print April 2001

UP THE ORGANIZATION: ATELIER VAN LIESHOUT

JUST HOW BIG CAN AN ARTWORK GET? Joep van Lieshout seems determined to find out. The thirty-seven-year-old Dutch artist has recently declared his sprawling studio compound at the Rotterdam harbor a free state. This month, Atelier van Lieshout (AVL) will become AVL-Ville, a civic artwork in progress—complete with housing, education, sewage treatment, and even a slaughterhouse. Since establishing AVL in 1995, van Lieshout has produced works on an ever-increasing scale: polygamy-friendly furniture (Modular Multi Women Bed, 1997), mobile homes for despotic campers (Autocrat, 1997), and shipping

print April 2001

Isabell Heimerdinger

Isabell Heimerdinger likes to watch actors watching their old movies. A voyeur of repertory cinema, the Berlin-based artist has previously made videos of Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer watching their performances in Wim Wenders’s 1974 road movie Alice in den Städten (Alice in the cities). In these strange screenings, the actors become witnesses to their own past, which is caught between the roles they played and their memories of making the film. Since Heimerdinger’s camera remains unflinchingly focused on them, their reactions veer awkwardly from spectatorship to performance. When a

print March 2001

Nina Fischer and Maroan El Sani

NINA FISCHER AND MAROAN EL SANI practice a strange sort of detective work. The German artists, who have been working together in Berlin since 1993 (exclusively so since 1994), are fascinated with what remains of people after they have disappeared. In the past, they have used high-frequency cameras to photograph electromagnetic fields in houses, once considered a means of capturing the “aura” of former inhabitants. Although their methods are scrupulous, the artists do not collect these traces in order to reconstruct the past. Unlike real detectives or even historians, they are evidently content

print February 2001

Angela Bulloch

Got a case of chromophobia? Angela Bulloch’s ingenious pixel boxes might not be what the doctor ordered. The artist, who is based in Berlin and London, has given the pixel—the indivisible picture element whose only information value is color—an entirely new plastic form. Basically, Bulloch has transformed the little color squares that make up a televisual image into large, individual sculptural units. Each one is a fifty-centimeter (nineteen-and-a-half-inch) cube and consists of a screen framed in a wooden box containing an RGB additive light system: three strip lights in red, green, and blue

previews January 2001

Darren Almond

An adept chronicler of the industrial age, Almond uncovers the eerie traces of its violence in the most unexpected artifacts, from bus-stop shelters at Auschwitz to the body of his working-class father. In Zurich, along with familiar works involving time and trains, he will present a new video installation that promises to sound the depths of the Central Asian mining industry. Almond went down an active coal mine in Kazakhstan and filmed workers moving through the rudimentary shafts. The large-scale projections of the footage are accompanied by audio recordings of strangely incongruous nocturnal

print December 2000

Manfred Pernice

A faint, unmistakable odor filled the air: sawdust. As a recipient of the Piepenbrock Sculpture Prize 2000, Manfred Pernice actually set up an atelier in the Hamburger Bahnhof. By adding freshly cut sculptures to completed pieces, the Berlin-based artist essentially transformed his award exhibition into a work in progress. Those who attended only the opening ended up missing most of the show.

Although the studio was located within the exhibition space, Pernice did not turn the exhibition into a performance. The artist’s working space remained off-limits to the public, its entry sealed with a

print October 2000

Matthieu Laurette

MATTHIEU LAURETTE IS A SORT OF MODERN-DAY HUNGER ARTIST. Currently based in Paris, Laurette became well known in his native France for having survived almost exclusively on products with money-back guarantees. He ate the food, then asked for a reimbursement, claiming to be somewhat less than “100 percent satisfied.” Since then, his projects have moved beyond a preoccupation with free consumer goods to a consideration of how to profit from the media's insatiable need for images. Evidently influenced by Guy Debord, the artist attempts to exploit the transformation of life into an endless accumulation

print May 2000

A.K. Dolven

A.K. Dolven’s paintings are moving—in both senses of the word. The Norwegian artist, who resides in Berlin and London, started out as a painter, but in recent years she began using video as well. While the paintings reveal a Minimalist aesthetic, the videos offer resonant figurative images taken from the history of painting. Dolven’s fidelity to this tradition, in spite of her turn to video, was affirmed this year in Berlin when she was awarded the Fred Thieler prize for painting—making her both the first woman and the first artist using video to be so recognized. Whatever the medium, Dolven

print December 1999

Michel Majerus

We know what lies beyond the looking glass, but what if Alice had stepped into a painting? The Berlin artist Michel Majerus shows us what Alice might have found: distorted images of virtually everything that has ever appeared on canvas. A sampling of Majerus’s painterly quotations could be seen at the entrance to the Italian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. Painted directly on the facade, Complexity/ Inhale Exhale, 1999, literally transformed the building, which contained an enormous collection of contemporary artworks, into the space behind a painting—hinting that Majerus will likely

print October 1999

Gösta Röver

Can contemporary art find a place in spectator sports? Gösta Röver decided to find out—by sponsoring the Sport Verein Erbsen (Erbsen sports club), a men’s soccer team near her hometown of Göttingen. Röver, who now resides in Berlin, proposed an “imagetransfer” project to the minor-league team: She would purchase and design their uniforms, provided the players would wear them— with her logo—for the 1998–99 season. Though skeptical at first, the team accepted her offer and Röver obtained the rights to record every game. On Sunday afternoons, from September to June, the players of Erbsen ran about

print Summer 1999

Matti Braun

Matti Braun has added yet another chapter to his secret art history of the twentieth-century. The German-Finnish artist, who was born in Berlin but makes his home in Cologne, is not interested in the heroic art movements that are the stuff of traditional art-historical narratives. Instead, Braun focuses on mistakes and errors, carefully mapping out those encounters between artists and cultures which went nowhere or ended in catastrophe. Last year saw the publication of his early book project Adolf Hitler, Installationen und Happenings, 1992, which considers the dictator’s aestheticization of

print May 1999

Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger

Those who showed up for the Dejanov & Heger opening found the gallery closed for vacation—or so a notice pasted on the shutters declared. The Vienna-based artists contributed a similar sign to the Vienna Secession’s 1997 “x-squared” exhibition, even going on holidays for the duration of that group show. For their Berlin debut, the pair decided that the gallery—artworks and gallerist included—deserved a rest. The installation Parallel Life (Plenty Objects of Desire), 1998, sat idle in the space while the gallery owner, Mehdi Chouakri, was off in the Canary Islands. On his return two weeks later,

Jennifer Allen