print September 1994

Michael Joo

Though the title of Michael Joo’s installation, Salt Transfer Cycle, 1993–94, suggested a neat scientific diagram, the artist offered a complex, disjunctive work. Several videos, one of which was projected across the space, partly obstructed by aluminum poles, competed for attention. A scale model of a missile-shaped vehicle sat on the floor; rows of slaughterhouse meat trays and elk antlers lined the side walls. This calculated visual scatter reflected the deliberately contradictory impulses of Joo’s work.

Videos projected on the back wall traced the salt transfer itself: they showed Joo “

print May 1994

Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler

Naming is never innocent, and capitalist culture has habitually enhanced the appeal of mundane items by slapping clever labels on them. Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler examine such nomenclatures, highlighting the often outlandish, sometimes absurd fantasies they provoke. Buy into the romance and temporarily deny the banality of a life flattened into two dimensions by the steamroller of mass production. In Keep an Eye on Your Pickles, 1993, pickle jars carry the names of prefabricated houses marketed by Sears. “Princeton” evokes neo-Gothic granite solidity set amid azaleas and sloping lawns, “Ashland”

print March 1994

Gotscho

As the installation created by French artist Gotscho pointed out, weddings are strict rituals governed by rigid conventions. Staging is a large part of the affair, and Gotscho, who has a background in theater, has “staged” his Wedding (all works 1993) accordingly. Neatly paired rows of tuxedos and wedding gowns were hung on opposite walls, presenting a range of these requisite, constraining costumes.

All of this rigidity obviously has something to do with the fact that weddings are society’s way of recognizing sexual union. Gotscho’s work stressed the violence below the social surface: “union”

print January 1994

Erika Rothenberg And Tracy Tynan

Art has often moved in and out of, or otherwise engaged with, the real world. Such work, by positioning itself outside the gallery or manipulating “nonart” material within conventional spaces, acquires an edge by threatening the admittedly fine line we draw between fiction and reality, art and life. Acting like scientists, anthropologists, private detectives, or journalists, artists like Hans Haacke haul in artifacts from the real world as “evidence,” which they analyze and interpret to argue specific points. Working in the same vein, Erika Rothenberg and Tracy Tynan created an installation

print October 1993

“The Art Of Hitler”

In “The Art of Hitler,” curator Steven Kasher presented a dense, thought-provoking collection of several hundred documents concerning Nazi art; the ways in which the Nazis exploited art; and various subsequent attempts either to rejuvenate or to repress the spirit of the Third Reich. Beginning with the future Führer’s early, unassuming watercolors and his first designs for the swastika, the exhibition went on to explain how Hitler created a comprehensive visual campaign to propagate Nazi values, maintaining personal control over graphic design, architecture, photography, and the public media.

print Summer 1993

Tom Friedman

Most of Tom Friedman’s recent works result from some extremely obsessive process: chewing endless wads of gum, separating synthetic pillow stuffing thread by thread, or stuffing black, plastic garbage bags inside one another. Friedman, who once wound pubic hair in a perfect spiral across the face of a bar of soap, transforms single, mundane materials—toothpaste, used bubblegum, tube socks—into unlikely, often absurd forms.

Artists have exploited everyday materials since Marcel Duchamp first introduced his readymades. Friedman merely domesticates the industrial supplies favored by the Minimalists

print Summer 1993

Thomas Ruff

In Thomas Ruff’s latest photographs lurid green light shines on residential and industrial buildings, the ragged edges of a nameless, graceless city. The illuminated scenes appear through a circular viewfinder, with the photographs’ edges darkened, as if the photographer were scanning the scene of a crime. The bizarre hue and mundane subject matter are unexpectedly mysterious, an effect heightened by the absence of any sign of life. A row of desolate warehouses suggests covert activity; an oblique view of an inscrutable facade resembles the much-reproduced shots of the building from which Oswald

print March 1993

Karen Finley

Karen Finley’s installation, Written in Sand, 1992, adopted a subtle and dark strategy which eschewed the emphasis on the sheer number of deaths characteristic of the most publicized tributes to the victims of AIDS. Emblematic of those works, Gran Fury’s 1987-88 LED installation stated “One AIDS death every ten minutes”; its latest incarnation reflects the continual increase in those statistics. The AIDS quilt, stitched together from the contributions of thousands who have lost friends and relatives, has grown so large that it can no longer be displayed in one place and is presented in fragments

print January 1993

Hirsch Perlman

Hirsch Perlman’s project The Layman’s Practical Guide to Interrogation offers strategies for questioning others, including the one outlined in “Silent” Technique (all works 1992) whereby information is elicited simply by staring down one’s interlocutor. Large sheets of paper (later to be collected in book form), some framed and hanging on the walls and others spread out on a table for the viewer’s perusal, feature handwritten texts accompanied by loose gestural drawings that ostensibly illustrate those texts. The drawings depicting two people in conversation recall old detective movies: anonymous

print January 1993

Leonardo Drew

Many contemporary artists who attempt to articulate African-American experience rely on photo-based techniques (Lorna Simpson’s studies of racist/sexist stereotypes and Carrie Mae Weems’ intimate narratives take the form of cool, almost clinical images, while Pat Ward Williams and Danny Tisdale frequently re-present racial hate-crimes using found photographs of events long past). By contrast, Leonardo Drew’s recent sculptures evoke African-American history using the actual materials of plantation agriculture: unprocessed cotton and cotton fabric, rusted metal, and rotting wood.

Drew’s abstract

print December 1992

Rikrit Tiravanija

In two spaces separated by a long corridor, Rikrit Tiravanija executed two very different projects. In the main gallery space, the artist neatly stacked what is usually kept out of sight: paintings and artworks from the storage area, but also spare lightbulbs; kitchen appliances, including a microwave oven, minifridge, and water cooler; numerous cans of gallery-white paint; and personal items—from a box of tampons to a single enormous sneaker. Amidst this accumulation, which practically filled the room, sat the gallery owner at her desk (also displaced from the back room), doing business as

print November 1992

Fred Wilson

In “Panta Rhei. (A Gallery of Ancient Classical Art),” 1992, a plaster cast of Atlas bent under the weight of a stack of Western art history books. Barely visible beneath the base on which the figure stood was a single volume devoted to African art. As with Fred Wilson’s best work, this seemingly simple, shamelessly didactic sculpture resonates with subtler messages. We all know by now that European and American art historians have stacked the cards heavily in favor of the classical tradition, at the expense of African and Far Eastern cultures. H. W. Janson’s History of Art tops Wilson’s pile—in

Lois Nesbitt