“Elephant Cemetery”

If modernism were truly dead, “Elephant Cemetery” would make a perfect burial ground—a suite of fractured monuments to monumentality, sprawling memos to memory. Ostensibly about “objects and our relationship to them,” curator Christian Rattemeyer’s final exhibition at this venerable SoHo nonprofit is surprisingly less drab—and phenomenology-fixated—than this sentiment suggests. Take, for example, Jamie Shovlin’s obsessive watercolor-and-ink tributes to the cover designs for the fifty-eight Fontana Modern Masters pocketbook primers (including ten that were announced but never published). The covers, divorced from their content, outline the trace of a system of knowledge—a compelling meditation on both epistemology and the metaphysics of presence. More playfully, Kirsten Pieroth’s Dead Ant, 2005, squished on the back of a Penguin pocket edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, dryly literalizes the book’s murderous narratives, a merging of the symbolic and the real that contrasts nicely with Shovlin’s fusty academic game. But the show isn’t all so bookish. David Maljkovic was recently appointed as Croatia’s representative to the 2007 Venice Biennale, and his fantastic, hilarious “Scene for a New Heritage,” 2004–, a video and ongoing series of drawings based on a Croatian memorial for the World War II Partisan Hospital, is a sci-fi sonnet to the disasters of war. Eight other international artists consider sculpture and its supplements, supplying a collection of ripostes to modernism’s heroics.