In a period when museum staffers can scrub a bathtub signed by Joseph Beuys, while Donald Judd markets a line of furniture, it is only natural for us to expect comment from younger artists. Joep van Lieshout has abandoned his neo-Minimalist investigations to produce a series of furniture pieces: tables, chairs, and other standardized furnishings. This is not to suggest that sculpture has fallen by the wayside in deference to the utilitarian object. On the contrary, the reintroduction of utility into the most formal Minimalism—the act of reinvesting sculpture with a functional value (which

Rebecca Horn has never stopped giving performances; her installations, no less than her films, are elaborately staged in time as well as space, and her poignantly humanized machines are also mechanized actors. In “La Lune rebelle-Concert Upside-Down” (both works 1991) the lead roles are accorded to a motley crew of manual typewriters and a grand piano. The once-proud typewriters, rendered obsolete (by electricity and word processors), hang bottoms up in the arcaded gallery entrance, intermittently clacking away and shifting their carriages with the help of a motorized hookup. At the end of the

Since 1984 Patrick Faigenbaum has been photographing aristocratic Italian families in their homes. The images reveal an attention to detail at the levels of both conception and execution—an obsession imposed, perhaps, at the expense of the models’ patience. These are stylized portraits, in which static poses, and gazes fixed directly at the camera evoke centuries-old genealogies—the permanence of names that can be traced through the history of a country or a region.

In the series shown here, entitled “Naples,” 1990-91, all of the images take the same square format, and wooden frames set them