reviews

  • Xavier Veilhan

    Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin

    Xavier Veilhan’s new exhibition bears the title of his film Furtivo (Stealth, 2008), recently made by the artist but not on view in the show. Yet the works included here are all linked to the dreamlike world of this thirty-minute piece, in which we follow the singer and musician Sébastien Tellier (with whom Veilhan has collaborated frequently) on an enigmatic voyage from the earth to the sea, from the Fiat factory in Turin to a sumptuous sailboat christened Stealth. The gallery’s two separate spaces were secretly linked by this absent filmic narrative, which lent coherence and atmosphere to what

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  • Claude Closky

    Musée d'art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (MAC/VAL)

    For his retrospective “8002–9891,” Claude Closky showed nothing. Instead, visitors were provided with a floor plan and headphones: This was a show to be heard. An artist disloyal to any single medium, Closky forged his retrospective out of a common museum accoutrement, the audio guide. The visitor’s infrared receiver picked up sound files from transmitters suspended above the vast, empty, undivided, sparsely lit exhibition space. But in place of explanations, one heard aural renditions of Closky’s works. For instance, at the entrance to the show, a voice recited in French, “. . . the seventy-ninth

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