Eva Scharrer

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  picks December 02, 2003

  Susan Hiller

  Susan Hiller’s first solo show in Berlin, “Learning to Love Germany,” is a discourse on paradox. A series of large photographs (all works 2003) portray peaceful lanes in the German countryside which lose their innocence once the road signs come into focus. The name on each begins with the prefix “Juden-”—laconic but disquieting reminders of a manifest absence. The German dilemma of forgetting versus remembering is also apparent in several displays of postwar ceramics from the GDR and West Germany. Hiller has organized them by formal qualities like color, but their design indicates that they

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  picks September 30, 2003

  Klaus Lutz

  A shoe box–size apartment in New York's East Village can be both a hermit’s cave and an entire universe; and in his microcosmic retreat, sixty-three-year-old Swiss artist Klaus Lutz both lives and creates his art. His work is a unique mixture of film, drawing, and performance—or “performance with film,” as Lutz puts it, in which he is director, stage designer, cameraman, and lonesome protagonist. In his current show, “The Caveman,” two 16 mm films are projected onto a pair of large balloons. We see the artist’s tiny self marching, floating, and coming to grief like Chaplin in the clockwork

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  picks September 24, 2003

  “Backjumps: The Live Issue”

  The graffiti-covered hallways of the Künstlerhaus Bethanien—where many artists have participated, uninvited, in “Backjumps”—illustrate critical issues brought up by this multivenue undertaking: the claiming of public space, and the sense, or non-sense, of the institutionalization of “street art.” Instead of merely dragging graffiti into the museum, the show, which was conceived as a “live” extension of Backjumps magazine, postulates the city as gallery. It offers a hybrid array of contemporary artistic practices, in- and outdoors, that reach beyond spray-can “writing.” Over forty local

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  picks September 16, 2003

  Michael Sailstorfer

  “Welttour” (World Tour), Michael Sailstorfer's second exhibition at Galerie Markus Richter, contains a bus, a set of drums, and a model solar system in which two disco balls reflect a spotlight “sun.” The drums are made out of a police car, continuing the series of metamorphoses that define Sailstorfer's work. Many of his sculptural interventions have taken the form of secret acts of de- and reconstruction in the Bavarian countryside: A dismantled camper van was transformed into a house; a cottage consumed itself, piece by piece, in its own oven; and a light aircraft went crashing into a tree,

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  picks September 04, 2003

  Ellen Harvey

  Ellen Harvey, who tagged New York City with tiny, oval-shaped landscape paintings, continues her witty beautifications at Warsaw's Ujadzowski Castle. As is the case with most of the city's “historic” center, the castle is actually a postwar reconstruction, and the only exception on its grounds—the seventeenth-century Laboratorium outbuilding—looks newer than the castle next door. To address this discrepancy, Harvey “aged” the Laboratorium's walls with a patina of watercolor and painted trompe l'oeil neoclassical architectural motifs based on the Castle's on the Laboratorium's interior and