Juan Muñoz

The Art Institute of Chicago
111 South Michigan Avenue
September 14–December 8, 2002

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
5216 Montrose Boulevard
January 24–March 30, 2003

New Museum
235 Bowery
April 21–July 28, 2002

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Independence Avenue at Seventh Street, SW
October 18–January 13, 2001

Juan Muñoz’s series of cast-resin and bronze tableaux occupied a full floor of the Dia Center in New York in 1996–97, but the Hirshhorn exhibition comprises the Spanish sculptor’s first career survey in the States. It also takes on added poignancy in the wake of the artist’s untimely recent death at the age of 48. A cluster of Borgesian tropes—the balcony, the trompe l’oeil floor, the dwarf—run through Muñoz’s strange theatrical settings, featuring figures enigmatically assembled as if for conversation. The catalogue to the exhibition, which includes work made since the mid-’80s, includes essays by Art Institute curator Neal Benezra, Hirshhorn curator Olga Viso, and critic Michael Brenson.

— Frances Richard

Alberto Giacometti

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd Street
October 11, 2001–January 8, 2002

Paris has already celebrated the centenary of Giacometti’s birth this year with a superlative show at the Centre Georges Pompidou that concentrated on his drawings. Now comes the full retrospective—190 sculptures, paintings, and works on paper—organized in conjunction with the Giacometti Foundation and the Kunsthaus Zürich (where it debuted last spring). The selection looks faultless, with an all-out focus on the early Surrealist-influenced sculpture; the inclusion of later masterworks such as the spectral painting of Jean Genet (1954–55); and not too much bronze anorexia. The existential chic of the later figures may at times be unrewarding, and repetition can narrow rather than widen the gap between Giacometti and, say, Bernard Buffet. But stifle that yawn; there are surprises in store.

— Richard Shone

Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977

Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street
October 18, 2001–January 27, 2002

Whatever hope film and video work have for artistic excellence depends on addressing questions specific to the medium—both visual and spatial. Curator Chrissie Iles brings together nineteen seminal works that first posed such questions in the ’60s and ’70s, including pieces by Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow, and Yoko Ono. Projected film and video is a hot topic today, its nature and status much contested. Rasters and reception, broadcast and projection, phenomenology and opticality: Theories about this art have been at once raw and pretentious, much like the medium itself. This exhibition should provide the perfect occasion to think it through from scratch.

— Katy Siegel

Brazil: Body and Soul

Guggenheim Museum | Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
June 29, 2002–January 1, 2003

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum | New York
1071 Fifth Avenue
October 19, 2001–May 29, 2002

The Guggenheim’s done China. It’s done Africa. But if Brazil sounds a tad more manageable, it’s still quite a lot to fit into one exhibition: four centuries of art and culture represented by 350 items ranging from Dutch depictions of the Brazilian landscape, Amazonian feather capes, and a monumental Baroque altarpiece to Neo-Concrete objects by Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark and works by contemporary artists like Ernesto Neto. Organized by an international team led by Edward J. Sullivan, the exhibition aims to show visual art in the context of performance, music, and ritual. Get ready to samba up the spiral.

— Barry Schwabsky

Janet Cardiff

Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon
Cité Internationale 81 quai Charles de Gaulle
July 19, 2013–September 8, 2002

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Avenue
October 14–January 31, 2001

Canadian artist Janet Cardiff is best known for her works in which participants don headphones for what are essentially self-guided tours (cued by the sounds and voices on the CD visitors listen to) of the specific places, often outdoors, for which the works were made. In them, present and past, reality and fiction, mingle, overlap, and sometimes conflict. For her first survey exhibition, the artist and P.S. 1 senior curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev present such pieces away from their original settings. But Cardiff also has more conventional indoor installations to show and a new site-specific work for the occasion.

— Barry Schwabsky

Alfred Jensen: Concordance

Dia Center for the Arts
542 West 22nd Street
September 19, 2001–June 16, 2002

Who was Alfred Jensen (1903–81)? A geometric abstractionist, you say? But his trademark grids of tiny, brightly colored triangles and squares are so heavily impastoed that, from ten feet away, the geometry wiggles like a desert horizon. An atelier mystic, à la Mark Tobey or Morris Graves? Hardly: The “esoterica” on which Jensen draws includes math and physics as well as Chinese and Mayan calendrical systems. Perhaps Dia’s season-long dozen-painting exhibition—which includes the never-before-publicly-exhibited Great Pyramid, 1979, a twelve-panel masterpiece considered the artist’s last major statement— will provide an answer.

— Peter Plagens

Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-cinemas

Wexner Center for the Arts
The Ohio State University 1871 North High Street
September 18, 2001–December 30, 2002

Kölnischer Kunstverein
Die Brücke Hahnenstraße 6
February 16–April 4, 2002

New Museum
235 Bowery
July 26–October 13, 2002

In this survey organized by the Wexner and coproduced by the Kölnischer Kunstverein and the New Museum in New York, curator Carlos Basualdo focuses on Hélio Oiticica’s “quasi-cinemas,” photo-based work like the “Block-Experiments in Cosmococa”— projected images of pop figures (Monroe, Hendrix, Buñuel) superimposed with drawings executed in cocaine. The Brazilian Conceptualist’s only film, Agripina e Roma Manhattan, and the slide show Neyrótika, shot in New York, are also being screened. The catalogue offers essays by Basualdo, Brazilian film historian Ivana Bentes, and New Museum senior curator Dan Cameron as well as little-translated writings by the artist.

— Frances Richard

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA)
2155 Center Street
September 12, 2001–December 16, 2002

University Art Gallery, University of California

January 15–March 3, 2002

The Bronx Musuem of Art
1040 Grand Concourse at 165th St.
April 4–June 16, 2002

Though Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s artist’s book–cum-novel Dictee commands cultlike enthusiasm to this day, her visual work remains largely unknown. Now, twenty years after her murder, this full retrospective provides an overview of Cha’s lyrical oeuvre. The performance artist, filmmaker, poet, and sculptor investigated geographic exile and linguistic displacement, drawing on influences from feminist psychoanalytic theory to Catholicism and Korean history. A catalogue with essays by Lawrence Rinder, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and curator Constance Lewallen is planned.

— Frances Richard