No Ghost, Just a Shell: The Ann Lee Project

Stuart Hall Library, Iniva
16 John Islip St
January 1–January 1, 2001

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
151 Third Street
December 14, 2002–April 16, 2003

Kunsthalle Zurich
Limmatstrasse 270
July 17, 2013–October 27, 2002

Curated by Beatrix Ruf

Poor Ann Lee. Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the manga-in-waiting from a Japanese clearinghouse. Because she was so simply drawn, they got her on the cheap. That price was also a reflection of her place in the anime food chain: Ann was never meant to survive her adventures. Now she’s been condemned to a different fate. Once they got Ann home, her adoptive fathers invited friends Liam Gillick and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster over to have their way with her. Records of these play dates—paintings, neon works, even rugs—make up this show organized by Kunsthalle Zürich director Beatrix Ruf.

— Philip Nobel

Giorgio de Chirico and the Myth of Ariadne

London
January 22–April 13

Philadelphia Museum of Art
26th Street and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway
November 3, 2002–January 5, 2003

Curated by Michael Taylor

While Renaissance artists frequently depict Ariadne bewailing her abandonment by Theseus on the island of Naxos, Giorgio de Chirico shows the princess fast asleep, just before Bacchus wings in on his chariot to rescue her. She is seen as a life-size antique marble sharply lit in Mediterranean midday sun—the personification of estrangement and melancholy. The eight haunting Ariadne paintings of 1912–13 are brought together for the first time in an exhibition selected by the PMA’s Michael Taylor; they join other versions of the Ariadne myth de Chirico made long after his celebrated Metaphysical period.

— Richard Shone

Douglas Gordon

Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road
November 1, 2002–January 5, 2003

Curated by James Lingwood

If you look hard enough, can you find a precise point at which opposites touch and come apart—when, for example, life becomes death, present becomes past, singular becomes plural, or right becomes wrong? Gordon pursues the question with grim determination, his experiments often seeming like exercises in vivisection. “Douglas Gordon: What Have I Done?”—planned around a “ghosted” autobiography of the artist by novelist Andrew O’Hagan and art historian Francis McKee—threatens to take a scalpel to the delicate area where “Gordon” becomes “not-Gordon.” Curated by Artangel’s James Lingwood (organizer of Feature Film’s stunning first showing in 1999) and the Hayward’s Fiona Bradley, the show comprises some dozen works from the past decade.

— Rachel Withers

Rodney Graham

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen - K20
Grabbeplatz 5
February 15–May 25, 2003

Whitechapel Gallery
77 - 82 Whitechapel High Street
September 13–November 10, 2002

Marseille
July 4–October 12

Curated by Iwona Blazwick, Anthony Spira, Julian Heynen, and Nathalie Ergino

Roll up, roll up, and see backward-bicyclist Rodney Graham loop the loop in this extensive retrospective. Planned thematically rather than chronologically, the show takes a trip through nearly thirty years of work in various media—film, photography, sculpture, text-based and musical projects. And it is a trip: Proceedings start with a showing of Halcion Sleep, 1994, and end with The Phonokinetoscope, 2001, including footage of Graham dropping a tab of LSD. The Whitechapel’s Iwona Blazwick and Anthony Spira, K21’s Julian Heynen, and Marseilles MAC’s Nathalie Ergino join curatorial forces to keep things bowling along.

— Rachel Withers