Best of 2006: every December, Artforum invites a broad spectrum of artists, critics, and curators to revisit the year in art. In the pages that follow, eleven contributors choose their top ten highlights and, for the first time, five others zero in for close-ups on single shows that, for them, rose above the others in 2006.

Thomas Lawson

A LOS ANGELES-BASED ARTIST AND WRITER, THOMAS LAWSON IS DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF ART, CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS, AND AN EDITOR OF THE JOURNAL AFTERALL. AN EXHIBITION OF HIS PAINTINGS WILL OPEN NEXT SPRING AT LAXART, LOS ANGELES.

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1 Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Sparta (Dunsyre, Scotland) Finlay's death this spring was a profound loss. But his garden remains a thoughtfully poetic legacy continuing to flourish in the high moorland country of southern Scotland. You can get lost in the intricacies of a mind contemplating the riddles of civilization in this studiously unkempt riff on the idea of a labyrinth. It is a carefully choreographed space, with the planting and the paths weaving through it bringing fragments of sculpture and language into and out of view. One moment you are in an intimate place contemplating a verse by Ovid or a small stone model of a tank; the next you turn a corner and the vista opens to a wild landscape prefaced by rough-cut boulders on which ORDER and DISORDER are inscribed in a severe Roman typeface.

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2 Monique Prieto, "A Great Stink of Burning but No Smoke" (ACME, Los Angeles) Intent on confronting the muteness of her earlier, nonrepresentational paintings, Prieto recently began using a weird, blocky, graffiti-inspired typeface to cram phrases from Samuel Pepys's diary into her paintings' frames--creating dramas of half-voiced anger, fear, and confusion that hover on the edge of the inarticulate. The clumped letters and words shout to be heard, and once deciphered remain strange, full of foreboding and threat.

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3 "Gustav Klimt: Five Paintings From the Collection of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer" (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) This aesthetically incandescent show created a delirious "what-if" moment: an imaginary permanent collection that would draw metaphoric links between Klimt's work and Los Angeles's early, Austrian-designed modernism, the weighty presence in the city of many intellectuals exiled from Nazism during the '30s and '40s, and, more recently, the light-filled sensuousness of Craig Kauffman and the decorative loopiness of Laura Owens. The paintings themselves were stunning, revealing a viable alternative to any Picasso-led version of the path to modernist abstraction. Here Art Nouveau patterning and Orientalist borrowings, with a splash of medievalism, come together to create shimmering surfaces of rhythmic pattern and a web of cross-cultural reference.

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4 "Nothing Is Neutral: Andrea Bowers" (Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles) This show, organized by REDCAT director Eungie Joo, was anchored by Letters to an Army of Three, 2005, a video in which actors, artists, and writers of various ages, genders, and races sit in front of flower arrangements reminiscent of Dutch still lifes and read the desperate pleas of people seeking help with abortions for themselves or for their loved ones. These heartbreaking letters, written during the '60s and early '70s to California-based activist group Army of Three, were reproduced elsewhere in the gallery as fine-grained drawings and juxtaposed with period wrapping paper featuring kitsch-pop floral designs. The power of the installation, with its graphic punch and searing intimacy, was matched by the visceral power of the words, and both were intensified by the horrible realization that current progress is constantly under threat.

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5 Neil Young I've spent a lot of time painting this year, and the sound track in my studio has been Prairie Wind (Reprise, 2005), Neil Young's best album in years, which was made even better by the release this year of Jonathan Demme's brilliantly simple concert film Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Demme's Ozu-inspired stationary camera reinforces the haunting grace Young achieves in the simplest repetitions and harmonies. Young's songs conjure a whole history of loss--of youth and innocence, of course, but also of a resonant folk tradition drowned by the relentless, attention-deficit-producing fast cut of commercial culture.

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6 Samuel Beckett, Eh Joe, adapted by Atom Egoyan for the Gate Theatre, Dublin (Duke of York's Theatre, London) In this performance of Beckett's 1965 television play Eh Joe, Michael Gambon appears alone on the stage, sharing the space with a huge screen that shows a close-up of his ravaged face in real time. In a series of nine movements the camera moves in ever tighter, while a female voice tells of the man's serial mistreatments of those who loved him. Gambon's face records each revelation with an unnerving precision. At thirty minutes, the piece is simple and short, cold and cruel.

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7 James Benning, Casting a Glance (work in progress) One of the pleasures of working at CalArts is keeping up with the work of brilliant colleagues. I recently saw several reels of raw footage from Benning's current project, a reconsideration, from the vantage point of Benning's hard-bitten romanticism, of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, 1970, through the lens of time. The finished work will consist of a series of one-minute stationary shots, edited from a year and a half of filming the monument in different seasons and at various water levels, revealing Smithson's project as both a melancholy testament to lost time and a still-breathing, ever-changing artwork.

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8 Rodney McMillian (Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles; "Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/McMillian," Walker Art Center, Minneapolis) Throughout his Vielmetter opening, McMillian repeatedly read Lyndon B. Johnson's "Great Society" speech from behind a podium, across from a big, blue, near-abstract painting with a crowd of crummy cardboard coffins scattered in front of it. In Doryun Chong's group show at the Walker, a video recording of this performance played in a gallery featuring a dirty-looking vinyl floor mounted on the wall (still holding the shape of the room it once served) and black-swathed columns of paint cans. Separately and together, these shows provided an extended essay on the rhetoric of hope and redemption brought low by seemingly inevitable entropic loss.

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9 Joan Jonas, The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (Dia:Beacon, Beacon, New York) Jonas works like a gardener, cutting and pruning images and ideas over time to bring forth new growth each year. Last spring I saw a workshop version of this piece at Rosamund Felsen's gallery in Los Angeles, but I was hardly prepared for the grandeur of the finished work in Dia:Beacon's huge basement space, with its Egyptian columns and reverberant acoustics. Conceived around the art historian Aby Warburg's 1923 lecture bemoaning the loss of a space for spirituality in modern life, The Shape ... offered a phantasmagoria of images and sound, using live performance, video feedback, and music. By collapsing space and time, as well as old-world and new-world cultures, into a hallucinatory garden of ideas and imagery, Jonas created an original space for the contemporary imagination, where devotion and reflection can exist without the trappings of institutional hierarchies.

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10 Farrow & Ball This summer Susan and I repainted our flat in Edinburgh, and became devotees of the paint company Farrow & Ball. The colors, apparently developed for those interested in the accurate re-creation of Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian country houses, are peculiarly subtle and very rich. They're evocatively named--"Mouse's Back," "Dead Salmon," "Book Room Red"--and satisfyingly dense, almost like the colors in early Brice Marden. And ecologically sound, too.

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Alison M. Gingeras

CURATOR OF THE FRANCOIS PINAULT COLLECTION, ALISON M. GINGERAS IS PREPARING THE NEXT EXHIBITION AT PALAZZO GRASSI, VENICE, SCHEDULED FOR JUNE 2007.

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1 Charles Ray's "A four dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures" (Matthew Marks Gallery, New York) An elegant exercise in distillation, this show was proof once again that artists are often superior curators. Ray condensed his analytic vision of sculpture--attuned specifically to how the medium defines and occupies "social space"--into four formally and conceptually disparate yet equally compelling works by four different artists. Alberto Giacometti's austere portrayal of the female form (Standing Woman, 1948), Mark di Suvero's monumental, precariously balanced assemblage of subway-inspired beams (The A Train, 1966), Edgar Tolson's disarmingly charming narration of the book of Genesis (The Fall of Man, 1969), and Jeff Wall's creepy two-dimensional mise-en-scene of middle-class Americana (A ventriloquist at a birthday party in October 1947, 1990) did not vie with one another; instead, the artworks quietly made the case for differing artistic strategies and preoccupations. Assembled by Ray under an intriguing title (quoting Giacometti), the combination of these four sculptures offered a rather revealing peek into this immensely important artist's mind.

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2 Ashley Bickerton (Sonnabend Gallery, New York; Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York) Bickerton is the most underestimated and overlooked artist of his generation, and this two-gallery overview last spring made the case for his full reinstatement on the art world's radar screen--and the urgent need for a full museum retrospective. His most recent works--painting/sculpture tableaux depicting les tristes tropiques and a series of self-exploitative portraits made in Bali--are as wonderfully toxic as the now classic-looking '80s icons, his faux-high-tech contraptions and his "abstract" logo paintings. Like his unconventional career choices, Bickerton's anthropological art forces us down an angry, politically incorrect path.

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3 David Hammons "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" could be David Hammons's motto for 2006, a year that saw both an unauthorized retrospective of his work made up of photocopies at the naughty Triple Candie arts center and a secondary-market show at Zwirner & Wirth (both in New York) made against the artist's wishes. These illicit yet highly rewarding attempts to conjure this elusive artist underscored how great work can resist even the most dubious of contexts--not to mention how hungry we all are for a real Hammons show.

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4 John Currin (Gagosian Gallery, New York) While writing an essay for Currin's latest monograph, out this month from Rizzoli and Gagosian, it became clear to me from studio visits with the artist that he has gone full tilt for his much-anticipated Gagosian debut. The signature cheesecake nudie imagery has given way to full-fledged porno--painted, naturally, in Currin's masterful Mannerist style. Perhaps this is a brilliant visual response to the gang of moralists who publicly pelted Currin for "selling out"? In addition to the pleasures of the flesh, Currin delivers quieter yet equally disconcerting images of figures reading books (2070, 2005, is a standout) and a gem of a still life with china tableware (Heritage Hall, 2003-2006).

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5 "Lucio Fontana: Venice/New York" (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice) This neo-avant-garde master's Tale of Two Cities is chock-full of seductive materiality and metaphysical ambition. In two previously little-known groups of Concetti spaziali from the early '60s, Fontana captured the majesty of Venice through a Byzantine series of works--complete with Murano glass-studded canvases and liberal use of gold and silver pigments--while he invoked the towering architectural presence of New York using slashed sheets of gleaming copper. Organized by Luca Massimo Barbero, this was a bijou of an exhibition.

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6 "Yves Klein: Corps, couleur, immateriel" (Centre Pompidou, Paris) What stand out in this Klein retrospective, organized by Camille Morineau, are not the "pure" art objects but all that is "impure"--the tuxedo-clad musicians, the naked ladies, the gold leaf thrown into the Seine, the Rosicrucian regalia, the judo poses, the leap into the void, etc. While his IKB monochromes, fire paintings, and grand anthropometries are as gorgeous as ever, it is the orchestration of Klein's persona that seems most significant today. This show confirms Klein's place as the undisputed godfather of Eurotrash.

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7 "Voyage(s) en utopie, Jean-Luc Godard, 1946-2006: a la recherche d'un theoreme perdu" (Centre Pompidou, Paris) JLG avoided the trap of translating his cinematic oeuvre into video-installation art by addressing the problem head-on. The perennial soixante-huitard served up a glorious, deliberately unsatisfying mess: A scatter art-like installation punctuated with snippets of video montages from the history of cinema came off as deliberately shoddy and unfinished. As the official press release glued to the wall at the show's entrance cited "creative, technical, and financial problems" in realizing the show (with the words technical and financial crossed out by Godard), it was no secret from the get-go that the auteur was actively thwarting the attempt to institutionalize his work. Not many artists would indulge in such an open celebration of the impossible--nor would they dare to fire the exhibition curator!

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8 Mike Kelley, "Day Is Done" (Gagosian Gallery, New York) A cusp pick from the last months of 2005, Kelley has cast a long shadow into 2006. This Coney Island-like constellation of sculptural installations-cum-stage sets and video projections pushed Kelley's ongoing investigations of adolescent angst, repressed desire, and subcultural milieux to a crescendo of complexity. Inspired by photographs of freaky afterschool antics culled from high school yearbooks, his thirty-one Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions created a darkly entertaining portrait of our collective unconscious.

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9 Sophie Calle When Sophie Calle placed a classified ad in the daily newspaper Liberation this past June seeking a curator for her show in the French Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, it was a brilliant gesture consistent with her playful, irreverent oeuvre. But the real stroke of genius came when she chose her rigorous compatriot Daniel Buren from among the "approximately two hundred candidates." No matter the end result, Sophie's Choice is perhaps one of her best conceptual works to date.

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10 Collecting Contemporary, Adam Lindemann (Taschen) If the '90s were about the figure of the Curator, our current zeitgeist is focused on the cult of the Collector. Lindemann managed to get all the major art-world players from Charles Saatchi and Baroness Marion Lambert to Barbara Gladstone and Glenn Lowry, to weigh in on art and commerce. More a trashy confessional than a how-to, this juicy tome is tantamount to art porn. Amid all the cheap thrills and egomania, there are some sociological pearls to be gleaned from these gossipy tales of flipping famous artworks, secondary-market speculation, and rivalry among artists and dealers.

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Maureen Gallace

Art Institute of Chicago

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house, my crypto-dream-house,
that crooked box set up on pilings, shingled green, a sort of artichoke
of a house, but greener (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?), protected
from spring tides by a palisade of--are they railroad ties? (Many things
about this place are dubious.) I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms: look through binoculars,
read boring books, old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days, watch the droplets slipping, heavy with
light.
--Elizabeth Bishop, from "The End of March"

MAUREEN GALLACE frequently paints houses--the buildings and landscapes, destinations nearby and routes to and from her hometown of Monroe, Connecticut; views and memories of views, abstract and yet faithful to the proto-crypto-structures that give meaning to the phrase "where I come from."

At a moment with too much talk of things being done over there so that they don't happen here at home, there is little talk of how the elusive construct of "homeland security" is a proto- and crypto-fantasy. While it would be remiss to yoke too swiftly the construct to Gallace's paintings, the resolution of her work, which at first glance can seem as innocuous as a Christmas card, allows a place for thinking about the political unconscious of domesticity, even if that is not "why" the work is made.

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Her pictures of structures--utterly unnostalgic and strange--manage to make most other contemporary painting look thin, overeager, and, in the end, fearful. This was clear at the Art Institute of Chicago's generous exhibition of Gallace's recent landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, organized by James Rondeau in collaboration with the artist. After some time with her work, it is difficult to imagine looking at the stridencies of Lisa Yuskavage, John Currin, Julie Mehretu, et al., so desperate they are to disappear vulnerability behind historical posing and earnest gimmickry, risking little or nothing.

Instead, Gallace's paintings, while at times taciturn and recalcitrant, convey a self and its privacies, a world where light registers an emotional state, color marks the temperature of temperament, and brushwork tracks a psychic meteorology. Take Cape Cod, Winter, 2004, a meditation on the empathetic possibility of ice blues, salt grays, and littoral neutrality depicted in the uncluttered form of two white, unwin-dowed, undoored, unenterable units, where light is slant and erasing, and consider it in relation to February, 2005, with its huddled, crimson buildings and sloe-eyed entrances, snowy fields, and snow-laced trees warmed by an early spring's sudden, unexpected arrival. Nature, of course, doesn't care whether anyone finds it welcoming or not. Gallace confronts this natural obliviousness in the accuracy of her views, and yet she also renders the mood--hers, anyone's--that allows certain winter days, months, to seem starker or more resplendent than others. February's valentine remains all the more moving and cherry-blossom tender because it refuses conclusiveness: Despite Gallace's unerring composition, which aims to make the casual perfect, she manages to engage the cheerful flux of the daily, the interruption of being, sunlight breaking through cloud.

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Gallace uses her own photographs as source material, winnowing particular vantages of her local knowledge, but these are little more than placeholders, as it should be obvious from looking that the artist abjures making work "about" photography or the photographic. Her pictures take up a lineage, from Cezanne and Gwen John to Morandi and Ryman, of what could be called homemade, rather than machine-made, modernity: As much as they are "about" painting, they approach a site, allegorical and not, a concept as well as an actuality, called "home"--the place where sexuality and being are formed, where anyone first begins to think about who he or she is and desires, the question of leaving home, and the possibility of homelessness, in the offing.

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At this point, in an earlier draft of this text, I mentioned Neil Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and then swerved into some kind of catchy autobiographical ramble about my own bedroom when I was growing up, a converted attic space where I would listen to records (Donna Summer, Blondie, X), read, do whatever--nothing, or almost nothing--for hours on end, in a room with a door I could lock from the inside, a room that helped form, I guess, whoever I am. But the first person now catches in my throat like a fish bone. I remember reading something about memoir being a kind of disfigurement or defacement. So much more intense to convey something--dark, salt, intimate--that mines the personal by way of the oblique, seemingly neutral, or mute. Gallace's untimely, unlikely considerations of earthly abidance provide the challenge of such observation, evidence heavy with light.

BRUCE HAINLEY IS A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF ARTFORUM AND THE AUTHOR, MOST RECENTLY, OF FOUL MOUTH (2ND CANNONS, 2006).

Okwui Enwezor

OKWUI ENWEZOR IS DEAN OF ACADEMIC AFFAIRS AND SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF THE SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE; ADJUNCT CURATOR AT THE INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY, NEW YORK; AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE 2ND INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART OF SEVILLE, CURRENTLY ON VIEW.

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1 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf) The last few years have seen an explosion of new postcolonial writing by sophisticated, confident young African writers. Adichie is a Nigerian writer justly lauded for her lucid, well-crafted novels. Half of a Yellow Sun uses the genre of historical fiction to unfold and illuminate the anguish of fratricide and social disintegration brought about by Nigeria's civil war during the 1960s. Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), made her a writer to watch; this book establishes her as a contemporary talent comparable to Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, Monica Ali, or Chris Abani.

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2 Luc Tuymans, Alarm (Belgium) Long-simmering xenophobia has swept across Europe, bringing once-shunned anti-immigrant extremist parties into the mainstream. As Vlaams Belang, the far-right party of Belgium's northern Flanders region appeared on the verge of making large gains in local elections, Tuymans and others organized Alarm, a tour de force of political and social protest and a work of moral courage. The simple yet powerful premise was for cultural institutions across Belgium to turn on their fire alarms and evacuate their buildings at 3 PM on October 5 for fifteen minutes. One week later Vlaams Belang polled strongly in the election but failed to take control of Antwerp. Perhaps the alarm bells will ring louder for the fire next time.

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3 "Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture" (Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York) This show debuted in Chicago last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, then made stops in London and Berlin--but it arrived in New York this past fall as fresh as ever. "Tropicalia" is curator Carlos Basualdo's elegant essay on Brazil's revolutionary creative period of the late 1960s, when avant-garde artists such as Helio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Lygia Pape, among many others, actively worked on the politics of form in music, visual art, design, architecture, and radical subjectivity. Basualdo extends the exhibition's logic of horizontality by mixing and integrating different artistic genres in order to relay the democracy of its content.

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4 "Fischli & Weiss: Flowers & Questions. A Retrospective" (Tate Modern, London) Since the 1970s this Swiss duo has created an oeuvre of strangely coherent heterogeneity. Tate Modern's retrospective, organized by Vicente Todoli and Bice Curiger, brings together sculpture, film, video, and photography. Filling the institution's capacious galleries, the exhibition explores questions of time, travel, consumerism, and mythology in works deploying humor and irony within rigorous conceptual premises, in veritable Fischli & Weiss fashion.

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5 Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World," Countdown with Keith Olbermann (MSNBC) In this season of partisan extremism, Olbermann uses satirical commentary to excoriate the excesses of the dumb political Right--in particular, baleful gasbags such as Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly and radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Many news shows have been complicit in shoring up the disastrous power of the Republican Party. Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World" segment manages at least to provide good comic relief.

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6 "Robert Rauschenberg: Combines" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in association with the Met (and curated by MOCA'S Paul Schimmel), this exhibition of Rauschenberg's highly inventive collage and mixed-media work from the 1950s and early '60s was one of the best shows in recent memory. In piece after piece it became clear that Rauschenberg is not merely contemporary art's poet of obsolescence but a figure whose creative influence--particularly regarding installation-art practices--is yet to be properly absorbed. He remains a pioneer.

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7 "David Hammons: The Unauthorized Retrospective" (Triple Candie, New York) Hammons is legendary for his style of public refusal, reticence, and shallow distance from conventional art-world celebration. One might view this absence as a carefully staged form of visibility, understanding Hammons's stance as its own performance, a form of asceticism that stokes an ever-greater desire for his rare exhibitions. The recent "retrospective" of his work at Triple Candie provided a case in point: When Hammons declined an invitation to show at the nonprofit space, the directors went ahead and held a Hammons show anyway, making photocopy bootlegs of his work. Compare this to his appearance two years ago in the Dak'Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art (in a section curated by Salah M. Hassan and Cheryl Finley). His weeklong sheep raffle, accompanied by music and dancing in the streets of Dakar, proved a radical mastery of public space and social reciprocity. Tombola du Mouton was easily one of the most memorable works of contemporary art I have witnessed.

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8 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, "Of Mice and Men" When the trio who brought us the Wrong Gallery--Maurizio Cattelan, Ali Subotnick, and Massimiliano Gioni--were asked to organize the fourth installment of the Berlin Biennial, there was no shortage of detractors who thought the exhibition would fall victim to Cattelan's penchant for calculated practical jokes. They were wrong. "Of Mice and Men" was a serious enterprise: focused, beautifully installed, and dazzling in its settings in desolate, crumbling apartments and an abandoned Jewish school on the potholed, charmingly decrepit Auguststrasse. The curators guided viewers through spaces haunted by history, turning the exhibition into a tour of the bleak landscape that is Europe's current state of mind. They proved that biennials are still places where curatorial intelligence and experimentation can reside.

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9 Emergency Biennale in Chechnya Using the creative flexibility of the biennial format to convey Chechnya's anational condition, curator and critic Evelyne Jouanno has taken a Duchampian approach, mounting exhibitions in multiple cities using nothing more than a few suitcases. Last year, in the biennial's first incarnation, the work of more than sixty artists was displayed at Paris's Palais du Tokyo, while Jouanno shipped duplicates of the art as well as new works in valises to other venues. This ever-changing exhibition--carving out an itinerary of transitory, endless, transformative solidarity and empathy, and providing a substitute for the perennial aid package--will finally be brought together in the ravaged city of Grozny, Chechnya, in 2007. Peace permitting.

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10 The United Nations General Assembly (New York) For pure political theater, no stage in the world rivals the ritualistic annual meeting of the world's heads of state and their coteries of diplomatic mandarins. With global affairs inflamed and in tatters, the political masters of the universe (Bush, Blair) use the stage to sing their Cassandra songs, while the opposition (Chavez, Ahmadinejad) wail their own arias of resistance to the suffocating imperium of America. The General Assembly remains a unique arena of global politics. Who can forget the dashing, nattily attired Yasser Arafat cloaked in revolutionary chic in his 1974 performance? Or the Hollywood-ready Fidel Castro in 1960? Or Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on the lectern? This year brought us Bush on Iraq (again) and Chavez's excoriation of American hyper-power. All this is nimbly presided over by the secretary-general-cum-ringmaster. No irony. Only a proper sense of occasion, with, of course, a stiff upper lip.

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Rita Kersting

RITA KERSTING WAS UNTIL RECENTLY DIRECTOR OF THE KUNSTVEREIN FOR DIE RHEINLANDE UND WESTFALEN, DUSSELDORF, AND IS A MEMBER OF THE PURCHASING COMMISSION FOR THE GERMAN NATIONAL COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY ART.

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1 Thomas Hirschhorn, Altar for Ingeborg Bachmann (Alexanderplatz subway station, Berlin) Hirschhorn used the vocabulary of street memorials--cuddly toys, candles, and collages of photographs and texts--to create this secular altar dedicated to the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who died in Rome in 1973. The incredible power of this work lay in its combination of reflection, personal affection, and Pop gesture. Initially wondering if someone had passed away in the station, people started reading Bachmann's subtle, philosophical poems, quotations from which were included in the work, along with her books themselves. Death is Bachmann's central theme, and Hirschhorn took it up with bravura, interrupting people's journeys to take them where they had not intended to go.

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2 Tacita Dean, "Analogue" (Schaulager, Basel) Much of Dean's work from the past fifteen years portrays processes of disintegration or disappearance. Her works confront us with brief, cosmic moments, such as the solar eclipse in Banewl, 1999, or with vestigial traces of the past in the present--the setting sun in the West reflected and refracted in East Berlin's Palace of the Republic, or an old man limping through a vast modernist villa. Appropriately, Dean's latest work, Kodak, 2006, portrays the end of film itself, documenting the final days of celluloid production at Kodak's last European plant, in Chalon-sur-Saone, France. Dean calls the film manufacturing process "a journey of overwhelming beauty." Now it is about to disappear forever.

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3 Alexandra Leykauf and Lisa Oppenheim (Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam) Oppenheim's "Damaged" series consists of prints made from broken and deteriorating glass negatives in the archives of the Chicago Daily News. Bearing abstract traces of the original images, the photographs are presented together with their original captions. The temporal aspects of photography are central to Oppenheim's work, which was shown together with that of Leykauf, who focuses on the medium's suppression of depth. In her "Hotel des Grottes" series, for example, caves are visible only as patches of black. These two young artists--born in 1975 and 1976, respectively--use found images to investigate the underpinnings of visibility. They explore the conventions of reception and turn photography into a kind of shadow play.

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4 John Stezaker (The Approach, London) Long a prominent figure in the London art world, Stezaker combined different times, genres, and atmospheres in his delicate new collages. In his portrait series "Marriage," 2006, the artist splices together masculine and feminine into single figures in a tender yet uncanny way, while in "Love," 2006, he conveys a kind of frightening ecstasy by doubling his subjects' eyes. Effective and rich both in their overt narratives and theoretical implications, such works provide yet more evidence of Stezaker's affections for Surrealism, Expressionism, film, architecture, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and literature.

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5 Isa Genzken (Wiener Secession) Wheelchairs, walkers, and folding chairs were scattered around the gallery, resembling grotesque figures in a hellish beach scene. Some were intensely decorated with consumer goods, like fetishes; some were left sober and functional; on others, scary dolls with big sunglasses sat in the shade of bright beach umbrellas. During the heat of last summer, this exhibition (organized by Annette Freudenberger) sent a chill down your spine and made you feel lonely. But Genzken's vision, though terrifying, is full of beauty. Her new work was a breathtaking surprise, the next stage in her magnificent, painterly sculpture.

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6 Monika Baer (Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, The Netherlands) This retrospective, organized by the museum's Alexander van Grevenstein in collaboration with Bernhart Schwenk and Gail Kirkpatrick, confirmed the power and unusual nature of Baer's work. For the first time, it was possible to see her seemingly disparate oeuvre in one location: her "Mozart Series," 1996-97--early paintings of a Rococo theater stage with string puppets; her white pictures, sparingly painted with strange portraits and sometimes cut open; and her new, dreamlike landscapes. In her virtuoso paintings and collages, Baer creates timeless and placeless scenes, in which bodies and narratives are fragmented elements existing in their own entirely imaginary pictorial realm furnished with references from the history of painting.

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7 "Lothar Baumgarten: Imago Mundi" (Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Germany) This extensive retrospective included Baumgarten's wonderful series of photographs from South America, "Montaigne," 1977-85; the installation Imago Mundi, 2002-2004, which brilliantly demonstrated the artist's lifelong concern with colonialism, color, and photography; and a more recent work, Fragment, Brazil, 2005, which is centered around slides of paintings of fantastic Brazilian birds by a seventeenth-century Dutch artist. A pioneer in handling issues of cultural identity and migration, Baumgarten uses his immense knowledge and material skill to make beautiful, rich work.

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8 Tino Sehgal, The Kiss (Berlin Biennial) Following detailed instructions from Sehgal, a couple lay down and began to kiss on the floor of the mirrored hall of Berlin's Ballhaus Mitte. The piece referenced other depictions of kisses, from those of Auguste Rodin (heartfelt devotion) to those of Jeff Koons (theatrical spectacle). Intimacy and artificiality blended into each other imperceptibly. Sehgal's works annoy many people who deem themselves the guardians of institutional critique, but his art not only reflects upon location, history, and the conventions of the art world, it breathes new life into these issues in a completely liberating way.

9 Martin Kippenberger (K21, Dusseldorf) This show opened with The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika," 1994, a piece as inquisitive and ambitious as it is despairing--even after having been scaled down for K21 from its original huge and devastating installation in Rotterdam. Much of the exhibition--organized by Tate Modern's Jessica Morgan and Doris Krystoff at K21--investigated Kippenberger's delegation of painting to others, an idea still unacceptable in Dusseldorf, where the art academy holds sway even today. His antimetaphysical tendency was most explicit in Heavy Burschi (Heavy Guy), 1991, a collection of destroyed paintings in a dumpster, surrounded by photographs of the paintings in wooden frames (in the enormous format favored in the city). The show's final works--unforgettable self-portraits, in which Kippenberger wears only underpants--were especially poignant, at once brave and melancholy.

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10 Joseph Beuys, Block Beuys (Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany) In 1970 Beuys installed his own work in seven galleries of this museum, creating the Block Beuys. He revised its composition several times, but since his death in 1986 it has been kept exactly as it was. It is both frozen in time and a time bomb. The galleries, whose walls are covered in jute, contain many works from 1949 to 1970, including major early endeavors such as Szene aus der Hirschjagd (Scene from a Deer Hunt), 1961, Grauballemann (Gray Bog Man), 1952, and Jungfrau (Virgin), 1961, as well as many other sculptures and objects, mostly in vitrines. The installation is now at risk because the museum, whose commitment to the Block Beuys has varied drastically over the years, is about to be renovated. The future of this physically and spiritually dense legacy is not yet clear, but one must hope that it will be preserved unchanged.

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Pierre Bonnard

Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

FRIENDS KNOW IT IS NOT MY HABIT to praise the installation of French museum shows, but this past January my reverse chauvinism was (temporarily) overturned, as Paris offered three superbly hung exhibitions, each very different in tone: "Dada," whose overflowing and overstimulating presentation at the Centre Pompidou made its subsequent, much reduced American incarnations (at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York) look absurdly bland; "Ed Ruscha: Photographer" at the Jeu de Paume, a greatly expanded and far better version of a 2004 show at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art; and, finally, "Pierre Bonnard: The Work of Art, Suspending Time" at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This last exhibition was the one I had specifically made the transatlantic trip to see, and this for two reasons. The first was to pay homage to Suzanne Page, for it was her swan song, the last exhibition she curated at the museum where for more than three decades (first as contemporary curator, then as director) she had been the most active advocate of international contemporary art in the overly cautious French museum world. The second was to see if what I had written in the catalogue (I contributed an essay but had no curatorial involvement) stood the test of empirical observation (immodestly, I think it did). For unlike other exhibitions and critical assessments that have cast Bonnard as a realist capturing things "as we see them," the show convincingly argued from the start that his universe is as much a dreamland as those of Odilon Redon (an artist he loved) and Giorgio de Chirico (whose work I doubt he ever saw).

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Thanks to the very beautiful 1998 exhibition curated by Sarah Whitfield at the Tate Gallery in London and presented by John Elderfield at MOMA, we have forgotten how easy it is to make a lousy Bonnard show (I have seen quite a few). A good half of his painting production, which totals more than two thousand canvases, is mediocre at best, and most of his numerous portraits, which he hated undertaking, are excruciatingly bad, pure bourgeois kitsch. (His rare self-portraits are, on the contrary, perhaps the most moving produced in the twentieth century.) So, while the curator of any exhibition always faces choices, in the case of Bonnard they are drastic. Fearless, Page, aided by her cocurators, Francois Michaud and Jacqueline Munck, had no qualms about getting rid of the exhaustivity principle: The show was not about presenting Bonnard's whole, very long career from his Nabi debut to his glorious final years. Instead, Page asked not simply, What are good Bonnards? but What are his truly original works? What is his specific contribution to the art of the first half of the twentieth century? Everything else she dismissed as redundant. For example, only a few Nabi works were included to inaugurate the show, and they were completely uncharacteristic of the quietude usually associated with that school. They included the three very erotic large canvases of 1899-1900, L'Indolente (Indolence), Le Sommeil (Sleep), and L'Homme et la femme (which are unlike anything produced in French painting at that time) and the insane decorative panels done for Misia Sert in 1906-10. Right from the outset, then, these two groupings--erotic compositions and decorative panels--indicated we would not see the usual Bonnard but that his eccentricity would be played up.

After these series came the exhibition's curatorial tour de force: the first return to Paris of all four major works bought by the pioneering Russian collector Ivan Morozov before the October Revolution. Here you realized that Bonnard was perhaps not simply eccentric but actually quite mad. Among the most striking of these sometimes huge canvases was L'Automne, Les Vendanges (Autumn, Fruit Harvest), 1912, in which a gigantic tree reminiscent of some Japanese anime monster occupies more than half the picture's surface and completely dwarfs the figures barely perceptible beneath it. Another was the loony La Danse from 1912 (a response to Matisse?), where there is absolutely no realistic, coherent viewpoint and in which it is impossible to determine what the figures are actually doing, what the elements of the landscape are, and what their relationship is to one another. So much for the critical saw that Bonnard painted things as we perceive them!

Besides these three specific groupings, the exhibition consisted almost entirely of works dating from 1920 on, including Bonnard's last painting, the small L'Amandier en fleur (Almond Tree in Bloom), which he finished on his deathbed in 1947. One of the show's two strong suits was its selection of "bathtub" paintings (many more were included than in the Tate/MOMA show), in which Bonnard's wife, Marthe, is shown eternally young, even though by the time he completed the last one in 1946 she had already died four years earlier at the age of seventy-three. The other major area of focus was the "garden seen from a window" paintings, beginning with the Minneapolis Art Institute's Salle a manger a la campagne (Dining Room in the Country), 1913 (a very unusual painting for its early date, especially in view of the truckload of wholly unimaginative works Bonnard produced in the teens) and ending with the mesmerizing L'Atelier au mimosa (The Studio with Mimosa) of 1939-46 (sadly, its pendant from the Phillips Collection was missing). There were many unpopulated or barely peopled landscapes and garden views--all chosen, it seems, for their oneiric quality, as if to make sure people got that Bonnard was no Impressionist and in fact was much closer to Surrealism. In addition, there were some still lifes and interior scenes (including one that so intrigued Antonin Artaud that he copied it) and a small section devoted to Bonnard's tiny vintage photographs. Finally, there was also a selection of the small sketches he made daily in his pocket appointment books, each accompanied by his record of the day's weather (RAINY, SUNNY, WINDY), a practice he long maintained until his beloved Marthe stopped living her life mainly spent in the bathtub. All these masterful selections were impeccably installed in a show that was airy, well paced, and beautifully lit (evenly, without any showy spotlights). And although it comprised mainly series and each group was visible at a glance, individual works were still given enough space to be contemplated by themselves.

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More than any other exhibition I've seen, this one made the whole cliche of Bonnard as the hedonic bard of bourgeois domesticity crumble at your feet. The French press, however--and here another reverse chauvinism of mine remained intact--did not get it at all.

YVE-ALAIN BOIS IS A PROFESSOR AT THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, PRINCETON, NJ, AND A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF ARTFORUM.