print Summer 2007

Mark Dion

EARLY IN THE MARK DION RETROSPECTIVE, “The Natural History of the Museum,” at the Carré d’Art Nîmes—Musée d’Art Contemporain, visitors encountered a large tarp spread on the floor, with gear from what appears to be a nature expedition arranged carefully in discrete piles: pickaxes, flippers, gas lanterns, butterfly nets and fishnets, twine and rope, canteens, spades and machetes, floppy hats, forceps and tweezers, work gloves, backpacks, and several huge packing crates. The meticulous organization is nonhierarchical: Here a stack of plastic bags is on equal footing with a pile of printed matter.

previews September 2004

Peter Weibel

Widely known as a new-media theorist and curator, Peter Weibel also played an important role in the his-tory of European Conceptualism, and this survey of his early work (1964 to 1979) follows Weibel’s trajectory from concrete poetry though performance art with the Viennese Actionists to closed-circuit video and interactive computer installations.

Widely known as a new-media theorist and curator, Peter Weibel also played an important role in the history of European Conceptualism, and this survey of his early work (1964 to 1979) follows Weibel’s trajectory from concrete poetry though performance art with the Viennese Actionists to closed-circuit video and interactive computer installations. In dialogue with the history of science, structuralism, and poststructuralism throughout his career, Weibel at once positioned the body as an overdetermined sign and explored the social effects of surveillance. His later video installations highlighted

print May 2004

Manfred Pernice

In Berlin-based artist Manfred Pernice’s recent show, art disentangled itself from, and then remerged with, modular furniture: Dinged plywood benches each formed of three open cubes and positioned against a gallery wall led into more elaborate “banks” in the center of the space, some built of concrete with inset tiles, others of partially painted particleboard, scored or cut as though halfway to assembly. The show was called “Commerzbank,” after the advertisement from which Kurt Schwitters cut his famous word fragment “Merz”; meanwhile the artist calls the benches themselves “merzbanks,” punning

Lytle Shaw