First take: at the beginning of each year, Artforum asks a seasoned group of critics, curators, and artists to introduce the work of up-and-comers they feel show special promise for the future. The following pages feature their picks for 2005.

DEBRA SINGER ON KRISTIN BAKER

Accident and control, anxiety and euphoria orbit one another in Kristin Baker's current series of paintings, which is inspired by the seductive theatricality of auto racing and fuses the sport's electric colors, industrial materials, and iconic imagery with passages of modernist abstraction. The resulting "dysfunctional panoramas," as the New York-based artist calls them, posit racing-with its combination of mastery, failure, calculation, and chance--as analogous to painting itself, offering an ambivalent reflection on modernity, spectacle, and global consumerist culture in the process. Interpreting the racetrack as a kind of contemporary coliseum, Baker's works conjure both complicit enthusiasm and tenuous concern toward the popular fascination with sensationalist mass entertainment.

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Baker's landscapes are steeped in a lifetime of frequenting the track with her father, an amateur race-car driver. But while she has long been shooting photographs and videos of the sport on location, it was only during her final months in Yale's MFA program that the 29-year-old artist began to engage conceptually with the activity of racing, and the imagery found its way into her painting. Baker explains that she started to understand racing as a microcosm of American capitalism, given the sport's inherent ties to technological innovation and corporate sponsorship, the latter evidenced by those omnipresent logos plastered onto car bodies, stadium walls, and drivers' suits. Despite such culturally specific associations, many paintings transform representational details into predominantly formal elements, as in Ride to Live, Live to Ride, 2004. The up-close vantage of a moment immediately following an explosive crash, when smoke clouds the view of drivers and spectators alike, is dominated by vibrant, propulsive shards that radiate outward, interlacing with billowing flows of sooty haze. The flurry of edges and forms, reminiscent of the ornamental impulse of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, imbues the scene of destruction with a paradoxical, almost floral delicacy, as translucent and opaque layers of paint overlap like scraps of torn tissue, beautiful despite circumstance.

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Baker talks about "building" paintings, an apt term given the works' distinct collage sensibility and almost trompe l'oeil relief. She creates such effects through an elaborate process of first intuitively "drawing" with tape and then, as she begins to paint, ripping up the strips gradually to generate strata of impasto areas beside passages of scraped-down sheerness. Her striking use of high-gloss, metallic, and cementlike pigments suggests a "constructed" industrial aesthetic, which is reinforced by her choice of materials: She applies acrylic paint with spatulas and knives onto outsize PVC panels, the kind commonly used for public signage and racetrack walls. Recently, Baker has also erected freestanding paintings; for example, Kurotoplac Kurve, 2004, a large, arced contour of panels supported by an aluminum lattice, evokes both stadium bleachers and winding track.

In this latter work, scattered car fragments blast across the surface in yellows, blues, greens, and blacks, possessing a strangely effervescent lightness. Blurred forms provide a tactile sense of speed, a pulchritude of velocity whose depiction recalls the early-twentieth-century Futurists, while gestural, undulating sweeps of red-and-white stripes lining the track walls around the gray, muscular whorl of a paved hairpin turn summon Abstract Expressionism. This coy insinuation of a range of stylistic references further indicates how Baker, throughout her work, reflexively addresses its status as painting, focusing in particular on questions of abstraction versus representation in her chosen medium.

The next year will be a big one for Baker. A solo show at ACME in Los Angeles (March 19-April 16) will be followed by an unusual opportunity: beginning in early May, she will exhibit six billboard-size works along the citywide raceway of the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix. The stunning combination of artifice and reality, with Baker's paintings placed in a setting appropriate for what she anticipates will be her last on this theme, promises to lend a new dimension to the term "action painting."

Debra Singer is director of The Kitchen in New York.

JESSICA MORGAN ON ROMAN ONDAK

You may have seen Roman Ondak's work and not realized it. Among the Slovak artist's projects that easily disappear into the fabric of quotidian life are Good Feelings in Good Times, 2003, a queue of ten to twenty people that formed daily outside the Kolnischer Kunstverein main entrance for half an hour; Teaching to Walk, 2002, for which the artist invited a young mother to bring her one-year-old boy into an otherwise empty gallery space for his first steps; and Silence, Please, 1999, in which attendants at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum dressed in the original guard uniforms from the periods in which they were born (the 1940s to 1960s). Ondak's work questions the "real" or tangible quality of lived experience--and the always provisional nature of representation--through the doubling of event and nonevent, staging and reality.

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His work is distinct from Peter Fischli and David Weiss's replication of the banal disarray of the workaday world, or Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's investigation of the exhibition as a site of both concrete and symbolic production. Though also informed by the legacy of Conceptual art and institutional critique, the idea of "disappearance" in Ondak's work most closely resembles the tactically subversive strategies of fellow Slovak artist Julius Koller. Koller's public interventions--such as his "Anti-Happenings" of 1965, in which he left "invitationcards to an Idea" around Bratislava and elsewhere--reflected a desire to remain independent from the Communist government and institutionally sanctioned art forms. With such works, Koller aimed to generate a commonality and reveal connections between past and present, lived and imagined experience. Ondak, though less institutionally constrained than Koller, deploys a similar subterfuge to effect empathy and intimacy among his performers and viewer participants.

Like Koller, Ondak has used children in various projects, not for any association they might have with non-art-world innocence or sincerity but to suggest instability and flux, the potential repetition of past and present in the future, and the effect of time and memory on our understanding of space. Teaching to Walk, for example, mobilizes various, often contradictory meanings: The traditional stillness of the gallery is transformed into a performative space; a movement-based activity becomes an object; and the child's achievement is simultaneously undermined and monumentalized by his (overlooked) presence in the gallery. While Ondak appears to present an unmediated "reality" within the gallery space, he also questions the construction of the reality-versus-art relationship. Teaching to Walk asks when this transformation takes place: At what point does reality become art, or vice versa, and how does this happen?

Ondak's most fluid and translatable work is Good Feelings in Good Times. Initially realized outside of the relatively quiet Kolnischer Kunstverein, the line implies the presence of a popular attraction rarely associated with contemporary art and also alludes to the construction of value through the visual evidence of supply and demand. A clearly coded form of social gathering, the line has vastly different connotations according to location, and Ondak's work subtly plays with cultural specificity, historical memory, and behavioral difference. His own sense of the work was informed by his memory of lines in front of Slovak shops during the Communist era, when passersby, lured by the promise of scarce goods, would eagerly wait, mindless of the reward. A repeat performance of the piece in London this year at the Frieze Art Fair also drew attention to the uniquely British custom of patient waiting, which leaves the hierarchy of the queue--like the country's class structure--largely unchallenged.

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Just as those who unwittingly joined in the performance Good Feelings in Good Times on the off chance that something of "value" could be had at the end of the line (whether entrance to the museum or otherwise), visitors likely remained altogether unaware of their complicity in the work Announcement, 2002. Here Ondak placed a radio in the gallery space, tuned to an international Slovak radio station broadcasting a prerecorded imperative statement by the artist: "Your attention please for the following announcement: As a sign of solidarity with recent world events, for the next minute do not interrupt the activity you are doing at this moment." Asked to perform the action of not performing, the visitor takes part in Ondak's complex structural analysis of producer and produced, implication and imagination.

Jessica Morgan is a curator at Tate Modern, London. (See Contributors.)

JOE SCANLAN ON WALEAD BESHTY

In 1969, a nightly TV-news anchor named Fred Van Amburg was troubled by his declining ratings, which he believed were due to the unbearable daily reports of protests and body counts. Having limited control over world events but much control over their packaging, Amburg decided that the news wasn't the problem, its presentation was. A somber, solitary journalist delivering the news directly into the camera--and, by extension, into people's living rooms--made viewers feel responsible for it, and the only way to avoid that feeling was not to watch. Amburg's innovation, dubbed "Happy Talk," forever changed television news. The format allowed two coanchors to banter between segments, thereby taking pressure off viewers at home. Rather than having to react to the news, viewers could react to the coanchors' reactions, which were invariably jovial.

As Amburg put it, "There's more to life than news, weather and sports." There certainly is! For one thing, there's shopping! The great side effect of Happy Talk was that advertising revenues soared. The more viewers learned how to shrug off Kent State or the My Lai Massacre as mere news (and therefore of no concern to them), the more they could transfer their newfound, carefree attitudes onto yet another trip to the mall.

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Walead Beshty's forays into shopping are every bit as perverse as Happy Talk viewers turning decapitations into matching drapes. His photographs of merchandise and shopping malls have an air of misapprehension to them, as if he has stumbled onto a curious phenomenon but doesn't think it has anything to do with him. Stumbled is the operative word here, since Beshty's serial photos are cumulative chains of events acted out in an engorged stupor: He consistently pays attention to the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way, or the right places at the wrong time--as in his photographs of outmoded shopping malls, visited thirty years too late. Little by little, step by step, potted plant by potted plant, Beshty's images zero in on the revelation of being confused.

The confusion in question is "late capitalism," as Fredric Jameson so optimistically put it. In this sense, Beshty's Dead Mall, 2002-2004, seems a little too mindful of the party line. Whatever Marxist schadenfreude might be gleaned from black-and-white images of corny decor, broken signage, and mismatched displays, this pleasure is more than offset by the will to power it reveals. However much Beshty would like to pass judgment on these nonsites by relegating them to the past, this is an exclusive privilege of the discriminating masses, one we artists can only dream about. And he probably shouldn't be any more judgmental of consumer society than we should be of him when an eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch photograph he displayed at P.S. 1 over the summer turns up in a Chelsea gallery face-mounted on Plexi at eight times that size.

Beshty's capitalism carries much more punch when he gets involved. Shot in stores all across the United States, "The Phenomenology of Shopping," 2001-2003, shows a pliant consumer inserting his head into banks of fake floral leis, racks of stuffed animals, and rows of washer/dryers like someone who's really, really into the whole shopping thing. The gesture is as effective as it is stupid, suggesting that when it comes to twenty-first-century capitalism, "hypertrophic" is a more apt adjective than "late." It's startling to see how many products the human head will fit into. I like the pun of "losing your head" while shopping, and I like seeing the body go limp as a consequence, not as a sign of death but of rank conformity--in the same way that a frog "conforms" to a great blue heron's throat. It's cathartic to see an artist dealing with his relative powerlessness by making an ass of himself, all in the guise of being a carefree consumer.

Joe Scanlan is an artist and assistant professor at Yale University. (See Contributors.)

CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV ON MICHAEL RAKOWITZ

I like the poetics of Michael Rakowitz--the pragmatics of his aesthetics and the "making" (poiein) of his projects. Toying with the various boundaries between architecture, engineering, industrial design, and art, Rakowitz devises his works in a concise but richly metaphoric language that almost belies the practical and political issues he addresses in his highly charged installations and public projects.

Born in New York in 1973 of Iraqi Jewish descent, Rakowitz is a nomad, always translating, transforming, shifting, renovating, and experimenting, continually asking what might happen if you put something belonging to one place, or one culture, into another. The effect resembles that of the poet who creates a surprising and unexpectedly vivid image through substitution, connection, or juxtaposition. After completing a masters of science in visual studies at MIT in 1998, he launched paraSITE that same year, first in the Boston area and later in New York: an ongoing project involving the production and distribution of inexpensive, portable dwellings in the form of inflatable, lightweight, double-layered plastic tents using trash bags and clear weatherproof packing tape. Created for use by the homeless during winter, the tents are designed to be attached to the exterior vents on buildings in major cities, temporarily exploiting, like parasites, the energy of their hosts. While every tent obtains and conserves precious heat, each one is also unique, custom-made for a specific individual's desires and needs, which the artist determines over the course of several conversations with prospective users. One of Rakowitz's "clients" asked for an elongated design while another preferred a bulbous, Jabba the Hutt-like look; one specified transparent walls, so that personal items would be visible from the outside, while others asked for opaque walls for privacy or for pocket windows to display "cardboard poetry."

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I first came across paraSITE while reading the city section of a New York newspaper, discovering only later that Rakowitz was an artist. This introduction is, I think, appropriate, given that Rakowitz--in contrast with most younger artists--does not engage the exhibition scenario as merely a site, cut off from ordinary life, for his cultural legitimization. For example, Rakowitz took over a run-down gallery space at New York's P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center with his installation Climate Control, 2000-2001, creating a low-budget system of humidifiers and galvanized steel ductwork (the latter ran in and out of the windows, like veins carrying immaterial blood) that effectively "climatized" the room: a metaphorical shelter for homeless art? A short time later, rather than exhibiting anything of his own making in a gallery in downtown Manhattan, Rakowitz constructed a vent running from the ninth floor to a Chinese bakery at ground level, filling the room with the smell of baking buns. He gave the 2001 project the multivalent title Rise, bringing to mind both the buildings rising above and the breads rising below. In each of these projects, Rakowitz makes audiences conscious of how a building breathes, of how spaces and people are ultimately connected, of how air (that invisible connector of all things) circulates, and of how that circulation might be diverted toward liberatory purposes.

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An exhibition in a former air-raid bunker in Berlin provided another location for an art project poetically related to the theme of air and connectivity: By Air, By Sea, 2002, was made by placing an electronic wildlife caller atop the tower at the bunker's entrance. This broadcast the cries of indigenous birds of prey as well as other songbirds, causing multitudes of sparrows, robins, finches, and blackbirds to ally and mob the scene in an attempt to drive away the fictional predators, and then to disperse just as quickly. The event as a whole served as a metaphor for all the invisible, yet no less real, exchanges that occur in everyday life, for how we aggregate and disaggregate as multitudes, for how our breathing creates endless patterns of movement in and through social space.

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Rakowitz's latest work to involve a sense both of dislocation and connectivity is Test Ballot: Examining the Faulty Machinery of Democracy, 2004, an event executed on November 2 to coincide with the US presidential election. Instead of summoning birds, he brought fifteen voting machines, the Votomatic brand used in Florida during the contested 2000 ballot, to locations in Europe--including Milan, Ljubljana, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Athens, and Innsbruck--and invited the global community to vote. This parallel election underscored what the artist felt was an odd paradox implied by the historic occasion: The outcome, on which so much depended globally, was derived only from the mandate of an American electorate. Again, Rakowitz proposed a connection between inside and outside (here, of the United States), asking for the admission of and interaction with different kinds of air.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin. (See Contributors.)

DAVID RIMANELLI ON ADAM McEWEN

A furtive quality of the almost-there or phantom presence haunts Adam McEwen's practice throughout, as he plays on inversions of context, reversals of fortune, and gallows humor. The first works that caught my eye were little signs such as one might see in store windows or on shop doors alerting visitors that the place was closed for business, but instead of "Sorry We're Closed" they said things like "Sorry We're Sorry," "Fuck Off We're Closed," or "Sorry We're Dead." All of which suggest that whoever made these particular signs (or decided to use them) isn't feeling terribly sorry for much. These signboards (realized in 2001 and 2002) are in fact little paintings, executed by McEwen in flashe on paper without the slightest hint of a brushstroke, Hung last year (and in the summer of 2003) inside the always-locked glass door of Chelsea's Wrong Gallery, an exhibition space maybe a foot deep, "Fuck Off We're Closed" did rather accord with the genius loci, where the attitude might be summarized as "Fuck Off We're Cool." It became site specific.

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McEwen subsequently glamorized such "protosignature" post-Pop/post-Conceptual text pieces by rendering a "Sorry We're Dead" on a large silver canvas (Untitled [Dead], 2002). The invocation of Warhol's death-and-disaster paintings, not to mention the Superstar fog of the silvered Factory decor, skirts cynicism in the brazenness of its references; transferred to metallic canvas, the cheap-looking shop sign becomes visibly pricey, a gallery-ready chattel. Didn't Warhol claim that he used the diptych format in his large death-and-disaster paintings because the monochrome half made it twice the painting, so to speak? He could charge more for it. Sorry We're Expensive. Maybe this is related to another of McEwen's store-sign paintings, "Come In We're Cunts." The artist remarks in an interview (in Wrong Times, a publication of the aforementioned gallery): "'Come in we're cunts' is just 'Come in. Fuck you.' There are shops that have cunty people working behind the counter in cunty shops, but that's more English. I like those shops where the customer is always wrong."

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McEwen did a four-year stint writing obituaries for London's Daily Telegraph. "I actually wrote the obit for John F. Kennedy Jr.," McEwen remarks. That's the background for his series of obits for still-living celebrities--among others, Malcolm McLaren, Jeff Koons, Marilyn Chambers, Macaulay Culkin, and Nicole Kidman. In all respects adhering to the obituary format, these pieces relate the life stories and accomplishments of their subjects. Only one item is missing: cause of death. McEwen suggests that these artworks--black-and-white C-prints, or colorless color photography--have their own shelf life, as it were: "The one thing I know for sure about these people is that some day they will die, at which point maybe the artwork doesn't mean anything." In these faux obits, McEwen makes hay out of the etiolation of meaning around the otherwise seemingly replete figure of the famous person. I'm reminded of Thomas Crow's comments about Warhol's dead-celebrity art: "How does one handle the fact of celebrity death? Where does one put the curiously intimate knowledge one possesses of an unknown figure, come to terms with the sense of loss, the absence of a richly imagined presence that was never really there[?]"

Entering the artist's recent exhibition at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York, one was confronted by a wall with a small doorway roughly cut out of it, leading into the gallery's project room, which housed Shoegazer (Bonus Version), 2002-2004, a multipart installation. The "shoegazer" itself is a long, narrow strip of mirror leaning against the wall, like those one finds in certain shoe stores. But the look isn't too flattering, as McEwen's mirror has an icky brown tint. Above the mirror, McEwen hung a closcup of Michael Jackson's feet, clad in superspecial dancing shoes and incandescent socks; a small drawing of a shoe-gazing guitarist from a very noisy band like My Bloody Valentine (a certain kind of low-frequency noise that can, apparently, trigger involuntary bowel movements is known as "brown sound"); and a purple-tinted version of an earlier piece, Untitled (A-line), 2002, where McEwen took the famous photograph of Mussolini and his mistress strung up by their feet and inverted it, so that they seem to be throwing their arms up as they ascend ecstatically. McEwen refers to "an unpleasant sense of exaggerated self-consciousness" at work in this piece, and the extremities of self-fashioning that went into the fairly ludicrous Italian dictator and our number one, off-the-hook pop star speak volumes of unpleasantness and exaggeration. The murky strip of mirror below might as well be the gate of Hell. Facilis descensus Averni, to borrow the words of the Poet. But why is the road to Hell easy? Because you're walking down.

Sorry I'm Finished.

David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Ariforum.

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TOM HOLERT ON JULIAN GOTHE

Julian Gothe likes to cut. A recurring theme when he muses about his work is the tender yet aggressive restiveness of the drawings, collages, and sculptures he produces. Perhaps owing to his enthusiasm for the bleeding edge, his works take on a certain air of danger, giving rise to almost visceral sensations. At the same time--and this is not to be considered contradictory at all--Gothe's hybrid creations are utterly sexual and seductive, at least for an observer capable of taking pleasure in the sight of such uncannily edgy, masculine shapes.

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The pleasurable dissonance becomes even deeper when one learns about the peculiar references and predilections Gothe brings to the game. "Living with Design," the artist's autumn 2004 solo show at Cabinet in London, took its name from a popular book by '60s interior designer David Hicks. Notwithstanding the nature of this vintage manual for combining antique-store finds and fashionable items of contemporary design--what could it possibly mean to "live" with design? And when does design-enhanced dwelling turn into a "design for living"?

Gothe's installation seems to point toward a strategy for survival by means of a perverse kind of "as if" furniture that radiates both jouissance and threat. Dominating the gallery space was Darkness Has Reached Its End, 2004, a monstrous, insectlike scaffold made of metal and topped by a metal structure that resembles a crossing of throne and obelisk. Shrouded in black chiffon, the sculpture automatically evokes death and ritual (the black widow), while the "legs" of the work seem to have been derived from '50s horror films. Diversifying matters even more, the ensemble bears features of the cast-iron sculpture-furniture of Gilbert Poillerat, the maitre ferronnier whose pseudoarchaic pomp was rediscovered by Karl Lagerfeld, formerly a fervent collector of these eccentricities.

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Gothe also takes inspiration from an interior designer from the 1940s and '50s, Jean Royer, and his oddly curved metal tables and seats, similar to the bizarre stil novo of the '50s represented most prominently by the idiosyncratic, postfunctional designs of Renzo Zavanella. The artist, who also works as an illustrator on animated films, explores the margins of design history, where bourgeois interiors can no longer be distinguished from movie sets and where furniture loses almost any use value and becomes instead an instrument of sublime torture, taking on a fantastic, surrealistic life of its own.

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Accordingly, the monumental folded-paper and metal sculpture Painted White in a Spirit of Rebellion, 2003, originally installed in the window of Daniel Buchholz's antiquarian bookstore in Cologne, has been rightly described as an homage to the "Big White Sets" of leading Art Deco-inspired Hollywood designers like Cedric Gibbons, Van Nest Polglase, Hobe Erwin, and Frederic Hope. Here, with this carefully illuminated stand-up relief landscape, the glamorizing functions of display and set design have been displaced in favor of a special brand of meta- or ultraglamour.

While activating a wide range of historical references and drawing on a long-standing interest in the intersection of bodybuilding and design as a means to plumb the social and aesthetic correspondences between ultramodernist stylistics and homosexual lifestyles, Gothe also cherishes the inherent anthropomorphic or zoomorphic qualities of his sculptures. The various elements of his shows seem to interact with each other, like creatures watching other creatures as they revel in the limelight of the white cube. The sculpture-creature in "Living with Design" seemed to look at the two objects on the wall: the friezelike Soft Furnishing Crisis, 2004, where abstract drawings rendered in purple ink merge with the photo silk screens of a bodybuilder's abs and pecs; and the fleece-like, fabric-on-painted-board collage Oochy Koochy, 2004. The latent, rapturous joy of the latter all-but-innocent still life is hinted at by the title, linking the shrieking sounds of a 1988 Baby Ford acid-house track with Gothe's sharpened shapes--and in the process, fostering an idea of relentless celebration while everything is frozen in pleasure.

Tom Holert is a writer based in Berlin. Recently he cocurated (with Heike Munder) "The Future Has a Silver Lining: Genealogies of Glamour" at the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

JORDAN KANTOR ON JAN DE COCK 

While there have been several opportunities to see Jan de Cock's sculptures and photographs over the past few years, the twenty-eight-year-old Belgian's particular brand of site-specific art first made an international splash last summer at Manifesta 5 in Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain. For that remarkable installation, de Cock took over an abandoned shipbuilding warehouse, erecting a large structure that, as is typical for his work, mined the fecund territory between art and architecture. Part sculpture, part building, de Cock's supersized piece filled the interior of the warehouse space and spilled out onto the roof, literally blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. As one walked around--and through--the soaring structure, its walls and exposed beams snapped in and out of visual alignment, creating compelling vistas and strange spaces, which had a strong perceptual, even bodily, effect. Constructed with quotidian, commercial building materials over a nine-week period--during which it looked like it may have doubled as the artist's crash pad--the work was memorable and surprisingly ravishing. I, for one, had no idea green fiberboard could look so good.

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Following shows at galleries in Amsterdam, Cologne, and Vienna, as well as at SMAK Ghent and De Appel in Amsterdam, de Cock's Manifesta project was the latest in an ongoing series of architectural interventions begun in 2003, which he calls "Denkmal." As others have noted, the artist's use of the term--a German word meaning both "monument" and "memorial"--knowingly alludes to AdolfLoos's famous quip in 1909 that the tomb (Grabmal) and the monument (Denkmal) were the only architectural forms that could rightfully be considered art. While de Cock's work certainly challenges the rigid taxonomy that has until recently allowed only slivers of overlap between the fields of art and architecture, its engagement with acts of memory extends beyond smart art-historical quotation. Indeed, with his "Denkmal" structures de Cock evokes the particularly nostalgic side of remembrance, yearning for a time--for Loos's time--when art and architecture seriously and self-consciously positioned themselves as vehicles for social change. His rigid geometric structures dance between the gestalt of monolithic sculpture and the inhabitability of architecture, and they strongly recall both the paintings and environments of de Stijl, that multidisciplinary movement that so trumpteted its potential to change our perceptual world. Caught in a seemingly irresolvable bind, de Cock's "memorials" seem to court social engagement while mourning its apparent futility. This two-pronged dialectic--which simultaneously pulls de Cock back to earlier moments of avant-garde radicality and propels him toward his own era--is common in much new art today and is one characteristic that makes his work utterly contemporary.

De Cock's architectural/sculptural project extends to light-box photographs, which document his structures in use. Made with three-second exposures, they capture the movement of people interacting with his installations during their short lifespans. After the constructions are disassembled, de Cock typically installs his photographs in the spaces they depict, creating a frisson between a visitor's memory of the installation and the artist's record of it. Sometimes, however, he shows the light boxes elsewhere, exploiting the particularly historicizing (and memoralizing) function of photography. (This month, for example, Fons Welters will mount an exhibition of de Cock's photographic record of his Manifesta project in Amsterdam.)

One of the primary objectives of de Cock's interactive and self-reflexive art is to pierce the doldrums of the viewer's everyday consciousness through active involvement. This strategy of engagement was, of course, crucial for modernism's pioneers, and de Cock's consistent use of the title "Denkmal" underscores both his appreciation for their aims and his desire to move beyond the sense of belatedness that inevitably haunts his project--and our historical moment more generally. Apart from meaning "monument" and "memorial," "Denkmal" can also be phonetically understood as the German slang imperative denk 'mal, meaning "think about it." By imploring his viewers to "denk 'mal," de Cock brings monuments and memorials back to life, pulling them from dusty history into our living world. With two more "Denkmal" projects on the horizon--in May at Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle and in September at Tate Modern--we will, indeed, have plenty more chances to "think about" de Cock's monumental, melancholic, and memorializing work.

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Jordan Kantor is assistant curator in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art and an artist.

PHILIPPE VERGNE ON ZON ITO AND RYOKO AOKI

When I first saw artworks by the Kyoto-based couple Zon Ito and Ryoko Aoki at the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, I couldn't tell which was which or who did what. Both in their early thirties, they have located themselves somewhere to the left of the cultural sphere dominated by economic, if not industrial, models of efficiency, investing instead in labor-intensive practices such as embroidery, beading, and handcrafted books, as well as notions of modesty, frailty, and the quotidian. The combination is not unlike the cinema of Hiroyuki Oki or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or the music of Daniel Johnston, Andrew Bird, and Momus. All are energized by a desire to slow things down in order to revitalize an aesthetic maquis, a kind of "rear-garde." This nonmonumental, nonheroic attitude may be one of the most difficult positions for an artist to adopt today.

It was not until I saw Ito and Aoki side by side installing Ito's work in the Walker Art Center's "How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age," 2003, that I understood that they are the feminine and masculine counterparts of one artistic practice. The two are actually one but remain distinct, their work never revealing the line between feminine and masculine sensibilities. For his part, Ito works primarily with embroidery on fabric, clay sculptures, and handmade books, but also makes strange animated films with hallucinatory landscapes whose morphing human figures and twisted wildlife scenes are so precious, awkwardly narrative, and obsessively craftsy that one might wonder what they could possibly have to do with any contemporary artistic discourse. In fact, his aesthetic is informed by Japanese tradition, 1980s video games, underground illustration, and youth culture, and his program seems to be charged with a deliberate and juvenile withdrawal from the modernist dogma of Cartesian rationality and efficiency. Rather, his visions, often dark and pessimistic, seem fished from the stream of consciousness. In Dried Persimmons, 2002, an embroidered diptych on fabric, realism, hypersubjectivity, memory, and dreams seem to drift freely together in a chaotic liquid world, intermingling forms resembling those of a Surrealist cadavre exquis.

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Aoki's drawings, installations, collages, animated films, and books--recently seen in Los Angeles at Marc Foxx Gallery--share a similar sense of a rotten Eden. With comparable grace, she depicts microscopic, decrepit floral worlds that suggest the irreversible erosion of being and put a poetic face on the normally imperceptible, as in Radiowave Observation, 2004. Occasionally her world is also one of interrupted fairy tales with a meditative, melancholy take on "girly" vanities. In works such as Pelvis Contortion, Back Bone Contortion I, and Back Bone Contortion 2, all 2004, her iconography seems borrowed from both Durer's intricate and codified woodcuts and children's books like Where the Wild Things Are, the latter targeting an audience emancipated from innocence but not yet stifled by intellectual immobility.

In their collaborative animated films, Ito and Aoki's aesthetics merge to create a third sensibility. Overall they share a detached, dreamy attitude toward the surrounding turmoil, a sensibility that allows for indeterminancy--what philosopher Francois Jullien has called "the propensity of things"--to guide their acts. In Children of Veins, 2004, the fluidity suggested by their respective works coalesces in movements of concentration, dispersion, and dilution, with forms reminiscent of water changing state from liquid to solid to steam. In Psychic Scope, 2001, a salamander becomes a girl who becomes a river, and in Breeding Wall, 2001, the head of a young boy becomes a tiger before disappearing into bushes--giving birth to a microcosm as vast as the greatest macrocosm, as if a single speck of dust contained the whole world. Such morphing imagery suggests an absence of permanence, a series of metaphorical visions, a book of changes, a world where nothing is actually achieved or stable yet is constantly and complexly shifting between becoming, being, and withering.

Philippe Vergne is senior curator at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis.

BOB NICKAS ON MATTHEW DAY JACKSON 

What could a Viking burial ship, Piet Mondrian, and the punk bands Black Flag and Bad Brains possibly have in common? For Matthew Day Jackson they serve as points in a constellation, multiple references that can be overlaid to draw, in his words, "a cosmological chart." The Viking ship in question is Jackson's sculpture Sepulcher, 2003-2004, which the artist constructed from unused material in his studio, as well as from bits and pieces scavenged from previous work. This conscious process of recycling extends to the sail, which references a Mondrian abstraction but is entirely composed of Jackson's old T-shirts. According to legend, a burial vessel should be sailed out to sea, set afire, and sunk. But here the course charted is decidedly forward. In effect, Sepulcher suggests that the preoccupations of Jackson's youth--modern art, various bands and products--were cast aside to preserve his creative future. He explains, "Sepulcher is a monument to my own death at the age of thirty and is meant to act as a farewell to beleaguered ways of making art, tired thinking, and antiquated strategies for expressing myself."

Jackson's Burial Costume (Second Skin), 2004, was laid inside Sepulcher when it appeared in "Relentless Proselytizers," a group show at Feigen Contemporary in New York last summer. Assembled from the artist's discarded wardrobe, the piece comprises a jacket with studded epaulets and serpentine camouflage-pattern inserts, military cape, fencing chest guard, dashiki, and various patches--POW, Slayer, Deicide--stitched together to form clothing at once stunning, funky, and dandified. The work resembles a uniform sewn by some urban tribe, appearing as much a relic as an omen of a postapocalyptic near-future--equal parts American Revolution, black power, Road Warrior, and hippie/headbanger. Although conceptual and material elements have always been reciprocal for Jackson, and his subject matter has consistently been politically minded, his earlier work was more traditionally painting based. The artist had never previously incorporated personal items, let alone cannibalized his own work. As Sepulcher and Burial Costume remind us, the past is called the past for good reason.

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Jackson's recent work may be seen as part of a return by younger artists to the handmade, and his fine carving betrays his Pacific Northwest roots. But his craftsmanship and invention always serve a critical purpose. Influenced equally by current events and American history, his projects often address the country's increasing militarism and idealization of its past, as well as an endangered global environment. Tomb of the Unknown, 2004-, takes its cue from an unlikely source in Eleanor Roosevelt: "What is to give light must endure the burning." The sculpture, still in progress, resembles a World War II tank barrier and serves as a perch for a wood-burned raven and two carved vultures--birds venerated in Native American culture but otherwise generally despised. One vulture triumphantly spreads its wings as if it were our most idealized bird of prey, the bald eagle. Jackson plans to char the entire main structure, making it appear to have endured a forest fire or warfare, a natural or man-made disaster.

In Jackson's Brooklyn studio, a number of new pieces are underway. One drawing is a study for a ceramic and stained-glass chandelier that will combine the facade of the Alamo and the form of the Pentagon--symbols, respectively, of America's "heroic" sacrifice in its conquest of the Wild West and of contemporary Western power. The artist is also poised to transform another icon of the pioneer spirit, the covered wagon. He will build its body with the remnants of some of his old paintings, making its wheels, yoke, and other moving parts with carved and glued scrap wood: Material usually considered worthless will propel the wagon ho! Given the art world's renewed interest in Americana, it might be easy to mistake Jackson's project as somehow nostalgic. But he sees no particular valor in the naivete and violence surrounding myths of the American frontier. Jackson's image for the wagon's canvas cover? Intertwined snakes abstracted from Benjamin Franklin's "Join or Die" cartoon and the slogan/challenge of the Revolutionary War flag: "Don't Tread on Me." Could Jackson's reappropriation be any more timely?

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Bob Nickas has curated more than fifty shows of contemporary art in the United States and Europe over the past twenty years. He is curatorial advisor at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.

ALISON M. GINGERAS ON RICHARD HUGHES

Cliches make good art. "One man's trash is another man's treasure" is a perfect case in point. As any MFA student knows, sifting through the forgotten byproducts of urban life can provide a gold mine of unusual materials--but Dumpster diving alone does not an art practice make. From early Dada assemblage to David Hammons's masterfully simple recuperation of things found on the street, very few artists have successfully (and selectively) incorporated "garbage" into their work.

Richard Hughes is one such artist. Born in Birmingham, England, in 1974 and recently graduated from Goldsmiths College in London, Hughes has already produced a constellation of sculptural works that convincingly appropriate castoff goods such as bicycle tires, dirty mattresses, torn posters, and plastic bottles (he either deploys found objects or skillfully recasts simulacra of the originals).

Hughes grew up in Britain at a moment when municipal planning was transforming many cities into sprawling urban wastelands, and his material preoccupations directly reference the youth subcultures that were nurtured in those environments. Take for example a work entitled Stuntnutter, 2003--an ephemeral public sculpture composed of three BMX bicycle tires, recast and poetically interlaced, initially exhibited on a desolate, road-side stretch of grass. Hughes not only makes a clear if melancholic nod to the BMX bike and skateboard gangs of his youth, but also underscores the class conditions and spatial context that gave rise to such collective experiences. Echoing the way in which teenagers appropriate the "nonspaces" of cities (roadsides, empty malls, housing-project stairwells), Hughes's display strategies reinforce his interest in uncovering the highly charged meanings of discarded objects and marginalized places.

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Even within the sterile confines of the white cube, Hughes is able to convey his blackly humorous engagement with uninviting ambiences and scavenged materials. What initially appeared to be a pile of plastic trash bags full of clothes (awaiting donation to the Salvation Army) propped unassumingly against a wall at Roma Roma Roma (during his Italian solo debut in 2003) was, in fact, a playful, trompe l'oeil sculpture entitled Dad's Bag of Rags, 2003. Hughes carefully arranged several brightly colored T-shirts inside the one clear plastic bag to create an iconic image of a face--the source for the image is taken from the cover of the psychedelic rock group Love's 1967 album, Forever Changes. Using a similar trompe l'oeil technique for an installation entitled Crash My Party You Bastards, 2004, Hughes created out of everyday scraps a three-dimensional version of Salvador Dali's 1935 painting Face of Mae West. In both of these works, Hughes merges low-budget illusion with pop-y/cult-y allusion. This powerful, somewhat startling combination conjures an entire constellation of interests, behaviors, postures, and attributes--the devotion to pop heroes and cult bands, the rebellious aura of subcultures--typically abandoned at the end of adolescence.

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In what is, perhaps, his most spectacular work to date, Hughes shifts gears away from youth culture to a seemingly more generic subject. Slouching Back, 2004, is a sculptural depiction of a sunset, which Hughes exhibited this past autumn at The Showroom in London. Each distinct element of this landscape is rendered from found objects and then carefully placed in the gallery. What at first appears to be nothing more than a dissonant collection of junky material ultimately coalesces into an image on the viewer's retina. A misty "mountain top" landscape was suggested by a heap of down comforters in one corner; a stunning backdrop made from torn posters pasted to the wall mimics the gradation of colors in a late evening sky; the "sun" is nothing more than a light bulb hidden behind two hexagonal pieces of Plexiglas--aping the lens-flare effect that occurs in most photographs of sunsets. More than just a cheeky simulation of nature, Slouching Back balances Hughes's formal originality with deliberate art-historical allusions (e.g., Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures; the affiches lacerees of Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villegle, and Mimmo Rotella). As with his more specifically subculture-inspired works, Hughes is able to recuperate even the most hackneyed of subjects (and materials)--like a beautiful sunset--and infuse them with new life. Hughes (and the web of concerns he evokes) commands more than just a casual glance.

Alison M. Gingeras is an independent curator living in Paris and New York.