On the ground: a year brings different things to different cities. Inaugurating a new annual feature, Artforum asked six writers--one each from New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, and Beijing--to weigh in on the local currents in art (and life) during 2004.

NEW YORK

JOHN KELSEY

THERE WAS A KIND OF INTELLIGENCE, IN THE WAY 2003 BLACKED out midstream. Some things thrive better in darkness; some things go to sleep. But this year was halogen lit, smooth as safety glass, and punctuated by ever-peaking terror alerts, no doubt manufactured by the Bush people in anticipation of their show of force at Madison Square Garden. The year may go down as the most managed in the history of New York, the year that so many potential and imaginary explosions were defused or diverted, the year that the wartime climate served as a consistent and dependable stabilizing device. It's tempting to consider all the ways that 2004 almost happened, or could have happened, yet didn't. But whether it did or not, the year had a certain managerial logic, a logic that applied to daily life as well as to cultural production, guiding the movement of money, people, and art into and out of New York.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There were some brief moments in the streets on the occasion of the Republican National Convention. Critical Mass, a roving party of five thousand bicycles, circled Manhattan two days before the event. During two minutes of mayhem on the steps of the New York Public Library, a battalion of riot police manhandled some overlively kids and ensnared many less lively ones in orange plastic netting. And as the sun came up on the last morning of the RNC, all of the city's major fountains flowed blood red (until the cleaning crews quickly corrected the anomaly). Later, Andre 3000 appeared downtown to support the more than one thousand illegally detained, bureaucratically "lost" protestors. But nothing was broken; nothing really got out of hand or exploded during the convention.

As if the '80s might be possible all over again, in 2004 money and art once again decided to quit fooling around and shack up: Their many children suddenly filled Chelsea from end to end. These well-educated artists proved to be experts at manipulating today's second and third appearances of '60s, '70s, and '80s countercultures, but could do nothing either to disrupt an insanely policed Republicanizing of their own city or to resist or refuse their own instrumentalization by an art market increasingly fine-tuned to the momentary whims of young collectors and curators. It seems that nowadays, we will appropriate everything but our own time and place, and yet appropriation will always feel a little too cool and vague if it doesn't take that extra, possibly criminal, step toward misappropriation, or a theft that actually takes something. In 2004, insider-outsider, faux-rebel art appeared as the rising sign of the ambitious post-MFA artist-monkey. Every pretty picture and scrappy drawing hanging on a gallery wall seemed to stand for a defused desire, a wallpapered-over possibility, a patch in the sails of the happy ship that carried us smoothly into another cold, bright winter.

So, as the election loomed closer, a remarkable amount of pictures were shown, a lot were sold, and some will say it's going too far to claim that this apparently contagious phenomenon was the result of so many galleries catering to the Judith Rothschild Foundation's desire to invest several million dollars in contemporary drawings as part of a proposed gift to MOMA. They will say it's going too far to claim that in 2004 the New York art world was dominated by private collectors and their easily predictable spending habits. That this is why so many galleries presented show after show of loveable little works you could slip into your briefcase. That these same galleries are increasingly connected to a sturdy yet flexible feeding tube: the Columbia University MFA program. That art students are now trained, above all, to manipulate this tube from their end, too. That museums offered no viable antidote to this epidemic. That this year, young artists even helped create the decor for the Whitney Museum's annual fundraising gala. That everyone (except every single artist I know) seemed to agree that assume vivid astro focus was the hottest thing since Wendy Airhole (because they dared to create retro-poppy, theme park-like environments rather than small, handmade things?). That things have suddenly become so amazingly transparent as far as art and money go, as well as in terms of a generalized libidinal investment in the smooth functioning of the high-speed, art school-collector connection. We all see it, and the fact that it's so easy to see is precisely what makes for a stable market, a steady production, a safe and manageable art.

An autopsy of a year requires sharp tools. But at the time of this writing in October (with the second presidential debate droning in the background), 2004 reveals its particular and extreme amnesia. All the things missed or forgotten in New York, all the shows we knew didn't matter but went to anyway. We forgot drawing. We forgot goth. We forgot our Biennial. We tried to remember Minimalism. After three years without it, we almost forgot the absence of MOMA in Manhattan (will we still recognize her when she unveils her extreme makeover in November?). But 2004 also produced its own particular life forms, and the following words are addressed to these other New Yorks, the ones you can actually live in. Because a few things do stick.

I remember the Downtown for Democracy Liberty Fair on Twenty-second Street in mid-September. Although the word "democracy" has recently taken on a distinctly empty and pornographic flavor, and although voting--or voting Kerry--became the be-all and end-all of political engagement for most New Yorkers, the street fair was remarkable for the momentary shock of a festive afternoon it unleashed on a normally battened-down Chelsea block. A spontaneous, collectively produced feeling exposed the ordinarily antifestive, low-intensity character of this zone--an open window, a stopped clock, a sudden joyful critique of the normal situation. Contributions to this rare carnivalesque atmosphere included Rachel Harrison's pay-to-enter/pay-to-exit "jail," samba lessons by Andrea Fraser, a kissing booth starring Emily Speers Mears, boxing with Cecily Brown, some disorderly conduct with trash bags and whipped cream, and an open bar in broad daylight. And for many of those involved, the feeling hasn't faded.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Speaking of the changing terrain of Twenty-second Street, 2004 was the year Colin de Land's American Fine Arts, Inc., finally closed its doors. The most adventurous art gallery of the '90s, AFA pioneered a critical-collaborative enterprise that kept its doors and its agenda wide open to alternative practices. It offered a humorously dysfunctional model of what a New York gallery could or should be--a willfully difficult model that now no longer exists in Chelsea. And in characteristic fashion, AFA went out with a string of excellent shows. There was Andrea Fraser's Official Welcome, 2001-2003, an Oscar-worthy thank you speech (in conjunction with an exhibition across the street at Friedrich Petzel Gallery that documented her literal consummation of a deal with a collector). There was "Get Real Estate," Gareth James's exhibition of conceptual origami. There was Patterson Beckwith's transformation of the gallery into a free schoolhouse, with a monthlong program of events and artist collaborations. There was Lutz Bacher's excellent, mordant "Jokes." And finally, "Election," a group exhibition organized by James Meyer. As if in hysterical reaction to the loss of AFA, a bumper crop of new Chelsea galleries mushroomed overnight this fall. We can only hope these young galleries and their artists will put as much energy into redefining something that resembles a local New York art as they will put into churning out product for NADA-Scope-Liste-Frieze. This was, after all, the year that art forgot New York, which every month shipped another part of itself to Miami, Basel, London, or a Utopia Station near you.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 2004 we witnessed the unexpected return-with-a-vengeance of Alex Bag at Elizabeth Dee Gallery. Many have felt her influence, but few can match her comic genius when it comes to exposing the insidious links between contemporary lifestyle culture, the global economy, and our latest wars. Another unexpected return was David Wojnarowicz, who haunted Roth Horowitz gallery in October with his freshly unearthed "Rimbaud in New York" series, shot in 1978 and 1979. Whoever ventured up to Seventieth Street to encounter these images couldn't help but feel the frisson of a now-extinct life form that once stalked the East Village: obsessed, poetic, committed, addicted, out of control, a community of exiles, a long-gone bohemia, not that long ago. And more untimely still: Dieter Roth, Lee Lozano, and Lee Bontecou.

There were some noteworthy visits from Europe. German painters Albert Oehlen and Michael Krebber both presented New York shows in 2004 and demonstrated, each in his own way, that if painting's old endgame isn't over yet, it's because fresh art can still be made by inhabiting this paradoxical living death in a robust way, and by using it as a point from which to question all the other forms and media whose vitality are taken for granted today. This is very close to what Londoners Oliver Payne and Nick Relph proposed regarding urban life in their faux-experimental film Gentlemen, 2003, which was one of the first shows at Gavin Brown's new space on Greenwich Street. How can we inhabit a dying city in a lively way? The first shot is of an out-of-focus urinal in Starbucks. What poetic revolutions might be lying dormant in a post-postrevolutionary, totally streamlined metropolis?

I also remember Gary Indiana's slapped-together, freestyle cabaret nights at Passerby and, at the same venue, Stephan Dillemuth's video/performance People of Light in the Slush of the Sun. The latter, based on the artist's research project about how the Third Reich absorbed previously thriving lifestyle cultures into its own machine, was in fact an explicit and hilarious critique of the present. That same night, Dillemuth reappeared down on the Lower East Side at Reena Spaulings Fine Art (a gallery admittedly close to my heart), where he presented an hourlong exhibition consisting of sculpted spaghetti, photographs of anuses, and a single flashing lightbulb.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

I remember music: a No-Neck Blues Band/White Magic concert on the steps of P.S. I and the very first live show of Rita Ackermann's Hungarian New Wave band (Dis)functionixs at Tonic. Also, the mysterious rise of Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance, the persistent, meandering trajectory of Black Dice, and the discovery of Early Man, the local metal band whose impromptu concert at The Hole goes down as one of the most deliriously fun nights of the year. Each of them--whether by noise, collage, detournement, chance, contagious rhythms, guitars or no guitars, abstracted song structures, or theatrics--added another facet to what might be called a downtown sound, which isn't really a sound so much as a collective commitment to keeping our music here but just out of reach, so we're kept guessing and wanting more. I also remember food: Agathe Snow's guerilla catering concept "Feed The Troops" reinvented eating in 2004 with its Dada-esque culinary interventions at various parties, picnics, and art openings. And, thanks to the young women of LTTR--the radical feminist and transgender journal, whose three-week downtown performance and lecture series unleashed a dense cannonball of otherness into the heart of the same--I remember that I am not a man, no longer a bio-boy, but, as of this year, a "non-trans-man."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It seems appropriate to conclude this murky memoir of a still-unfinished year with two big shows this month that deserve mention, only because they serve as warnings: The Jet Blue-sponsored group show in Terminal 5 at JFK airport, which was closed down by the Port Authority immediately after its opening, and the Guggenheim's Rirkrit Tiravanija event (bankrolled by American Express at the former Ace Gallery), which met a similar fate during a Dead Meadow concert. That art can be arrested today for a little vomit, broken glass, or noise is bad enough. Worse is that artists and musicians felt the need to apply their talents to such cynical, crassly promoted, high-security, bogus utopias in order to do their thing and were shut down anyway. So I'll leave the year in midstride with the example of these two forgettable un-happenings, and all my votes for a less stabilized and neutralized 2005. Next year we'll all blow up.

John Kelsey is a member of the artist's collective Bernadette Corporation and codirector of Reena Spaulings Fine Art. (See Contributors.)

LOS ANGELES

JAN TUMLIR

WHEN DENNIS HOLLING SWORTH MOVED OUT OF HIS CHINATOWN digs in late 2002, those left behind began, either eagerly or anxiously, proclaiming the end. After all, the painter and honorary "Mayor of Chinatown" was among the first wave of aesthetes to take advantage of the former tourist trap's economic misfortunes, replacing cut-rate chinoiserie with contemporary art. Then, a few months later, Giovanni Intra, the genial artist/writer who with partner Steve Hanson effectively put the place on the map by opening China Art Objects Galleries, passed away at the tender age of thirty-four. And there went the neighborhood.

Or so we thought. For despite all portents to the contrary, the 2004 season started on a surprisingly determined up note. October 2003 witnessed the launch of a troika of new and promising galleries on Bernard Street, at the far end of Chung King Road, inaugurating "a clean-and-sober chapter two for Chinatown art," as LA Weekly put it last December. They included Pruess Press, a combination print shop and publishing concern run by Joel Mesler, formerly of the Diane Pruess Gallery, who guaranteed a certain free-spirited continuity, while the Golinko Kordansky and Daniel Hug galleries set a somewhat more "professional" future agenda. Opening its doors shortly thereafter, Jorge Pardo's bar The Mountain likewise seemed to grant Chinatown a longer life expectancy than many, or most, had assumed. Although hard-core old-timers still prefer the louche glamour of haunts like Hop Louie, this strikingly refurbished space, with its sharply swooping angles and dripping, blood-red walls, remains a compelling example of Pardo's civic work, and unlike his house-that's-also-a-sculpture on Sea View Lane, it's actually open to the public. So, Chinatown remains an art mecca, and one that (unlike Chelsea, for instance) continues to cater to a living, breathing bohemia despite its steadily mounting fashionability. Somehow, the boom/bust cycle that provided the shaky materialist foundation of my worldly experience has been stalled by its artistic enablers, perhaps no longer oblivious to their role as the avant-garde of gentrification and real-estate redevelopment.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The case of Chinatown strikes me as exemplary of the LA art scene in 2004: It is precisely the fact that nothing really happened that's so surprising. Rather, this was the year of reassessments, revivals, recuperations, and belated fulfillments. If history is the first casualty of progress, then art here seems increasingly determined to exempt itself from the process, to stay put and squat among the ruins. Although each new addition to Chung King Road is more upscale than the last, by and large they all still apply a distinctly '90s version of the DIY template. And despite the fiscal policies of Bush fils, which everyone feared might repeat the withering of the LA art world seen under his father, every sector and niche of an ever-more-expansive scene registered growth, as if to foil leading economic indicators. Blum & Poe, once the "tiny gallery that could," has moved into a space on La Cienega Boulevard that rivals Gagosian or LA Louver in sheer square footage as well as architectural aplomb (courtesy of Dia:Beacon's OpenOffice team). No pause, no break, things just go on and on--and not only the '90s but also the '80s, the '70s and, above all, the '60s.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Endlessness, as opposed to infinity, let's say, is at the crux of Michael Fried's anti-Minimalist polemic, "Art and Objecthood." Drawing on Tony Smith's awestruck account of a nighttime drive on an unfinished section of the New Jersey turnpike, Fried would go on to diagnose the art that followed, be it Minimal, Pop or Conceptual, with a fatal case of overreaching its limits. Currently in LA we find his analysis confirmed in both spatial and temporal terms. For starters, the art world is now literally "all over the map," stretching from Venice Beach to downtown, via Culver City and the burgeoning mid-Wilshire corridor. This places special demands on art's patrons, who no longer even attempt to cover the field in a single outing, as well as on the gallerists, who must play against type as gracious hosts to each and every visitor. Often enough, this is not even an act: Starved for conversation and "news of the world," they monopolize the attention of visitors continually checking their watches as traffic collects ominously outside. However, the sense that each gallery exists as a solitary island marooned behind the rising tide of rush hour was mitigated in 2004 by a kind of cohesion in terms of the work on view. Here again, radical change was consistently trumped by a desire to reinvestigate the aesthetic landscapes of late modernism and early postmodernism.

This year's key events and exhibitions all took a page form the same history book, conveniently provided by the constellation of Ann Goldstein's "A Minimal Future?" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Lynn Zelevansky's "Beyond Geometry" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the arrival from out of town of Douglas Fogle's conceptually oriented "The Last Picture Show" at the UCLA Hammer Museum. All three called up their chosen moments and movements in a distinctly programmatic fashion, as if to insist on their undiminished, perhaps even augmented, relevance for current theory and practice. Common assumptions concerning the funereal effects of the periodizing process were vigorously countered at every turn, above all by the refusal to bracket the object in any strict sense. Segues were consistently privileged over breaks, and accordingly the historical object--take, for instance, Dan Graham's Homes for America, 1966-67, which appeared at both MOCA and the Hammer, as well as in most of my lectures this year--was granted a certain categorical leeway. "Rather than proposing a circumscribed definition, 'A Minimal Future?' features an expanded field of practices," writes Goldstein in the introduction to her exhibition catalogue. This, too, is a recipe for endlessness, one that was applied to the most ambitious art made and seen in studios and galleries across LA this year, much of it casually reprising the language of modernist aesthetics in order to connect the once-autonomous forms of "advanced" art to the social reality of the built environment.

This summer, "Supersonic," the first semicomprehensive exhibition of graduating MFAs from eight southern California art schools, was full of "expanded field" aesthetes. On the painterly front, for instance, UCLA's Kirsten Everberg (featured in April at 1301PE) weaves Pollock-style drips and pours of oil and enamel paints within representational matrices that at a distance snap into near-Photorealist focus as hotel lobbies and dining rooms. Similarly, CalArts's Brett Cody Rogers (signed to the David Kordansky Gallery stable) deploys an outwardly "literal" technique of dry-brush smears and scrapes that doubles, paradoxically, as a mode of architectural rendering. The show's "new media" proponents simply reversed the process, submerging their photomechanical and/or electronic image sources beneath layers of stylized gesture. John Richey converts footage of freeway pileups into animated cartoons dominated by a tautly quivering line that continually threatens to collapse background/foreground distinctions. Gil Omry (who showed in February at Overtones gallery in Culver City) processes the ultramundane view of a surveillance camera overlooking a dark, urban plaza through a series of eerie, abstract permutations reminiscent of computer games.

As might be expected, "Supersonic" inspired much talk of "selling out" and reignited the late-'90s art-school controversies recounted in articles such as Dennis Cooper's "Too Cool for School," Andrew Hultkrans's "Surf and Turf," and Deborah Solomon's "How to Succeed in Art." But considering that a good number of the show's works were already signed off to local galleries and, moreover, that none of its participants seemed genuinely determined to resist a similar fate for their art, these complaints seemed more than ever tinged with sour grapes. Mounted in the massive Wind Tunnel hall of Art Center College of Design's new South Campus building, the exhibition itself served as a training ground for artists destined for a nomadic future of international art fairs and biennales, where their work will have to stand out in similarly expansive (and crowded) halls. At the same time, though, the venue endowed these various meditations on the place of art in architecture and urban design (and vice versa) with an almost site-specific flavor.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A consciousness of space as a kind of social content both shaping and shaped by abstract form also dominated some of LA's most ambitious gallery exhibitions. Jennifer Pastor's sculptural triptych The Perfect Ride, 2003, shown at Regen Projects in May, takes its cue in part from such monuments to modern engineering as the Hoover Dam. Instead of using the finished structure as the basis for a formal reduction or extrapolating from a detail of it, Pastor completely reformulated its shape in an attempt to understand and externalize its complex circulatory system. Taft Green's Reaction Facets: international airport, 2004, accomplished a similarly convulsive operation on LAX. A single, freestanding piece that commandeered the narrow confines of Richard Telles Fine Art much like Pastor's Christmas Flood, 1994, did a decade ago, Green's work trades the normally grounded consciousness that comes with the territory of sculpture for a highly contingent, mobile point of view. For both Pastor and Green, it is movement through the built environment that yields the armature of their respective constructions. This structure is gestural, seemingly free-form, yet at the same time wholly objective and empirical--a concrete remainder of impressions gathered "on the fly."

No longer in the service of a comprehensive view, this sort of in-transit abstraction inclines either toward a mind-boggling complexity or to its opposite, either to the horror vacuii or the void. The latter option was explored in three more historical overviews, which together spanned the '50s, '60s, and '70s; Yves Klein's air, water, and fire architecture, shown at the MAK Center Los Angeles Schindler House; Ant Farm's soft and inflatable architecture seen at the Santa Monica Museum of Art; and Superstudio's antiarchitecture, exhibited at Art Center's Williamson Gallery. In this disaster-prone capital of nomadism and obsolescence, these attempts to translate the strategies of dematerialization into an urban program could only be greeted as imminently utilitarian. Clearly it's a very similar mixture of spacey poetics and millenarian pragmatism that motivates the series of High Desert Test Sites organized by Andrea Zittel and others in and around Joshua Tree. Besides acting as a literal "museum without walls," this event, already in its third act last October, doubles as a boosterish push for a full-scale cultural relocation to the Mansonian hinterlands. Presented as a prototype, Zittel's own dwelling actually comes off as a chic rejoinder to the Independent Group's New Brutalist program, in particular Alison and Peter Smithson's postapocalyptic Patio and Pavillion for the seminal "This is Tomorrow" exhibition of 1956. Ostensibly conducive to a highly productive yet ecologically viable lifestyle, it takes Frank Gehry's former fetishism of recycled and retooled low materials to the extreme. Gehry, too, recently took things to the extreme--but precisely in the opposite direction. His Walt Disney Concert Hall debuted late last year before a literally delirious public as perhaps the definitive monument to aesthetic overreaching. The outcome of a design process that generates not only a plan but its very own means of construction, this is a building that rejects the discourse of functionalism on principle, and with it any responsibility to worldly givens. Here, as in much of LA this year, abstraction is preeminent. Reality will just have to follow.

Jan Tumlir is a critic based in Los Angeles. (See Contributors.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

LONDON

MARTIN HERBERT

UNLESS SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY HAPPENS VERY SOON, 2004 will go down in the annals of British art history as the Year of the Momart Fire. And--without denying that the immolation of over a hundred artworks (including key pieces by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tracey Emin, Patrick Heron, and Gillian Ayres) in an allegedly undermonitored East London storage unit is a disaster for all concerned--that's a shame. Not only because it's impossible, in retrospect, to separate the event from gleeful attempts by British mainstream journalists to spin it as a supremely appropriate Viking funeral for Young British Art (note to newspaper editors: For all intents and purposes YBA died years ago), but because in the London art world this year was primarily about anything but destruction. Mostly, it was about building.

In fact, it was more about building than about art, with most of the action occurring at the glitzier end of an expanding gallery circuit--the evolution of which might have serious long-term consequences for the city as a center of artmaking. On May 27, just three days after Momart's Leyton storeroom ignited, Larry Gagosian unveiled the biggest commercial gallery London has ever seen--12,000 square feet of former garage in the increasingly gentrified area of King's Cross, given a beautiful makeover by Caruso St. John--with an exhibition of new Cy Twombly paintings, whose uncommonly static, even wallpaper-like quality almost seemed to signal that Gagosian didn't want anything to upstage his new building. So the capital has a terrific new venue, but time will tell whether the gallerist will program adventurously or resort to lucrative dreck like Damien Hirst and David Bailey's photographic "Stations of the Cross"--the show running at his testing-the-waters Piccadilly gallery when the King's Cross space opened. The new space later hosted the first substantial London showing of Martin Kippenberger's work in living memory: a good omen.

And we very much want to see such omens right now, because there's a real fear that as more international galleries open in the city, London could turn into just another dealing hub for the franchise. Fortunately it seems that not every foreign gallerist who's opened here recently is in it purely for the money. A fair example of balancing business and pleasure has certainly been set by Hauser & Wirth, who, following Paul McCarthy's celebrated trashing of their Lutyens-designed former bank's interior in 2003, gave the main space a slinky revamp and this year rolled out a lineup--including fine shows by Mary Heilmann, Anri Sala, Maria Lassnig, and, in his first London solo since he won the Turner Prize in 2001, Martin Creed--that felt like it was of actual benefit to the city's art enthusiasts. The Swiss gallerists thereby moved confidently into a sector of the London market that has become quite crowded in the past few years, thanks to the influx of fellow international galleries such as Spruth Magers Lee and, of course, Gagosian; the inauguration of top-end British dealer-ships such as Haunch of Venison; and the ramping-up (via bigger galleries) of leading dealers such as Victoria Miro and Jay Jopling, the latter of whom is currently renovating a former London Electricity substation in Piccadilly from which he'll apparently just deal, rather than exhibit. The immediate success of the Frieze Art Fair--now widely considered second only to Basel in Europe--hasn't hurt, either. London is officially safe for topflight galleries.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

All of which has had effects elsewhere in the ranks. Public spaces have naturally taken note of the booming audience for contemporary art; two venerable institutions, Camden Arts Centre and South London Gallery, reopened this year after varying degrees of expansion. Tate Modern didn't change its appearance in 2004 but continued to nudge along the burgeoning public taste for bigger! better! more! via saccharine spectacles such as Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project, whose artificial sun finally went out in March. Fired by infectious gigantism (or perhaps just fearful of being left behind), smaller private galleries are scaling up, too. In July, British dealer Michael Hue-Williams, previously known for a smart transatlantic roster (James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Tony Bevan) and a shoebox of a space on Cork Street, boldly opened Albion, an 11,000-square-foot space designed by Norman Foster on the south side of the Thames. Hales and Andrew Mummery, a pair of respected up-and-coming galleries previously based in somewhat far-flung areas, have sprung for more floor space and congregated in the Tea Building, a storied venue in the heart of the East End. Meanwhile, Greengrassi and Corvi-Mora, previously of Fitzrovia and specializing in young American and European art, have taken up a similar Chelsea-style, safety-in-numbers arrangement in a building in the riskier South London borough of Kennington. Thomas Dane, a gray eminence of YBA, finally opened a gallery of his own in Piccadilly, in the location formerly occupied by Simon Lee (of Spruth Magers Lee). Timothy Taylor had a successful first year in Anthony d'Offay's old space. Nobody, as yet, has boldly scaled down and called it the New New Thing.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Some people should have, though. Just like last year and the one before, those who didn't swim, sank--at least partly, one assumes, as a result of those making waves elsewhere. This time the casualties included Cork Street dealers Entwistle and Hirschl--that avenue is clotted with tumbleweeds, these days--and East End skin-of-the-teeth outlets Mobile Home and Hammer Sidi, both of which had fairly recently moved to flashier spaces. It seems like every time a midlevel gallery makes a jump for the next echelon via a larger or smarter venue (like Maureen Paley Interim Art and Modern Art, to take two recent successful examples) a few of their previous coevals wither and die.

Not that there are fewer galleries; unquestionably there are more. There are also more artist-run initiatives, with shoestring-budget spaces such as Rockwell, The Ship, MOT, and Cell firing on all cylinders; collectives such as Trailer taking over empty venues to mount shows like it was 1989; and another project space seeming to spring up in Dalston every week. There are more nascent dealerships, too. The problem, as ever, is money: Rising rents in central and east-central areas have increasingly pushed even the latter outlets into the affordable boondocks, alongside the artist-run affairs. Out there, they look even more like the impossibly poor cousins of those dazzling first-division galleries, and, as art-market analyst Colin Gleadell wrote recently in London's Daily Telegraph, most international collectors never find these places in the "Dickensian warrens of the East End." Result: Whereas a young unknown artist who's brightened up a few lo-fi group shows could previously look to a number of accessible second-division galleries to market him, increasingly this moderately comfortable level of the infrastructure doesn't exist.

But hell, everybody has to start somewhere, which is why the Zoo Art Fair seems like such a good idea. Designed as a piggybacking alternative to the Frieze Art Fair, and held across the park from it, Zoo's first edition ran parallel to the main fair in mid-October and featured twenty-six galleries all less than three years old (including that of the event's director, David Risley) and will surely help some of these less-established spaces move out of their economic bracket, or at least prosper within it, by grabbing the annual attention of passing trade and familiarizing locals with some comparatively obscure outlets. Certainly we shouldn't expect to see many newbie galleries popping up in Gagosian's King's Cross, unless the latter's owners know exactly what they're getting into. (A similar weird-wasteland effect has been felt around Bankside since Tate Modern opened.)

Galleries and fairs aside, the other factor that can give our hypothetical young unknown a boost is, of course, Charles Saatchi, who--along with others including Jopling, Gagosian, and collectors Anita and Poju Zabludowicz--covered 50 percent of the operational costs of Zoo. It's been a very strange year for Saatchi, though. Nobody, it seems, particularly likes his County Hall gallery. He's had to read quotes from the British press and public about what a jolly good thing it was that parts of his collection were torched in Leyton. Having hired a new PR company, he shattered the remains of his aloof mystique by taking out advertisements in art magazines for the first time, as well as by ringing up journalists (albeit not personally) and inviting them for tours of County Hall. Now, while propping up the bottom end of the market through his active presence in the Dickensian warrens--which, if he bought for profit or prestige, he'd arguably need to do anyway, since a slowing in the velocity of British art could have an adverse effect on the status of his extant collection--he may be backing off from showing the fruits of those trips and focusing instead on shoring up his long-term rep. The upcoming January exhibition at County Hall, celebrating the gallery's twentieth anniversary and entitled "The Triumph of Painting," features a good number of established Europeans and Americans.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A bull market with several hairline cracks in it, then. What effect the bullishness or, later, the cracks will have on the art being made in London is of course another question, because this certainly isn't the kind of situation in which YBA gestated. Seeking some kind of portent, I recently went up to Liverpool to see Bloomberg New Contemporaries, the annual open-submission exhibition for recent graduates. Most of those included were doing well already, exhibiting regularly in festivals and London group shows (one artist had boasted twelve shows this year), and their work was cocky and oxygenated, floating merrily on this early success and a nothing-to-lose attitude. On the other hand, there was a preponderance of the type of one-liner art that's become increasingly prevalent post-YBA: the sort of easily absorbed trinket that bespeaks an interest only in the short-term, in raising a quick, nervous laugh. Which is not surprising, given the market that these artists are facing if they choose to settle in London now--wherein a swift hop onto the bottom of the ladder is likely to be followed by a period of wondering where the middle rungs are, while the upper end of the thing increasingly disappears into the heavens. But they'd better have a more serious strategy up their sleeves, or perhaps pray for a big, fat recession. Otherwise, in ten years' time London could be just one more place to touch down, pick up a blue-chip artwork from a spacious boutique, and fly out again.

Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. (See Contributors.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

PARIS

JEFF RIAN

LAST NOVEMBER FRIENDS SOPHIE DUBOSC, JONATHAN LOPPIN, AND Jeanne Truong put together a group show in an abandoned commercial building that a friend had squatted on Impasse Saint-Claude, a blind alley in the Marais. Taking advantage of the French law entitling everyone to a roof overhead, they cleaned the space, painted its walls, hooked up heat and electricity, and named it L'Impasse. The November exhibition was the first of four held on the second floor of the three-story building, in which they featured the work of more than sixty mostly young, unknown artists, as well as a few more familiar ones with an affinity for alternative efforts, like Fabrice Hybert and Claude Leveque. The buzz grew with each exhibition, and for a time it seemed the space could be made legal. But success drew the attention of the building's owners, who promptly called the authorities: Police arrived with battering rams on August 10, 2004, giving the sleeping squatters fifteen minutes to clear out. Despite the venue's brief run, the young curators stirred up a lot of interest in a very short time and without institutional or financial support--leading one critic to call L'Impasse the highest-level alternative space he'd seen in years.

L'Impasse wasn't alone. During the past year alternative spaces like The Store, a converted retail shop, and La Galeru, a miniscule space operating in a former shoe-repair store in a Paris suburb, have gained prominence, and struggling, makeshift, sometimes inconsistent new galleries like Eva Hober, Jocelyn Wolff, and Atelier Cardenas Bellanger have lately been showing young artists, including some seen at L'Impasse. The latter galleries even had stands at the FIAC art fair's recently established Future Quake pavilion in October, next door to what seemed, by comparison, the staid, all-too-familiar parents' pavilion. What's emerging in Paris is a fresh generation of artists, curators, and galleries.

In a recent conversation, Baptiste Debombourg, a former Ecole des Beaux Arts student who showed at The Store and participated in L'Impasse's first exhibition, suggested to me that his peers are trying to escape the cultural dominance of the baby-boom generation, their greater numbers, and their conceptual art practices. Boomers were the first to grow up with TV; they showed sophisticated versions of Pop art in abandoned factories renovated by postmodern architects; they glorified loft living, museum stores, classic rock, MTV, art fairs, glossy magazines--and a designer lifestyle that this generation can no longer afford. In France, Boomers, with few exceptions, abandoned painting and drawing, and as professors they hardly bother to teach these media anymore.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

A middle generation--Douglas Coupland's Gen-Xers--created political correctness and installation art; they used personal computers to make amateur magazines and allied art with fashion. In France, the strongest manifestation of this generation--the youngest generation's older siblings, so to speak--has been the Palais de Tokyo, a nationally funded pseudosquat whose unfinished interior looks like a construction site and is regularly redecorated with international scatter art along with videos and photographs of every stripe. Neither a museum nor a squat, the Palais de Tokyo's identity remains unclear, particularly to a new generation of artists and curators suspicious of the one that came before them.

Many of this younger generation of artists were the Boomers' students. They grew up in a world of computers, camcorders, and an evolution in graphic communication that combined drawing and coloring with mouse clicks and screen images. And so they experiment with every conceivable medium and process but are criticized by Boomers for their miserabiliste mix of materials and styles; for not caring enough about history--or the end of history, in Boomer parlance; and for being too commercially oriented.

But to get a truer sense of the work appearing in these spaces, consider the examples of Debombourg and Olivier Soulerin, two artists from the emerging generation. At The Store, Debombourg presented Code Articles, 2004, an inexpensive bookshelf, cabinet, table, and chairs that he hammered to pieces, then painstakingly glued back together, enough to be usable. The title comes from France's penal code and the work suggestively expresses a pathetic fallacy, borne from the found objects' debilitating scars resulting from severe trauma inflicted upon them. In 2002, Soulerin (now with Atelier Cardenas Bellanger) repainted the interior and exterior of La Galeru, transforming the four-foot-wide sidewalk gallery into a cartoon for his piece +/-[degrees]. At L'Impasse, Soulerin was among eleven painters chosen for the exhibition "Exercices," which examined what might be construed as the formal limits of painting. Soulerin set a wooden lattice into a wall at baseboard level, like an extremely low drop ceiling, then painted the wall and lattice in institutional green so that viewers could step directly into the "painting." Debombourg and Soulerin did use affordable materials. But what really seems to be happening is that these artists (and a lot of others) are exploring materials, concepts, and styles of every conceivable variety, from handicrafts to high art--whatever that means anymore. (French art schools, almost across the board, are dropping "Beaux" in preference for "Ecole des Arts," meaning all the "arts," especially design.)

As for the new generation's commercialism, it is based on survival, not consumerism. They can barely afford studio apartments. Nor is financial support as available in the current political climate, with devastating budget cuts to regional art centers and public collections (which had proliferated across France in the 1980s). They can't even picture an artist's life the same way their parents did: working alone in a loft, trying to advance art history, maybe with a patron offering a stipend. From the younger perspective, social consciousness is a given, and art is made with a Beuysian esprit de corps: Everyone can be an artist, and art can be any kind of object or form. It doesn't require historical or critical pedigree. It can be any material or style. These kids aren't interested in readymades, making the familiar strange, deconstruction theory, or political correctness. They're interested in creating a psychokinetic response, using available means befitting contexts as divergent as squats, sidewalks, makeshift galleries, a curator's theme show. They're interested in every kind of graphic art and in making what Carlos Cardenas of Atelier Cardenas Bellanger calls "process-oriented objects"--using materials of every conceivable type they can afford--which, of course, they're hoping their parents' generation will be buying.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Jeff Rian is an editor of Purple magazine and a regular contributor to Artforum.

BERLIN

ISABELLE GRAW 

WHEN OUT OF TOWN, THOSE OF US WHO LIVE IN BERLIN regularly find ourselves confronted with the question, "So what's it like there?" As if we were personally responsible for the city's reputation as a "happening" place. Sometimes the question resonates with excited expectation, and other times a skeptical tone betrays reservations about all the hype. Depending on my mood, I either add fuel to the fire or adopt a strategy of demystification. For the residents of other major cities, Berlin has undoubtedly become an ideal surface for the projection of all sorts of fantasies: a city with a functioning underground culture, an exciting nightlife, and a lively art scene with a bohemian flavor, where there's still a lot of drinking and heated arguments, and where there's still a symbolic struggle over aesthetic questions. All of this is true, but at the same time it's a cliche, and one that we all contribute to. We shouldn't forget that this seemingly protected subcultural preserve in fact serves as a test case for an economy in which individual responsibility and maverick communication skills are again writ large. As if in a laboratory, the lifestyles of Berlin's young creative workers can be examined under a microscope, and--even if this sounds a bit like conspiracy theory--we can be sure that streetwise corporations have long since dispatched their trend scouts to neighborhoods like Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, and Friedrichshain.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

There's almost no other city where people move around so much and with such enthusiasm; on my street alone, the blue-and-white vans from the budget truck-rental agency stand outside my window every week. The oft-mentioned low rents are what provoke this constant moving and also give Berlin its status as a "space of possibility." While in some areas, especially parts of Berlin-Mitte, rents now approximate those of more expensive German cities like Munich or Hamburg, there are still comparatively cheap studios and apartments to be found, especially since there are always new areas awaiting discovery--and gentrification. At the moment it's Wedding, a working-class district bordering on fashionable Mitte and once considered extremely unattractive. The fact that Galerie Guido W. Baudach, formerly known as Maschenmode and located in Mitte, recently opened in a new Wedding space with museumlike dimensions portends the beginning of a shift.

Affordable living space has concrete consequences for cultural production. Whereas in other cities the issue for artists is sheer survival, and all energy is directed toward covering the cost of living, here it is feasible to produce without immediate concern for economic ends. Experiments or "projects" proliferate, regardless of what (if anything) will come out of them and whether they will actually be worth the effort in a literal sense. With their open-ended approach in terms of results, these so-called projects initially seem opposed to the professionalism and demands for "efficiency" that artists face elsewhere. But on closer examination, one has to admit that this apparent lack of purpose represents the very experimental ethos that today's capitalist system increasingly values and seeks to absorb. In the end, openness to experimentation and the ability to roll with the punches are among the personal qualities that pay off. Seen from this perspective, the creative "free space" that Berlin provides is actually the ultimate commodity.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Nonetheless, many artists here still face enormous economic pressures, despite the low rents. The dismantling of Germany's welfare state, which goes hand in hand with the neoliberal call for more "self-reliance" and "individual responsibility," can make survival precarious. In light of high unemployment and a collapsed job market there are few means for artists to earn a living on the side. In place of "security" we have unpredictability: It's good to be ready for anything. Still, it remains possible for artists to get state cultural funding, and at the moment the odds aren't all that bad, particularly for projects with a social-critical bent.

From the perspective of the art market, Berlin has assumed the role of outsourced production: a site for cheap labor that continuously replenishes the booths of international art fairs. The label "Berlin" seems automatically to ennoble the products of artists who live here. Whatever the work, so long as it comes from Berlin it has the chance of being seen as something special. But while the production happens here, the selling takes place elsewhere, and more and more artists produce primarily with art-fair dates in mind. As much as this affects their work, the art market scarcely surfaces in this city. It is strangely invisible--no signs of money far and wide. For example, one waits in vain for the notorious towncars that in New York symbolize the presence of rich collectors on a gallery tour. Here, collectors are more discreet, visiting artists directly in their studios as if wanting to possess not just the art but the particular urban experience that, indeed, accounts for much of its value.

When I returned to Berlin at the beginning of October after a few weeks in New York, I found a transformed cultural-political climate. It was a different city than the one I left. It had become possible for a private collection bearing the surname of a notorious Nazi and war criminal, the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, to be prominently displayed in a state museum, the Hamburger Bahnhof, and even granted blessings from official cultural and political quarters. Protests from all directions, beginning with the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany and followed by numerous newspaper critics, were powerless to do anything. Even the most convincing objections seemed to bounce off the official agenda once it was established as cultural policy. "Normalization" was on the menu. Even the chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, didn't dare miss the opening, giving the collection his own personal seal of approval. And the connection of the Flick Collection directly to the Hamburger Bahnhof can be seen as a symbol of this normalization: From now on, these artworks, thrown together in just a few years with start-up capital amassed by the collector's grandfather, a Nazi collaborator who employed 48,000 forced laborers and profited from the "Aryanization" of Jewish property, are to be legitimized as an integral part of a state-run museum, as if one emphatically wanted to erase the history tied to the collection.

The longing to finally settle the questions of the past is widespread in Germany today. But of course the past will continue to rear its head and cannot be shaken off, as one recognizes in Berlin at every turn. Hence, the production surrounding the opening of the Flick Collection can be seen as one aspect of a more representative development, the other side of which is a revisionist attitude toward history and a wish to finally break old taboos. The widely acclaimed film about Hitler's last days Der Untergang (The Downfall), 2004, is one cultural product that points in this direction, simultaneously celebrating a Nazi aesthetic while also suggesting that the primary victims of the war were the Germans themselves. Also, a reemergence of a supposed Nazi "totalitarian chic" can be seen in the experiments of some Berlin-based painters and performers who seem to take up the mantle of German history without any critical distance. As disempowered as an enlightened and analytical perspective might seem in this climate, I would, nevertheless, like to insist that such an approach can still make a difference, demonstrating its power over the long run.

Isabelle Graw is a Berlin-based critic. (See Contributors)

Translated from German by Brian Currid.

BEIJING

SZE TSUNG LEONG

BEIJING IS A MONUMENTAL WORK IN PROGRESS, ON A SCALE, like many things in China, that is a constant reminder of one's microscopic position within a population of 1.3 billion other little specks. Any first-time visitor will remark on the slowly gyrating skyline of cranes. Veterans of the city will nonchalantly point out clusters of new towers that only recently were empty sites or, in many cases, old Beijing. Indeed, Beijing's perpetually becoming new is, in a way, its most reliable urban constant.

Inevitably this pattern of unceasing change is woven into the city's artistic and cultural fabric. Consider the best-known art zone in Beijing, the Dashanzi Art District (also called the 798 Factory). Formerly a military factory built in the 1950s in collaboration with East Germany and the Soviet Union, Dashanzi comprises a series of large, open-plan concrete buildings topped with sawtooth skylit roofs and stamped with Cultural Revolution-era slogans proclaiming, for example, that Mao Zedong will live for ten thousand years. The transformation began in the late '90s when the Central Academy of Fine Arts, one of Beijing's major art schools, established a massive sculpture workshop there. Artist Sui Jianguo, dean of CAFA's sculpture department, soon moved his studio to the area. In 2001, Robert Bernell opened a publishing house and bookstore, Timezone 8 Art Books. Later that year, the first gallery, Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, was opened by Tokyo Gallery's Tabata Yukihito, followed in 2003 by 798 Space Gallery, opened by photographer Xu Yong.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Today, Dashanzi features an array of international galleries--including London's Chinese Contemporary, Berlin's White Space, Singapore's China Art Seasons, and Milan's Marella Gallery Beijing 798 (whose doors will open to the public in March)--not to mention artist studios, workshops, offices, restaurants, and cafes. In fact, Dashanzi is now Beijing's largest venue for new art, an important destination for international curators and collectors to discover contemporary work. And yet, significantly, the area occupies the opposite end of the spectrum from Beijing's most prominent museums, which are generally unwilling to exhibit new or experimental art, and therefore points to a strange incongruity within the country: The West's interest in art from China has been so phenomenal, the subject of numerous international museum exhibitions, that contemporary Chinese art is now often more visible in the West than in China itself.

In this context, Dashanzi has faced the prospect of demolition ever since it was first created. One key story of 2004 was the continuing struggle between artists and developers who have in recent years sought to transform the zone into a "New Silicon Valley," threatening to apply a by-now-commonplace formula in China: demolish anything more than a few years old, wipe it clean, start anew. In April, Huang Rui organized the first Dashanzi International Art Festival--a series of exhibitions, performances, lectures, and symposia--to make the area more visible to the international community as a significant cultural center. The high volume of visitors, and increased media interest in Dashanzi (the event even received New York Times coverage), made government authorities aware of the area's cultural importance, not to mention its potential appeal as a tourist draw during the Olympics here in 2008. As a result, they recommended that the area's buildings should not be torn down. It remains to be seen how strongly this will be enforced.

This lingering uncertainty is a microcosm of the larger forces enveloping Beijing. In many older portions of the city, homeowners do not know if their houses will exist in the next few years, months, or even days. The momentum of the new is so unrelenting that Beijing is hardly an ancient city any longer. Little of the original urban fabric is left intact, having been reduced either to slums after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution or to rubble as a result of current property speculation. There are also the lanweilou or, literally, "rotten remnant buildings," solemn concrete shells of unfinished projects, abandoned for various reasons--a developer lost his backing or was arrested or simply disappeared along with loan money.

Such tensions find numerous expressions in contemporary Chinese art--I'm thinking of Zhang Dali's interventions in demolition sites, or Ai Weiwei's performances of destroying genuine historic artifacts--yet in 2004 the architectural community might have provided their most poignant measure. This year, architects from around the world working in China had the chance to showcase their efforts in the first Beijing Architecture Biennial. The exhibition, which was to include symposia on ambitiously broad-ranging topics such as "Art and Architectural Creation in the 21st Century" and "Architecture/Non-Architecture," featured seemingly everyone in the architecture world and sprawled over eight exhibitions throughout the city, including one at the China National Art Museum. But organizers, in the spirit of the times, ultimately saw an opportunity to turn a quick profit and set ticket prices between $250 and $1,200--the latter including a "free introduction service to architects, engineers, designers, developers, [and] decision makers ... for business contractual purpose." Many prominent Chinese architects withdrew; exhibitions and forums ended up sparsely attended; and intellectual efforts, if there were any, seemed irrelevant. And so the event was less remarkable for any vision of the city's future than as an indicator of the sheer volume of architectural energy now pouring into China. Intended to present the country's ideal future, the exhibition could not escape the profiteering and messiness of the real world. For the time being, perhaps nothing can.

Sze Tsung Leong is a photographer based in New York and Beijing. His work is exhibited in the 2004 Taipei Biennial.

RELATED ARTICLE: THE ARTISTS' ARTISTS

To take stock of the past year, Artforum contacted an international group of artists to find out which exhibitions were, in their eyes, the very best of 2004.

LUCY MCKENZIE

"In the Vitrines: Wendingen Magazine," Van Abbemuseum Library, Eindhoven An over view of the Amsterdam-based arts and architecture magazine Wendingen (1918-31), each edition hand printed in a square format, including some extremely sympathetic issues devoted to seashells, masks, and ex libris plates. At 12 X 12 inches, they looked like the best record covers in the world.

KAI ALTHOFF

Isa Genzken, "Wasserspeier and Angels," Hauser & Wirth, London The work is so modern it made me want a future forever.

ELMGREEN & DRAGSET

Klaus Weber, "Unfolding Cul-de-sac," Cubitt Gallery, London Gently subversive attacks on public space. Were those mushrooms magic?

DAVID REED

"L'intime, le collectionneur derriere la porte" (Behind Closed Doors: The Private World of Collectors), La Maison Rouge, Paris Investigating the purposes of collecting and its obsessive nature, this wonderful exhibition re-created rooms from fifteen collectors' homes, situating art in the environment in which it ordinarily lives.

CECILY BROWN

"Peter Paul Rubens," Albertina Museum, Vienna In his oil sketches, the loose blond paint on the luminous ground reveals so much with a few fast movements. Skin, muscle, wood, cloth--one washes into the next as if seen and said all at once.

WIM DELVOYE

Doug Fishbone, 30,000 Bananas, Trafalgar Square, London As part of Tom Morton and Catharine Patha's Man in the Holocene project, Fishbone piled thirty thousand bananas in Trafalgar Square on the morning of October 5. At 3 PM, bananas were given away to passersby, just in time to raise their plummeting sugar levels. The work is part seduction, part potlatch or conqueror's gift, and contains odd ghosts that sour its sweetness (I'm reminded of piles of abandoned shoes at Polish railway stations in the 1940s). All the best art involves the squandering of time, or resources, or both.

JEREMY DELLER

"Andy Warhol's Time Capsules," Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt/The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Just when we thought we knew all about him through endless retrospectives and publications, here was a show--put together by Matt Wrbican and John Smith--that really gave insight into how hilarious and ridiculous it must have been to be Andy Warhol.

PATRICK TUTTOFUOCO

Martin Creed, Hauser & Wirth, London I have always appreciated the seriousness of his work, even if it felt very far away from me. But after this show I had the opposite sensation: It was like catching someone's gaze for the first time and having the strange certainty of knowing them from another life.

EIJA-LIISA AHTILA

Dias & Riedweg, "Possibly Talking about the Same," Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki An exhibition by two artists--one Brazilian, one Swiss--who make video installations about street children, immigrants, Islamic cities, and male prostitution. The visual pleasure of their desert (and other) imagery, paired with the interesting and relevant issues explored in the cleverly installed works, was a combination I could not resist.

CAROL BOVE

Catherine Sullivan, Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land, 2003, in the Whitney Biennial, New York This work made me think about Brecht's brief residency as a seminal moment in California's history.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES

"Surf Revolution@Spiral: Surfboard Shapes Since 1968," Spiral Building, Tokyo We laughed out loud as we "surfed" through the show's Hokusai-like wave entryway, made from hundreds of pairs of sea blue flip-flops.

LAURA OWENS

"Painted Poems: Rajput Paintings from the Ramesh and Urmil Kapoor Collection," Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena I felt transported to a different world by the exquisite and evocative paintings in this surprising show.

ALEX KATZ

"Louise Bourgeois: Ode a L'Oubli," Peter Blum, New York Bourgeois's handmade cloth book seems to be the perfect fusion of drawing, color, and image.

ANNIKA LARSSON

Tobias Bernstrup performance on March 26, Moderna Museet, Stockholm This show was hardcore melancholia at its best.

JULIAO SARMENTO

Bruce Nauman, Raw Materials, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London One needs incredible courage to be given such a space--which I believe is the dream of every sculptor--and not touch it. To use only specific corridors of sound and no apparent visual residues of the artist's presence is in itself brilliant. It is the type of show and experience that, seriously, leaves me quite happy to be alive! But again, Bruce Nauman always reinvents himself in a way very few artists can.

NICK RELPH

Orthrelm performance on Aug. 10, Tonic, New York Nonrepetitive hypnotics, both microscopic and colossal, and totally beautiful.

OLIVER PAYNE

Cerith Wyn Evans, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston My friends went to Boston to see Morrissey. I tagged along to see the Cerith Wyn Evans show. Got there five minutes before it closed. Heard myself all out of breath in front of Inverse, Reverse, Perverse. Got ushered out and saw his fireworks piece that said "Thoughts unsaid ... then forgotten ..." and another line which (rather fittingly) I have forgotten. An hour in the pub with this man is worth three years of art school.

MICOL ASSAEL

Thomas Hirschhorn, "24h Foucault," Palais de Tokyo, Paris Nonstop.

TACITA DEAN

Mark Wallinger, Sleeper, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin A description of this performance can only fail, but that's the point; It takes brilliance to have created such a poignant and moving work with just a bear suit and an empty Mies van der Rohe gallery at night. I never imagined how captivated I would feel, staring through the glass trying to see the bear; it became about scale, history, location, symbol, pathos, humor, and hibernation.

WOLFGANG TILLMANS

"The Undiscovered Country," UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles This was an unusual group show, because it was not trying to make out another brand-new trend, but instead set the stage for an inspiring coexistence of historic and contemporary positions in painting.

PHILIPPE PARRENO

Liam Gillick, "Construccion de Uno," Galeria Javier Lopez, Madrid This was a show in a commercial gallery that gave me reason to keep making art and art objects when a lot of monographic museum exhibitions don't. A show addressing the city, literally mirroring the city. An exhibition defining the outer-space. Foucault defined these spaces as heterotopias, in opposition to utopias, which are sites with no real place. Heterotopias are places outside of all places; it is always possible to indicate their location in reality.

LUCKY DEBELLEVUE

Jonathan Horowitz, Silent Movie, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford Patty Duke flips out to Helen Keller's politically radical, punk-colored quotes, while in the next room, a video of movie stars as blind people emoting in agony and ecstasy to the tinkling of "Tommy" on a player piano left me feeling like I was wading through a swamp toward the light.

JASON MEADOWS

"Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form 1940s-70s," Los Angeles County Museum of Art A fascinating "essay" on the synapse between thinking and making. Douglas Huebler's Tower of London is sublime.

T.J. WILCOX

The question shouldn't be the triumph of one exhibition over all others, but I will say that in the past week in New York I've been treated to three standout examples of contemporary cultural production: Jonathan Caouette's film Tarnation, Rirkrit Tiravanija's Untitled 2002 (he promised), and Morrissey at Radio City Music Hall.

CHRISTOPHER WOOL

"Julian Schnabel: New Indian Paintings and Selected Sculpture," PaceWildenstein, New York I saw the show three times late last year, and I even bought the catalog, but I couldn't convince anyone. One of the few memorable shows in a sea of sludge.

CHRISTIAN HOLSTAD

Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, Feigen Contemporary, New York My brain goes numb when I see his work. He made ceramic crowns for himself and his wife to wear to dinner. I imagine their life together in complete admiration.

MONICA BONVICINI

Henrik Olesen, Wiener Secession, Vienna I was impressed by this show's minimal yet extremely effective intervention in the exhibition space, its shifting of perception, as well as its profound dialogue with issues of homosexuality and heterosexuality through the use and reworking of contemporary and historical materials. I've never seen such amusing and beautiful Max Ernsts!

JAMES ANGUS

Richard Grayson, Yuill/Crowley Gallery, Sydney Grayson managed to create a timely and diabolical mess by updating Handel's Messiah with homespun country music.

JESSICA STOCKHOLDER

Pierre Huyghe, "Streamside Day Follies," Dia: Chelsea, New York I loved the way my experience of the Dia space, of time, and of my own fantasy life merged with the fictive space of the video.

GLENN LIGON

Luc Tuymans, Tate Modern, London The Tate was my Lourdes, and there I journeyed to see if I, too, would be a believer.

ADRIAN PACI

Jakup Ferri, Don't Tell Anybody, 2003, in the group show "Mediterraneans," MACRO, Rome This video of the artist counting all the grains in a kilo of rice manages to confront conceptual rigor with the everyday, capturing an obsessive action with a simple gesture of domestic life in which mathematics becomes a fable.

ROE ETHRIDGE

William Eggleston, Stranded in Canton, 1974, Cheim & Read, New York/Art Unlimited, Art Basel Strung-together single takes, zero production, guns, drunkenness, transgressive behavior, loud music--Stranded in Canton is a debauched fugue for the Mississippi Delta, 1974.

RICHARD PHILLIPS

"Julian Schnabel Paintings 1978-2003," Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt Curated with brutal clarity by Max Hollein, this show was from entrance to exit an over whelming barrage of painting taken to the limits of "prehistory," "honor," "glory," "risk"--and most importantly: abject failure. I will stand convinced in my declaration that Ethnic Types no. 15 and no. 72, 1984, lives up to and beyond any and all of the '80s promotional claims and likewise provides a stern critique of much of today's!@#$ efforts in any medium. RESPECT!

TRISHA DONNELLY

"Pink Steam," Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch Library, San Francisco In this group show curated by Colter Jacobsen, artists responded to the writings of Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian. So strange and serene, cordoned off from the books, small works by Raymond Pettibon, Nayland Blake, Anne Collier, Sheree Rose, and GB Jones--to name a few--cuddled into the corner of a local library where quiet people and retirees read about vintage automobiles and whispered to the librarians. And that library smell. Really great.

FRANCESCO VEZZOLI

Thomas Hirschhorn, "24h Foucault," Palais de Tokyo, Paris This larger-than-life installation celebrating the French philosopher's written and spoken work was intellectually engaging and artistically exciting at the same time.

KARIN DAVIE

"Willem de Kooning: A Centennial Exhibition," Gagosian Gallery, New York In contrast to today's focus on work that hovers around "technical realism," de Kooning proves how important it is to evoke all the senses. Through the slip of the hand he makes us understand just how seeing allows the body to believe.

MIGUEL CALDERON

Pablo Vargas Lugo, "Guirnaldas para Snoopy" (Garlands for Snoopy), Galeria OMR, Mexico City Two pieces of sidewalk lying crashed in pieces on the floor, one in a star shape and the other in a diamond shape, underlined in my mind the bizarreness of Mexico City and art's ability to trigger abstract emotions.

MARY HEILMANN

Cannon Hudson, Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, New York I love these paintings because they look uncannily like frozen, empty domestic moments ... or even still video games.

JIM LAMBIE

Isa Genzken, "Wasserspeier and Angels," Hauser & Wirth, London Into the ether and back again. Truly great.

MARJETICA POTRC

"Shrinking Cities," Kunst-Werke, Berlin Cities are shrinking all over the world! Check out the cities of Detroit, Ivanovo, Liverpool/Manchester, and Halle/Leipzig.

RONI HORN

"August Sander: People of the Twentieth Century. A Photographic Portrait of Germany," Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Looking at photographs from a time when a portrait was still a unique image, even in the context of an inventory. This is a paradox contemporary photography does not sustain.

LOS SUPER ELEGANTES

Thomas Zipp, "Futurism Now! SAMOA Leads," Daniel Hug Gallery, Los Angeles Zipp is a real classic. His work is a government in itself; saving trees, burning forests, shedding light on raw politics. We find him exceptionally bright.

OLAFUR ELIASSON

"Minority Report: Challenging Intolerance in Contemporary Denmark," various locations in Aarhus and its environs, Denmark Against all odds and with no Danish institutional support, the curatorial team and artists succeeded in creating an informal debate about art and society. In 2004, Denmark strategically pushed exports to Canada, exploiting the Danish arts as a promotional tool for business as usual. Imagine if Denmark had exported "Minority Report" instead, opening much-needed international debate about intolerance in the contemporary world. Exposing your weakness is a much stronger act than trying to muscle your national export through with yet another set of Danish design formalities.

ISAAC JULIEN

Juan-Pedro Fabra, Untitled, 2004, in the group show "Sometime," Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London In images that were almost too dark to see, this silent video emblematically portrayed the darkness of war. Nothing appeared to move except soldiers between the leaves in the trees.