print January 1996

Jim Anderson

Jim Anderson’s formal lexicon derives from the guitar, which he perverts into all manner of what Duchamp called “objets d’ard,” including sculptures of bedpans, sex toys, and S/M paraphernalia of obscure purpose, to name but a few. In Swan Song (all works 1995), a V-shaped guitar is no longer a prosthetic rock-star penis but has been coaxed into a form simultaneously resembling a swan and a strappado. One of the accompanying videos shows the artist bound to this torture device, the wings of the V pinioning his arms behind his head, the neck of the sculpture sidling down his spine into his ass.

print October 1995

Allan Kaprow

“Once, the task of the artist was to make good art; now it is to avoid making art of any kind,” wrote Allan Kaprow in a 1966 manifesto, formulating a paradox that has come to pervade his entire oeuvre. The Happenings and Environments through which he made his name in the ’50s and ’60s all attempted to merge art and life, to bring the audience inside the work instead of leaving it standing stupidly around in front of it. Kaprow has never ceased to make works or pen position papers (such as “The Education of the Un-Artist: Part II,” 1972, and “Art Which Can’t Be Art,” 1986) that decry this separation

print September 1995

“Critics as Artists”

It goes without saying that every critic is a failed artist, bitterly transforming his resentment and disaffection into superfluous analytical bitchiness. Those who can, do, and those who can’t, write criticism. As if to give credence to the stereotype, by and large the works in “Critics as Artists” demonstrated about the same level of quality as a collection of thrift-store paintings; if you were looking for technical virtuosity or esthetic vision, there was no point in looking here, even though taken as a whole the works could have comprised a great conceptual maneuver à la Jim Shaw. To be

print Summer 1995

Nicola Tyson

Nicola Tyson excels at figure studies of the human body—not as it is but as it could be. Like a balloon artist, Tyson twists a basic form into novel arrangements, building an inner pressure that erupts in unexpected evaginations and bulbous erections. Little holes denote misplaced anuses, vestigial urethras, or other orifices of obscure purpose. In Self-Portrait: Early ’70s (all works 1995), a figure—isolated against a flatly painted background that nevertheless suggests the corner of a room—stands with her feet pointed at the viewer and her head at the corner, truncated arms groping blindly

print December 1995

Allen Ginsberg

Like the other Beats, Allen Ginsberg upheld an esthetic that emphasized directness, immediacy, and lived experienced-a kind of aformalism that enabled its practitioners to sow their creative seeds in a variety of fields. William Burroughs added collage and painting to his writing; Paul Bowles added writing to his music; and Ginsberg took up photography alongside his poetry. Given the pictures exhibited in Ginsberg’s show—some from the halcyon ’50s and ’60s, others more recent, in either case mostly portraits, unpretentious in form, personal in content, all in black and white—he appears to treat

print May 1995

“Bunnies”

Bunnies—unlike the “death of painting,” the “rebirth of abstraction,” or the “return to figuration”—are rarely the conceptual framework for a group show. Bunnies are thought to be cute, huggable, cuddly; even the word, which rhymes with “funny” and “sunny,” connotes something infinitely friendlier, happier, goofier than art, which almost never aspires to cuteness and only infrequently allows itself to be touched, let alone cuddled. In “Bunnies,” the apparent incompatibility between this fuzzy creature and the work of art is embodied by Dieter Roth’s Rabbit, 1975, which insinuates that even shit

print April 1995

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto is known primarily for the three series of photographs he has been working on since the late ’70s, early ’80s. The series are nominally differentiated by content—movie theater interiors, seascapes, and dioramas—although Sugimoto approaches them all with a precise sense of form: balanced if not symmetrical compositions, extreme clarity of focus, grays modulated into a sort of photographic grisaille, long exposure times reminiscent of Atget. All of this—the impulse to work in a series, to foster a project over a period of ten years or more, to apply a stringent set of compositional

print April 1995

László Moholy-Nagy

Though photography may be an a posteriori medium by nature, László Moholy-Nagy had a very a priori notion of what comprises a good photograph—one shared by many of his contemporaries. It had to be distinctly photographic, he felt, an exploration and exploitation of the technical possibilities inherent in various kinds of picture-making processes—and the result, generally speaking, were photographs with geometric, Constructivist compositions. In his camera-made works, Moholy-Nagy demonstrated how the worm’s and the bird’s eye view can transform a European metropolis into an aggregate of plunging

print March 1995

Adolph de Meyer

Adolph de Meyer is largely remembered as a pictorialist photographer. He was a close friend of Gertrude Kasebier, and Alfred Stieglitz not only showed his work at the Photo-Secession Galleries in New York but also devoted two entire issues of Camera Work to his pictures. However, with the incredible ascendancy of fashion in recent times—we now have supermodels, though not superartists or superwriters—it should come as no surprise that this exhibition of de Meyer’s photography makes a convincing, intelligent argument for reevaluating the commercial work that he produced for magazines such as

print February 1995

Allan Wexler

Allan Wexler’s brilliantly inventive oeuvre, which consists of variations on and mutations of something far older than the novel or the easel painting—domestic architecture—should give hope to anyone suffering from the anxiety of influence. Perhaps the key to Wexler’s inventiveness lies in his description of himself as an architect trapped in an artist’s body. In architecture, the realm of the possible is often fenced in by practical exigencies (everything from the constraints of construction to the demands of clients) that can be swept aside when working on a smaller scale. Thus, in applying

print February 1995

Christian Lemmerz

In his first New York solo show, Christian Lemmerz delights in injecting death and decay into an otherwise elegant and precise post-Minimalist esthetic. In Body Bag 1 & 2, 1994, two black body bags are labeled “vagina.” Augenzeugen (Lucy) [Eyewitness (Lucy), 1993-94] presents nine fish tanks filled with formaldehyde and pigs’ eyeballs. Embryo (Anal) II is comprised of what looks like a brown fetus pulled out of someone’s asshole. Naturally, such a project produces a certain je ne sais quoi that an accompanying catalogue essay describes as “revulsion,” and the press release deems “Evil.” In a

print January 1995

Andres Serrano

Andres Serrano returned from the land of the dead and apparently decided to go East—to Budapest, “a city that attracted his attention in 1993 during a brief detour from Vienna,” as the press release for his latest exhibition so picturesquely put it. Serrano is the artistic equivalent of a band that puts out concept albums, and for this new show the theme is not the morgue, the KKK, or body fluids, but the city. While being plunged into the rhythms of a new metropolis tends to produce a discombobulating sense of contingency in most of us, Serrano appears to have emerged from Budapest with an

Keith Seward