print December 1997

Sean Landers

After an early career devoted, more or less, to an obsessive chronicling of the mindset that goes along with jerking off to MTV, Sean Landers has finally sucked it up and started working. He’s produced a series of “bad” paintings, along with one sculpture (all works 1997), that feature some charmingly sad-sack riffing on the Masters, mixed with dispatches from the ’70s, the decade that time forgot. This bizarre hybrid opens up a whole new arena of loserdom for this artist. Zorkon is a large canvas showing a group of space aliens on a sailboat, which manages to recall both Géricault’s Raft of

print September 1997

The Sea and Cake

Released after more than a year-long recording hiatus, The Sea and Cake’s latest effort, The Fawn, is a small masterpiece of grooviness, at once beautiful, happy, and slightly silly. Oozing, sliding, and burbling out of your speakers, it’s a kind of sonic equivalent to lava-lamp blobs. Which is not to imply that The Fawn or The Sea and Cake are a purely camp experience; actually, you get the sense that the guys enjoy this stuff in a truly genuine way, and you can too.

The Sea and Cake first got started in the fall of 1993, at a time when Chicago music was dominated by two forces—an alterna-rock

previews September 1997

Fashion and Film The Warhol Look: Glamour, Style, Fashion

A good deal has been written lately about the liaison between art and fashion; these two shows follow the course of that connection. Organized by Mark Francis and Margery King of the Andy Warhol Museum, “The Warhol Look” features more than 500 paintings, drawings, and re-creations of Warhol’s window displays, contextualized through the work of forty artists, photographers, and designers, including Richard Avedon, the late Gianni Versace, and Stephen Meisel. For “Fashion and Film,” assistant curator Matthew Yokobosky has brought together fifty-plus films and videos ranging from early newsreels

previews September 1997

Staging Surrealism: A Succession of Collections 2

In terms of mirroring the strangeness of everyday life, Surrealism’s jarring juxtapositions and emphasis on unknown, inner territories—sexual and otherwise—remain compelling even today. Curated by Donna De Salvo and with a catalogue including an essay by Mary Ann Caws, this show offers a survey of Surrealist artists and examines their impact through the work of four contemporary photographers and filmmakers—Inez Van Lamsweerde, Zoe Beloff, Gregory Crewdson, and James Welling. Gathering together the work of thirty-six of the best-known members of the movement, the exhibition is centered around

previews September 1997

Tony Oursler

In Bordeaux, eyeballs will swivel from walls, talking heads will chatter away, and empty suits will greet the visitor with moans, as Tony Oursler transforms a section of the capcMusée this fall with his signature video projections. Curated by Jean Marc Avrilla, plans for the installation include a giant site-specific cube that serves as the screen for images of cityscapes, figures, and body parts, an extensive single-channel video, a new performance collaboration with Constance de Jong, and Switch, Oursler’s 1996 piece commissioned by the Musée National d'Art Moderne. Scattered throughout the

previews September 1997

Alpenblick: Contemporary Art and the Alpine

In the Romantic imagination, mountains in general and the Alps in particular represented a privileged locale of the sublime, a place where beauty could be considered in its purest form. Over the years, however, the power of these peaks has been put to reactionary purpose, slathered over with a gooey layer of kitsch. This exhibition, curated by Wolfgang Kos, looks at the fate of the alpine experience in art since the ’60s, examining its resurrection and recreation in the work of artists such as Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, Fischli/Weiss, Gerhard Richter, and the IRWIN collective, among others.

previews September 1997

Sensation

It’s been touted in the glossies and shown at the museums; it’s fueled a seemingly limitless number of conversations. In case you haven’t been paying attention—London’s art world has undergone a renaissance. Cocurated by Norman Rosenthal and Simonetta Fraquelli, “Sensation” traces that rebirth through the collection of Charles Saatchi, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the scene that grew out of the seminal late ’80s shows “Modern Medicine” and “Freeze.” Works by over forty artists in the collection, from Damien Hirst and Gary Hume to Fiona Rae and Rachel Whiteread, are included. An

previews September 1997

Piero Manzoni

After a major renovation, the Serpentine Gallery reopens with a show of over 100 works by this charter member of the Italian neo-avant-garde, curated by Germano Celant. Including such notable pieces as Merda d’artista n. 066, 1961, the show examines the complete spectrum of Manzoni’s groundbreaking output—wall pieces, three-dimensional floor pieces, and works on paper—most of which was produced over the course of a six-year period ending with the artist’s untimely death in 1963. A catalogue featuring essays by Celant and Jon Thompson accompanies the show.

print September 1997

James White and Tim Sheward

Just do it. That’s what Nike says. James White and Tim Sheward—former assistants to another British art duo, Gilbert & George—heard, and were moved to create a sweet little homage to that ongoing Brit obsession, the trainer (known stateside as athletic shoes). Dubbed “Plastic Picnic,” the piece consists of twelve lifesize polyurethane foam bendy figures, anthropomorphic versions of Gumby, on a platform about the same size and shape as a boxing ring; in keeping with the cheapo childhood-toy theme, the figures tend to be kind of ragged around the edges, as if the molds didn’t quite match up. Decked

print Summer 1997

Mark Van de Walle on Art and Artists' Projects

Unless you’ve got an ISDN hookup, or even a T3, looking at art on the Web is still a band-width hogging, patience-testing, time—eating affair—like leafing through an art book after a three-year-old with a mouthful of gum and a lollipop in both hands has just read it. You know there's amazing stuff waiting there, it's just so . . . difficult . . . to get the pages unglued. Still, when you consider the amazing popularity of, for instance, Web porn sites, which have really slow servers because of the sheer volume of people trying to access the pic of the week (you know who you are), obviously the will is there. It's just a matter of finding stuff worth waiting for. This month, in accordance with the time—honored belief that media should both entertain and edify, we're featuring visually intelligent sites that are at least as interesting as Ms. or Mr. Babe of the Day.

Mark Van de Walle contributes Hot List monthly to Artforum.

print Summer 1997

Jack Risley

Previously, Jack Risley’s work could reasonably be described as Donald Judd-by-way-of-Richard-Tuttle Minimalism. He used (among other things) stacked cardboard boxes and cheapo blankets in various pastels to create objects that simultaneously evoked Judd’s bottom-line corporate aesthetic and Tuttle’s obsessive fragility. Along the way, he also managed to load a good deal more affect into his empties than did either of these artists: Risley’s work was more about psychological states than philosophical ones. This time out, he’s turned his hand to the construction of elegantly half-baked mechanisms:

print May 1997

Dennis Balk

Charting the points where the outer limits of theoretical physics meets the out-there limits of the metaphysical, Dennis Balk has created objects to go along with a discourse that hovers between real science and a science of the Real. Balk’s drawings on vinyl and Masonite sure look like science: there are computer-generated pictures of electromagnetic anomalies with names like “Houdini knot,” complete with impenetrable commentary, scrawled Magic Marker notations about “appearance frequency,” and plasma fields; there are rows of numbers and graphs where the y-axis equals time and the x-axis equals