print January 1995

Rita McBride

Le Corbusier conceived of his Villa Savoye as a house “in the air,” as “no more than a series of views choreographed by the visitor, the way a filmmaker effects the montage of the film.” With her recent installation, Backsliding, sideslipping, one Great Leap and the ‘forbidden’, 1994, Rita McBride took him at his word, creating her own, almost literal, version of this Modernist vision of architectural utopia.

McBride’s scale model of the Villa’s ground floor—wood covered with vinyl tile—presented an open, schematic plan, topped by truncated pilotis (those skinny columns Le Corbusier adored) that

print December 1994

Willie Doherty

Seemingly emblematic of “the troubles” themselves, the two wall-sized projections that comprised Irish artist Willie Doherty’s video installation, The Only Good One Is A Dead One, 1994, were shown, symbolically, at right angles from each other. Like the still photographs of Northern Ireland captioned with intimations of terror (for which he is better known), Doherty’s video depicts a landscape inscribed with fear.

Both projections are night scenes: one of the city, its darkness irradiated by hot-orange street lamps; the other of the countryside viewed from the driver’s seat of a car, the blue

print November 1994

Lilla LoCurto & William Outcault

Having established separate artistic careers, Lilla LoCurto and William Outcault first came together as collaborators to create Self-Portrait, 1992, for the controversial exhibition “Corporeal Politics” held at the List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts that same year. (The NEA revoked funding for the show because of its explicit subject matter, so that both the exhibition and its handsome catalogue had to be produced with alternate resources including a donation from Aerosmith.) Self-Portrait was comprised of a stack of video monitors, the top one featuring the viewer’s head and

print October 1994

Bas Jan Ader

In a comic send-up of the difficulty of pinning down the ever-elusive artist, Bas Jan Ader’s 1972 series of untitled photographs depicts a simple method for capturing a plein air painter. A large crate propped open by a stick is set in an appropriately idyllic woodland grove. Baited by an attractive tea service, the painter (played by Ader) abandons his easel and creeps under the open box to take some refreshment. At this point, the hunter pulls away the stick, trapping the artist. Thus the tea party, which begins with a man and ends with a Minimalist cube is also a postcard passage from

print September 1994

Carolee Schneemann

With a knack for identifying and then violating taboos, Carolee Schneemann makes work that gets inexorably under your skin. During the “sexual revolution,” her performance piece Meat Joy, 1964, reveled in appetites of and for the flesh in a manner that rendered even the most hardened squeamish. (Deemed pornographic by some, Schneeman’s work has, for the most part, been marginalized, despite its connection to displays of masculine excess usually considered vanguard.)

With typical unflinching candor, her most recent work, Mortal Coils, 1994, honed in on death, not as the kind of abstract loss

print May 1994

Michel François

Belgian artist Michel François is all over the place, moving with vivid ease from photography to sculpture to video, from representation to construction to invention. Better known in Europe, where his work was included in the last Documenta, his first solo show in New York looked like a room temporarily deserted by a gifted child who had neglected to turn the television off. Strung with fistfuls of pasta-colored clay, the giant Necklace, 1993, roped off much of the floor. In French lavatory fashion, a gargantuan lemon of soap cantilevered off one wall; a belt denoting the territory of My Waist

Ingrid Schaffner