Jean-Pierre Criqui

• previews September 2001

  CTRL [SPACE]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother

  The twofold destiny of the spectator: A viewing subject, this modern figure who was constituted parallel to the autonomous work of art, is also always the object of the other’s gaze. This is the theme explored by Thomas Y. Levin through an itinerary whose theoretical and chronological point of departure is Jeremy Bentham’s vision of a panoptical prison project. Examining the consequences of this model of total control for visual culture, Levin has gathered around fifty names, among them artists, photographers, architects, and filmmakers. “CTRL [SPACE]”: an exhibition that should see you.

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  print April 2001

  “Voici”

  It is possible to say, if one has a slight taste for paradox, that from the very beginning there has only ever been contemporary art, and so the history of art in its entirety could be described as an interminable succession of contemporary moments. There is something of this Zeno-esque perspective in the subtitle of “Voici: 100 Years of Contemporary Art,” a show that presented such unusual pairings as Jeff Koons and Rodin, Sue Williams and Manet. The inclusion of Manet alone suffices to demonstrate that the strict limits of the century were blithely transgressed; in fact, the oldest work on

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  print November 2000

  Christopher Williams

  For example: What relationship is there between a French car from the ’60s—a Japanese student posing for a fashion photo in 1993, papayas (of the Carica papaya Linné sort), and a dishwasher tray filled with brightly colored plates? This is the sort of question raised by Christopher Williams’s first solo exhibition in a French institution, “Couleur Européenne, Couleur Soviétique, Couleur Chinoise” (European color, Soviet color, Chinese color)—a title that is already somewhat confusing in light of the images presented. What was found on the walls of Le Magasin’s rooms, hung (“orchestrated,”

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  print September 2000

  Galería Kurimanzutto

  AS SPECIFIC AS A BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENT, it was the first thing you read on the back of the small poster that served as the invitation to an exhibition: “The Kurimanzutto Gallery was founded on August 21, 1999, in Mexico City, by Mónica Manzutto, José Kuri, and Gabriel Orozco with thirteen artists to collaborate and represent their work: Minerva Cuevas, Eduardo Abaroa, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Damián Ortega, Philippe Hernández, Gabriel Kuri, Sofia Táboas, Jonathan Hernández, Fernando Ortega, Alejandro Carrasco, Luis Felipe Ortega, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Daniel Guzmán.”

  Kurimanzutto doesn't have its own

• previews September 2000

  François Morrelet

  The natural child of Max Bill and Alphonse Allais, born by chance in 1926, François Morellet combines the joys of geometry and wordplay in his work. This ninety-five piece full-career survey, his first in Paris since the 1986 retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou, should prove once and for all that he is one of the four or five most important French artists of the postwar period (to resort to the kind of appraisal that never fails to cause dissension). Daniel Abadie, the museum's director, places particular emphasis on the neon pieces, where the genius of the absurd vies with a programmatic

• previews January 2000

  Daniel Buren

  Of the handful of upcoming European exhibitions devoted to Daniel Buren, this pair looms large. In Villeneuve d’Ascq, the emphasis is on the artist’s beginnings through the refinement of his “visual tool” (striped canvas in bands 8.7 centimeters wide, alternately white and color) in 1967. Also on offer, in Villeurbanne, is a retrospective of the “Cabanes,” an in-progress suite begun in 1982 that takes architecture and the notion of in situ (central to Buren’s thought) in a radically new direction. The occasion coincides with the publication of the first volume of Buren’s catalogue raisonné.

• previews May 1999

  “Murdering the Media: Karl Kraus's Die Fackel”

  “Art must displease,” wrote Karl Kraus, a master stylist whose artistry was equaled only by his pessimism. A friend of Adolph Loos and Oskar Kokoschka, admired by Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, Kraus published 922 issues of Die Fackel (The torch), the journal he founded in 1899 and edited almost single-handedly from 1911 until his death in 1936. The exhibition at Vienna's Jewish Museum (which includes nearly 600 photographs) offers a detailed presentation of this unique undertaking that attacked all the moral and cultural pillars of Austria—with particular ferocity reserved for journalists.

• previews September 1998

  Bernard Frize

  Someone who makes paintings this, well, different, then gives them titles like 61% True–38% False and Drexel-Burnham-Lambert is bound to hold your attention. Bernard Frize, the most singular French painter working today, has been pursuing a remarkable European career. With about forty paintings, most from the last two years, the show in Tilburg (organized by De Pont director Hendrik Driessen with a catalogue authored by Dominic van den Boogerd) allows a detailed look at a way of thinking about painting in which nothing goes without saying and each work problematizes the conditions of its own

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  print Summer 1998

  Thomas Struth

  At the entrance to the Carre d’Art, site through mid June of the first large-scale exhibition devoted to Thomas Struth’s work in Europe, two oversize photographs face one another: an exterior shot of the Buddhist monastery of Todai-Ji in Nara, Japan, and an interior view of the Pantheon. These international tourist destinations were also originally places of worship, so it’s not unexpected to see these images, among seventy-eight other works by Struth, displayed here, a few yards from the Maison Carrée—a Roman temple from the beginning of the Christian era now transformed, naturally, into a

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  print November 1997

  Bruce Nauman

  How does one become a monochrome? The four Art Make-Up films, made between 1967 and ’68, answer that question and show their maker, Bruce Nauman, to be not only painter but painted. This work, in which the artist covers his body in white, pink, green, and black, stirs up from the spectator’s musings an assortment of memories: Noh theater, Al Jolson, the pink and blue bodies of Pontormo’s famous Entombment, even Rodchenko. Faithful to the logic of the monochrome, it is silent, a silence rendered all the more enigmatic by an exhibition subtitled “Image/Text 1966–1996,” and largely (if you take

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  print October 1996

  Ghosts of Chance

  IN BOOK 35 OF HIS Natural History, Pliny the Elder tells how the Greek painter Protogenes, frustrated by his inability to finish one of his paintings to his satisfaction, ended up throwing a sponge he was using against the artwork. A small miracle resulted: the hurled sponge did what the painter was unable to do, and “chance placed nature into the painting.” This painterly dilemma—How does one finish? When does one stop?—seems never to have concerned Ellsworth Kelly, whose work, though extremely attentive to the operations of chance, has developed instead through a meditation on beginnings. This

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  print September 1996

  Paris

  THIS SPRING BROUGHT WITH IT the rare opportunity to view, in its entirety, the donation Jean Dubuffet made to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1967. Presented under the title “Les Dubuffet de Jean Dubuffet ” (Jean Dubuffet’s Dubuffets), this exhibition comprised 21 paintings, 135 gouaches and drawings, as well as six sculptures, all produced between 1942 and 1966. It was unquestionably the best introduction to the work of an artist who, since his death in 1985, has yet to be acccorded a full retrospective. Most striking was the wealth of invention, the supreme indifference to hierarchies and