Glen Helfand

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  picks September 30, 2002

  Thomas Struth

  At this moment of international tension, Thomas Struth’s images of international zones have an added poignancy, especially when seen in the constantly remade environs of downtown Los Angeles. This retrospective, including nearly a hundred pictures of cities and forests all over the globe, offers a kind of around-the-world-in-a-day experience, as one industrialized, high-rise-ridden landscape replaces another. Struth’s well-known and truly alluring museum pictures, which introduce the show, explore the multilayered gazes and accidental choreography of the public gathering. You take away a sense

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  picks September 27, 2002

  Paul Sietsema

  Paul Sietsema’s new 16 mm film project employs the kind of entrancing didactics wistfully associated with classrooms of the not-so-distant past. Clocking in at twenty-four minutes, Empire is an opaque, teacherly meditation on the construction of a sensibility. In a series of near-static silent sequences, Sietsema sets his sights on an elusive sourcebook of objects and interiors: a barely perceptible grasshopper, a biomorphic sculpture referencing Jackson Pollock’s rare work in that medium, a splendidly ornate room, and, most notably, the glamorous, modern interior of Clement Greenberg’s New York

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  picks September 16, 2002

  “To Whom It May Concern”

  We all know that e-mail has turned letter writing into a lost art, but Matthew Higgs makes the point with a wistful wit and an abundance of material in his curatorial debut at CCAC. Comprised of works, by multiple generations of artists, that involve or imply a correspondence between artist and other, this literate show reveals a certain humanity and perhaps isolation at the core of creative practice. More often than not, the dynamic is expressed with artists “acting” as fans of celebrities, dealers, or social and political institutions. The distant, bemused snail-mail relationship Jeffrey

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  print Summer 2002

  Jim Campbell

  Jim Campbell was included in two recent Whitney Museum extravaganzas: the digitized “BitStreams” and the spiritualized 2002 Biennial. While these high-profile outings reflect a certain curator’s interest in his work, in combination they also demonstrate how Campbell’s electronic projects have overcome the stigma of his technological tools to elegantly address universal contemporary themes, namely, the now unavoidable intersection of subjective experience and machine. His exhibition at Hosfelt included a group of light-box works and two series of gridded LED displays, by now Campbell’s signature

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  film April 2002

  Sundance Film Festival

  LOW-KEY AND REAL. That was how most people described Sundance 2002. The crowds were smaller, the streets less clogged, the movie and party buzz down to a hum. War and recession set a more sober tone, and post-September 11 Sundance felt less like a Hollywood ski weekend than, of all things, a serious, socially responsible, artistically ambitious film festival. Fittingly, documentaries blossomed in this climate, emerging from the nonfiction-film ghetto to be discussed with as much excitement as the “quirky” indie features of festivals past.

  How to Draw a Bunny, Andrew Moore and John Walter's

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  picks March 04, 2002

  Eva Hesse

  Eva Hesse Retrospective

  Oft-quoted Mel Bochner makes a most salient observation in the catalogue to this most satisfying retrospective of Eva Hesse: “The thing that I don’t think anybody writing about Hesse’s work has picked up on yet is not the pain, not the suffering, not the anxiety, not the absurdity, but the joy of the work—the light that it emits.” Indeed, the real appeal of Hesse’s work may lie in precisely this: It looks radiant. This is not to say, however, that the show, curated by Elizabeth Sussman and Renate Petzinger (of the Museum Wiesbaden in Germany), doesn’t address the dour, genre-blurring, ephemeral

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  print January 2002

  Rebeca Bollinger

  Off-the-shelf electronic devices always seem to have a feature that some engineer gleefully cooked up but few actual users ever figure out quite what to do with. Take the “tile” function on most digital cameras—the button that multiplies an image into a gridded set of sixteen squares, like a sheet of Sanrio photobooth stickers. It’s this type of dubiously useful function that serves as Rebeca Bollinger’s inspiration to explore the found structures of online databases, personal image banks, and sorting programs. The centerpiece of her recent exhibition was a double DVD projection titled

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  print October 2001

  Todd Hido

  The houses in Todd Hido’s new color photographs all exude an eerie stillness. The middle-class homes of a certain fraying age that serve almost exclusively as his subject are shrouded in the atmospheric light of wintry dusk or the motionless darkness of late evening. Sometimes there’s a car parked out front, but there’s never a human figure in sight. There might be a light on in the window, a square that sometimes glows a fluorescent white or a more welcoming golden hue, yet no one invites us in; the dried-out, overgrown lawns and streets seem to serve as suburban moats.

  Relatively long exposures