Jeff Rian

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  news February 2005

  Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Swiss-Swiss Democracy”

  THE AGGRESSIVE REACTION to Thomas Hirschhorn’s multimedia extravaganza “Swiss-Swiss Democracy” at the Swiss Cultural Center (CCS) in Paris came as a surprise to the artist. Hirschhorn and eight assistants (after four months of studio preparation) had spent three weeks installing his signature cardboard cavern of photocopied articles and pictures, scripted slogans, philosophy books, videos, and packing-tape-covered objects for the December 4 opening. This time he added a one-hour burlesque of Schiller’s play William Tell (the mythical fourteenth-century hero who freed Switzerland from foreign

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  print December 2004

  Paris

  LAST NOVEMBER FRIENDS SOPHIE DUBOSC, JONATHAN LOPPIN, AND JEANNE TRUONG put together a group show in an abandoned commercial building that a friend had squatted on Impasse Saint-Claude, a blind alley in the Marais. Taking advantage of the French law entitling everyone to a roof overhead, they cleaned the space, painted its walls, hooked up heat and electricity, and named it L’Impasse. The November exhibition was the first of four held on the second floor of the three-story building, in which they featured the work of more than sixty mostly young, unknown artists, as well as a few more familiar

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  print December 2004

  “L’Intime”

  L’intime, le collectionneur derrière la porte (Behind Closed Doors: The Private World of Collectors) was the inaugural exhibition of the private foundation La Maison Rouge. Filled with sixteen near-replicas of collectors’ salons, offices, bedrooms, and even bathrooms and WCs, all filled with artworks and posh furniture, and representing extracts of larger collections, its rooms were constructed like linked stage sets leading viewers from house to house to peek through open windows and doors. None of the collectors were named, except the Maison Rouge’s founder, Antoine de Galbert, who showed

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  previews September 2004

  Nothing Compared to This

  The quieter descendants of Pop and Conceptualism continue a ’90s trend away from the big, brash, bulimic ’80s. The works will be elusively presented without wall labels in a setting to include moody sounds like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports.

  The quieter descendants of Pop and Conceptualism continue a ’90s trend away from the big, brash, bulimic ’80s. The roughly twenty artists in this show, among them Kara Hamilton, Andrea Zittel, Ricci Albenda, Jorge Pardo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, have produced such conceptual objects as shadow paintings, quirky architectural surfaces and decor, optically soft wallpaper, wall rubbings, a heat sculpture, books arranged by the color of their spine, and a suit by Zittel worn by its collector. These works will be elusively presented without wall labels in a setting to