Best of 2005: 11 critics and curators look at the year in art.Robert Storr [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] AN ARTIST, CRITIC, AND CURATOR, ROBERT STORR RECENTLY ORGANIZED A RETROSPECTIVE OF THE ART OF ELIZABETH MURRAY CURRENTLY ON VIEW AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK. HE IS NOW AT WORK DIRECTING THE 2007 VENICE BIENNALE. 1 "ACCUMULATED VISION, BARRY LE VA" (INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA) For me, the past year's most awaited, most revealing, and most beautifully executed exhibition was this miniretrospective organized by Ingrid Schaffner (who deserves her own high ranking on some roster for the string of exhibitions she has curated over the years). Le Va is one of those ground-and-wall-and-glass-breaking characters whose reputation had for too many years hung tenuously on grainy Artforum photos (nostalgically recycled by Matthew Antezzo) and a few verbal generalizations. But the work itself is varied, complex, emotional, and visual. Alas, the pitiful state of current museum programming meant that this exhibition, initiated by a gifted curator and a small, risk-taking institution, couldn't find an additional venue or a larger audience. Shame on every big museum in every big city. 2 "SLIDESHOW" (BAL TIMORE MUSEUM OF ART) Why didn't anybody think of devoting an exhibition to the slide as an art form before, especially now that Kodak has ceased producing the projectors and will soon curtail its film stock? Fortunately, Darsie Alexander did have the idea and gathered together an impressive array of pieces by Marcel Broodthaers, James Melchert, Nan Goldin, Jack Smith, James Coleman, and many more. Full disclosure: I wrote an essay for the project, and in that spirit of advocacy (and my Le Va entry above) would like to use this occasion to ask the director of the Brooklyn Museum why his increasingly art-averse institution dropped "SlideShow" from its 2005 schedule, shortchanging the public out of one of the most innovative theme shows in recent memory. 3 JEFF WALL (SCHAULAGER, MUNCHENSTEIN/BASEL) This exhibition took place in the fastness of Switzerland and was seen mostly by Basel locals and international art nomads. An elegantly designed catalogue raisonne accompanied, but the show itself--mounted in its one-of-a-kind contemporary art-storage-and-display facility--was a coolly taxonomic study of Wall's deceptively consistent photo-fictions. Highlighting the thematic and theatrical unevenness of Wall's output made his broader enterprise seem less critic-friendly and more the work of a shrewd but genuinely restless sensibility that encompasses still life, landscape, the grotesque, and faux documentary vignettes of alienation and "otherness." Presently photography is permitted the illusionistic naturalism denied genre painting, and Wall is the point man for recuperation of lapsed prerogatives. The next step should be to investigate his inverted traditionalism and its remarkable appeal among the ostensibly antihistoricist theory crowd. 4 ROBERT SMITHSON (LOS ANGELES MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART) All credit goes to Eugenie Tsai (aided by Connie Butler) for having brought this long-standing project to completion. It eclipsed Robert Hobbs's less textured version of Smithson at the Whitney twenty-three years ago, and not only raises fascinating questions (most of them concerning Smithson's ambivalent, quasi-Pop eroticism and religiosity) but also leaves behind one indelibly romantic image: a skinny man/boy in a white shirt retracing on foot the umbilicus um·bil·i·ci (-s he wound into a lake that mirrors the sun like a flashing supemova.   ) See navel. 5 ISTANBUL BIENNIAL Organized by Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche, this biennial was a lesson in how to make the most of a physically stunning, culturally textured city and a small budget. It is impossible to cover everything but special mention must go to Hala Elkoussy's haunting video of life on the outskirts of Cairo, Peripheral Stories, 2005; Dan Perjovschi's stream-of-bad-consciousness mural cartoons; and videast Halil Altindere's whimsical disruptions of everyday urban life, which include volleyball teams playing in the streets for the duration of a red traffic light and demonstrators carrying a banner through the crowds that reads DOWN WITH THE PEOPLE. Up with art that is wholly in the present-imperfect tense. 6 JORG IMMENDORFF (NEUE NATIONALGALERIE, BERLIN) Perennial political Puck of the German art scene, Immendorff never succumbed to '80s temptations of premature Old Masterism--he's too scrappy for that--which makes his protean production and saturnalian remodeling of Mies's modernist temple to art an invigorating anti-apotheosis, poignantly accented by his losing battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Schlerosis (ALS). 7 MARTIN KIPPENBERGER Just as Immendorff keeps kicking up a fuss, Kippenberger did not go gently into the night either, and though not long gone he is due for an American retrospective, something we were reminded of by various shows in New York at Gagosian, Luhring Augustine, and the Nyehaus gallery (curated by scene-maker Tim Nye). Boozy neo-Dada. Conceptualism on Ritalin, whatever Kippenberger was up to or down on, he was living and dying proof that--as he famously said--"You can't do dumb if you are dumb." 8 BRUCE NAUMAN Sneak peeks and missed chances: During intermittent visits to Nauman's studio I have been lucky to watch the gestation of several works that I was nevertheless unable to see in their final form. These include One Hundred Fish Fountain, 2005--just exhibited at Donald Young in Chicago, the piece actually consists of only ninety-seven fish cast in bronze, plus several fiberglass heads unnervingly recycled from earlier works--as well as Raw Materials, whose cries and whispers filled the Tate's Turbine Hall through the beginning of 2005. This piece effectively shifted from sight to sound, silence to unsilence, turning the panoramic video semivoid of Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001, into a vast echo chamber that amplified the urgent intimacies first heard in Nauman's 1968 sound piece Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room. The fact is that people can't leave, nor can the artist escape the cluttered work space from which a steady but wholly unpredictable flow of ideas just keeps on coming. (As to what's on Nauman's mind, belated thanks to Janet Kraynak for Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman's Words [MIT Press, 2003].) 9 KALUP LINZY Linzy has the stylish charm of Cab Calloway and the gleeful offensiveness of John Waters. "A star is born," wrote Holland Cotter in the New York Times when reviewing this performance artist and videast's wildly un-PC funk satire of a soap opera titled All My Churen, 2003, shown this year at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Surely there's more to come, but anyone who thinks racial and sexual lampoon is out of season need not attend. 10 VASCO ARAUJO For me, the black-box discovery of Venice was Araujo's video The Girl of the Golden West, 2004, a riff on the eponymous '30s film (based on the same play as Puccini's La Fanciulla del West [1910]). In the Spanish artist's retelling, the on-camera narrator--an African-American woman who worked at the Texas art school where Araujo was an artist-in-residence--talks a weary, exegetical "blues" about Puccini's lyric vision of an America at war with Mexico, as we are now with other "others" elsewhere in the world. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Alison M. Gingeras [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ALISON M. GINGERAS IS AN ADJUNCT CURATOR AT THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM, NEW YORK, AND A FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR TO ARTFORUM. 1 PAUL MCCARTHY, "LALA LAND PARODY PARADISE" (HAUS DER KUNST, MUNICH) After years of intensive toil in his Pasadena studio, McCarthy delivered an epoch-making exhibition based on his two pet obsessions: pirates and cowboys. All the signature McCarthy elements were present, and then some: monumental installations-cum-film sets (the pirate ship, the houseboat), the conflation of historical trauma and kitsch Americana (US cavalry troops channeling the SS), live bacchanalian performance (a parade featuring horse-drawn covered wagons and a lederhosen-clad Bavarian oompah band), and mind-boggling storyboard drawings, as well as a series of new autonomous sculptures (standouts included an anatomically correct mechanical pig). This show was spectacular not only in the scale of its execution and ambition, but also in the dense layering of conceptual conceits, which allowed viewers to get something of a unified-field view of McCarthy's brilliantly crazy cultural critique. 2 KAREN KILIMNIK'S DOUBLE FEATURE (FONDAZIONE BEVILACQUA LA MASA, VENICE; HISTORISCHES MUSEUM BASEL, HAUS ZUM KIRSCHGARTEN) Together, these two solo shows amounted to the year's most riveting antiblockbuster. Frequently pigeonholed as a pop-culture groupie and overshadowed in that category by some of her more market-friendly peers (Elizabeth Peyton et al.), Kilimnik, these exhibitions cannily proved, is one of our most subtle yet authoritative commentators on class envy and collective enslavement to celebrity culture. Harnessing the pungent aura of nostalgia that permeated the shows' antique, jewel-box venues, she filled the galleries and period rooms with delicate paintings, nearly imperceptible sculptures, and deliciously poetic sound installations. In an age of ever-increasing production values and gargantuan scale, Kilimnik's faux-naive gestures remind us that critical import and aesthetic magic sometimes come in more modest guises. 3 ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI, REPETITION (POLISH PAVILION, 51ST VENICE BIENNALE) Zmijewski's documentary video, for which he restaged the infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, was perhaps the darkest--and most timely--work of art I experienced this year. More than just an exploration of the pathological effects of power, Zmijewski's film conjured the specters of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay while unflinchingly confronting a host of thorny issues: What does "political art" look like, or mean--and is it even an appropriate term--when every trace of redemptive humanism is extracted from the mix? Is exploitation a valid artistic strategy? How do we reconcile standard ethical conventions with our appetites for violence and drama? Look to Zmijewski in 2006 for answers to these questions and more. 4 TAKASHI MURAKAMI AS CURATOR ("LITTLE BOY: THE ARTS OF JAPAN'S EXPLODING SUBCULTURE," JAPAN SOCIETY, NEW YORK) No matter how you feel about Murakami's seductive-yet-virulent oeuvre, he is undeniably one hell of a curator. This exhibition-as-manifesto was one of the most meticulously installed, thoroughly researched shows of the year. The final installment of his Superflat exhibition trilogy, "Little Boy" forcefully corrected the popular misperception that Murakami and his coterie are mere neo-Pop spin-offs. By demonstrating connections between Japanese society's preoccupation with cuteness (kawaii) and its deeply unresolved attitude toward the traumas of World War II, Murakami convincingly differentiates his engagement with pop and subcultural iconography from that of his American counterparts. 5 CHRISTOPH BUCHEL Whether draping prayer rugs that celebrate 9/11 all over a beat-up car with Afghan plates (Fliegender Handler [Traveling Salesman], 2005) or staging the forensic investigation of an exploded bus in the pristine galleries of the Kunsthalle Basel (Hole, 2005), Buchel demands maximum (physical, emotional, conceptual) engagement from his audience. Messy, unnervingly humorous, and politically scathing, his ever-ambitious environmental installations provide apt metaphors for our turbulent times. 6 URS FISCHER, JET SET LADY (FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI, MILAN) In the magnificent hall of the Istituto dei Ciechi (Institute for the Blind). Fischer presented one of the most spectacular single artworks of the year. Simultaneously beautiful and ugly, mammoth and intimate, Jet Set Lady is a three-dimensional map of the artist's mind: an iron tree, thirty feet tall, its trunk and branches abloom with over two thousand high-res color scans of drawings, prints, and paintings Fischer made over the past five years. A tour de force from one of the most consistently convincing artists of the thirty-something generation. 7 GELITIN, RABBIT (ARTESINA, ITALY) Plopping a giant stuffed rabbit on top of a hill in the picturesque region of Piemonte, the madcap Austrian performance collective managed to add an unlikely stop to the Must-See-Land-Art itinerary. With tufts of hay (to nourish local sheep) poking through its pink yarn skin, their big bunny looks like a creepy toy knitted by a gang of Goliath-size grandmas. Neatly scoffing at the high seriousness of Spiral Jetty or Lightning Field, Gelitin takes another irreverent jab at another macho art-historical genre. Like other great in situ works, Rabbit has designs on posterity: It will be left in place until 2025. 8 "THE PERFECT MEDIUM: PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE OCCULT" (METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK) This extremely pleasurable, even revelatory show gathers an array of late nineteenth- through early twentieth-century prints, cartes de visite, and other image-documents purporting to depict all manner of supernatural phenomena, from mystical apparitions to ectoplasmic auras. Like a good Ouija board session at a slumber party, the exhibition coaxes viewers into shelving their skepticism, inviting them to indulge in photography's capacity to spin marvelously seductive fictions as well as attest to cold hard facts. 9 "BEYOND PAINTING: BURRI, FONTANA, MANZONI" (TATE MODERN, LONDON) This modest exhibition dedicated to the titular Italian postwar triumvirate seemed a perfectly timed history lesson, charting a counternarrative in the midst of the current art market's amnesiac am·ne·si·ac (  m-n  z- love affair with all things painted. Whether slashing the canvas, burning it, or soaking it with unorthodox materials (e.g. kaolin), each of these three artists infused his oeuvre with equal doses of anarchy and aestheticism to a degree seldom seen since the late 1950s. Italian neoavant-garde incursions against painterly convention have never looked so pertinent. 10 CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE, THE GATES (CENTRAL PARK, NEW YORK) They're gone, but far from forgotten! [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ann Goldstein [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ANN GOLDSTEIN IS SENIOR CURATOR AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES, WHERE SHE IS CURRENTLY ORGANIZING THE FIRST AMERICAN RETROSPECTIVE OF THE WORK OF MARTIN KIPPENBERGER, OPENING OCTOBER 2006. 1 MICHAEL ASHER (ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO) For the Art Institute of Chicago's 73rd American Exhibition, in 1979, Asher relocated a twentieth-century bronze cast of Jean-Antoine Houdon's eighteenth-century statue of George Washington from the museum's exterior to the eighteenth-century galleries. Twenty-six years later, at the invitation of James Rondeau, with Anne Rorimer as guest curator, Asher relocated it again, this time from the mayor's office back to the AIC's eighteenth-century galleries. By placing the work within its seemingly appropriate context, he has quietly shaken up the house. The statue is an institutional misfit: The museum is its custodian, but it is not in the collection; rooted in the eighteenth century, it is a twentieth-century copy. Rondeau has also reinstalled key works by Daniel Buren, John Knight, Hanne Darboven, Fred Sandback, and others which, like Asher's earlier project, were acquired or first exhibited during Rorimer's tenure and are a tribute to the former curator's exceptional vision. 2 "MoMA IN HAMBURG" (KUNSTVEREIN HAMBURG) In 2004, crowds lined up to see "MoMA in Berlin" at the Neue Nationalgalerie. In 2005, Louise Lawler brought the new MoMA to Hamburg with just two images of its interior that were produced as posters shown on the gallery walls and throughout Hamburg. Lawler's posters played with the marketing campaign for Berlin, conflating advertising and art, and making what was visible inside and outside the institution almost exactly the same. 3 GAYLEN GERBER (DANIEL HUG GALLERY, LOS ANGELES) Gerber's "backdrop" painting was by far the largest work in this exhibition--a huge stretched canvas that occupied an entire wall--and yet it was almost invisible. Initially painted gray, then white to match the gallery walls, it served as the ground for a painting by Remy Zaugg, which was hung directly on top of it; together they comprise Backdrop/Not Here, 1990-95. With this piece, together with two of his "supports" for works by Adrian Schiess and B. Wurtz, Gerber challenged not only the hierarchy of figure and ground but the stakes of individual identity. 4 MATT MULLICAN, "LEARNING FROM THAT PERSON'S WORK" (MUSEUM LUDWIG, COLOGNE) Winding through Mullican's intimate labyrinth of suspended bedsheets covered with works on paper, the spectator was immersed in the products of the artist's extraordinary performances done while under hypnosis. One was, walking amid the soft walls, arrested by videos of "that person" (the distinctive personality that appears during Mullican's trance state) engaged in the most mundane activities. Watching Mullican (or rather, that person) eat breakfast or slowly examine the entire contents of his studio was at once captivating and profoundly affecting. 5 ALBERT OEHLEN (THOMAS AMMANN FINE ART, ZURICH) This selection of Oehlen's abstract paintings and drawings since the late '80s was an important occasion to examine a core aspect of his practice. With fragments of figurative imagery embedded in the layered passages of paint, these works are just on the cusp of representation. Oehlen's paintings are not simply struggling with the problems and weight of their history, nor are they bound by its guiding principles. They are boldly and brilliantly unethical. And Oehlen's current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, not only examines this facet of his output but offers a timely opportunity to reconsider the oeuvre of one of the most significant artists working today. 6 ISA GENZKEN (DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK) Genzken's ongoing confrontation with the conflicting and fragmented states of reality--both physical and psychological--has been fundamental to her extraordinary and influential practice since the 1970s. For her first major solo exhibition in New York in several years, her uncanny assemblages combining old and new consumer goods constituted one of the most striking and compelling reflections on war, death, obsolescence, and ruin--in essence, on the fragility of contemporary culture. 7 JOHN BALDESSARI AND LAWRENCE WEINER IN LOS ANGELES While it was my misfortune to miss Baldessari's landmark two-museum retrospective in Vienna and Graz this year, he did save one of his best exhibitions for home. At Margo Leavin Gallery, he returned to the basics, pairing a single, black-and-white photograph of a person's face with a single word, and their bold simplicity was absolutely stunning. Opening the same day at Regen Projects was new work by Weiner, whose ongoing engagement with simultaneity and nonhierarchy has been at the core of one of the most significant and generative practices of our time. Two friends, two colleagues, two indelible figures--and both at the top of their game. 8 JEROEN DE RIJKE AND WILLEM DE ROOIJ, MANDARIN DUCKS I was unable to see it in Venice, but, knowing the work, I was disappointed not to see greater mention of de Rijke and de Rooij's extraordinary film in the Biennale reviews. A melodramatic construction of light and flesh and objects interacting in a stark interior, Mandarin Ducks is both visually ravishing and appalling. It is one of the most blunt and unforgettable representations of xenophobia and the insidious brutality that permeates people's treatment of each other. 9 MARTIN KIPPENBERGER IN NEW YORK Three concurrent gallery exhibitions each focused on an aspect of Martin Kippenberger's work; a remarkable gathering of the early "Dear Painter" series at Gagosian; a look at aspects of the "Metro Net" and "Museum of Modem Art Syros Syros, Greece: see Síros." projects at Nyehaus; and a heartfelt assembly of outstanding self-portraits at Luhring Augustine. Considered together, these independently organized exhibitions were a minisurvey of sorts, and reinforced my determination to foster a greater understanding of the complexity and contradictions of Kippenberger's production. 10 RETROSPECTIVE EXHIBITIONS AND BOOKS Each a model of curatorial empathy with the artists and their work, the retrospective exhibitions of Stanley Brouwn (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands), George Herold (Kunstverein Hanover), George Herms (Santa Monica Museum of Art), Richard Tuttle (San Francisco Museum of Modem Art), and Jeff Wall (Schaulager Basel) were truly inspiring. Finally, our library of artists' writings was greatly enhanced by the collected texts of Carl Andre, Andrea Fraser, and Lawrence Weiner; and in his Alien Hybrid Creatures, Michael Krebber has assembled a visual syllabus to talk about dandyism--and an index to his elusive practice. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Martin Herbert [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] MARTIN HERBERT IS A WRITER AND CRITIC BASED IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS, KENT, ENGLAND. HE IS THE AUTHOR, MOST RECENTLY, OF CATALOGUE ESSAYS ON OLAF BREUNING AND BARNABY FURNAS, AND IS A CONTRIBUTOR TO VITAMIN D: NEW PERSPECTIVES IN DRAWING (PHAIDON, 2005). 1 "AN ASIDE" (CAMDEN ARTS CENTRE, LONDON) Making a virtue of the ballooning art world's deleterious impact on its own epistemology--i.e., no one can get a fix on the whole picture anymore--Tacita Dean's superb curatorial venture foreswore holistic mastery in favor of a journey through the artist's own cloud of unknowing. Chance meetings with art and artists (plus several Sebaldian coincidences) guided the collection of this daisy chain of works by, among others, Lothar Baumgarten, Paul Nash, Sharon Lockhart, Joseph Beuys, and Fischli & Weiss. An endeavor few "professional" curators would have risked, "An Aside" benefited hugely from Dean's eye for marvelous obscurities and offbeat affinities while arguing convincingly for faith in serendipity. 2 DARREN ALMOND (K21 KUNSTSAMMLUNG, DUSSELDORF) Almond's constellation of photography, film, and sculpture doesn't easily communicate its breadth and interdependence in smaller commercial shows. This attentively installed midcareer retrospective, though--drawing into its orbit polar exploration, global warming, trains, clocks, the Holocaust, the history of photography, and Almond's grandmother nostalgically watching ballroom dancers--repeatedly hit a high elegiac note, making the world (and the artist's place within it) seem small and inestimably precious. As happens all too rarely, I was floored. 3 SASKIA OLDE WOLBERS (SOUTH LONDON GALLERY, LONDON) Olde Wolbers makes one short film a year (the model environments she builds as miniature sets are seriously labor-intensive) and won Beck's Futures in 2004, so expectations were high for Trailer (2005). A loamy, digressive excursion across duplicitous surfaces--zonked footage depicts a liquefying jungle and a faded cinema while, in voice-over, a man recounts his discovery that he's the bastard product of an illicit old-Hollywood tryst--it cleared the bar and then some, authenticating Olde Wolbers as a fabulist in a class (and, quite possibly, world) of her own. 4 GUY BEN-NER (ISRAEL PAVILION, 51ST VENICE BIENNALE) An unlikely bouillabaisse of Nauman, Wegman, Chaplin, and Daniel Defoe. Ben-Ner's video Treehouse Kit, 2005, follows a Robinson Crusoe-like figure--the artist, in shorts and fake beard--stranded in a room, comically permuting flat-packed furniture into and out of the form of a tree (also on exhibition). Tension and tenderness ripple beneath the witty carapace, as this handyman's determined ingenuity feels inseparable from the New York-based Israeli artist's own status as an immigrant househusband trying to build a new life for his two kids. The latter previously dispensed charm all over Ben-Ner's reworkings of silent movies; here they're conspicuously absent, but one senses their presence just outside the frame. 5 "FACES IN THE CROWD" (WHITECHAPEL GALLERY, LONDON) I expected to hate this, since the mandate for inclusion seemed to be any work depicting people in modern times. The selection encompassed Manet's Masked Ball at the Opera, 1873, Chantal Akerman's D'Est, 1993, a Warhol Jackie, 1964, and works by Grosz, Beckmann, McCarthy, Duchamp, and innumerable others. But, crucially, its catholic profusion split the thesis into coteries and subsets so fast that one soon gave up on it and simply wandered, an indoor boulevardier, ticking off (and often luxuriating in) brilliances both newfound and familiar. 6 "FOLK ARCHIVE: CONTEMPORARY POPULAR ART FROM THE UK" (BARBICAN, LONDON) Britain's first folkart exhibition in half a century, and it took Jeremy Deller's post-Turner prestige (and help from cocurator Alan Kane) to achieve it. Packed with evidence (including artifacts, documentary video, and photographs) of unpretentious people doing unpredictable things--parading around in a suit made of burrs, offering a funeral service in which the hearse is a motorcycle sidecar, affectionately painting champion pipe-smokers--with scant regard for the world's opinion, "Folk Archive" was a bounteous miscellany that suggested the contemporary art scene as viewed through the looking glass. 7 RAPHAEL MONTANEZ ORTIZ (BLOOMBERG SPACE, LONDON) In his abyssal 1985 piece What Is This?--the highlight of "The Mind Is a Horse (Part 2)," the latest in an occasional series of video compendiums lassoed together by Bloomberg's curators--"Destructivist" artist Ortiz toggles agonizingly between frames of an old movie, stretching a few seconds of black-and-white celluloid (a girl rolling an unexploded bomb off a table, to her parents' horror) into nine minutes of stuttering Freudian psychodrama. Video may be more "real" nowadays, but rarely is it this visceral. 8 FANTOMAS, SUSPENDED ANIMATION (IPECAC ipecac /ip·e·cac/ (ip´e-kak) the dried rhizome and roots of Cephaelis ipecacuanha or C. acuminata; used as an emetic or expectorant. ip·e·cac (  p, 2005) 1. Load up on coffee and/or sugar. 2. Slip album four by Mike Patton's avant-metal supergroup out of its gorgeous, info-rich, Yoshitomo Nara-designed calendar for April 2005, each day of the month spotlighting a different angry kid. 3. Get pummelled by thirty one-minute-long tracks demonstrating that speed metal and Carl Stalling's onomatopoeic Warner Bros.-cartoon music reinforce each other's aesthetics beautifully, each style yoking bionic musicianship to mindless violence in order to divert the energetic overspill of kids and kidults. Suspended Animation is funnier (and heavier) than a boulder landing on Wile E. Coyote; unsurprisingly, my three-year-old daughter loves it too. 9 ETTORE SPALLETTI (HENRY MOORE INSTITUTE, LEEDS, UK) But we are complex beings, and after our conceptual rock we demand blissful, Minimalist painting/sculpture hybrids, painted in brow-soothing grays and Mediterranean azures. Again, it's a mood thing. The spikes in this show's cardiograph 1. An instrument used to record the mechanical movements of the heart. 2. See electrocardiograph. car di·og appear unpromising: a sly tonal modulation; a variance of angles in two paintings that tilt away from the wall; disporting natural light darkening and haloing curved surfaces. And yet--such is the recalibration of attention that Spalletti's exquisitely judged, indeterminacy-assisted art creates--each felt fleetingly epochal. 10 INTERNATIONAL BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PRAGUE In which the National Gallery of Prague, having ousted the Flash Art-organized biennial it hosted in 2003, mounted its own grand show. Chaotically hung (video projections in daylit spaces, anyone?), heavily seasoned with bad-to-indifferent local artists, but emphatically not designed in Italy, IBCA was a brilliant burlesque of the nationalist underpinnings and image-politicking of a hypertrophied biennial structure wherein your city's expo doesn't need to be any good--it just needs to exist and be homegrown. (This was satire, wasn't it?) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Thelma Golden [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] THE DIRECTOR AND CHIEF CURATOR AT THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM, NEW YORK, THELMA GOLDEN MOST RECENTLY ORGANIZED "FREQUENCY," A SURVEY OF WORK BY EMERGENT BLACK ARTISTS, WITH CHRISTINE Y. KIM. 1 THE AUDIENCE AT "BASQUIAT" (BROOKLYN MUSEUM) I had an irrepressible desire to channel the enthusiasm of a Borscht Belt emcee as I walked through the Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective. The audience embodied all of the cliches inherent to any conversation about "attracting a wider cross section of the public." Except that the "we are the world" crowd was real, not some marketing consultant's demographic fantasy. The turnout for "Basquiat" was truly multigenerational, genuinely multicultural, and completely engaged. That is what made the museum feel so astoundingly alive. 2 JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, "IN WORD ONLY" (CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK) The energy coursing through the rooms of "Basquiat" emanated not just from the huge, reverent crowds (whose murmurs and hums made for an incredible sound track) but from the paintings themselves. Clearly, one exhibition alone could not capture the complexity of Basquiat's work, making "In Word Only" a crucial complement. Exquisitely selected and thematically rich, this show presented Basquiat's text-based art in the form of paintings, drawings, and notebooks. In bluesman phrases and concrete poem fragments, we could see and feel Basquiat through his visual whispers and shouts. 3 STAN DOUGLAS, INCONSOLABLE MEMORIES There were many interesting moments at the 51st Venice Biennale (Olafur Eliasson, Hussein Chalayan, Kiki Smith, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and William Kentridge), and some refreshing moments (Francesco Vezzoli), but the most rewarding moment for me was Douglas's dazzling film, featured in "The Experience of Art," Maria de Corral's exhibition in the Italian pavilion. Douglas uses repetition to great effect in order to tell a powerful story of loss and despair that takes place in the era of the Mariel Boat Lift, when thousands of Cubans fled the country. Awash in melancholy, Inconsolable Memories hovers beautifully between fiction and reality. 4 ROBERT GOBER (MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY, NEW YORK) In the Reagan Era, there was so much bad in the world to react to that "political art" seemed a necessity, and Gober's exhibition reminded me of how much this moment is really the '80s all over again. What's more, if the idea of "political art" is in need of revision some twenty years later, then this show was a step in the right direction. Gober configured the gallery into a chapel, within which one could contemplate his ongoing cogent investigation of childhood, sexuality, and transcendence through a brilliant melange of object and image, memory and fact. As they say in the black church: "Can somebody say 'Amen'?" 5 YOHJI YAMAMOTO "JUSTE DES VETEMENTS" ("JUST CLOTHES," MUSEE DE LA MODE ET DU TEXTILE, PARIS) Yamamoto has always been one of the most compelling shape-shifters working in contemporary fashion design, his rejection of tradition having long ago assured his status as the avant-garde of the avant-garde. This career-spanning exhibition, done in collaboration with the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, presented an exhaustive look at his process and production. Ingeniously split between two sections that form a call and response between a survey and a revealing look at the designer's influences. "Juste des vetements" provided an intriguing model for a retrospective, both looking back and looking forward through an artist's work. 6 "SAFE: DESIGN TAKES ON RISK" (MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK) We all fear something--and especially at this moment, when acts and events that would have only recently been unimaginable are frighteningly common. With this timely look at attempts to create a sense of safety, curator Paola Antonelli's exhibition has the converse effect of highlighting our fears. Antonelli continually organizes shows that probe our responses to the world around us. "Safe" brilliantly encompasses social science and psychology in its presentation of indispensable designer solutions for all sorts of calamities: large and small, real and imagined. 7 BIG GROUP EXHIBITIONS I love Consumer Reports because while I can't research every existing cappuccino maker, I am thrilled to benefit from the knowledge of someone who has. For this reason, I applaud my colleagues who curate big group exhibitions. It is a thankless task, because we viewers find it hard to consider the selections at hand rather than the selections we would (but did not) make. I respect P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center's curatorial team for supporting this city's local art scene with "Greater New York 2005." I loved the big mess of it, the highs and the lows. Similarly, I am grateful to the curators at the Hayward Gallery in London for "Africa Remix," a flawed but important survey that sought to define contemporary African art across continents and aesthetic practices. 8 THE '60S AND '70S Several exhibitions this year made up an interesting and compelling coda to the proliferation of surveys focusing on artists from the '60s and '70s. First and foremost was "The Whole World Is Rotten: Free Radicals and the Gold Coast Slave Castles of Paa Jones" with its Ghanaian fantasy coffins at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. At the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, "Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Radical Imaginary" plotted a new visual and physical geography for Black Power. And I cannot forget the courtroom drawings of Malcolm X by Tracy Sugarman in "Malcolm X: A Search for Truth" at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. 9 JULIE MEHRETU (PROJECTILE, NEW YORK) A lot has been said this past year about Julie Mehretu's work. Its importance has been both debated and acclaimed. In the midst of all this, or perhaps in spite of it, her show of drawings at the Projectile gallery was a tour de force. Though her genius has always been acknowledged, it was particularly rewarding to see it made official when Julie received a MacArthur "genius grant" this past September. 10 KANYE WEST In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I was glued to the television, trying to digest the latest news, and felt truly angered by how quickly celebrity-filled telethons could be organized while aid for the victims proved to be so mystifyingly elusive. But during the haze of overproduced live "coverage." I was surprised, humored, and even proud of West's unscripted moment. Sure, he really didn't say anything that many were not already feeling. And sure, I wish it had come out of Condi's mouth instead. But as illustrated by Luc Tuymans's stunning painting The Secretary of State, 2005, her mouth remains resolutely shut. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] John Kelsey [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A NEW YORK-BASED ARTIST AND WRITER, JOHN KELSEY IS A MEMBER OF BERNADETTE CORPORATION AND CODIRECTOR OF REENA SPAULINGS, NEW YORK. 1 HURRICANE KATRINA Ask Stockhausen. As if timed for the opening of the Whitney's Robert Smithson retrospective, this was arguably less a natural disaster than a case of Land art land art or earthworks, art form developed in the late 1960s and early 70s by Robert Smithson, Robert Morris, Michael Heizer, and others, in which the artist employs the elements of nature in situ or rearranges the landscape with earthmoving equipment. The resulting work, often vast in scale, is subject to all natural changes, such as temperature variations, light and darkness, wind, and erosion. gone horribly wrong. An environmental and political tragedy of Spielbergian proportions, Katrina produced images of the sort of "naked life" we'd previously only identified with non-sites like Iraq. The drowned ghetto, the shooting of homeless looters, the police suicides, the forced evacuations, the superdomes filled with refugees--these are visions we can only try to erase. For some reason it was impossible not to imagine the hurricane as a terrorist act. And I guess it was--Made in USA. 2 RIOT THE BAR (BARD COLLEGE, ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY) A sort of antimonument to the Stonewall riots of 1969, RIOT THE BAR was a nightly drinking party and chaotic program of music, dancing, bonfires, talks, games, etc., culminating in the bar being auctioned off and then promptly destroyed in a nearby field. This week-long collaboration between Bard summer MFA students and faculty was conceived and "choreographed" by performance artist Ei Arakawa, who was inspired by his memory of a failed gay pride march in Tokyo and subsequent encounter with the banality of official gay culture in New York. Nothing remains but the zine Arakawa assembled to document the event: "It took some years to realize that WE ARE EVERYWHERE. Aren't you tired of this motto? Yes, you are ... welcome to RIOT THE BAR." 3 POOR THEATER The Wooster Group's Poor Theater appropriated, cunningly travestied, and thereby exorcized various demons that have long possessed its director: Jerzy Grotowski's legendary experimental theater in Poland, avant-garde choreographer William Forsythe, Max Ernst, and Hollywood westems. Involving fewer pyrotechnics than usual, the Group accomplished its magic with little more than bodies and language. Absorbing and then suddenly discarding Grotowski's hard-core physical exercises, alternating between Polish and English, playing back the tape-recorded commentary of a disappointed theater critic, launching into delirious danced monologues, and finally disappearing under the floorboards, Poor Theater was stripped-down for speed and as astonishing as anything Liz LeCompte and company have ever done. 4 THE READYMADE ARTIST How should we measure our distance from the avant-garde role models we learned about in school? How can we begin to treat the subjective whateverness of the contemporary artist? Coined by the Paris-based art collective Claire Fontaine, the term "readymade artist" seems perfectly adjusted to a situation where something like the "artist's life" no longer seems possible. No longer prophetic or revolutionary but professional and post-everything, we have no influence over the cultural apparatus that employs us, still less over its political function. Overexposed, inflated, instrumentalized beyond recognition, imposters in our own styles, miraculously outlasting our own purpose, as readymade artists we can begin to surpass our shared incompetence only by confronting the fact that contemporary art is no longer destined to act directly on reality. 5 MY LIFE IN CIA: A CHRONICLE OF 1973 (DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS) Harry Mathews's new novel is based on true events from his life in Paris during the year 1973, when he joined the experimental literary group Oulipo and unwittingly earned a reputation as an undercover CIA agent. Rather than deny his "true" profession (his repeated denials only made others more suspicious), Mathews decided to assume this new identity and play it to the hilt. All authors are imposters anyway. Mathews reinvents the memoir and himself by applying the language games he invented (with fellow Oulipians Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau) both to his experience of everyday life and to its recollection. My Life in CIA is a manual for escaping bourgeois literature through bourgeois literature, an autobiographical thriller packed with "evasive tactics," paranoia, fine wines, and false bottoms. 6 GALERIE MEERRETTICH (BERLIN) Artist Josef Strau curates this tiny glass "pavilion" (or giant vitrine) near Rosa-Luxemberg-Platz in Berlin. It is always there and almost always closed (except for openings). I was there one night in June for a live rooftop performance: Paulina Olowska and two friends used their bodies to spell out poems by Strau and others. 7 "JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES: BLACK LIGHT PAINTINGS" (NYEHAUS, NEW YORK) The most memorable painting show in New York this year was Humphries's tripped-out, daringly queasy exhibition of "Black Light Paintings" and painted light boxes. Her plugged-in works literally heated up the darkened rooms like ovens and melted down the boundary between painterly abstraction and sweaty nightclub decor. 8 THE ACCIDENT OF ART (SEMIOTEXT(E)) The latest in a series of dialogues between Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio that began with Pure War in 1983. The Accident of Art attempts to diagnose the crisis of aesthetics in the age of the cruise missile and the implant. Known for his extreme theories on speed and disappearance, Virilio claims that if contemporary art continues to deny the missing ground beneath its feet it will soon be past the point of producing anything worthwhile. Lotringer believes the crash has already happened, saying that art's proliferating market is nothing but camouflage for its own postmortem condition. Virilio replies that an accident is not the same as the end of art: There's still hope if art can live up to its own catastrophic destiny. 9 WAR OF THE WORLDS 9/11 revisited as multimillion-dollar B movie, embodied by unstoppable acting-machine Tom Cruise. 10 COCAINE KATE Destroy your favorite celebrity with a cell phone. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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