print April 1989

Claude Rutault

For the past fifteen years, Claude Rutault has created a series of works that constitute an obsessive exploration of the relationship between the painting, its physical environment, and its multiple levels of signification. Whether by varying the size and shape of the canvas, or by linking the canvas and the wall through the use of color, Rutault’s art is based on the concepts of difference, similarity, and familiarity. These concepts inform our perception of the work itself.

Rutault’s most recent installation, Toiles tendues sur chassis a peindre de la même couleur que le mur sur lequel elles

print March 1989

Renaat Braem

In a pamphlet published in 1968, the Flemish architect Renaat Braem referred to Belgium as “the ugliest country in the world.” His critique of reckless urban planning and his vision of architecture as a social tool form the basis of this retrospective exhibition, which features photographs, maquettes, drawings, and collages. Braem’s career has consistently reflected his socialist ideals over a period of more than 50 years. His projects operate in the realms of the imaginary, the utopian, the practical, and the mundane. Braem cannot be tied directly to any one style. Yet he remains remarkably

print February 1989

Cristina Iglesias

Cristina Iglesias’ pieces reflect traditional sculptural concerns—her work delineates relationships of various materials to each other and to the space in which they are situated. In the main gallery of her current exhibition are four pieces, each placed against a wall and featuring a combination of steel, wood, and concrete. These pieces are both multi faceted and illusory. Their spatial and physical relationships are variable, defined only when the viewer activates them. One piece—all are Untitled, 1988—is composed of three curved steel plates, arched in a semicircle toward the wall. Forming

print January 1989

Rob Scholte

In the foreword to the catalogue of this exhibition, Wim Crouwel refers to the more than 50 works on display here as constituting a retrospective. The term seems both appropriate and incongruous in discussing Scholte’s work. On the one hand, a retrospective simply comprises a survey of work from a particular period of time. Yet Scholte has produced a wide-ranging body of work that delineates a number of histories. His references are both personal and art historical; they are directed toward the mediation of traditional approaches through the processes of mass communication. The paintings present

print December 1988

André Cadere

Born in Warsaw of Romanian parents, André Cadere produced a body of work based on the complementary concepts of presence and absence. Between 1970 and 1978 he orchestrated a series of events, or actions, designed to question the relationship between the art object and the space within which it is exhibited and evaluated. In fact, the term “exhibition” is too formal a word to apply to Cadere’s art, as his work attempts to reveal the arbitrary distinction between such sites as the gallery wall, the street corner, or the neighborhood bar. As Cadere often appeared in these sites holding the ever-present

print December 1988

Ottone, Ottone

A woman in a short white dress, wearing a pair of wings, walks onto the stage. She sits on a chair in the corner, facing away from the audience. A man enters, smoking a cigarette, and leans against the back wall, posturing. For a moment, the scene seems frozen; as in an image by Edward Hopper, emotional distance seems measured by space. Shortly thereafter, the “angel” turns on a tape recorder and the music—Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione de Poppea—begins. The lights come up on stage and the rest of the dancers enter. The introduction to Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Ottone, Ottone, 1988, is an

print November 1988

Lili Dujourie

Lili Dujourie is an artist whose work has consistently belied appearances by reversing our expectations of the media used. In this exhibition, which included pieces made with fabric, granite, mirror, and steel, she challenged the viewer to go beyond the work’s facade and to penetrate its inherent ambiguity. American Imperialism, 1972, is an important early work. In a pale white room, one section of the wall is painted red. Leaning against it is a black steel plate. The piece simultaneously ignites and deadens the room with its magnification and negation of color. Its reference to American

print September 1988

Marin Kasimir/Christian Israel

Marin Kasimir is a young German artist who has been living and working in Brussels for the past five years. During that time, he has produced pieces for a variety of settings, including galleries, public sites, and the theater. His work, through its transformation of particular spaces and subsequent investment of narrative potential, calls to mind both architectural and filmic concerns. Through the use of columns, benches, and passageways, Kasimir’s work implies an activization of a particular space; oftentimes, the means to that end is through vision and its inherent possibilities of variation.

print September 1988

Richard Hamilton

This exhibition was divided into two sections: “Installations,” a series of works designed as rooms, and “Ulysses,” a group of drawings and prints inspired by James Joyce’s novel. Throughout “Installations,” curated by Mark Francis, Hamilton consistently draws attention to the notion of surveillance and the ways in which rooms can imply, or be a function of, relationships based on power and control. Treatment Room, 1984, for instance, recreates the space of a hospital emergency room, complete with antiseptic walls and furnishings. The setting is Orwellian in its overtones: the image of Margaret

print April 1988

Jean-Luc Godard, King Lear

Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, King Lear, 1987, is first and foremost an “approach,” as its intertitles frequently remind us. At one point, in the guise of a shaman/professor, the director says, “An image is not strong because it is brutal or fantastic, but because it is distant and true.” Thus, the aim of the film, like most of Godard’s work, is to approximate the subject/text rather than to limit it. The intertitles, the sketchiness, the home-movie quality, the deliberately fractured narrative of King Lear are linked to a persistent esthetic. Like Two or Three Things That I Know About Her, 1966,

print March 1988

“Cites-Cines”

After picking up a pair of headphones at the entrance to this exhibition, I walked into a spacious room in which clips from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1926, and Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera, 1929, were being shown. Vertov created one of the most emblematic of all film images, featuring the protagonist (the cameraman of the title) perching on a steel girder high above the city and panning his camera over the teeming forms below. Just as this sequence was projected on the screen—a “curtain” made of a regular movie screen cut into strips and hung from the ceiling—a group of people broke

print February 1988

“The Other Body”

In the text that accompanies his work The Bridge, 1984, Victor Burgin writes, “In everyday language it is common to find the word ‘bridge’ used to metaphorically express such otherwise abstract notions as ‘exchange’ between two parties and ‘transition’ from one state to another.” The works in this exhibition, “The Other Body: Cultural Debate in Contemporary British Photography,” organized by guest curator Tim Norris, repeatedly call to mind these notions of transition and exchange in the ways that they construct bridges of signification between and within images.

Almost all of the pieces in the

Michael Tarantino