Richard Flood’s Real Life Rock

1. ROBERT GOBER

   (Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Rotterdam, through 28 April 1996. Curator: Theodora Vischer). The exhibition contains only four objects and they are given a great deal of space; it is an unnerving and shatteringly beautiful arrangement. The site-specific centerpiece, Split Wall with Drains, 1994–95, is the show’s most poetically evocative piece. Two doorways, framed in creamy molding, evenly punctuate a Sheetrock wall. Sunk in the floor on either side of the wall, and between the doors, are drains through which water sluices over a congestion of leaves and crumpled beer cans. Trapped in the far drain is an envelope that beckons like the hand of a failing swimmer in an onrush of water. The piece is a delirious monument to lost opportunities.

2. MATTHEW BARNEY

   “Pace Car for the Hubris Pill” (Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, now closed but traveling. Curator: Karel Schampers). Liberating new sculptural materials (prosthetic plastic, petroleum jelly, tapioca pearls, Teflon, thermal gel, etc.), Barney has developed a unique sculptural practice. Yet his sculpture is the most neglected aspect of his art. In Rotterdam, each gallery focused on a single installation or object, including his videos but not focused on them. As most of the work absorbed light, there was a moment of refraction, a strange, hovering glow that was at once chilly and seductive. The sculpture possessed a kind of archetypal power: like an Aztec ball court, you could imagine the activity but you couldn’t ever fully reclaim the ritual.

3. RAYMOND PETTIBON

   (Exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Bern). Nobody is better at L.A. Noir than Pettibon; his drawings with text are a synthesis of every Raymond Chandler or John Fante novel you’ve ever read. In Pettibon’s world of cheap hustles and dead-end conspiracies, adolescent psychoses meet cold-war angst, Joan Crawford and J. Edgar Hoover are the national treasures of domestic violence and civil unrest, and being on the run is no different than running in place. The book contains a sensational selection of images and a fascinating interview with Pettibon by Ulrich Loock.

4. RICHARD PRINCE

   Adult Comedy Action Drama (Scalo Publishers, Zurich, $70). Prince has been making rigorously innovative books for years. This one, however, is the first devoted essentially to his own photography (as opposed to rephotography), and it provides a giddy, revelatory ride through his personal geography.

5. JACK PIERSON

   All of a Sudden (Powerhouse Books, New York, $50). A velvety work filled with blurry mornings and sleepily beautiful boys and Vegas dreams and beach-town lassitude. Where Prince is all icy energy, Pierson is all melancholy torpor.

6. WOLFGANG TILLMANS

   (Taschen Verlag, Cologne, $24.99). Tillmans is younger than Prince and Pierson, and his book is much less consistently of a mood, but he has an enormous gusto for recording YOUTH. Everybody looks like they’re capable of surviving yet another night of theatrical waste—ready to get up and march in a gay rights’ parade or go to the beach or pose for Tillmans.

7. MIKE FIGGIS

   Leaving Las Vegas (MGM/UA). From Stormy Monday through Internal Affairs and the fascinatingly off Liebestraum, Figgis has always been an interesting director; with Leaving Las Vegas he has moved from interesting to important. There is no plot to speak of; both compositionally and psychologically, the film is more like an extended fugue. A man decides to kill himself and a woman decides to love him. Basta! As a nonanalytic exploration of unconditional love, Leaving Las Vegas is overpowering in its willingness to replace judgment with understanding. Nicolas Cage has long been our most inventive actor but here his choreography of a role is at its most sublime. The final scene is at once pathetic and transcendent.

8. (8/9) JOYCE CAROL OATES

   Zombie (Dutton, $19.95); SUSANNA MOORE: In the Cut (Knopf, $19.95). Rather hastily shunted off the advertising pages of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, these novels are ambitiously risky digressions for their authors. Of the two, Oates is the more overtly cautionary. Her first-person narrative of a Jeffrey Dahmer–like serial killer contains just enough sociological clues to offer a kind of reason for the narrator’s actions. As always, however, it is Oates’ stylistic combativeness that offers the thrills. Using a terrifyingly deadpan voice, she conjures up the rot that is destined to destroy all our neighbors’ perfectly nice kids—the killers and the killed. Zombie is numbing but necessary.

   In the Cut feels more like a personal than a stylistic challenge. One can almost sense Moore pushing herself to ever more daring set-pieces in this evocation of sexual submission. The armature for the plot is again serial killing, and the kind of hedonistic anomie that drives Moore’s narrator on is surprisingly similar to that which afflicts Oates’ narrator. Both are waiting for something/anything to give meaning to their lives. That one character is psychotic and the other tenure-tracked is less relevant than the fact that these two exemplary novelists have felt compelled to test the waters of violence and pornography in the middle of the last decade of the 20th century. The results are among the more provocatively depressing artworks of 1995.

9. (8/9) SUSANNA MOORE

   In the Cut (Knopf, $19.95); JOYCE CAROL OATES: Zombie (Dutton, $19.95). Rather hastily shunted off the advertising pages of the Sunday New York Times Book Review, these novels are ambitiously risky digressions for their authors. Of the two, Oates is the more overtly cautionary. Her first-person narrative of a Jeffrey Dahmer–like serial killer contains just enough sociological clues to offer a kind of reason for the narrator’s actions. As always, however, it is Oates’ stylistic combativeness that offers the thrills. Using a terrifyingly deadpan voice, she conjures up the rot that is destined to destroy all our neighbors’ perfectly nice kids—the killers and the killed. Zombie is numbing but necessary.

   In the Cut feels more like a personal than a stylistic challenge. One can almost sense Moore pushing herself to ever more daring set-pieces in this evocation of sexual submission. The armature for the plot is again serial killing, and the kind of hedonistic anomie that drives Moore’s narrator on is surprisingly similar to that which afflicts Oates’ narrator. Both are waiting for something/anything to give meaning to their lives. That one character is psychotic and the other tenure-tracked is less relevant than the fact that these two exemplary novelists have felt compelled to test the waters of violence and pornography in the middle of the last decade of the 20th century. The results are among the more provocatively depressing artworks of 1995.

10. KAREN PINKUS

    Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising under Fascism (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95). This study suffers from a lack of quality bookplates illustrating Pinkus’ occasionally weird, often brilliant analysis. That said, it was the illustrations (such as they are) that initially drew me to the book. In her close reading of the advertising graphics of Mussolini’s Italy, Pinkus has come up with a truly frightening account of the awful relationship between how a country sells and what a country reaps. The chapter on “Advertising the African Campaigns” is a particularly powerful indictment of colonial mischief of the worst sort.