First takes.

At the beginning of each year, Artforum asks a group of seasoned critics and curators to introduce the work of up-and-comers they feel show special promise. The following pages feature their picks for 2007.

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Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on

Stuart Ringholt

WHEN I WAS INVITED to attend a "curatorial clinic" last year in Melbourne, Australia, I anticipated that the event, organized by curator Juliana Engberg, would satirically treat the primary psychological illness among curators overwhelmed by the excess of information in the art world: superficiality. In fact, this daylong therapy session featured a number of artists making earnest PowerPoint presentations about the state of contemporary art, seeking to help their curator colleagues gain deeper self-understanding. Standing apart, however, was a young artist from Perth, Australia, named Stuart Ringholt. Tall and skinny, with deep, penetrating eyes, he seemed both nervous and oddly calm and assured--a paradoxical person with traits of both analyst and analysand. Instead of giving a lengthy lecture, he pulled a number of things from his rucksack, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat. There was a strange, sticklike object, a newspaper, and a number of books. Particularly striking was Circle Heads, 2005, an altered volume of portraits by a relatively unknown photographer: Ringholt had literally "defaced" the found work, switching people's heads, joining others together, creating new relationships among them. To me, this endeavor seemed at once compelling and problematic, not so much a critique of the mass media or popular culture (in the modern tradition of artistic collage) as a deflected self-portrait registering both a kind of violent confusion and an attempt to work through it with small, poetic acts of reconnection. It made sense when Ringholt handed me Hashish Psychosis: What It's Like to Be Mentally Ill and Recover, 2006, a book about his own breakdown years before, after taking drugs once too often in India--an experience that eventually led to his involvement with art.

Ringholt's artistic production today ranges from books and performance to painting and sculpture, but I do not know whether saying so is sufficient to describe what he does. One would do well simply to read Hashish Psychosis, in which the artist explains, for example, a work titled Celebrity Twins, 2001--a performed "regression reenactment" of his illness, during which he adopted the personae of an Australian Football League umpire and Superman (whom he once imagined himself to be) in the presence of a pair of twins and a security guard. While the notion of celebrity implies extreme individuality, the twins ironically suggest the opposite, because they are not unique, while the security guard represents the institution (psychiatric or artistic) designed, Ringholt says, to protect the public from the unaccounted likes of Superman. Most powerful, however, are the works that take the lessons of Ringholt's private world into the public one, beyond the gallery confines, whose insistent themes of social maladjustment bring to mind an odd mixture of Lygia Clark, Bruce Nauman, and Jean Dubuffet--in other words, a relational therapeutic practice marked by a phenomenology of confusion and Brutist pleasure as well as the evocation of regressions to childhood. For Conceptual Art Improved My Embarrassing Life, 2003, Ringholt ran an advertisement in a newspaper inviting readers to request materials on a clownish series of actions he had performed in the public realm, each one intended to cause self-embarrassment for the purpose of overcoming it: spending twenty minutes in Florence with toilet paper stuck to the rear end of his pants; walking around with snot in his beard; chewing a pen until the ink went all over his face in a train compartment. As a subsequent project, Ringholt organized Funny Fear Workshop, 2004, in which he led a group of people in conversations and exercises meant to overcome their sense of embarrassment. (After narrating personal experiences such as "pissing all over a household toilet because a hair had stuck itself over the eye of my dick," Ringholt sent the participants into the public with the task of embarrassing themselves.) Much of what Ringholt does might seem childish or foolish, and irrelevant to contemporary art, but his apparent naivete in fact forces a reevaluation of what we consider appropriate. He opens a vertiginous void between exhibitionism and modesty that forces us to become aware of our place at the intersection of isolation and social interaction--and to reconsider our sense of self in the world.

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At times Ringholt makes works primarily for himself, becoming in effect his own therapist. The artist has quietly (and disquietingly) been exhibiting a white monochrome painting mounted on a table. There is color hidden from view under the picture plane; even Ringholt does not know the underpainting's hue). On the back of the work, This Painting Improved My Life, 2004, Ringholt marks the date every time he looks at the canvas. "When I look at the white rectangle with a hidden color," he says, "I am reminded that I don't know everything. I am reminded not to fight for my opinion, which is important, because my mind then becomes quieter. The dates on the back provide the history of a quieting mind." This funny self-help approach to the spiritualist underpinnings of abstraction seems an endeavor parallel to Ringholt's clumsy deflations of conceptual performance, which, for all their modesty, draw the principles of high art closer to a lived life. Ringholt is a paradox: Nothing he does seems legitimate as art, let alone arguable as important art, and yet he claims it as art, and positions it with tremendous assurance. In a world of fragility, disempowerment, and fear, Ringholt--a fool--finds a way for us to claim and reclaim territory for the self, and he makes this his practice.

CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV IS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR FOR THE 2008 BIENNALE OF SYDNEY.

Elizabeth Schambelan on

Amy Granat

NEW YORK-BASED ARTIST AMY GRANAT makes films but generally dispenses with the camera, producing images by damaging film emulsion through direct manipulation. Or, as she put it in a recent interview, "Whatever kind of assault you can make on film material, I've done." Her first such attacks were carried out when she was studying for her BA at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, in the late '90s; working in total darkness, she would dump a spool of 16-mm stock into a bathtub full of (highly toxic) chemicals, then mash and grind the film against itself. Around the start of the current decade, Granat developed a somewhat more controlled and less hazardous process that involves manually scratching the film (always 16 mm), using razors, hole punches, and other tools.

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Watching one of these manual "scratch films" wending its way through a projector, you can see a certain pattern in the marks she makes: Scrolling down the length of the strip are undulating lines or zigzags, often punctuated by hole-punched disks. In projection, however, the works are spectacles of Brownian chaos in which luminous figures--vertical lines that jump frantically from left to right, disks that seem to jitter up and down--flash by against a black background too quickly to be fully apprehended.

Subverting the persistence of vision that is the sine qua non of the moving image, Granat's films picture a disconnect between vision and cognition. But in effecting this breakdown, the artist establishes a different kind of perceptual connection, a synesthetic one. "What you hear is what you see," she says. With the aid of guitar amplifiers, Granat captures the sound of light itself as her film passes through the optical sound head that produces audio signals in film projectors. The indexical sound tracks that result are eerie washes of popping, hissing, static, and percussive rumbling.

But, austerely self-reflexive as it might seem, Granat's work sets off cascades of associations. Recalling the light-against-dark interfaces of early computers and cold-war-era tracking systems (radar, sonar) as much as they evoke the imagery of film-leader countdowns or the abstract cinema of Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, the scratch films appear haunted by histories of the moving image within and beyond the context of art. This historiographical resonance echoes Granat's immersion in avant-garde film, which she became seriously interested in while at Bard a decade ago. As illustrated by the omnivorous programs she puts together for Cinema Zero, a nomadic film-and-performance series begun in 2004, she has a nuanced grasp of the experimental-film corpus.

In the case of her own work, the most relevant precedent might be the radical '70s nonfilm of Anthony McCall and his fellow New York experimentalists (contrary to what many viewers of her work might expect, she doesn't identify strongly with the work of Stan Brakhage, despite the correspondences between their processes). Granat cites Paul Sharits as an early influence, and her installations, which typically include two or more looped films running simultaneously, evoke his "locational" version of expanded cinema. In Circle Jerk (for N.S.), 2006, on view last fall at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, three of her scratch films ran while a trio of spotlights cast bright circles onto the black-painted walls, indirectly illuminating three round photograms made of stills from the films. The work as a whole fragmented the projector-to-screen vector into multiple sight lines, fully encompassing the space while accessing the uncanny charge of Granat's temperamental old 16-mm projectors, which flickered and whirred away atop pedestals, their lens apertures and vents emitting a vaguely infernal glow.

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Granat's cinema is also "expanded" in that it permeates and is permeated by her other, frequently collaborative activities. These range from curating Cinema Zero's programs, to making various types of photographic prints (Xeroxes of broken mirrors, scans of layered imagery), to, producing performances and sound compositions. At the opening of her first New York solo gallery show, "Scratch Films/Stars Way Out (for O.K.)," at Oliver Kamm/5BE last winter, she and composer Stefan Tcherepnin staged a performance in which the films' sound tracks were channeled through a vintage Serge Modular System, the pioneering synthesizer designed and built by Serge Tcherepnin (Stefan's uncle); a CD Granat and Stefan Tcherepnin had made together, Teepees and Igloos, was available at the gallery during the show. Granat produced a CD to accompany Circle Jerk as well, working in collaboration with musician Chris Anderson.

For "Scratch Films/Stars Way Out," Granat divided the gallery into two spaces, a black room and a white room. Her accompanying statement read, in part, "These films are movies made ... from the attack and scratch of their own emulsion.... In nature we see it all around us. At the same time something is being created, something is being destroyed." The impulse to conceptualize her work around such binaries--black/white, creation/destruction, mechanical/organic, absence/presence--is also evident in her current plans to make negative, black-on-white versions of her scratch films. But, like the zeros and ones of binary code, these base components are deployed or activated in myriad (theoretically infinite) ways. Granat unlocks the recombinant potential of her work by recycling its elements (making a negative of a positive, making a print from a film still, wresting a kind of life-in-death from analog technics like the Serge Modular System) and reusing them in various permutations (as when she presents the same projectors, like kinetic readymades, in multiple installations).

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And it is the logic of recombinance, and the layering of meaning that can come from it, that accounts for the complex address of Granat's art. If her work in some sense extends the tradition of filmmaking that "creates itself out of its own experience," to quote curator John G. Hanhardt's characterization of the tradition of medium-specific cinema that culminated with Structuralist film, it creates itself out of other experiences as well, expanding into other disciplines, other registers. The motif, for example, of an effulgent circle (hole punches, spotlights on walls), which crops up throughout her work, could be linked to blankness, ciphers, to the "zero" in Cinema Zero, to the reduction of film to the barest of terms. But it could also be linked to the moon--a figure Granat invokes in talking about her art, drawing a parallel between its cycles and a looped reel of film. Falling somewhere between Melies's iconic fantasy of lunar voyage, the archetypal establishing shots of vampire movies, and McCall's projector-beam-as-sculpture, Granat's luminous disks illuminate a cinema that is historical as well as temporal, allegorical as well as material.

ELIZABETH SCHAMBELAN IS AN ASSOCIATE EDITOR OF ARTFORUM.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist on

Xu Zhen

IN AUGUST 2005 word began to spread through the Chinese art community that the Shanghai-based artist Xu Zhen had scaled Mount Everest and, what's more, managed (with a band of expert climbers) to saw off the top 1.86 meters of the mountain's peak. A month later, this icy trophy became the piece de resistance in the artist's installation 8848-1.86 at the Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art in Japan--preserved inside a refrigerated vitrine surrounded by video and photographic documentation of the climb as well as by the team's equipment. The natural reaction among audiences was, of course, to doubt that the evidence was real, even if the artifact's presentation conjured a seeming veracity (one thinks of those installations found at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles). Yet soon it was audiences' own distrust that was cast into doubt: Only a month after the triennial opened, the People's Republic of China Everest Expedition Team publicly revised its official estimate of Everest's height, knocking four meters off the previous measurement of 8,848 meters.

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It is precisely this slippery character of socially accepted reality that Xu calls "mobile public fact," something the artist addresses often in a practice that is notable for its political punch. Born in 1977, Xu started out making videos that focused on the body and public space in a manner reminiscent of early Bruce Nauman or Vito Acconci: For example, the four-minute video Rainbow, 1998, shows a person's back growing increasingly red, the result of slaps heard on the sound track but never seen. In another video from the same year titled Shouting, a moving crowd faces away from the camera until, startled by screams behind them, they spin around (a reaction that elicits laughs from whomever is behind the camera). The next year, Xu extended the implications of the latter work by engaging viewers more actively. In From Inside the Body, 1999 (an installation that appeared in "Art for Sale," a 1999 group show that he co-organized at a Shanghai mall), viewers sit before three video monitors in a room outfitted with a single couch: The central screen shows the same couch, empty; the left-hand screen shows a man, and the right-hand screen, a woman. While the middle image remains static, the man and the woman begin to sniff the air, as if suddenly aware of an aroma. They smell themselves, stripping off their clothes to locate the source of this intoxicating scent. Finally, in their underwear, they walk off camera only to reappear together on the central screen, where they sit on the couch and start to sniff each other--tentatively at first, but soon doggedly enough to be on top of each other. During the course of the video piece, an aroma is released in the room, as if inviting viewers to mimic the actions on-screen. Government officials shut down the exhibition after just three days, calling the work "pornographic."

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Xu's practice since has become only more provocative in the political realm, even though he--in a manner perhaps befitting a provocateur--claims that "Shanghai artists don't pay attention to politics." One of his most compelling recent pieces, 12'91", 2005, is a sculpture of a military tank, made out of high-density foam, iron, and resin. Sullied with dried dirt, its exterior imprinted with the marks of people's hands and feet, the work seems an angst-ridden cast burdened with a continuing history of rebellion and oppression. The sculpture was first shown in 2005 at the Second Triennial of Chinese Art (held at the Nanjing Museum in China), but its power supersedes its immediate Chinese context, as evidenced by the public's emotional reaction when it appeared as part of "China Power Station, Part I," a Serpentine Gallery project I co-organized with Gunnar B. Kvaran and Julia Peyton-Jones last fall at Battersea Power Station in conjunction with the Red Mansion Foundation and the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo.

This past year Xu drew the interest of Chinese officials again with An Animal, 2006, featured in "38 Solo Exhibitions," a large show in Shanghai's Creative Garden that he cocurated: This three-channel video installation shows a panda variously ejaculating (with the assistance of a group of men, faces digitally blurred) and sleeping. (Not surprisingly, as Xu put a national symbol through the wringer, Shanghai authorities shut down the entire exhibition only half an hour after the opening.) The artist's irreverent humor also took the exhibition space into the private sphere with Temporary Expansion, 2006, for which Xu rented out sections of friends' apartments, installing his own objects within their homes--placing a skeleton in one window, hanging dirty laundry in a garden, even positioning a traffic light in a living room. These interventions were documented in photographs and videos.

Clearly, Xu's sociopolitical appraisals distance him from the herd of contemporary Chinese artists. And the breadth of his practice, in all its seeming spontaneity and surprising inflections and turns, only complicates the attempt to pin him down to any single position within his country's art scene--or, indeed, within cultural production at large. Ironically, at a time when China's cultural activities are on the map as never before in the modern period--driven by successive waves of economic expansion, new galleries, museums, biennials, and record-breaking auctions--these qualities might make Xu emblematic of his moment.

A CONTRIBUTING EDITOR OF ARTFORUM, HANS-ULRICH OBRIST IS CODIRECTOR OF EXHIBITIONS AND PROGRAMS AND DIRECTOR OF INTERNATONAL PROJECTS AT THE SERPENTINE GALLERY, LONDON.

Debra Singer on

Kalup Linzy

"I AM CALLING from KK Queens Survey, and today we are contacting artists in your community.... Metaphorically speaking, how many asses do you kiss a week? One to two asses a week, three to four asses a week, five to six ...?" asks the pollster. "Five to six asses. I used to kiss more," quips the distressed artist on the other end of the line, "but I got an infection on my bottom lip from all of the bullshit!"

Occurring about midway through Kalup Linzy's blistering lampoon of art-world power dynamics, KK Queens Survey, 2005, this bawdy exchange typifies the twenty-nine-year-old, New York-based artist's trademark mixture of raunchy humor, campy theatricality, sexual intrigue, and poignant social commentary. For the last several years Linzy, who grew up in rural central Florida, has been making satirical videos inspired by personal events and the daytime-television soap operas that were a youthful obsession. He cites Keenen Ivory Wayans's 1990s sketch comedy show In Living Color and the televised performances of drag queen RuPaul as influences, as well as early John Waters films, themselves indebted to kitschy television sources. In his videos, Linzy concocts his own alternative televisual world, replicating the convoluted melodrama and artificial style of afternoon soaps but inflecting them with outrageous humor and replacing daytime drama's predominantly white, heterosexual characters with a cast of protagonists more relevant to his own life as a Southern, black, gay man.

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Linzy's most elaborate project to date is the serial "Conversations wit de Churen," 2002-. Comprised thus far of five installments, the episodic videos weave in and out of interrelated plots revolving around the travails of the Braswells, a Southern, black, small-town family. As hilarious as "Conversations wit de Churen" is, recurring moments of pathos are generously interspersed among the gags. For instance, in Conversations wit de Churen III: Da Young and Da Mess, 2005, drag queen and aspiring singer Taiwan receives a marriage proposal from his handsome, rich, loving boyfriend, Harry. Instead of being overjoyed, Taiwan plunges into an emotional crisis as he tries to decide whether to make a public commitment to Harry and thereby risk losing the security of his family and church relationships. Played by Linzy with compassion and self-aware comic aplomb, Taiwan sends up almost every stereotype of a cross-dressing gay man but at the same time emerges as an empathetic character faced with an agonizing dilemma. Offsetting his amazing bubble-bath phone consultation with dial-a-psychic Lenita--who demands that her clients pose their questions to her in the form of improvised, soulful ballads--are his distraught calls to his domineering mother, Nora Lee, and his supportive grandma Leelabell. In Linzy's universe, irony doubles back on itself, becoming irresistible sincerity.

The artist began making videos at the University of South Florida at Tampa, where he studied television production as well as art during his undergrad and graduate years. It is there that he developed his distinctive style, favoring low-tech production methods and a DIY aesthetic and serving as the writer, director, cinematographer, and editor of his videos while also playing multiple roles, both male and female. Artist friends of various ethnic backgrounds round out his casts, but Linzy often dubs his own voice over theirs, using software to shift the pitch and timbre into variations on his own reinvented black vernacular, characterized by double entendres, meaningful slang, and a pronounced Southern drawl. Frequently layered on top of these performances are cheesy special effects and sentimental sound tracks. Most often, men play women, and occasionally women play men, with everyone decked out in over-the-top drag. Donning unconvincing wigs and ill-fitting dresses (frequently combined with pointedly overgrown facial hair), the actors perform an endless parodic relay that disrupts conventional categories of gender, sexuality, and race. The characters embody various stereotypes but ultimately subvert them through Linzy's incisive forms of exaggeration. Emphasizing through performance the constructed nature of identity, Linzy confronts received notions and offers in their stead complex positions of subjectivity that not only assert what makes each of us distinctive but also highlights connections we might share, such as our responsiveness to the universal emotions--love, hope, disappointment--that animate his story lines.

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Most of the action in Linzy's videos, however, takes place offscreen and is retold via phone calls. For example, in Conversations wit de Churen IV: Play wit de Churen, 2005, we meet emerging artist Katonya, played by Linzy in a bra and blond wig, and root for our heroine as she dishes on her bedroom phone with her best friend, Matissa (memorably played by Matthew Day Jackson in a satin toga), and argues with her boss, who then fires her, over the phone, because she skipped work to be with her boyfriend, who dumps her, over the phone, when he discovers she has been fired, and so on. Such phone sequences dramatize connections between people but also mark the distance between them, since each character is always seen sequestered in his or her personal space. Our attention is thus focused on the dialogue and its delivery. This emphasis on dialogue underscores the work's relationship to African-American rhetorical and performance traditions in which language represents both an expression of autonomy and a validation of a specifically black cultural history. Linzy's reinvented idiomatic language recalls, for example, literary precedents like Zora Neale Hurston's novels, which embrace an African-American vernacular, while his stylized expressiveness, cross-dressing antics, and critical use of humor all reference histories of minstrelsy as well as performances on the chitlin circuit (the network of venues that emerged during segregation where black theatrical acts performed for mostly black audiences), in addition to contemporary black comedians like Eddie Murphy or Martin Lawrence.

But Linzy's linguistic strategies might be most productively considered in light of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s notion of "signifyin(g)." For Gates, signifyin(g) is a rhetorical mode of "black double-voicedness" whereby words and ideas can be "decolonized" through a process of semantic substitution and reappropriation in which words accrue new meanings while still retaining their original connotations. Like a palimpsest, speech in Linzy's works operates on two levels: A surface layer of meaning is a commentary on another layer, which must be "read" through it. And this is true of the visual as well as the spoken language that he reclaims. In one shot in Da Young and Da Mess, Taiwan, with a flower tucked behind his ear, reclines on a couch in a pose clearly quoting Manet's Olympia. Linzy replaces the white female figure and accompanying black attendant with his own character, a cross-dressing, gay, African-American man who presides serenely in the central position of attention and beauty. This mirroring of meaning is representative of Linzy's compelling combination of witty camp and poignant drama, which transcends the limits of irony and allows his work to function as an affirmation of black gay identity and as an astute social observation of empathy, love, friendship, and family.

DEBRA SINGER IS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND CHIEF CURATOR OF THE KITCHEN, NEW YORK.

Mark Godfrey on

Rosalind Nashashibi

A PLUG SOCKET, three screw holes in the floor, the back of an electric toothbrush ... A pair of earrings above a string of pearls, a bank logo, two wooden knobs and a letter slot ... Sequences like these make up one part of Eyeballing, a film shot in New York in 2005 by London-based artist Rosalind Nashashibi. The objects appear on-screen for around fifteen seconds apiece in static, unbroken shots. Given the title's prompt, you quickly get the picture: Each item appears to have two rudimentary eyes and a mouth. They are not so disparate after all, but form a collection of found faces, an absurd archive.

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Like Nashashibi's other films, Eyeballing was shot on 16 mm, and the medium in this instance has a particular effect. Seeing faces in random objects is child's play, but here, with a basic knowledge of film, you realize immediately that the artist had to set up a camera and tripod for every carefully exposed shot. Rather than suggesting the spontaneity of a game, the work therefore recalls serious 16-mm films--particularly the rigorously edited first section of Hollis Frampton's Zorn's Lemma, 1970, another collection of signs filmed in New York. But what makes Eyeballing remarkable is the way in which the city is integrated into its fabric. The "faces" sequences are intercut with passages showing cops standing around during breaks outside the First Precinct station in Lower Manhattan. Nashashibi filmed the police from quite close by--from across the street, it appears. They do not acknowledge her, and so you cannot help but wonder whether her activity was illicit, even illegal. What does it mean to survey the surveyors in post-9/11 New York? Eyeballing poses this question but deflects an answer, for each time you concentrate on the police, the "faces" intrude again--absurd, melancholic, and deformed. The two juxtaposed sequences of Eyeballing initially seem distinct but can be connected. If the faces stand in for real people, suggesting that Nashashibi found it impossible to represent authentic individuality in an administered society, the police represent the enforcers of such administration. Another take would be to note how the face passages, like the NYPD ones, provoke questions about paranoia and control. Forcing the viewer to an awareness that there are hidden faces all around us, Nashashibi represents the paranoid subject's encounter with New York while simultaneously demonstrating what it means to be in control of vision. After all, you see faces only because she has persuaded you to--through her title and selection, but also by cropping each shot and filming it from an angle of her determination. The film raises crucial issues about very contemporary aspects of subjectivity and visuality, but does so without announcing itself as a meditation on these questions, and its subtlety is a major part of its success.

Eyeballing increasingly appears pivotal to Nashashibi's practice, consolidating various themes and formal strategies developed in her work over the past seven years. She was initially recognized for the three-and-a-half-minute film The States of Things, 2000, which, like Eyeballing, is structured through a collision of two disjunctive elements. The grainy black-and-white images were shot in Glasgow, where Nashashibi went to art school, and show women shopping at a charity jumble sale, but the sound track is a '20s love song sung by Egyptian diva Um Kulthoum. The music led many viewers to assume they were looking at an exotic bazaar rather than a humdrum Scottish Saturday. In its use of footage made without the subjects' knowledge, Midwest, 2002, shot in Omaha, also presaged Eyeballing. Nashashibi initially meant only to record users of Omaha's public spaces, but it turned out that the people on the streets were the homeless and the unemployed. Midwest is a haunting portrait of the dispossessed, but by keeping shots quite short, Nashashibi prevented viewers from indulging in the questionable activity of projecting onto, and pitying, the film's characters.

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A similar editing pace structured Hreash House, 2004, made in Nazareth, Israel, where Nashashibi, whose father is Palestinian, has family friends. The film portrays a family in the middle of a fractious zone, but everyday rituals proceed, and no one seems to notice the filmmaker, who forges a tender and unsensational representation of Palestinian life. Yet like Midwest, Hreash House posed problems for the artist. Were her films becoming overly narrative, and reliant on the characters of her subjects? In Park Ambassador, 2004, she eschewed real people altogether. Shot at a Glasgow playground, the film shows the painted frame of a derelict swing set. Centered in the image, still against the windblown trees, the frame appears like an ancient idol. With her title Nashashibi connects the primitive figure in the park to that of the ambassador, indicating that the "magical power" with which societies once endowed totems persists in the authority invested in the modern state official. Here (as in Eyeballing) Nashashibi anthropomorphizes objects not to produce a naive account of the world but to open up political questions.

Eyeballing, rooted in all these earlier works, has also launched new trajectories in Nashashibi's art. Its sense of illicit activity is conveyed in a different way in another film made by Nashashibi in New York: Flash in the Metropolitan, 2006, a collaboration with Lucy Skaer, was shot in pitch darkness after the crowds left the museum (the Met gave permission, but there is still the sense of intrusion). Occasionally the dark is banished as powerful film lights briefly illuminate a painted urn, a figure, or a mask. Sometimes the glow of the bulbs reflects warmly off ancient metal, but elsewhere the light is so intense as to seem violent, burning away the object rather than rendering it visible. Flash manages at once to suggest an assault on the museum and to retrieve the original psychic weight of the artifacts in its collection. No longer neutralized under vitrines and constant light, the masks and figures appear magical once again.

It had seemed from Midwest and Hreash House that Nashashibi's work was primarily motivated by sociological inquiries, but now the artist's concerns appear more diverse and, in the context of contemporary artists' films, less familiar. What's refreshing is her ability to portray the psychological atmosphere of locations and to address major questions about the power of political and cultural institutions through anthropomorphic images and through a recourse to the language of primitivism--strategies that might seem as defunct as the idols and figures she filmed at the Metropolitan but that she revitalizes. Yet all along, Nashashibi's formal sensibilities have separated her work from the documentary style that the early films might have seemed to approach. The collision in her art of disjunctive elements--whether sound and image or different kinds of sequences--has always meant two things: first, that her work creates space for the viewer to join in creating meaning rather than just receiving it; and second, that established ways of controlling and categorizing images and ideas crumble.

MARK GODFREY TEACHES AT THE SLADE SCHOOL OF FINE ART, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON.

Michael Ned Holte on

Amanda Ross-Ho

TO CREATE HER WORK SEIZURE, 2006, Los Angeles-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho incorporated several dozen images she had culled from the Internet into a single large laser print. They were photographs of contraband: caches of weapons both primitive and automatic, drugs and paraphernalia, and repetitive stacks and radial piles of (minted or counterfeit) cold cash--all forms of capital extracted from an illicit economy and carefully arranged for the camera by cops unwittingly negotiating issues of morphology and presentation while creating perfunctory documents of their night's work. Ross-Ho printed the images, singly or in groups, on 8 1/2-x-11 inch bond paper and taped the images to a backdrop in a seemingly artless composition that was then rephotographed as a single seamless image.

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The "seizure" of Ross-Ho's title, of course, deliberately calls attention to her act of appropriation by evoking a parallel black-market economy of images and signification. A related strategy is in play in the ironically titled photo Have the Courage to Be Yourself, 2006, in which she posits a found image of a young Asian girl making Jackson Pollock-esque splatters as a self-portrait, suggesting the banality of the idea of self-expression(ism). In these and other works, Ross-Ho traces an art-historical lineage extending back to the "Pictures" generation--to, say, Richard Prince's theft of popular 1970s advertising images. One might also see a relationship between her work and Mel Bochner's Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, 1966, which employed then-new Xerox technology to level the hierarchies between fine art, invoices, and scientific diagrams. An analogous leveling effect takes place in Ross-Ho's presentation of images--which range from the seemingly banal and generic (doilies, gift baskets, stemware) to the specific or potentially charged (Jay-Z, a black dog fucking a white dog)--but the grouping of similar images paradoxically serves to highlight the individuality of each single image. Put another way, the generic easily slides into the specific: Doilies unexpectedly become as unique as snowflakes; an appropriate gift basket emerges for every conceivable occasion.

Ross-Ho's post-"Pictures"-era investment in the image is further complicated by her transformation of such readily available imagery through various sculptural negotiations. As a graduate student at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts in Los Angeles, Ross-Ho began an ongoing series titled "Black Widow," 2005-, which consists of enlargements of the intricate weblike patterns of paper doilies (or images of paper doilies found on the Internet). These cutouts, each nearly seven feet in diameter, are made from canvas drop cloths and coated in black latex. Considered formally, these works compound flatness and dimensionality, bringing to mind photographic negatives of white paper doilies while affirming sculptural objecthood in the removal of canvas to create the voids.

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The sculptural properties of Ross-Ho's work were brought to the fore in a recent solo show at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, where Black Widow #4, 2006, was displayed on a setlike, three-angled Sheetrock wall that replicated the gallery perimeter. Next to that canvas work, Ross-Ho created another doily pattern (Gran-Abertura, 2006) by roughly cutting voids into the Sheetrock, allowing light to pass through and form a radial pattern on the gallery wall. Several empty, readymade gift baskets were placed throughout the gallery.

As suggested by the layered, gendered title of the "Black Widow" series, Ross-Ho's work constructs a web of associations in which something personal gets entangled. Perhaps it is not surprising that she once worked for a company that designed embroidered gift pillows with corny phrases--WHAT PART OF "PRINCESS" DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?; QUESTION AUTHORITY / ASK ME ANYTHING!--that aim to find their target audience by implying personality while remaining impersonal enough to appeal to a wide audience.

The gift baskets that appear frequently in Ross-Ho's work--both as found images taken from commercial websites and as readymade objects--also reflect her thematic concern with locating the personal within the impersonal: Their prepackaged contents are seemingly chosen for a specific recipient. At the same time, they signify abundance while establishing a physical limit that prevents their bounty from overflowing its woven container, suggesting an endless, if paradoxical, struggle between infinity and limitation. Indeed, Ross-Ho's work as a whole might be said to productively inhabit this conundrum, too, oscillating between the dimensional materiality of sculpture and the endlessly reproducible, scalable mutability of the photographic image.

MICHAEL NED HOLTE IS A LOS ANGELES-BASED WRITER.

Bob Nickas on

Adam Helms

VISITING AN ARTIST'S STUDIO for the first time is a lot like going on a blind date. One of the surest points of entry is to scan the walls to see what has been tacked up--postcards, posters, newspaper clippings, art reproductions. Within seconds you might absorb enough information to at least hold your own. In the case of Adam Helms, you hit the ground running, armed with a head full of images and associations: photographs of Chechen guerrillas, Cuban revolutionaries, and guys in fatigues playing war games; stills from Dead Man and The Night of the Hunter; pictures showing the surrender of Geronimo and the majesty of the American West; a cover of Soldier of Fortune magazine and a portrait of Joseph Conrad; images of dead bandits that helped enforce late-nineteenth-century notions of "frontier justice"; and the famous photo of a murdered Che Guevara. Invited by curator Doryun Chong to take part in last fall's "Ordinary Culture: Heikes/Helms/McMillian," a show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis that proposed a reading of culture as "a mechanism of social stabilization, or a matrix through which history is conducted, like electricity," Helms seized the opportunity to turn his source material into a visual index. A selection of imagery from his studio walls was reconfigured into two large pieces, An Ideal for Living and Means to the End, both 2006, serving as keys to his major work in the exhibition. In a statement written for the show, the thirty-two-year-old New York-based artist wrote: "I think of myself as an ethnographer. I survey and document the iconography, posturing, and symbols of radical political groups and subcultures.... I am interested in the ethos of violence, the romanticization of extremist ideology, and linking issues from our political past with contemporary events."

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To this end, Helms created his own fictional paramilitary group, the NFA, or New Frontier Army, in 2003. Working exclusively on paper, in gouache, graphite, and ink, Helms depicts the members of the group and their coat of arms, fortifications, sniper's nest, and training exercises in exquisitely rendered works. His exacting draftsmanship is at the service of what appears to be a ragtag army based in ramshackle structures, and the works balance fine detail with outlined, "unfinished" areas, as if to acknowledge on the level of image and execution that this is not only a fictional but also a provisional army. Many of the NFA combatants wear elaborate buffalo heads that function both as protective helmets and as masks to shield their identities. The eyes that stare out from behind them fix a steely gaze on the viewer, engaging him or her in a silent battle of wills. The look registers suspicion, defiance, and determination. Almost always horned, the buffalo heads also link the soldiers to the animal world of the plains and prairies of the American West, a lost time and place that lives on only in myth and imagination, where it has given rise to the fantasy of the lawlessness, adventure, and taming of the Wild West we know from rewritten history and from a pale-faced Hollywood. The NFA prompts an obvious question: What is the new frontier today? And exactly who and what cause will its army serve?

Helms's two-part visual index was mounted on parallel freestanding walls to form an architectural frame for Untitled (48 Portraits), 2006, an expansive grid comprising four dozen images of hoods, masks, and balaclavas--an anonymous rogues' gallery that readily calls to mind all-too-familiar images of terrorists, political prisoners, abductees, and their captors, both past and horribly present. Working on Mylar, an impermeable material, Helms let the ink run and pool to create the portraits. For an artist who has previously exerted great control over every mark in his drawings, Helms in Untitled (48 Portraits) introduced an element of chance into his production, as well as an aspect of abstraction that plays off his subject: the masking of anonymous, seemingly random violence. The title and dimensions of the work are based on Gerhard Richter's 48 Portraits, 1971-72, a patriarchal pantheon that features figures such as Einstein and Kafka alongside men who are wholly unrecognizable. For Helms and the world in which we live today, the lineage of "great men" has been replaced by a succession of faceless hooded phantoms, behind each of which are ten to take its place. With Untitled (48 Portraits), Helms's work can clearly be seen in relation to the abstract/covert conceptualism that has surfaced in recent years--in the work of artists like Gardar Eide Einarsson and Kelley Walker--representing a sly mode of political engagement that, unlike the sloganeering and accusatory art of the politically correct 1980s and '90s, infiltrates enemy lines without a shot being fired.

BOB NICKAS IS CURATORIAL ADVISER AT P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER, NEW YORK.

Jens Hoffmann on

Mario Ybarra Jr.

OFFERING A FRESH PERSPECTIVE on the fusion of cultures, practices, and aesthetics, Mario Ybarra Jr. has reenergized everything from the commingling of street culture and fine art to the grassroots workshop and the artist-run gallery. He is one of a new generation of artists of Mexican descent who, in contrast to many of their forebears, do not reject their American identity but embrace both of the trajectories in their backgrounds equally. Since graduating from the University of California, Irvine, in 2001, Ybarra has developed a prolific artistic practice that emanates from his upbringing, producing what he calls "contemporary art that is filtered through a Mexican-American experience in Los Angeles."

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Ybarra's biography is a key to understanding his work, which draws attention to forms of culture on the fringes of the mainstream and reveals hidden histories within the context of what he himself has experienced. He was brought up in Wilmington near the Los Angeles harbor, where he still lives. There he was not only immersed in the local Mexican-American culture but also encountered the politicized union dockworkers and their insignia, parades, and aesthetic sensibility. It is also worth noting that two artists in particular have been central to his development: He worked for a year as Ruben Ortiz-Torres's studio assistant, and Daniel Joseph Martinez was one of his tutors at UC Irvine. Both artists' skepticism about the idea of Chicano identity is clearly reflected in Ybarra's unhesitating approach to his work as an artist.

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Ybarra's talent lies in examining his surroundings in an almost anthropological fashion. Many of his installations reflect how Latino communities in the United States have appropriated elements of mainstream US culture and mimicked, altered, and even parodied it to make it their own. For "Alien Nation," an exhibition currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (which I co-organized with John Gill and Gilane Tawadros), Ybarra painted a large mural, titled Brown and Proud, 2006. The piece is one part Diego Rivera and one part graffiti; it brings together two significant revolutionary figures, one from each of the artist's two worlds: Emiliano Zapata from Mexico and Chewbacca from Star Wars.

But earlier projects, such as Cowboys on Broadway, 2002, and For All I Know He Had My Friend Angel Killed, 2005, make clear the link between Ybarra's incisive analyses of contemporary culture and conceptual political art more generally, often resulting in humorous and insightful observations on the hierarchies of art and life. The former work comprised an undocumented "action" that involved cruising through downtown LA in a 1979 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that had been decorated by Ybarra's friend Angel Montes Jr. to boast of his obsession with the Dallas Cowboys. Montes had painted the car in the team colors and replaced the Chevy logo with that of the sports club. Plastic footballs covered the air valves on the tires, and the rims were adorned with blue stars--the entire enterprise turning on its head the city's much-lamented lack of both a local NFL football team and a "real" downtown and making it, instead, a cause for celebration. For All I Know He Had My Friend Angel Killed was a series of readings and reenactments that Ybarra did in Miami Beach of some key scenes from the 1983 Brian De Palma movie Scarface. The performances, which took place during the 2005 Art Basel Miami Beach (not far from the movie's setting), were based on the cult around the main character, Tony Montana, among Latino teenagers in the United States and on the story of a Mexican-American friend of the artist's who had gone to jail for drug dealing.

More recently Ybarra presented The Peacock Doesn't See Its Own Ass/Let's Twitch Again: Operation Bird Watching in London, 2006, for the "Uncertain States of America" exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London's Hyde Park. This piece, made in collaboration with Ybarra's partner, Karla Diaz, consisted of an alternative bird-watching club, appropriately situated in one of London's largest green spaces. The room-size installation consisted of studies of the "birdlife" of London, in an extended sense: from hairstyles to found objects, museum displays to corporate design. An insightful glance into the otherwise marginalized world of bird-watching enthusiasts, this unorthodox version of a "club" allowed a diverse audience to contemplate the activities of identification, appreciation, and admiration, while positing a correlation with the reception of contemporary art.

Ybarra's practice does not stop with making artworks and staging actions or performances. His early collaborative project Slanguage, 2002-2005, was an art center for young adults in Wilmington that included a gallery space, an education department, and a workshop. In 2005 he and Diaz converted the New Chinatown Barbershop into a small art space in LA. He installed a full-scale reproduction of it, titled Fair Exchange, at the Los Angeles County Fair last year, and we can look forward to seeing it in London this fall, when it will again be re-created, this time at Tate Modern, for the exhibition "The World as a Stage," where Ybarra plans to use the space to host a haircutting competition.

JENS HOFFMANN IS DIRECTOR OF THE CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE, SAN FRANCISCO.

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Barry Schwabsky on

Tala Madani

THERE'S SOMETHING FAMILIAR about these men; if we don't know them, then we know others like them. Wandering around the house in their undershirts, engaged in ridiculous horseplay, they are our eternally awkward uncles, the boorish family members you hope your friends never meet.

Or no, actually. Such an identification with the situations depicted in Tala Madani's "Cake-Men" series (begun in 2005; all works referred to here are from 2005) depends on ignoring the constant reminders of their cultural specificity. The first hint might come from pictures within the pictures--portraits of men in turbans (perhaps ayatollahs?) that hang on the walls behind the men in paintings such as Eftar or Kneeling. After those details are noted, however, it suddenly seems obvious that the Iranian-born, American-educated Madani is recollecting the homeland she left in 1995 at the age of fourteen. Her artfully crude, expressionistically cartoony paintings capture the stereotypes of ethnic identity without losing the idiosyncratic details that allow a certain humoral quiddity to shine through. Though I feel they could have been recollected from my own Jewish New Jersey, these bald, grizzled figures are definitely men of the Muslim Middle East.

Madani's work first caught my eye at the Volta Show in Basel last summer; the 2006 Yale MFA will have her first solo exhibition at Lombard-Freid Projects in New York in February. The headlong ease and assurance with which Madani addresses her medium will delight any lover of pure painting, but her disabused look at her subjects is intended to leave viewers troubled and questioning. "I am interested in presenting men as phenomena," Madani has written. (In her artist's statement Madani does not address what is perhaps an even more obvious question: What does it mean to paint "stereotypical men of the Middle East"--as she describes them--in a country currently making war on men not so far away from these?) But a woman painting men is still a contentious subject. When Ellen Altfest organized an exhibition at 1-20 in New York this past summer titled "Men," consisting of paintings of men made by women, the artists Nicole Eisenman and A. L. Steiner sent a letter objecting to the show's premise. They wrote, "Men are problematic on every level, emotionally, spiritually, economically, physically."

That's certainly how they--excuse me, we--appear to Madani. A sort of quotidian slapstick appears throughout the "Cake-Men" paintings (with cake replacing the pie in the face). Yet even when nothing untoward seems to be taking place, in paintings such as Communal Blowing and Cake and Book, there is a sinister undertone. A violent humor invests the men's shenanigans. The recurrent cake of the series title suggests not only aging but also the opposite--regression, the fantasy of a return to childhood. For Madani, it also evokes a chain of associations: "blowing out the candles, blowing out the fire, blowing up"; it bespeaks an incendiary atmosphere in which the candle is more like a fuse. What's funny, though, is just how coolly one of the men in Hands In shoves a cake (with oddly smoking candles) down on the head of his companion. And why does the man in Carrying Cake kneel on all fours, a cake perched on his naked back? There is some sort of free-floating perversity at work here, which becomes more explicit in Blowing: One character, again on hands and knees, balances a cake on his behind, as another guy puffs at the candles.

Madani's larger paintings reveal a complementary aspect of her art, as if deliberately illustrating Clement Greenberg's dichotomy between "the intensity of the easel picture and the blandness of the mural." (Imagine if Sue Williams had painted her de Kooningesque abstractions of 2000 simultaneously with her raw notes on victimhood, made a decade earlier.) Limited in their palette to just three or four mostly bright, keyed-up colors, these works open up the hothouse domestic interiors of the small paintings to some unidentified open plane; individuality is effaced as the human figure is turned into something halfway between a motif in a pattern and a letter in a calligraphic scroll that inscribes, possibly, nothing.

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Bowing might be thought of as a post-Jonathan Lasker reworking of Matisse; each figure, kneeling toward Mecca, has been suggested by a few summary swipes of fluent color. Sharing Matisse's willingness to reduce the figure to a decorative module, Madani has something of his slyness as well. Remember that odd visual pun in his Moroccans, 1915-16, whereby most of the people alluded to in the title are rendered so tersely as to be illegible, while the fruit in the picture's lower left could easily be taken for the Moroccans themselves, "bowing their foreheads to the ground in prayer," as Alfred H. Barr noted. Madani paints the bodies of her bowing men with just as much ambiguity--they could just as easily be, oh, I don't know, a bunch of plucked chickens; only the caricatural heads she has lightly added to some of them clinch the figurative identification. She also includes a satirical fillip: Three men are shown kissing images of their spiritual leaders--one with such fervor that he has pushed his head through the picture. Praying to Allah, they unwittingly give themselves over to idolatry. Here, the submergence of identity in the homosocial mass brings an unholy ecstasy.

BARRY SCHWABSKY IS A FREQUENT CONTRIBUTOR TO ARTFORUM.

Anne Ellegood on

Sara VanDerBeek

IN ON PHOTOGRAPHY, Susan Sontag claimed that all photographs are memento mori, tinged with an intrinsic pathos that encourages an awareness of our mortality. In the context of our historical moment--mournful and uneasy after September 11, overwhelmed in the face of violence and human suffering in Iraq and Darfur--this property of photographic reproduction seems particularly appropriate for an artist to engage. Certainly, the intimately scaled photographs of handmade assemblages that comprised Sara VanDerBeek's first solo show, "Mirror in the Sky" (last year at D'Amelio Terras in New York), are deeply resonant in this regard. In her photograph Decorations in a Notebook (all works 2006), for example, VanDerBeek places an Associated Press image of a Vietcong soldier adjacent to a reproduction of Pablo Picasso's haunting sculpture Death's Head, 1941, whose isolated skull form has been lit by its original photographer in order to cast a dramatic shadow to one side (the appropriated image clearly derives from a catalogue of Picasso's work). Another piece, A Reoccurring Pattern, conspicuously adopts the visual language of the memorial, featuring a collage of portraits and patterned textiles affixed to a chain-link fence, a coupling reminiscent of the spontaneous shrines that adorn urban streets after a fatal accident or other tragedy.

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The latter photograph could be said to provide something of an allegory for VanDerBeek's practice. Her instincts are those of a collector--a cataloguer, an archivist, a keeper of images--and this compulsion to save otherwise discarded or potentially forgotten representations of the past makes time tangible. The artist amasses advertisements, film stills, newspapers, postcards, exhibition catalogues, old Life and Fortune magazines--all found at flea markets, at yard sales, and in her late father's archive. (A visionary and renowned experimental filmmaker, Stan VanDerBeek exhibited an interest in Surrealist collage, and his innovative sequencing and overlapping of an abundance of found images created a rich visual language his daughter has clearly absorbed.) She carefully assembles these appropriations into tabletop constructions made of tree branches, painted wooden forms, accumulations of buttons, and other simple materials, all bound together with string and accented with pieces of mirrors, crystals, swatches of textiles, and even the occasional macrame piece, upon which her selected photos can interact. VanDerBeek then shoots numerous photographs of each composition but selects only one print as the final work before disassembling the sculpture, keeping the remaining images and trinkets as part of an ongoing collection of objects to be incorporated into later work. Thus, each photograph becomes the permanent, lasting manifestation of her process, taking up photography's ability to memorialize gestures or moments lost to time's forward march.

VanDerBeek, it seems, has an innate understanding of how photography (perhaps the most ubiquitous presence in our contemporary life) operates in the world, and it is the starting point and the ending point of her practice. Indeed, the way in which VanDerBeek pictures our world, while creating both erasures and distortions, suggests her awareness that each photograph, for all its apparent relationship to truth, is a manipulation of sorts, whether through posing, decontextualization, framing, or juxtaposition. Her attentiveness to photography's capacity for simultaneous presentation and obfuscation is evident in her selection of existing images, cropping techniques, and overlappings, and recalls poet and critic Susan Stewart's provocative assertion that collections reside somewhere between public and private space, "between display and hiding." The artist clearly controls our view into her three-dimensional assemblages; the inclusion of images of Constantin Brancusi's Endless Column, 1918, and of one of Frank Stella's frameless abstract black paintings in her work titled Ziggurat makes the viewer more mindful, by way of contrast, of the photograph's edges, and of the photographer's intervention as the framer.

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VanDerBeek typically also reveals something not previously apparent in the objects and found images by themselves. Consider Extravaganza, in which the artist, with eerie elegance, chalks up a death toll reminiscent of Andy Warhol's "Death and Disaster" series: In addition to a car crash appropriated from Warhol, VanDerBeeks's assemblage features a Life magazine photo of a supine (and astonishingly intact) woman lying dead on the ground after having jumped from a building; a counterintuitively gorgeous image of a mushroom cloud; the terrible shot of Martin Luther King Jr. collapsed on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis; and the figure of Marilyn Monroe, whose visage is provocatively obscured in VanDerBeek's structure. Each picture is lovingly adorned with lines of silver glitter and precariously propped up against tree branches skinned of their bark. Whereas Warhol's invocation of tragic figures participated in their transformation into icons--his use of repetition paralleling the numbing reproduction of individuals and events in the public sphere--VanDerBeek maintains their expressive, emotional quality. Eschewing repetition in favor of combining visually linked but distinct images, VanDerBeek disallows their full or succinct consumption by the viewer, layering them and adding her own material flourishes--returning these images, in effect, to the private sphere. Viewers slow down and consider connections and possible meanings among the images and objects, rather than scanning them as one would a magazine or a billboard.

Such intimacy is significant for the cultural relevance we recognize in VanDerBeek's borrowed images (which have their own particular history of quotation and circulation), taken primarily from the 1910s to '20s and the 1960s to '70s, periods marked by enormous artistic innovation and social upheaval. Her astute selection of imagery proposes that the events depicted--and the attendant themes of mortality, celebrity, political strife, representation--are somehow synchronous with our time. It is this capacity to tap into our moment by borrowing images from the past--shared by other contemporary artists such as Kelley Walker, Seth Price, David Noonan, and Edgar Arceneaux--that gives VanDerBeek's work its sense of urgency. Socially aware and yet still somehow sweetly personal, her miniature worlds are balancing acts of the hopeful and the morose--at times nostalgic, perhaps, but only while asking audiences to consider the ramifications for our future should we fail to keep with us the tragedies and traumas of the past.

ANNE ELLEGOOD IS A CURATOR AT THE HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN IN WASHINGTON, DC.