Meghan Dailey

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  print November 2002

  “Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values”

  With the art-world radar now trained on the slightest aesthetic stirrings in every corner of the globe, it’s only a matter of time before a local scene is written up, mated, and dispensed to a wider audience. Given the buzz around Mexico as a hot cultural exporter, “Mexico City: An Exhibition about the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values” might have been another attempt by American and European art institutions to capitalize on foreign trends. But the show’s weighty conceptual title signaled that this grouping of some twenty like-minded artists was a serious endeavor. As presented by P.S. 1

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  print November 2002

  Toland Grinnell

  Toland Grinnell is unapologetically aspiring to the condition of fashion. The young artist has gone from using Samsonite suitcases as quirky unfolding Duchampian constructions to designing and fabricating his own “line” of traveling trunks worthy of Louis Vuitton. For his first New York show in two years, Grinnell presented a thirty-four-piece set of these cases, collectively titled Pied-à-terre, 2001-2002—aligning himself with the creation and advertising of exquisite and pricey commodities and the desires of a consumer population. He even “branded” himself, adorning each of his objects

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  picks October 25, 2002

  Claudia & Julia Müller

  In their first New York gallery show, Basel-based sisters Claudia and Julia Müller present drawings and a video installation—based on imagery from family snapshots found in Switzerland and in New York—which take up questions of difference, family, ethnicity, and evolution. To appropriate this kind of material isn’t so new anymore, but if the results are this quirky and affecting, then why not dig through dusty bins at the local Salvation Army? Alongside renderings of a type of European family-style menu that freely mingles languages and cuisines are ink-on-paper portraits of people assuming or

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  picks October 02, 2002

  “Ferus”

  In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Ferus gallery was the place for young California artists to show (its stable included Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Jay DeFeo, Hassell Smith, Bruce Connor, John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, and Ed Moses, among others). Founded by Walter Hopps and Ed Kienholz and guided by director Irving Blum, Ferus also gave LA a look at what was coming out of New York—introducing the early work of Lichtenstein and Warhol, as well as Cornell’s boxes and Schwitter’s Merz paintings, into a space that regularly featured Finish Fetish sculpture. The gallery was a kind of HQ of cool, judging

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  print October 2002

  “Family”

  Families are the stuff of great stories, both fictional and real, from Lear and the Sopranos to the Hapsburgs and Kennedys. We are all experts on the subject, whether our expertise lies in trying to escape family—with its dynamics of guilt, manipulation, and other dysfunctions—or working to create or re-create one. Group shows are yet another kind of familial collective, and the Aldrich Museum (a former house, appropriately enough) took on this unwieldy matter in “Family,” bringing together a clan of thirty-seven artists who have made works that consider the institution in its many mutable forms:

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  picks September 27, 2002

  Alix Pearlstein

  Alix Pearlstein's new ten-minute video Episode enacts the classic family dynamic of mom, dad, brother, and sister. Its two parts are projected simultaneously on two facing walls of the gallery, and keeping up with this fast-moving minidrama defines the viewing experience. The players communicate only through look, touch, and gesture—no speech—and Pearlstein punctuates their actions with neatly inserted plonk!s and ping!s. The opposing projections visually and conceptually reiterate shifts in characters’ movements and roles, as they mimic one another, tease, avoid, circle around, and assume

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  picks September 10, 2002

  Michel Majerus

  Michel Majerus’s “Leuchtland” comes straight out of the “artists who push painting to new limits” department, but his sharply conceived, large-scale installations test the boundaries of even that broad category. Utilizing the seemingly endless high/low, art/culture image bank that artists dip into so freely these days, Majerus (who does this better than many others) juxtaposes art-historical references—passages of gestural abstraction, Minimalism, and Pop—with language, commercial logos, comic-book-style action figures, and the graphic from the video game Space Invaders. Sometimes he renders

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  print September 2002

  Wayne White

  Wayne White’s New York debut, “I’m Not Going Around Advertising Surrealism,” is, of course, nothing less than surreal. What else could be invoked by gaudily framed seascapes and woodland glades interrupted by processions of giant words in dropped-out block capitals? In one of the nine canvases here, the phrase HONEST ARTISTS floats like a barge along a river; in another, a row of tall, narrow, rainbow-hued letters reading NASCAR TIT SHIRT bisects an autumnal forest clearing. A third message is less subtle: Cutting across an image of a gently flowing stream amid oak trees is the sentence I’LL

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  print Summer 2002

  Ugo Rondinone

  I can’t stand clowns. Although their ostensible purpose is to make people laugh, clowns seem to exist for the sake of sheer perversity and torment, functioning as absurd objects of derision, creepy interrupters, or surreal distracters—and often cruel ones at that. Think of the cynical Krusty the Klown of Simpsons fame, or Bruce Nauman’s 1987 video installation Clown Torture, which brilliantly captured the buffoon’s persona: We are nearly driven mad by the chaotic dissonance of multiple tragicomic figures shitting and screaming (“No no no!”). The clowns that appear throughout Ugo Rondinone’s work

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  previews May 2002

  Mexico City: An Exhibition About the Exchange Rates of Bodies and Values

  Forget Paris—and New York and London. Think Kwangju, Havana, and Tirana: dynamic cities where politics, class, and the market are in constant flux. This may spell bad news when it comes to living, but it’s ideal for making art. Or so argues P.S. 1 curator Klaus Biesenbach, whose exhibition considers one such locale, Mexico City. Biesenbach’s well-timed show examines the heady, often conflicted dialogue between the teeming, difficult, extraordinary city and the artists who live and work there, including Francis Alÿs, Miguel Calderón, Gabriel Kuri, and Daniela Rossell.

• previews May 2002

  Catherine Sullivan

  Is an actor great because she or he makes us cry? Is it more of a challenge to play Helen Keller than, say, an ordinary housewife? Catherine Sullivan interrogates assumptions both social and theatrical about the presumed power of heroic characterizations. For her first solo show in a US institution, the Los Angeles–based Sullivan (who performs, writes, and directs her video and theatrical work) has come up with an ambitious hybrid project focused on the multichannel video Five Economies (Big Hunt/Little Hunt), 2002 (the title refers to models meant to produce specific

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  print April 2002

  Guy Richards Smit

  Guy Richards Smit's latest exhibition opened with a bash on New Year's Eve, as if to announce that in 2002 art could be funny again. Reveling in self-parody, Smit's videos and related watercolors offered a deft mockery of the excesses, attitudes, and social pretensions of the New York art world. This is familiar ground for Smit: In previous videos, he cast himself as his own artistic alter ego, Jonathan Grossmalerman (“big painter guy” in German), a narcissist with a high substance intake who spends more time in nightclubs than in the studio. Grossmalerman embodies the overindulgence of '80s-style