previews September 1998

Walter Van Beirendonck

Belgian designers tend to look to the street for inspiration. Walter Van Beirendonck does his prêt-à-porter countrymen one better in combining youth style and the futurism thats become de rigueur in Japanese design. Gathered under the aegis of “Wild and Lethal Trash,” his fall/winter collection is being impresarioed by Boijmans design curator Thimo to Duits, with a catalogue including contributions from International Herald-Tribune fashion writer Suzy Menkes and artist Orlan. Along with Beirendoncks homage to adolescent knuckle-dragging couture (“Cybercombat style for space skaters”), the

previews September 1998

Let's Go to the Living Room

One assumes something got lost in the translation, but the motif of this aggressively antigallery exhibition is ochanoma, or “living room,” the metaphor curator Koichi Watari asked each of the six participants to take as an inspiration. So Japanese artist Kaoru Arima will send visitors on a sort of treasure hunt, Cai Guo Qiang will collaborate with Chinese Feng Shui specialist Kongjian Yu on an Internet site, and 1997 Venice Biennale prizewinner Fabrice Hybert will provide an in situ installation, as will German-American Christine Hill. Meanwhile, Thai artist Navin Rawanchaikul’s project—a comic

print May 1998

artists in residence

The Swedish Art Grant Committee has named curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum director of the International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS). Birnbaum, a regular contributor to Artforum, succeeds Sune Nordgren, who will become director of Baltic Flour Mills, the exhibition center being established in Newcastle, England.

Appointed for a three-year term, Birnbaum will oversee a program that began providing studio grants to artists and organizing exhibitions last year. IASPIS is housed in the Royal Swedish Art Academy, an allegedly haunted seventeenth-century landmark in central Stockholm

previews May 1998

Christopher Wool

A man of large, block letters—and a maven of various textual-turn and neo-abstract collusions as much indebted to Franz Kline as Ed Ruscha—Christopher Wool gets his first major one-person show in the United States, an encompassing rundown of fifty-odd pieces, some dating from as early as 1986. MoCA curator Ann Goldstein has enlisted the artist to devise an in situ exhibition plan to present his engaging, often daunting, sometimes inscrutable work, including ’80s-vintage pattern paintings and stenciled- and stamped-texts pieces, plus silk-screened and spray-painted works from the ’90s. The show’s

previews May 1998

The ’80s

Now that the ’70s have been parsed from every imaginable angle, is it time for the big ’80s revival? From María Corral, director of Barcelona’s Fondació “La Caixa” collection, comes this internationally inflected, thirty-seven-artist summary of the Go-Go Decade’s “pluralistic mosaic of expressions.” Americans from Jenny Holzer to Bill Viola are on the docket, Rosemarie Trockel’s ideological fillips will balance Georg Baselitz’s and Anselm Kiefer’s painterly Sturm and Drang, and sculpture will be largely given over to the British representatives (e.g., Tony Cragg and Richard Deacon). The Iberian

previews January 1998

Pay for Your Pleasure (Reprise): Joe Scanlan

Considering Joe Scanlan’s obsession with the ephemeral pageantry of everyday objects—biodegradable flowerpots, underwear—the question posed by his first one-person museum show derives from the MCA’s institutional imprimatur. Will the need to occupy space violate the intimacy the artist characteristically evokes through his edgy commentaries on quotidian beauty? Titled to pun on Mike Kelley’s 1988 Pay for Your Pleasure, Scanlan's installation—the sixth in the museum's series highlighting emerging artists—features new work in his signature idiom of recycled domestic detritus along with Kelleyesque

previews January 1998

William Kentridge: Weighing . . . and Wanting

Working in a South Africa troubled by its past yet giddy about its future, William Kentridge has managed to fashion an enviable career, appearing at Documenta X and the 6th Havana Biennial. The Johannesburg native shifts modes easily between drawing and filmmaking, reconciling the two practices in an art of ambiguity in which, in his words, “optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay.” For Kentridge’s first solo US museum show, MCA director Hugh M. Davies has organized “Weighing . . . and Wanting,” consisting of the artist’s satirical yet melancholy charcoal drawings and a film documenting

print September 1997

U2's PopMart

Pop art is the arena rock of art history. So why shouldn’t U2—whom everyone expects to deliver a jam-the-stadiums extravaganza with each new album—latch onto Pop and its glib iconography in order to revivify their fading image? The band’s final Meadowlands performance on the troubled PopMart Tour summarized the exceptional crassness of this tactic: what better way to resist becoming an anachronism than to follow the example of an art movement that refuses to grow old quietly? Rest assured, these lads are never going back to the sooty Dublin days of Boy and Kajagoogoo haircuts, not as long as

Matthew DeBord