print February 2005

“Real World”

There’s a strong sense of “back to the future” about “Real World,” a showcase for six contemporary sculptors, mostly in their thirties and all working in a wide variety of media. The exhibition “considers what sculpture might be at the beginning of the twenty-first century,” but its subtitle, “The Dissolving Space of Experience,” makes one wonder if anything much has changed. After all, the idea that modern sculpture is centrally concerned with dissolution or “dematerialization” has been around for decades.

First of all, let’s set the record straight. The dematerialization of the art object never

print February 2003

Rachel Feinstein

There’s something slyly diabolical about Rachel Feinstein’s imaginary universe. The American sculptor is fixated on the most hedonistic and decorative manifestations of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European court culture, whose visual codes she seems to enjoy re-creating in her own cultural backyard, but in an increasingly poisoned and desiccated way. Her sculpture used to be brightly colored; now it has become ghostly white and gray. To call this increasing austerity puritanical would make it sound too pious. Instead, hers is a sort of gleefully sabotaged rococo. This artist sets

print January 2003

Marion Coutts

In her laconic sculpture and video installations, the British artist Marion Coutts mythologizes the mundane. With the insouciance and economy of a professional magician, she makes the one-dimensional multidimensional and transforms stale habit into compelling ritual.

This is evident in her works of the last few years. Fresh Air, 1998–2000, consists of three Ping-Pong tables shaped and marked with the asymmetrical layout of three London parks; the rules of the game were completely changed, inside became outside, private became public, and the mind wandered away. In Eclipse, 1998, a small garden

print May 2002

Hamish Fulton

Hamish Fulton has sometimes been regarded as the poor man’s Richard Long. Both artists attended St. Martin’s School of Art in the late ’60s, where they became friends. They simultaneously developed a new form of landscape art in which country walks and treks were documented using combinations of photographic image and printed text. But whereas Long made deft interventions in the landscape—most famously, making circles and lines of stones, which he subsequently recreated in the gallery—Fulton merely photographed what he saw and brought back no sculptural residue.

The impressive retrospective

print November 2001

Juan Cruz

Born in Spain in 1970, Juan Cruz has lived in the United Kingdom since he was eight, and his work so far has been a painstaking rumination on Spanish culture. Yet as a cultural ambassador he would have to be counted a distinct failure. In 1996, he sat for ten days at a small desk in the basement of the Instituto Cervantes in London (the Spanish Cultural Institute), reading aloud for three hours each day from Don Quixote, simultaneously translating the original text into English and thereby slowing the novel down to a donkey's pace. Subsequently, Cruz went to Spain to make a documentary, Sancti

print October 2001

Angela de la Cruz

Since 1994, the London-based Spanish artist Angela de la Cruz has been making what she modestly calls “everyday paintings.” Her basic technique is simple. To begin with, she makes a blank, monochrome abstract painting in a conventional way, applying oil paint to stretched canvas. But having created an impeccable surface and shape, she then puts them through some grueling paces, distressing and manipulating the painting in a variety of ways. Seeing a group of de la Cruz’s paintings is like following a tragicomic abstract version of the Stations of the Cross. Let’s call it Stations of the Canvas.

print Summer 2001

William Tucker

WILLIAM TUCKER'S CAREER has been sliced down the middle. Born in 1935, he made his name in the '60s as one of the younger generation of abstract sculptors associated with Anthony Caro at St. Martin's School of Art in London. In 1974, Tucker published The Language of Sculpture, a history of early modernist sculpture, which rather summed up this phase of his career. It led Albert Elsen to call him a “spokesman for an academic abstract art.” He emigrated to North America in 1976 and wound up on a farm in upstate New York Soon after, he abandoned constructed abstract sculpture, and started to model

print March 2001

Jane Prophet

THE WAPPING PROJECT, managed by the Women's Playhouse Trust, is one of London's more ambitious attempts to turn a former industrial building into an arts center. It is located in a Victorian hydraulic-power station, which has been an occasional venue for concerts, performances, and installations since the early '90s—the best known being Anya Gallacio's Intensities and Surfaces, 1996, a thirty-four-ton block of ice that melted during the course of the show. What were formerly the boiler and filter rooms have been converted into exhibition and performance spaces, and a restaurant was created

print January 2001

Elisa Sighicelli

The Turin-born, London-based photographer Elisa Sighicelli looks for signs of the numinous in empty and desultory spaces. For her recent series “Santiago” (all works 2000), she visited Santiago de Compostela, the most important pilgrimage site in Spain, but pointedly ignored the more famous and crowded landmarks. Instead, she photographed apartments that are usually rented out to students, but which were then uninhabited. Through a meticulous orchestration of light, she dramatized these dowdy, limbolike spaces.

Sighicelli’s photographs are almost all square in format and mounted on light boxes.

print December 2000

“Domestic Bliss”

The South London Gallery, founded in 1891, has become one of the liveliest venues in London since the appointment of David Thorp as director eight years ago. Despite operating on a shoestring budget—around half that of its worst funded counterpart in London, the Camden Arts Centre—Thorp consistently pulls stimulating exhibitions out of a hat. Many artists have been persuaded to show here by the gallery’s majestic navelike space.

“Domestic Bliss” is a good example of Thorp’s intelligent opportunism. Four years ago the nearby Goldsmiths College set up an M.A. in Creative Curating (

print November 2000

Zaha Hadid

The Baghdad-born, London-based architect Zaha Hadid is one of the most important contemporary exponents of sculptural architecture. This term—which became prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century—is most often applied to asymmetrical, freestanding, and labyrinthine structures whose plan and layout cannot be reconstructed from a single frontal viewpoint. Rather, the viewer has to walk around and through the building to comprehend it. Sculptural architecture is thus the corollary to sculpture “in the round”: It is predicated o n movement and activity.

The organizers of Hadid’s

news October 2000

Kasper König

BIG THINGS ARE EXPECTED of Kasper König when he becomes director of Cologne's Museum Ludwig in November. A former Warhol Factory worker, founder of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design's influential publishing program, and most recently dean of the Frankfurt Städelschule and director of the institution's Portikus project space, the fifty-six-year-old König is incontestably a mover and shaker—and Cologne could use a little moving and shaking. Arguably Europe's most prominent contemporary art center in the '80s, Cologne's star dimmed during the '90s, a result of rising taxes and a slowed

James Hall