Martha Schwendener

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  picks December 02, 2005

  Pam Lins

  Pam Lins's sculpture, Win Me Free, 2005, meshes perfectly with its location, a dank nook of a gallery located in a charming dead end alley: Trastevere via the Lower East Side. The diminutive dirt-and-sand floor part of the sculpture nods to Ana Mendieta and Walter De Maria, but the real draw is the live mushrooms incorporated in several other areas. Fungi crawl out of white boxes stacked against a brick wall that looks like it is growing a few spores itself. The piece, a recreation of Lins's accommodation in an artists’ colony in Upstate New York, also incorporates a small shack that rests on

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  picks December 01, 2005

  “Looking at Words”

  With over 300 works installed, not just salon style, but with horror vacui density, “Looking at Words” defies the impulse of overstimulated Chelsea viewers to take “just a quick peek” at the show. Yet quantity does not preclude quality. Even though there are works on paper by everyone from Man Ray to Mel Bochner to Mark Lombardi, the objects are arranged according to loose formal criteria so that they complement and converse with one another rather than compete for attention (although the ones near the top get a bit lost in the crowd). Text appears in a variety of ways: the Cubist and Dadaist

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  print December 2005

  Joel Sternfeld

  The circumstances surrounding Joel Sternfeld’s last show, in 2004, were almost as sensational as the photographs themselves. Defecting from Pace/MacGill Gallery to the same gallery as Gregory Crewdson (a Sternfeld champion who makes work that bears a striking resemblance to the senior artist’s), his “American Prospects” photographs, shot in the late 1970s and mid-’80s, were printed nearly twice the size of earlier editions. It was a controversial move that seemed both market- and art-historically driven, a selfconscious update for the post-Gurksy age aimed at positioning him as an overlooked

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  picks November 15, 2005

  Fred Eerdekens

  The idea that hidden messages are embedded in objects is a mainstay of both art and mysticism, from Netherlandish altarpieces to ancient shamans examining the entrails of sheep for omens. Belgian artist Fred Eerdekens's sculptures do most of the divining for viewers, rather than making them sift through iconography or intestines. Light shines through a fake tree, projecting the word “Still” onto the wall. Curly bits of mounted copper that look entirely abstract reveal the phrase “A very short story with a lot of fiction in the middle and something real in the end” when light is cast upon them.

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  print November 2005

  “Remote Viewing: Invented Worlds in Recent Painting and Drawing”

  Artists are an opinionated bunch, so one often wonders what those included in group exhibitions think of the context in which their work has been placed. Sometimes I imagine they feel lucky; on other occasions dismayed. “Remote Viewing” triggered the latter suspicion. For while the venue was distinguished and each artist was afforded adequate space, the show’s close focus on certain traits in contemporary painting made some of the artists look more like trendy copyists than unique practitioners. Curator Elisabeth Sussman strove to identify several symptoms in recent practice: abstraction with

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  picks October 23, 2005

  Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed

  Luis Gispert and Jeffrey Reed’s one-off collaboration Stereomongrel, 2005, is a neo-psychedelic film in the vein of Isaac Julien, complete with a hallucinogenic trip through a museum (as in Julien’s Baltimore, 2003, which took a spin through the Peabody). Here, the museum is the Whitney, tricked out with blue-chip objects, cyber-geishas posing as curators, and security guards doubling as DJs and crooners. While sections of the film’s narrative feel as hackneyed as the stilted dialogue in a bad music video, the idea of the artist as DJ, remixing culture, still works, particularly as Gispert and

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  picks October 06, 2005

  Candice Breitz

  Candice Breitz’s video installation Mother + Father, 2005, which was shown at the recent Venice Biennale, consists of two adjacent rooms, each with six monitors. They feature synchronized videos in which the artist has blacked-out everything but individual actors and edited iconic performances (e.g., Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest or Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman in Kramer vs. Kramer) into a kind of sample/scratch version of the original “texts.” Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1976, is the monophonic antecedent to Breitz’s polyphonic fugue, but where Birnbaum’s video

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  picks October 04, 2005

  Negativland

  Sandwiched between ‘70s agitators like Ant Farm and more recent groups like the Yes Men, Negativland has been going strong for twenty-five years, an anniversary commemorated by this retrospective of their work. Among their best-known culture jamming exploits is their album U2, which includes liberal sampling from U2's album Joshua Tree (prompting a landmark 1991 intellectual property case in which U2's record label, Island Records, sued Negativland and SST). In addition to a listening station playing U2 is “U2 v. Negativland iPod,” a one-hour program of video from the last seven years; photographic

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  print October 2005

  Charles Sandison

  It has always seemed that more artists should have followed Jenny Holzer’s lead, illuminating and animating words in order to address the complex variety of ways in which kinetic texts address us in everyday life. Charles Sandison is one of the few to have done so, and he accomplishes it by unbridling Holzer’s structure and uniformity, unleashing it in installations governed by an abstraction that is both visual and syntactic.

  In earlier installations such as male & female, 2002, words, generated by a computer and projected onto walls, clustered together to form figures. In the works in this

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  picks September 22, 2005

  Kota Ezawa

  The kid-friendly feeling of animation clings to Kota Ezawa’s remakes of “serious” video works and documents. Take, for instance, his current installation: A simple arrangement of three projections placed side-by-side with audio bubbles for listening hung from the ceiling. The projection on the left remakes archival footage of a press conference during John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous Amsterdam “Bed In” for peace in 1969. The center animation recreates Susan Sontag lecturing at Columbia in 2001. The third is a take on Joseph Beuys’ 1974 talk at the New School in New York, where he discussed his

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  print September 2005

  Victor Burgin

  In Design and Crime (and Other Diatribes) (2002), Hal Foster argues that design has taken over every aspect of industrialized society. Yet Victor Burgin’s recent video, The Little House, 2005, points out that even in earlier eras design was linked to everything from natural urges and social constructs to sexual desire to the creation of narrative.

  At Christine Burgin Gallery, a large box functioned as a small theater for viewing Burgin’s work, which is based on a panning shot of the interior and garden of a 1922 Rudolph Schindler house in Los Angeles. The images are accompanied by narration

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  picks July 24, 2005

  Bill Owens

  Occupying the territory between Lee Friedlander’s formal elegance and Gregory Crewdson’s over-the-top American Gothic, Bill Owens has been using photography to pry into the American psyche for almost four decades. This show includes work from his best known series—“Suburbia,” 1972, “Our Kind of People,” 1976, “Working, I do it for the money,” 1978, and “Leisure,” 2004—as well as unpublished photographs from the late ‘60s that point toward Larry Clark’s vision of debauched American youth. An untitled work from “Suburbia” that looks down on a cul-de-sac block party conjures Crewdson’s later