Elizabeth Schambelan

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  print January 2009

  CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: PROSPECT.1 NEW ORLEANS

  International biennials of contemporary art have long ventured into the cities that serve as their hosts, but perhaps none has reckoned with so loaded a locale as PROSPECT.1 NEW ORLEANS. More than three years after Hurricane Katrina wrought its devastation, much of the city remains in grave disrepair, making it a setting where critical designations such as “site-specific work” and “socially committed practice” can seem tenuous at best. Curator Dan Cameron and the eighty-one international artists he invited to participate in the first New Orleans biennial were well aware of this dilemma, and they often addressed the challenge by directly involving local communities across the city. The nearly three hundred works on view through January 18 by no means obviate the complexities of staging an exhibition in such a deeply troubled place, but they necessarily suggest heightened and far-ranging questions about how a biennial—or any work of art—might truly engage its context. Artist GLENN LIGON and Artforum senior editor ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN headed to the bayou to survey the results.

  I ALMOST MISSED one of the most affecting presentations of Prospect.1 New Orleans. Wandering into a small room at the back of the L9 Center for the Arts, I discovered “Gone,” an exhibition of flood-damaged photographs assembled by the center’s founders, local artists Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. Hung salon style in their ruined mats and mud-encrusted frames, these black-and-white documentary photos of weddings, block parties, and second-line parades in the Lower Ninth Ward are a devastating reminder of what Hurricane Katrina swept away and what a courageous and determined group of artists,

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  print Summer 2008

  the Whitney Biennial

  IN AMY GRANAT AND DREW HEITZLER’S 2007 double-screen film, T.S.O.Y.W., on view in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, a motorcyclist travels from Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, on the banks of the Great Salt Lake, to the Mojave Desert. But the primary sense of movement is in the back-and-forth between the two projections: Sometimes the images on the screens are just slightly off-register, as if Granat and Heitzler were shooting standing next to each other; sometimes they’re completely divergent. The lateral dynamic cuts across and impedes the linear momentum of the journey, as does the intermittent

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  previews May 2008

  Seth Price

  This exhibition will feature at least as much new work as old and will likely blur the distinction between the two, as befits a practice so invested in dispersal, circulation, and recursion.

  Crumpled sheets of clear polyester film screenprinted with stills from mujahideen videos pulled off the Internet; precision-cut pieces of wood and metal delineating the negative space around images of people kissing or lighting cigarettes; vacuum-formed polystyrene that registers the shape but jettisons the mass of objects like bomber jackets and ropes: Even at their most insistently material, Seth Price's works gesture toward some state of antimatter, invoking voids, transparency, and the weightless flux of the digital. This exhibition, organized by Beatrix Ruf, will

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  previews May 2008

  Andrea Zittel, Monika Sosnowska 1:1

  In this exhibition, roughly one hundred of Zittel's quasi-utilitarian objects, plus gouaches, drawings, and paintings on wood, occupy the Schaulager's first floor, while on the lower level, Sosnowska presents nine sculptures.

  Andrea Zittel's multiplatform practice elaborates a high-design, postmillenarian vision of rugged individualism—which is to say, one that remains very much on the grid, engaging with, rather than retreating from, the encroachments of consumer culture. The grid with which the Warsaw-based Monika Sosnowska concerns herself, on the other hand, is the geometry of modern architecture: Her sculptures and installations skew verticals and horizontals and expose the latent irrationalities of even the most soberly institutional setting. In this exhibition, organized by Theodora

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  previews January 2008

  Ulla von Brandenburg

  Like some other artists for whom the world is a stage—to paraphrase the title of the Tate Modern group exhibition in which she recently appeared—Ulla von Brandenburg reanimates outmoded theatrical tropes (notably, the tableau vivant), along with nineteenth-century source materials drawn from that moment when the avant-garde seemed as enamored of the occult as of industrialism and science.

  Like some other artists for whom the world is a stage—to paraphrase the title of the Tate Modern group exhibition in which she recently appeared—Ulla von Brandenburg reanimates outmoded theatrical tropes (notably, the tableau vivant), along with nineteenth-century source materials drawn from that moment when the avant-garde seemed as enamored of the occult as of industrialism and science. Her 16-mm films, watercolors, murals, and labyrinthine installations of moving-image projections on fabric panels—all of which will be represented in this exhibition of new and

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  books October 2007

  The So-Called Utopia of the Centre Beaubourg

  HENRI LEFEBVRE CALLED IT an “immense boutique,” the “Palm Beach of the poor,” and a “complete failure”; Gordon Matta-Clark dubbed it a “brave-new cobweb”; and Jean Baudrillard, in a single short paragraph, likened it to a “carcass,” an “incinerator,” a “black monolith,” and a “mad convection current.” Architectural history is full of snarky disparagements of newfangled buildings, but the wave of criticism that greeted the 1977 opening of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Centre Pompidou was remarkable not only for its intensity but also because so much of the opprobrium came from the intellectual

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  previews September 2007

  Francis Alÿs

  Francis Alÿs has proposed “the politics of rehearsal” as the organizing principle of his first major US museum exhibition, which brings together some half dozen video installations, as well as preparatory drawings and paintings from the past decade.

  Francis Alÿs has proposed “the politics of rehearsal” as the organizing principle of his first major US museum exhibition, which brings together some half dozen video installations, as well as preparatory drawings and paintings from the past decade. If a rehearsal is an enactment of an event that has yet to occur, then its politics would seem to locate possibility in perpetual deferral. This is one way, in any case, to think about the artist’s wryly Sisyphean projects (most recently, he traced Israel’s contested Green Line with a leaky can of paint and connected Havana

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  previews September 2007

  Kelley Walker

  This exhibition, the artist’s first institutional solo show, consists of some thirty pieces, most of them new works created for the occasion.

  Kelley Walker takes mass-media images (ads, magazine covers, mug shots of Michael Jackson) and subjects them to various manipulations—scanning, cropping, rotating, enlarging, abstracting, superimposing, sometimes using toothpaste or chocolate at various points along the way. The resulting artworks—whether screenprints, CD-ROMS, sculptures, or posters—behave more like waves than like particles, in that their materiality seems less at issue than the processes of their dissemination and the velocity at which they move across sites of reproduction. This exhibition, curated

• previews May 2007

  Paul Poiret

  To understand the radicality of Paul Poiret’s designs, you have to compare his “look” to the starchy, buxom, Edwardian silhouette that preceded it. True, the “Pasha of Paris,” as he was known, released women from their corsets only to encrust them in a kind of Orientalist carapace. But he also implied that a woman’s allure lay not in the shape of her torso but in her gestures, attitude, and presence—a step in the right direction that blazed the trail for Chanel’s protofeminist modernism. Featuring fifty Poiret ensembles dating from 1903 to 1928, Art Deco

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  print May 2007

  Andrea Fraser

  There’s a storied moment in Andrea Fraser’s 2001 video Little Frank and His Carp: Touring the Guggenheim Bilbao, the artist, exhorted by her audio guide to admire the architecture, proceeds to share an erotic interlude with a wall. Fraser’s twelve-minute video A Visit to the Sistine Chapel, 2005, on view in her recent show at Friedrich Petzel, has a similar premise. It, too, follows the artist on an audio-guided tour, this time through the Vatican Museum. But its humor is less outré, as befits the setting. The laughs derive mainly from Fraser’s deadpan reactions to the inevitable rhetorical

• previews May 2007

  A.R. Penck

  A. R. Penck’s painterly language—a kind of visionary semaphore forged under the pressures of life in the GDR and refined in the hothouse of the 1980s art world after his move to the West—could use some revisionist lexicography. This ambitious retrospective will present some 150 works, including large-format paintings, sculptures, and artist’s books. Together with the accompanying catalogue, which includes essays by Isabelle Graw and others, the exhibition should help redefine an important oeuvre that has often been overshadowed by that of wilder Neue Wilde. Travels to

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  print February 2007

  Chris Hammerlein

  In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the character Edward Casaubon famously devotes his life to deducing “the key to all mythologies”—a sort of ur-fable underlying and explaining all others—only to realize that there is no such thing. He dies a beaten man, leaving behind a mountain of disorganized notes. Brooklyn-based artist Chris Hammerlein seems to have something in common with Casaubon: For the past eight years, he has been making drawings that delve into the mythic iconography of various locales and epochs, including that of modern pop culture. But instead of evincing a desire to unify the field,