Kate Bush

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  print January 2008

  the Biennale de Lyon 2007

  THE BIENNALE DE LYON 2007, as conceived by curators Stéphanie Moisdon and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, was an attempt to write the history of the current decade—“a decade that has not yet been named.” To give an account of a period still in progress is an endeavor either absurdly poetic or absurdly hubristic, and the biennial, as it spilled over three main venues—the Musée d’Art Contemporain, a large former warehouse called La Sucrière, and the Institut d’Art Contemporain—was a little of both.

  At the core of this conflicted sense was the biennial’s very premise. Seven months before the

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  print September 2007

  Kate Bush

  SMALLER AND MORE SUBDUED than its last incarnation, in 1997, Skulptur Projekte Münster 07 is also, perhaps, more thoughtful. Indeed, it holds its own in the context of the show’s distinguished history, and each previous installment has proved a fair barometer of its times. Thirty years ago, the very first Sculpture Projects was dominated by big American sculpture in the tradition of Land art. Monoliths by Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, and Carl Andre still dot the city and are now much loved by this Catholic Westphalian town’s initially recalcitrant citizenry. Bruce Nauman’s impressive Square

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  diary January 07, 2005

  Union Mike

  London

  Lancashire's greatest auteur took to the stage to meet the public after a screening of his latest, the almost universally praised Vera Drake. His Q-and-A session at the National Film Theatre was ably set in motion by the British Film Institute's Sandra Hebron, who had selected the movie to open her acclaimed London Film Festival last October. In print, Mike Leigh can come across as a grumpy old man, verging, in his invectives against the Hollywoodization of cinema (a disease, in his view), on the sanctimonious. In person—and before an audience of informed and adoring cinephiles—he is

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  print October 2004

  Young British Art

  Sixteen years separate “Freeze,” the legendary 1988 Damien Hirst–curated exhibition that gave birth to Young British Art, and Tate Britain’s recent “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” a show that signaled both the phenomenon’s institutional apotheosis and, for many, its creative swan song. A three-way collaboration between Hirst, Sarah Lucas, and Angus Fairhurst, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” was classic YBA: simple themes—sex, death, religion—dispatched in fairground style, and aesthetics ranging from miserablist to spectacular. Full of gaily colored fish, spooky animatronics, crucifixions, various sexual organs and

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  previews May 2004

  Helen Chadwick

  With Helen Chadwick's death in 1996 at the age of forty-two, the art world lost yet another major young female artist. This seventy-work retrospective places the artist's last pieces alongside reprises of two major London solo shows, in 1986 and 1994.

  With Helen Chadwick’s death in 1996 at the age of forty-two, the art world lost yet another major young female artist. For Chadwick, pleasure, visual and otherwise, had parity with politics, and she is remembered as much for her vibrant, sassy feminism as her roving experimentation across sculpture, installation, and photography. This seventy-work retrospective places the artist’s last pieces alongside reprises of two major London solo shows, in 1986 and 1994, to trace her journey from an allegorical, decorative postmodernism to exuberantly scatalogical yet sensual sculpture.

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  print December 2003

  Kate Bush

  KATE BUSH

  1 “The Air Is Blue” (Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City) Compared with the clutter and chaos of “Utopia Station” at the Venice Biennale, this Hans-Ulrich Obrist curatorial vehicle at architect Luis Barragán’s exquisite home in Mexico City was the epitome of restraint. Twenty-seven artists, local and foreign, were invited to respond to the man and his manse. Their interventions in the house were often as intangible as Barragán’s own subtle fusions of light, form, and color. Rirkrit Tiravanija got his green Cadillac running, and Cerith Wyn Evans played his record collection on old phonographs.

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  print October 2003

  ALL SYSTEMS GO: THE ART OF ROE ETHRIDGE

  NEXT MODEL SABRINA, ALL PERFECT SKIN AND LUSCIOUS LIPS, as luminous as the glossy surface of her photograph. “Party Til You Puke” rocker Andrew Wilkes-Krier, bloodied and haloed like some contemporary Antichrist. UPS deliveryman Fergus Rave perched on the back of his truck. A postcard-perfect moonlit forest. A young pine tree. Leigh Yeager. A holiday home in the Catskills. A cable TV repairman on the job.

  Looking for the ties that connect the diverse photography of young American artist Roe Ethridge is a little like groping for Ariadne’s mythical thread—until one understands that the seeking is

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  previews May 2003

  Reagan Louie

  From Hong Kong massage parlors to Taiwanese betel-nut stands, Japanese love hotels to Filipino dance halls, photographer Reagan Louie spent six years patrolling Asia’s underground sex dens in search of his subject.

  From Hong Kong massage parlors to Taiwanese betel-nut stands, Japanese love hotels to Filipino dance halls, photographer Reagan Louie spent six years patrolling Asia’s underground sex dens in search of his subject. Highly keyed color and an almost classical sense of form characterize Louie’s portraits of Asia’s working girls. Despite the documentary approach, his is no sermon: The seventy-odd works swing from the poignant to the provocative to the downright prurient in order to ask uncomfortable questions about sex, power, and photography. Curated by SF moma’s Sandra S. Phillips, the exhibition

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  print February 2003

  PORTFOLIO: SIMRYN GILL

  “STANDING STILL” IS A SUITE OF 113 PHOTOGRAPHS MADE BY THE Singapore-born artist Simryn Gill in her travels across the Malaysian countryside over a period of two years ending last summer. Gill, who was educated in India and England and has lived and worked in Australia since 1987, revisited her former homeland in the wake of the financial crisis that shook the entire Asia Pacific region beginning in 1997, turning boom into gloom and souring Asia’s dreams of galloping globalization. Until that point, photographed Asia was dominated by the image of frenetically erupting supercities—and nowhere

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  print January 2003

  Kate Bush

  ONE OF A COTERIE GROUPED AROUND MEXICO CITY’S Galería Kurimanzutto, Damián Ortega conceives his artworks not as discrete, rarefied objects but rather as forms of action combining material with thought. The young Mexican artist leaped onto the international stage this fall with “Cosmic Thing,” a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, which followed contributions in 2001 to a number of notable group shows, like “Squatters #1” at Witte de With, Rotterdam, and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto, and “Animations” at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New

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  print December 2002

  Kate Bush

  KATE BUSH

  1 Igloolik Isuma Productions/ The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat) It was easy to appreciate the social imperatives of this Inuit film collective’s documentary work at Documenta 11; harder, within the time constraints, to admire the extraordinary artistic accomplishment of their Camera d’Or–winning first feature, The Fast Runner (Atanarjuat), directed by woodcarver turned filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk. A tale of love and hate in an exceptionally cold climate, Atanarjuat dramatizes a thousand-year-old tale of festering evil on the frozen Canadian tundra. The first film ever to be performed in the

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  print November 2002

  ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EAST: PIOTR UKLAŃSKI

  A man in a museum, surrounded by a crowd: Suddenly, he is swallowed in flames, as abruptly as a flaring match. A thirty-second performance, Untitled (The Full Bum), 1998, might stand as the emblem of Polish artist Piotr Uklański 's artistic credo: It's an image underlaid with the memory of real-life self-immolations executed at moments of political desperation. But here, safely contained in the museum, it becomes pure stunt, pure spectacle—an event of pure horror distilled, through innumerable incendiary images in Hollywood action movies, into pure entertainment. The Full Bum is an explosive