Chris Burden’s exhibition in Vienna’s Museum für angewandte Kunst (MAK) wasn’t just his first large-scale show in a European museum. It also marked the peak of a European “rediscovery” of the artist that began in 1990, particularly in France, and that could be seen in others’ work throughout the decade. “Chris Burden: Beyond the Limits” offered a summation of Burden’s various installations and projects since the 1977 C.B.T. V., as well as drawings and the Deluxe Photo Book, 1974 (fifty-three documentary photographs of performances dating to 1971); as such it was a corrective to the view of Burden

Some have doubted the appropriateness of granting Franz West a museum retrospective at this point in his career, as he only began to achieve wide recognition during the mid ’80s. Skepticism might also stem from the fact that the fascination of his earlier shows lay in their focus on particular situations, something hardly possible in a large-scale exhibition. By showing the long prehistory of West’s work, however, this exhibition made it clear that he adopted his characteristic stance very early on—by about the mid ’70s—while it also demonstrated that his origins can be traced to the particular