Fall 2004 preview: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between September and December.

Robert Smithson

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

September 12-December 13

Curated by Eugenie Tsai with Connie Butler

One of postwar art's canniest theoretical provocateurs, Robert Smithson was famously ambivalent about conventional museums. His writings and public statements are replete with sardonic jeremiads likening museums to "asylums," "jails," and cultural "tombs" that force art into "esthetic convalescence" and "stupendous inertia." Yet at the same time, few artists have thought as strategically as Smithson about the relationship between extra-institutional gestures and the gallery environment--about how best to manipulate established modes of display to excite the network of references he conjured among the various artifacts, activities, and locations involved in his work.

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In the thirty-odd years since his death, Smithson has become an indispensable component of the contemporary canon. And despite a practice that interrogates the very idea of the museum, his diverse work--a complex gallery-based practice, seminal site-specific environmental projects, and eclectic and erudite writings--demands the kind of large-scale scholarly appraisal that only major institutions are equipped to present fully. This fall sees the arrival of such an exhibition as independent curator Eugenie Tsai debuts her eagerly awaited "Robert Smithson," the first American retrospective of the artist in a quarter century and the most comprehensive ever, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Tsai, a former senior curator at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art who organized the highly regarded exhibition "Robert Smithson Unearthed" at Columbia University in 1991, says that Smithson's "aesthetic of the 'entropic landscape,'" with its "allusions to a prehistoric past and science-fiction future," remains as relevant today as ever. And she notes that the artist's complicated relationship with the institutional context is integral to this continuing appeal. "It may not necessarily be in the form of Earthworks per se, but rather in the idea of working beyond the walls of the museum or the gallery, of investing your art in social systems," she says of his ongoing influence, "and questioning the whole power structure of the art world and its institutions."

"Robert Smithson" will feature some 180 objects--little-known paintings, drawings, and collages from the late '50s and early '60s among them, as well as extensive documentation of major Earthworks in the American West and elsewhere--and a substantial catalogue with essays by scholars including Thomas Crow, Suzaan Boettger, Ann Reynolds, Richard Sieburth, and MOCA curator Connie Butler. More than just "a heap of language," Tsai's catalogue, and the ambitious show it accompanies, promises a new perspective on this most eloquent, and contentious, of artists--an institutional appraisal of an often aggressively anti-institutional figure that hopefully won't be afraid to let a bit of its subject's high-desert spirit invade the clean white corners of the museum.--Jeffrey Kastner

Travels to the Dallas Museum of Art, Jan. 14-Apr. 3, 2005; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 23-Oct. 16, 2005.

NEW YORK

East Village USA

New Museum of Contemporary Art

December 2-March 19, 2005

Curated by Dan Cameron

The East Village scene of the early '80s--a roiling stew pot of artistic endeavors and a cesspool of degradation, intentional or otherwise--still exerts a powerful hold on the imagination of those who lived through its glories and excesses and those born circa 1985, the year Carlo McCormick declared the whole shebang dead in the East Village Eye. Opening at the New Museum's temporary Chelsea location, this survey outlines counterculture antecedents and attempts to encompass the full spectrum of Alphabet City with more than eighty artists, from avatars of graffiti art and punk expressionism to pencilsharpening practitioners of the neogeo and "Pictures" typology. Will Fun Gallery proprietor and underground-film star Patti Astor attend the opening? I sure hope so.--David Rimanelli

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Isamu Noguchi

Whitney Museum of American Art

October 28--January 16, 2005

Curated by Valerie Fletcher

Focusing on Isamu Noguchi's series of wood and stone totems that evoke the nearly sentient quality particular to his work, this retrospective covering mainly the early '30s to the early '60s celebrates the centenary of the Japanese artist's birth. Also featured are sixty-five sculptures and twenty drawings, all highlighting Noguchi's mix of European modernism with Japanese tradition and his extraordinary sense of material and form. Organized jointly by the Whitney and the Hirshhorn and curated by the latter's Valerie Fletcher, the show is accompanied by a catalogue that features essays by Fletcher, Bonnie Rychlak, and Dana Miller. Travels to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Feb. 10, 2005-May 8, 2005.--Dike Blair

Katharina Sieverding

P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center

October 17-January 31, 2005

Curated by Alanna Heiss, Daniel Marzona, and Amy Smith-Stewart

While inundated with photography by students of the Bechers, we are less familiar with those, like Katharina Sieverding, who studied with Joseph Beuys. Sieverding, born in Prague in 1944, worked in Dusseldorf from 1967 until 1972. Known chiefly for large-scale photography that pushes its subjectivist dimensions, she often focuses on her own body, submitting her visage to various forms of photographic dissolution. This survey of roughly a dozen works--multimedia installations, photographic series, and film and slide projections--is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by, among others, Brian O'Doherty and Norman Bryson and provides American audiences with their first museum show of Sieverding's work. Travels to Kunst-Werke Berlin, dates TBA.--T.J. Demos

Design [not equal to] Art

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

September 10-February 20, 2005

Curated by Barbara Bloemink and Joseph Cunningham

It has become almost rote to pronounce a blurring of the line between art and design. Artists who have dabbled in both disciplines have, however, felt the need to delineate boundaries. "The intent of art is different from that of [design], which must be functional," Donald Judd said. "A work of art exists as itself, a chair exists as a chair itself." The washroom sink that Judd designed for his home is on view here among sixty-nine functional objects by eighteen other luminaries of minimalist aesthetics, from John Chamberlain's table made of car parts to Rachel Whiteread's daybed formed from the casts of negative space around a bed. It's form following function, albeit not without a detour or two.--Tom Vanderbilt

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BOSTON

Lucy McKenzie

Institute of Contemporary Art

September 22-January 2, 2005

Curated by Nicholas Baume

Many of Lucy McKenzie's activities--like Flourish Nights, informal events organized at her collective studio in Glasgow--center on collaborative practices. But the Scottish artist also teams up to work on her own installations, curatorial probings, and site-specific projects (in locations as diverse as the Sunday Herald Magazine or the shipyard in Gdansk). Referencing such sources as the 1980 Moscow Olympics, handmade East German Depeche Mode concert flyers, and fascist and socialist mural paintings, McKenzie's paintings, drawings, and installations always engage visual manifestations of political culture, intertwining the personal and the social. This show, McKenzie's first in a US museum, consists of new works specifically produced for the ICA.--Christian Rattemeyer

Cerith Wyn Evans

Museum of Fine Arts

October 6-January 30, 2005

Curated by William Stover

"I'm interested in evoking polyphony, superimposition, layers, levels, the occluded and the visibility of the mask," remarks Cerith Wyn Evans on his commitment to an uncommonly erudite artistic practice. A former assistant to director Derek Jarman, Wyn Evans completed several experimental films before returning to sculpture in the '90s. Employing fireworks, mirrors, and neon--and notably commissioning a remake of Brion Gysin's "Dreamachine"--he investigates the phenomenology of language and perception with a romantic touch. Wyn Evans has achieved recognition in Europe and Japan but is rarely seen in the US. This first American museum survey features about fifteen objects and installations and a new project to be shown concurrently at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.--Michael Wilson

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ITHACA, NY

E.V. Day

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art

October 23-January 9, 2005

Curated by Andrea Inselmann

For her taut and tart sculptural work, E.V. Day has taken women's undergarments off the body and into the realm of art. Stretching nylon and silk both physically and conceptually, she's used thongs and G-strings to create formations suggestive of jet planes or birds, employed crotchless panties and chicken eggs in a reproductive allegory, and made her own version of Winged Victory from monofilament and a shredded red sequined dress. Do these works "suggest the possibility of an active female pleasure," as the press release claims? Viewers can draw their own conclusion from a new commission and about fifteen works made since 1997. Wayne Koestenbaum contributes to the catalogue, which also features an interview between Day and curator Andrea Inselmann.--Meghan Dailey

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RIDGEFIELD, CT

Shahzia Sikander

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

September 19-January 2, 2005

Curated by Ian Berry and Jessica Hough

Pakistan-born Shahzia Sikander reinterprets the tradition of Mughal miniature painting for a contemporary eye, fluidly combining Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and American pop-cultural iconography within a single image. Her jewel-like paintings and drawings and deft fusion of cultural and visual elements make for an arresting body of work; but more than that, Sikander puts relevance and meaning back into shopworn "multiculturalism." The second half of an exhibition that appeared at Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery earlier this year, this show features fifty new works on paper, a digital animation, and a site-specific wall drawing made with marker and paint. The catalogue includes contributions by novelist Mohsin Hamid and others.--MD

PHILADELPHIA

Pepon Osorio

Institute of Contemporary Art

September 8-December 12

Curated by Johanna Plummer and Ingrid Schaffner

Pepon Osorio's latest suite of works, arising from his recent three-year residency at Philadelphia's Department of Human Services, dramatizes and humanizes the roles of counselors and clients during critical moments of transition. The artist's reconstruction at ICA of DHS offices places the personal minutiae of employees' cubicles adjacent to the caged-in contents of a family's storage locker. His video of a running child, projected on the wooden skeleton of an unfinished house, destabilizes the suburban ideal, while another video implicates the social-service system with footage of teens ill prepared for their imminent departure from foster care. The show promises to highlight the unique underpinnings of Osorio's aesthetic deliberation and political critique.--Lori Cole

WASHINGTON, DC

Dan Flavin

National Gallery of Art

October 3-January 9, 2005

Curated by Tiffany Bell and Michael Govan

Exhibited mostly in Europe since his death in 1996, fluorescent maestro Dan Flavin is overdue for a domestic retrospective. While standing installations of his work exist in Bridgehampton, New York, and Marfa, Texas (where thirty-six thousand square feet of Flavin-colored space debuted in 2000), Flavin deserves the cachet only a big exhibition can provide. The National Gallery is ponying up its east wing for 119 works, from early "icons" to large-scale installations (like a 1972 homage to George McGovern), not to mention seventy-two of Flavin's delicate, often sentimental drawings. The first catalogue raisonne of Flavin's light works accompanies the show's monograph. Travels to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Feb. 25, 2005-June 25, 2005; MCA, Chicago, July 1, 2005-Oct. 30, 2005.--Caroline Jones

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MIAMI

Cut/Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video

Museum of Contemporary Art

November 13-January 30, 2005

Curated by Stefano Basilico

With the idea of "postproduction" in the air, it's not hard to hear scholarly rumblings about how moving pictures provide artists with the newest form of readymade--just slice and dice cinematic masterpieces or the nightly news and re-present them on-screen to critical effect. But incisive exhibitions on this strategy of appropriation are still relatively few and far between. "Cut/Film as Found Object in Contemporary Video" promises to be among the first in the US, creating a new framework for pieces by Candice Breitz, Christian Marclay, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Paul Pfeiffer, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Omer Fast, and Michael Joaquin Grey, Travels to the Milwaukee Art Museum, June 25, 2005-Sept. 25, 2005.--Tim Griffin

CHICAGO

Yang Fudong

Renaissance Society

September 26-November 7

Curated by Susanne Ghez

In the second installment of his ongoing film pentalogy Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Yang Fudong's latter-day sages forsake the Taoist natural paradise of Yellow Mountain for a seductively quotidian Shanghai apartment complex as they divine their place in an emergent global economy. Premiering in Chicago, the film will be screened alongside part I of the series and three other works, among them his 2002 feature film An Estranged Paradise. Taken together, they should offer a sustained panorama of the longings of an artist who is part traditional lyricist evoking the enigmatic subtlety of scroll painting and part auteur following the surreal lead of Jim Jarmusch. Yang's investigations resonate as a kind of paradise not merely estranged but irremediably lost.--Suzanne Hudson

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DALLAS

Lothar Baumgarten

Dallas Museum of Art

September 19-December 5

Curated by John R. Lane

Lothar Baumgarten is too conceptually agile in his employment of text, design, and installation to be thought of as simply a photographer--but his photographs are too fine to be the work of one of those supercilious "artists who use photography." One of his best-known works, Carbon is the German artist's elegy for the American landscape and a meditation on its tradition of landscape photography. Published as a book in 1991, it has been exhibited in various ways, but this promises to be its grandest presentation so far, incorporating wall drawings, 116 photographs, and a selection of materials from Baumgarten's six-month trek in 1989 along America's railroads, whose names often memorialize the native peoples they helped displace but which were themselves, by then, becoming marginalized.--Barry Schwabsky

CINCINNATI

Nothing Compared to This

Contemporary Arts Center

September 24-November 28

Curated by Charles Desmarais

The quieter descendants of Pop and Conceptualism continue a '90s trend away from the big, brash, bulimic '80s. The roughly twenty artists in this show, among them Kara Hamilton, Andrea Zittel, Ricci Albenda, Jorge Pardo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, have produced such conceptual objects as shadow paintings, quirky architectural surfaces and decor, optically soft wallpaper, wall rubbings, a heat sculpture, books arranged by the color of their spine, and a suit by Zittel worn by its collector. These works will be elusively presented without wall labels in a setting to include moody sounds like Brian Eno's Music for Airports. A free visitor's guide offers information about art seemingly made to play off and probe the accoutrements and subtle seductions of lifestyle.--Jeff Rian

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CLEVELAND

Ilya Kabakov

Museum of Contemporary Art

September 10-January 2, 2005

Curated by Jill Snyder

Having outlived the demise of the Soviet Union's socialist Gesamtkunstwerk, recent septuagenarian Ilya Kabakov shows no sign of relinquishing the mantle of celebrated unofficial artist. Engaging the "work" of two fictional artistic personae, Charles Rosenthal and "Ilya Kabakov," both of whom sought to reconcile representation and abstraction, the real Kabakov seeks a parallel synthesis between aesthetic experimentation and a new social realism. This massive and complex retrospective of 146 monumental paintings, mixed-media objects, and drawings, as well as didactics and wall texts, transforms MOCA's contemporary galleries into a Beaux-Arts museum. The Kabakov-designed catalogue promises engaging essays by Russian art scholars Victor Tupitsyn and Boris Groys.--Nicole Rudick

LOS ANGELES

The Undiscovered Country

UCLA Hammer Museum

October 3-January 16, 2005

Curated by Russell Ferguson

Taking its cue from Hamlet's description of the afterlife as a place "from whose bourn no traveler returns," this show examines the current resurgence of figuration in art as only the latest communique from that parallel universe of the "lifelike." Further, this renewed figurative drive suggests that photography and painting are locked in a dialectical process that is much more give than take, in opposition to notions of historical rupture. In this selection of over forty paintings spanning the past five decades, figures like Fairfield Porter, Gerhard Richter, and John Baldessari act as parental enablers to a younger generation--among them, Jochen Klein, Thomas Eggerer, and Mari Eastman--that once more gives vent to the "mimetic impulse," and without even a vestigial trace of the old ambivalence.--Jan Tumlir

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Robbert Flick

Los Angeles County Museum of Art

September 12-January 9, 2005

Curated by Tim B. Wride

Since the mid-'70s, Robbert Flick has played a crucial role in the growth of Southern California's photographic culture and its conversion into art-world currency. In the most traditional documentary sense, his practice is determined by subject or genre, specifically the transformation of the urban landscape over time. Accordingly, he provides a complex record for posterity, typically unfolding in sequential, gridded arrangements that suggest the mobile point of view of cinema and point inward as much as out. Ostensibly consistent, each work (and site) is in fact subjected to a markedly different structural principle. The eighty-seven prints and photographic groups on view in this, his first retrospective, may finally allow us to measure the aging of our cities and suburbs against that of Flick's conceptual system(s).--JT

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SAN DIEGO

Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia

San Diego Museum of Art

November 6-March 6, 2005

Curated by Betti-Sue Hertz

The regionally themed survey of contemporary Asian art, met with generic "East meets West" curatorial rhetoric, can seem as outdated as fusion cuisine. After a nearly decadelong succession of such offerings, "Past in Reverse" explores how twenty-one artists and collectives reinterpret indigenous forms such as scroll paintings. The show not only presents the usual suspects (Cai Guo-Qiang, Wang Qingsong) but also takes a risk with a long roster of unknowns, suggesting that while East Asia now has claim to a bevy of internationally established artists, it remains a hotbed of experimentation. Travels to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, June 3, 2005-Sept. 4, 2005; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, Jan. 15, 2006-Mar. 12, 2006; and other venues.--Reena Jana

SAN FRANCISCO

Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

October 9-January 16, 2005

Curated by Joseph Rosa

Glamour's got a bad rap in modern design circles, but this sure-to-be-fabulous show may change all that. Connoting affectation and deception--it's the "ugly stepsister of elegance," quips curator Joseph Rosa--glamour had no place in the strict, right-angled minimalism of the early twentieth century. But its delusive charm crept back into fashion, industrial design, and architecture after 1945 to become a hallmark of consumer culture. The combination of such glamourous offerings as a 1965 Jaguar E-type and couture clothes by Yves Saint Laurent for Dior with more recent interpretations like Herzog & de Meuron's Tokyo Prada boutique and a diamondencrusted Rolex should please hardened design divas and shopaholic fashionistas alike.--Annette Ferrara

BERKELEY, CA

Byron Kim

Berkeley Art Museum

September 15-December 12

Curated by Constance M. Lewallen and Eugenie Tsai

Byron Kim's exquisitely subjective monochromes are suspended between the reflective, heady abstraction of Reinhardt, Marden, and Rothko and the deft, politically incisive Conceptualism of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Glenn Ligon. Alternately indexing skin, Korean celadon pottery, a station wagon, and even a Brooklyn public pool, his paintings will be shown to great effect in his first major solo museum exhibition. Against the BAM's neo-brutalist architecture, the hazy atmospheric surface effects of these thirty-two works should betray an unbearable lightness of being. Travels to the Samsung Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Mar. 10, 2005-May 8, 2005; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, May 29, 2005-Sept. 4, 2005; and other venues.--SH

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VANCOUVER

Massive Change: The Future of Global Design

Vancouver Art Gallery

October 2-January 2, 2005

Curated by Bruce Mau

A good deal of this century's design effort will, ironically, be directed at getting us out of the troubles we've designed ourselves into. In the US, we've so rigorously designed physical labor out of our lives that obesity is now a top cause of preventable death. Graphic-design maestro Bruce Mau has organized an exposition around the central question: "Now that we can do anything, what will we do?" Melding objects, imagery, and even a radio program, he explores how we'll have to adapt the world to the changing conditions to come. From the megacities of 2015 to inventor Dean Kamen's "Stirling Engine," from transnational call centers to Ford's prototype "Disassembly Line," this show probes the power, promise, and peril design will exert on the future.--TV

LONDON

Daniel Libeskind

Barbican Art Gallery

September 16-January 23, 2005

Curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume

Before Daniel Libeskind became Governor Pataki's favorite architect, he enjoyed a distinguished (if hardly prolific) career as an academic, theorist, and designer in Europe. This survey of his architectural work provides an opportunity to evaluate Libeskind's efforts at Ground Zero in the context of his efforts as leader of the "symbolist wing" of the deconstructionist movement that dominated avant-garde architecture in the '90s. Designed by architect Matthias Reese, formerly of Studio Daniel Libeskind, this show includes materials and models related to sixteen realized and unrealized projects and culminates in a "specially commissioned illuminated model" of the Freedom Tower. One imagines it will be 1,776 millimeters high and sport a tiny effigy of David Childs impaled on its spire.--Kevin Pratt

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Glenn Brown

Serpentine Gallery

September 14-November 7

Curated by Rochelle Steiner

Since the early '90s Glenn Brown has copied reproductions of paintings by Auerbach, de Kooning, Fragonard, and Dali, as well as sci-fi book-cover illustrations, emphasizing the flaws in his source material (overripe color, weird cropping, flattened impasto--the latter rendered by Brown in spectacular trompe l'oeil) while seemingly equating grandness and schlock. Yet he's far from being just another frolicker at originality's wake: The British painter's increasingly unfaithful remakes suggest an interlaced articulation of subjectivity and deliberate misprision, while his vitrined objects smothered in thick agglutinations of paint offer a neat sideline in postheroic sculpture. This survey comprises some forty works and is accompanied by a catalogue featuring an essay by Alison Gingeras.--Martin Herbert

Faces in the Crowd

Whitechapel Art Gallery

December 3-February 5, 2005

Curated by Iwona Blazwick, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, and Andrea Tarsia

Like a good modernist, this show starts squarely with Manet, but like an even better deconstructionist, its roughly sixty works in various media propose alternate histories of this well-traversed terrain. Refusing a formalist privileging of abstraction and autonomy, the artists constellated here--a who's who from Picasso to Heartfield, Warhol to Sherman--have recourse to the figure. A comprehensive catalogue-cum-anthology penned by such contributors as Ester Coen, Charles Harrison, Jill Lloyd, Robert Storr, and exhibiting artist Jeff Wall accompanies the show. An imaging of the social in many guises, this exhibition can't help but feel resolutely avant-garde after all. Travels to the Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Mar. 28, 2005-July 3, 2005.--SH

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BIRMINGHAM

Ian Davenport

Ikon Gallery

September 22-November 7

Curated by Jonathan Watkins

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." A proud example of the latter, Ian Davenport tests the properties of household paint--pouring it, dripping it, blowing it, using electric fans, anything but brushing it. He began this practice in the late '80s and in 1991 became, at twenty-five, the youngest-ever Turner Prize nominee. Having perfected a mode of colorful post-painterly abstraction that winks to theory-heads and aesthetes alike, he's lately gone gigantic: Davenport's recent fifty-nine-foot-long wall work at Tate Britain was a delirious multihued parade of syringed dribbles, and a similar centerpiece is planned for this, his first retrospective. Ikon director Jonathan Watkins and Tony Godfrey provide catalogue essays. Hedgehog? Sounds foxy to me.--MH

LIVERPOOL

Liverpool Biennial

Various venues

September 18-November 28

Curated by Lewis Biggs

A historically proud city, Liverpool will be European Capital of Culture in 2008 and already hosts the UK's largest visual-arts festival, so it's not surprising that the thematic focus of the biennial's third installment should be ... Liverpool. In practice it's a four-card flush. One component, "International 04," invites artists like Takashi Murakami, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Esko Mannikko to research the postindustrial northern metropolis as a context for public artworks, while "Independent" launches a flotilla of artists, architects, and filmmakers on galleries, temporary spaces, and disused buildings. Exhibitions for the city's prestigious open-submission John Moores painting prize and for the whippersnapper Bloomberg New Contemporaries round out the heady mix. Are you paying attention, London?--MH

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PARIS

Rineke Dijkstra

Jeu de Paume

December 13-February 27, 2005

Curated by Hripsime Visser

Rineke Dijkstra's beautiful and unsettling portraits of individuals in transition--early adolescence, childbirth, and initiation into military life--are brought together for the first time in this show of seventy photographs and two video pieces. The exhibition starts with Dijkstra's beach pictures of teenagers from the early '90s and climaxes with her recent studies of a young Frenchman entering the Foreign Legion and Israeli teens turned soldiers. These portraits, for some of which Dijkstra followed her subjects for several years, convey a poignancy that is mirrored in her video portraits of young club-goers dancing for the camera. Travels to the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Mar. 11, 2005-May 22, 2005; Fundacio "la Caixa," Barcelona, June 4, 2005-Aug. 21, 2005; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, fall 2005.--Andy Grundberg

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Xavier Veilhan

Centre Georges Pompidou

September 15-November 15

Curated by Christine Macel

As in his Projet Hyperrealiste presented at the 2003 Biennale de Lyon, the work of Xavier Veilhan revisits modernity through visual adventures that heighten the experience of perception. For his first solo exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, one of the best French artists to come out of the '90s fills Espace 315 with a "total work of art": A distorted pattern of squares covering the walls manipulates the perceptual dimensions of the room, and a monumental sculpture of a boat is lifted off the ground by a polyester wake. Also on view are a new Light Machine (a cross between a movie screen and a "luminous painting") and pixelated digital landscapes on aluminum. And in October, Veilhan will install a spectacular mobile in the Pompidou's forum space.--Jean-Max Colard

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Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.

BILBAO

Jorge Oteiza

Guggenheim Bilbao

October 8-January 9, 2005

Curated by Margit Rowell

Although not well known outside Spain, Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza is highly regarded in his native country. The Guggenheim Bilbao, perhaps paying a debt to the region, is mounting a retrospective of the late artist's work. The show positions Oteiza's sculptures, drawings, and collages, mainly from the '50s, as precursors to Minimalism, particularly the cubic structures through which he created spatial "desocupaciones" (his term). While this is a temptation that no art historian dealing with geometric abstraction of the period can resist, the work actually has less to do with the literalness and bluntness of Judd's boxes than with the sculptural experiments influenced by Malevich and Russian Constructivism that took place in Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela at the time.--Monica Amor

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

Nancy Spero

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea

September 24-January 6, 2005

Curated by Susan Harris

For more than five decades, Nancy Spero has paired an array of fragmented, totemic figures (from serpent-tongued harpies to sperm-engorged bombs) with fragmented, coded language (from writings by Artaud to descriptions of torture techniques). This show includes both new work and highlights from Spero's oeuvre, such as selections from the "War Series 1966-70" and Hours of the Night II, 2001. The accompanying catalogue comprises essays by independent curator Susan Harris as well as Juan Vicente Aliaga, Jo Anna Isaak, and Diana Nemiroff. The artist's lifelong feminist project of plumbing the depths of human cruelty and subjugation while pointing up unexpected moments of grace couldn't feel more timely.--Johanna Burton

TURIN

Franz Kline

Castello di Rivoli

October 18-January 30, 2005

Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Ida Gianelli

The relation between Franz Kline's early portraits and landscapes--images of the coal-mining region of Pennsylvania where he grew up--and the far-better-known abstract canvases has always been a bit obscure. Beyond their basis in drawing--indeed, many of Kline's most celebrated paintings were first sketched out in ink on telephone-book pages--is there a connection between these two phases in his life as an artist? Viewers will have the chance to pose the question of the whole of Kline's oeuvre with this seventy-work survey, which marks the twentieth anniversary of the Castello di Rivoli. In addition to the seminal black-and-white oils of the '50s, the show includes later canvases in which Kline extravagantly explores color.--Eric Banks

GENEVA

Guy de Cointet

Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain

October 16-January 2005

Curated by Marie de Brugerolle

Guy de Cointet (1934-83) is perhaps known less for his work than for the influence it has exerted on other artists, like Catherine Sullivan, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and William Leavitt. The latter three contribute to the catalogue for de Cointet's first European retrospective, no doubt to discuss the permission they gained from his cryptic yet undeniably Pop performances and objects. Emigrating from his native France to the US in 1967, de Cointet put in time at Warhol's Factory before settling in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo. There, this insider/outsider devised a new phonetic system that would form the backbone of all his ensuing artistic activities, including many of the roughly 125 films, drawings, paintings, and reconstructed set designs gathered for this show.--JT

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ZURICH

Sean Landers

Kunsthalle Zurich

August 28-October 31

Curated by Beatrix Ruf

Sean Landers was one of the avatars of early-'90s "abject" or "loser" art. His handwritten "diary" titled [sic], penned in 1995, remains a cult classic, standing out for its humor and a quality of honesty that was truly cringe inducing. In the decade since, he has continued to explore the ups and downs of artistic success. This show includes about eighty paintings, works on paper, videos, and sculptures. Although the catalogue is the first monograph on Landers, it's rather more like an artist's book: Landers has selected the images and made a collage of his own texts. It also includes a conversation between the artist, Kunsthalle director Beatrix Ruf, and critic Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, as well as an essay by Alex Farquharson.--DR

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The Future Has a Silver Lining: Genealogies of Glamour

Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst

August 28-October 31

Curated by Tom Holert and Heike Munder

If Benjamin's "aura" has an equivalent in today's capitalist empire, it may well be glamour. Etymologically, the word is linked to casting spells, which stands to reason since glamour is that mercurial "it-ness" that sells clothes as lifestyles and celebrities as icons. Tackling the ambitious task of tracing glamour's various genealogies, this show deals less with representations that propel the market than with the ways artists have demystified or subverted glamour's potency. The twenty-one samplings run from Meret Oppenheim's fetishistic underwear to a number of contemporary works, like T.J. Wilcox's film reenvisioning of Marlene Dietrich's funeral. Even Zurich gets its glamour quotient checked in citywide events and parties.--Christopher Bollen

VIENNA

Gerwald Rockenschaub

Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien

November 19-February 13, 2005

Curated by Wolfgang Drechsler

Reduction and remixing are at the heart of Gerwald Rockenschaub's installations. With a neo-geo sensibility that employs PVC foil, color animations, inflatables, benches, and platforms, the Austrian artist reworks the minimal elements of a structure's architectural frame, adding barriers, lookouts, and look-ins with the ease of a DJ mixing tracks. For this show, which features approximately ten large-scale works produced since the early '80s, Rockenschaub integrates his own favorites into the MUMOK building, from his scaffolding for the Austrian pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale to the "Life Style" house built at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 1998. Roger M. Buergel, Jorg Heiser, and curator Wolfgang Drechsler provide catalogue essays.--Jennifer Allen

GRAZ, AUSTRIA

Moving Parts

Kunsthaus Graz

October 8-January 16, 2005

Curated by Katrin Bucher, Peter Pakesch, Heinz Stahlhut, and Peter Weibel

Grounded in the pioneering work of Gabo, Moholy-Nagy, and Duchamp, kinetic art seemed simply to fade away after its flowering in the '60s. "Moving Parts," organized by the Kunsthaus Graz in conjunction with the Museum Jean Tinguely, proposes, on the contrary, that movement and the machine have remained central in art of the later twentieth century. Fifty sculptures, robots, light works, and more provide a survey of machine and kinetic art from Tinguely and Pistoletto to contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson. A particular focus on specially commissioned works by Jeppe Hein, Sabrina Raaf, Malachi Farrell, and others demonstrates the continuing relevance of the kinetic principle. Travels to the Museum Jean Tinguely, Basel, Mar. 6, 2005-June 26, 2005.--Michael Archer

Peter Weibel

Neue Galerie Graz

September 25-November 21

Curated by Gunther Holler-Schuster and Peter Peer

Widely known as a new-media theorist and curator, Peter Weibel also played an important role in the history of European Conceptualism, and this survey of his early work (1964 to 1979) follows Weibel's trajectory from concrete poetry though performance art with the Viennese Actionists to closed-circuit video and interactive computer installations. In dialogue with the history of science, structuralism, and poststructuralism throughout his career, Weibel at once positioned the body as an overdetermined sign and explored the social effects of surveillance. His later video installations highlighted the new medium's function within emerging models of observation and control. The catalogue includes essays by Boris Groys, Ursula Frohne, and others.--Lytle Shaw

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DUSSELDORF

Rebecca Horn

K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen

October 2-January 9, 2005

Curated by Armin Zweite and Anette Kruszynski

This Rebecca Horn exhibition promises to prove that it is not mere platitude to speak of pencil and paper as an extension of the artist's body. The show places about eighty-five drawings alongside both her early fabric appendages, which extend their wearers' body parts, and four recent machine installations that perform repetitive bodily tasks. Though bios of Horn routinely mention the year she spent in a sanatorium recovering from lung damage after working with polyester and fiberglass, the artist's own body has remained a refreshingly puzzling absence in her work. Travels to the Fundacao Centro Cultural de Belem, Lisbon, Jan. 29, 2005-Apr. 25, 2005; Hayward Gallery, London, May 26, 2005-Sept. 11, 2005.--Christine Mehring

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FRANKFURT

Yves Klein

Schlrn Kunsthalle

September 17-January 9, 2005

Curated by Olivier Berggruen and Ingrid Pfeiffer

Though Yves Klein is most frequently recalled for his Leap into the Void, 1960, the self-proclaimed descendant of Delacroix was also a stunning colorist, prescient performance artist, cunning Conceptualist, sly sculptor, and skilled judoka--all within the course of an eight-year career cut short by his death in 1962 at thirty-four. This comprehensive retrospective, accompanied by a sizable catalogue, offers meaty samplings from all periods of Klein's work. In addition to famous monochromes, including those in International Klein Blue, are sponge reliefs, sculptures, "Anthropometries" (in which nude female models served as "live" paint brushes), and his spectacular late experiments with natural elements like fire.--JB

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Sturtevant

Museum fur Moderne Kunst

September 4-March 5, 2005

Curated by Mario Kramer

One of the art world's greatest eminences terribles, Sturtevant has for over forty years been charting the unruly interiors and exteriors of the visible. Curator Mario Kramer takes over the entirety of the Museum fur Moderne Kunst with about 140 multimedia works for what's being billed as the artist's first retrospective--but let me assure you, Sturtevant don't want no retro spective, since her endeavor has always been exposing contrafactual immanence, eternally returning. Sadly, this landmark exhibit won't travel, so let's hope some staunch American museum takes heed and brings this artist and her work home. With an essay by Bernard Blistene and an interview by John Waters, the catalogue will expose brutal truths, and, licking the shiny boot of beauty, we like it that way.--Bruce Hainley

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HAMBURG

Formalism: Modern Art, Today

Kunstverein Hamburg

October 9-January 9, 2005

Curated by Yilmaz Dziewior

"After all, is it so bad? What is it anyway? Nobody knows." One suspects that Matthew Collings's bafflement at the power of formalism might be resolved by this survey of the territory currently shared by aesthetes and conceptualists. Tracing the legacy of modernism through the work of young artists--Tomma Abts, Carol Bove, David Lieske, and Cathy Wilkes, among others--"Formalism" follows up the Kunstverein's 2002 foray into institutional critique. A comparatively subdued evocation of theoretical-historical bugbears, this show argues for a chummier relationship between style and content. The catalogue boasts a discussion between curator Yilmaz Dziewior, Michael Krebber, Benjamin Buchloh, Alexander Garcia Duttmann, and Juliane Rebentisch.--MW

LIECHTENSTEIN

Fabian Marcaccio

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

October 1-January 18, 2005

Curated by Christiane Meyer-Stoll

This exhibition of Fabian Marcaccio's work confirms the Argentinean artist's European popularity (he is particularly well known in Germany, where his work was included at Documenta 11 in 2002). The show comprises seven canvases that span the artist's oeuvre, over six hundred drawings, a group of digital paintings on LCD monitors, and a room-size painting whose perspective shifts dramatically in relation to the viewer's position. Curator Christiane Meyer-Stoll explores the artist's weaving of an interdisciplinary approach to painting with an interest in the condition of the image in contemporary society. An accompanying catalogue will feature essays by Meyer-Stoll, Thomas Keenan, Katy Siegel, and Marcaccio himself.--Monica Amor

OSLO

Jeff Koons

Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art

September 4-December 12

Curated by Grete Arbu, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hanne Beate Ueland

Over the course of two and a half decades, Jeff Koons has explored the excesses of a hypertrophied consumer culture. The more than fifty works included in this retrospective will allow viewers the opportunity to consider the full span of the artist's career, from the lesser-known early "Inflatables" (plastic blow-up playthings paired with mirrors) to sculptures from his 1988 "Banality" series to his more recent hyperreal paintings. A catalogue with texts by the curators and by Arthur C. Danto, Rem Koolhaas, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist should shed further light on Koons's status as one of the preeminent heirs to the legacy of Pop. Travels to the Helsinki City Art Museum, Jan. 2005-Apr. 2005.--Michael Lobel

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SAO PAULO

26th Bienal de Sao Paulo

Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilhao

September 25-December 19

Curated by Alfons Hug

Under the swashbuckling banner "Free Territory," the latest edition of the granddaddy of Southern Hemisphere biennials features the work of 142 artists from sixty countries in its massive Niemeyer-designed space. German-born Alfons Hug, who also curated the Bienal's timid 2002 installment, now proposes the theme of the "no-man's-land," described as a "power-free zone," a land of "emptiness, of silence and respite, where the frenzy that surrounds us" is brought to a momentary standstill. Biennial regulars Julie Mehretu, Jorge Pardo, Santiago Sierra, and Neo Rauch operating in a "power-free" zone? For those preferring their artistic lands manned, the exhibition also contains the old standby, "National Representations."--Nico Israel

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GWANGJU, SOUTH KOREA

Gwangju Biennale 2004

Various venues

September 10-November 13

Curated by Yongwoo Lee

Nearly a decade after its inception, the Gwangju Biennale is breaking new curatorial ground for its fifth incarnation. Promoted as an attempt to challenge the passive position of the viewer, sixty so-called viewer-participants from all walks of life were asked to select one artist each. Italian fashionista Miuccia Prada, for instance, invited Korean video artist Lee Kyung-ho, while British farmer Ross Cherrington chose art star Damien Hirst. Among the roughly two hundred artists in the themed shows are Anish Kapoor, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Park Bul-dong. This process might, however, risk reviving the exhibition's origins as a political decoy in its obtuse celebration of transformation, exchange, and ecological correctness, symbolized by its organizing themes of dust and water.--CR

PERTH

Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India

Art Gallery of Western Australia

September 25-January 16, 2005

Curated by Chaitanya Sambrani

This show of more than eighty works by thirty-two artists and collectives hopes to do for contemporary Indian art what "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" did in 1998 for art from China. That is, to provide both regional and global contexts that challenge preconceptions of recent art from India--whose presence in Western pop culture is often limited to Bollywood, yoga, and outsourcing. The show presents work by urban, nondiasporic artists like documentary photographer Dayanita Singh yet also takes a curatorial risk by offering pieces by rural folk artists such as painter Swarna Chitrakar, who reinterprets in a traditional style scenes from the Hollywood film Titanic. Travels to the Asia Society and the Queens Museum of Art, New York, Mar. 6, 2005-May 29, 2005.--RJ