Cindy Sherman’s oeuvre is expanding in both directions—not just forward time, but backward as well. We have always been told that her work begins in 1977, with ’’Untitled Film Stills,“ the series that occupied her through 1980. (Although the ’97 traveling LA MoCA retrospective included five images dated 1975, that show’s catalogue treated these straight-on head shots, in which the artist altered her appearance by means of hats and makeup, less as part of the oeuvre itself than as part of its background. Indeed, the pictures were presented not in the chronological sequence of plates but as

Originally a slogan of the fight for nuclear disarmament, the phrase “protest and survive” was hijacked by the curatorial team of Matthew Higgs and Paul Noble for an energetically eclectic exhibition featuring work from some forty American and European artists, spanning several generations, with a core of local Londoners. The rallying cry—coined by socialist historian and activist E.P. Thompson for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1980—conjures an idealistic image of organized resistance against the common and clearly identified threat of nuclear power and its champions. But

The Turin-born, London-based photographer Elisa Sighicelli looks for signs of the numinous in empty and desultory spaces. For her recent series “Santiago” (all works 2000), she visited Santiago de Compostela, the most important pilgrimage site in Spain, but pointedly ignored the more famous and crowded landmarks. Instead, she photographed apartments that are usually rented out to students, but which were then uninhabited. Through a meticulous orchestration of light, she dramatized these dowdy, limbolike spaces.

Sighicelli’s photographs are almost all square in format and mounted on light boxes.

Hands up, all those who find the Ten Commandments irrational, inconsistent, and scary. OK, not killing is an excellent basic principle, but should one’s neighbor happen to have a really superb ass, let’s say, is it so very wrong to covet it? Are the Commandments arranged in order of importance? Surely the eighth, stealing, must be far more grievous than the third, swearing. And what of all those other God-given and thoroughly alarming laws in Exodus (chapters 20 ff.) regulating the stoning of oxen, deflowering of virgins, beating of slaves, and so on? Are these as binding as Commandments, or