and mourning.

Portraits of books were presented as though the tomes themselves were famous personages. Fiction, 1991, is a drawing of a book whose cover modestly declares: “Good Stories by the Best Authors of the Day. 10 cents.” This piece sets the show’s tone: tongue-in-cheek reverence mixed with sly elegance. Low to High, 1994–96, gives

print October 1995

Annette Messager

For years I’ve pored over magazine reproductions of Annette Messager’s pieces, deeply intrigued, sighing with longing to see the real thing(s). Messager has not shown much in the U.S. and only twice before on the West Coast. This first major American exhibition of her work, co-organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA in New York, where it opens this month, was long overdue.

Describing Messager’s work as poetic, mysterious, eerie, dark, smart, playful seems woefully pale. I suppose this is the critic’s most dreaded disease—admiration fever. If you love the work, you choke. If

print September 1995

Charles Gaines

In “Night/Crimes,” Charles Gaines presented eight noirish photo-and-text-based works that combine what looks like pages from an astronomy book with photos that resemble the ones Weegee managed to snap before police photographers arrived to document his city’s latest mayhem. Each piece consists of a large vertical rectangle encased in a thin black frame, recalling the way funeral announcements used to be surrounded by dark borders. The predominance of black and white in this show typified the exhibition’s central juxtaposition, evoking at once the conventions of fine-art display and the bleary,

print November 1994

Jennifer Pastor

Visitors to Jennifer Pastor’s first solo show were treated to a three-dimensional, freezeframed explosion of cartoon energy. Pastor’s single, sprawling sculpture dominated the small gallery like a cuddly, restive tiger cub held captive in a shoebox. Viewers had to stoop and then flatten themselves against walls as they circumnavigated the piece to experience it in its goofy, slightly unsettling entirety.

Pastor’s sculpture presents an image of cute, loony Christmas decorations run amok that seem to both shrink and elongate while thrashing about in some kind of wild tide. Like any well-conceived

Amy Gerstler