On the ground: it may be true, as Aldous Huxley once wrote, that "a large city cannot be experientially known." But we can still seek out its stories. For the second year running, Artforum asked writers and artists, each from a different point on the globe--New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Tokyo--to reflect on local currents in 2005.

New York

I KNOW SOMETHING MUST HAVE HAPPENED this year besides Paris Hilton. I was recently in a video store scanning the new-releases board. A video clerk had penned an amusing one-line summation of House of Wax: "Paris Hilton dies in this remake of the horror classic." Diderot, too, had a flair for deflating concision, describing in his Salon of 1767 Jean-Baptiste Leprince's Portrait of a Young Girl Abandoning her Toys in Favor of Study as a "mediocre picture, but an excellent lesson for a child." Too bad contemporary critical etiquette prohibits such terse judgments; but why, I wonder, should one-liner artworks deserve any more than one-liner reviews? Diderot was notoriously fond of lessons, though, praising the sentimental moralizing canvases of Greuze and damning the Rococo froufrou of Boucher and Fragonard. Neanmoins, Diderot is Diderot, and I'm merely me, but I'll risk the ridicule of my colleagues and venture a simple question in the spirit of the sage philosophe: What lessons are to be learned from the New York art world during the last year?

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Quite late one night several months ago, a few artist friends of mine--Hanna Liden, Nate Lowman, Aaron Young, and Adam McEwen--came over to my apartment for drinks after some opening/dinner/after-party. P.S. 1's "Greater New York 2005" had recently opened. A rumor was circulating that Mary Boone, like any canny dealer, was eager to lure certain Greater New Yorkers to her gallery, perhaps for a group show, perhaps for something more--and Lowman, Young, and McEwen had all been included in the 170-odd-artist juggernaut. Rather than sign on for a conventional group show, I suggested that we re-create Gavin Brown's bar Passerby--had we been there that very night? it's just down the street from my house--inside Boone's Chelsea Gallery. Now, if you've ever been to Passerby, you know that it is a tiny space that often attracts uncomfortably large crowds. Piotr Uklanski's disco floor--an installation I had seen at Brown's first gallery on Broome Street in 1996, and which had been adapted as pulsing, at times headache-inducing decor for Passerby--wouldn't be cheap to replicate, but, thinking big, the consensus was expense be damned. I also thought that we should populate the "bar" with archetypal denizens of the original in the form of photographic or painted cutout figures: Gavin, curator and demiurge Clarissa Dalrymple, Elizabeth Peyton, Rirkrit Tiravanija, et al., would lean against the bar; a Spencer Sweeney cutout would be at the turntables spinning, just as the real Spencer frequently does. It seemed so funny, the notion of remaking Passerby, a blinding-headlight signifier of the cool art scene of the late '90s, within the immaculate and commodious precincts of Boone's downtown space, with a conscious bow to her own persona as an avatar of the '80s New York power dealer. I mean, Parker Posey played Mary Boone in Julian Schnabel's Basquiat. She's art history and pop history. But the idea came to nothing, of course, like so many clever but dubious schemes conjured up during the hour of the wolf and in a spirit of boozy camaraderie.

Gavin Brown's Enterprise--with its annex, Passerby--remains preeminent as a precursor to newer "scene" galleries like Maccarone Inc., Rivington Arms, Daniel Reich Gallery, and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, many of them located either in the hipster hell of the Lower East Side or in the even weirder no-man's-land of Chinatown. Aside from building up a roster of now internationally famous stars, Brown, who moved to New York from London in 1988, succeeded in delivering to New York more than another neutral exhibition space; he created a situation that encouraged partying, louche behavior, and fuck-you antics. And a certain genus of New York artists, writers, and performers, many still living on fantasies of the Factory and willingly possessed by the specters of Andy Warhol and his superstars, gravitated to GBE and Passerby. You could dress up; you could dress up in rags. Unadvisedly, you could totter in your spike heels as you danced perilously on the bar like an alcoholic maenad. You could go to the bathroom with seven of your new best friends. Of course, much of this scenester mayhem was inescapably juvenile, and you probably met more assholes than charmers. (Recall, for instance, last summer's "GBE hot dog bust": Brown found himself, briefly, in the hands of plainclothes police because at the party following the opening of "Drunk vs. Stoned 2," a couple of guests started throwing hot dogs at people walking by on the street below.) But the message was clear: You could maintain a serious and trendsetting artistic program--GBE's roster hasn't stultified, and Brown has scored with several additions to the program in the last few years, among others Mark Leckey, Oliver Payne/Nick Relph, Anselm Reyle, and Jonathan Horowitz--and you could maybe enjoy some kicks at the same time.

Located on the far east end of Canal Street, Michele Maccarone's three-story operation remains the ne plus ultra "destination" gallery, redolent of attitude, gossip, mockery, and desuetude; it also boasts one of the sharpest programs in New York, exhibiting young and youngish European and American artists such as Christoph Buchel, Christian Jankowski, Anthony Burdin, Mike Bouchet, Nate Lowman, Roberto Cuoghi, and Carol Bove. Maccarone--who had for several years worked at Luhring Augustine, a very established gallery with a quasi-corporate profile, before setting up her own operation--learned the art business inside-out, savvy to the whims of collectors and curators, the machinations of auctions and art fairs. She didn't set out to open a scene gallery, but--in the service of extremely demanding installations (e.g., her inaugural show in 2001, wherein Buchel created a total environment de haut en bas, or Bouchet's New York Dirty Room this year) and seemingly off-the-hook artists (anarchic noisemaker Burdin, among others)--the sheer force of her hysterical humor, histrionic persona, and fuck-off gestures could not help but endow her gallery with its own auratic halo.

Mirabelle Marden and Melissa Bent opened Rivington Arms in 2002, and seemingly within weeks their tiny Lower East Side space flowered as an epicenter of gilded and grubby youth. Rivington Arms and its stylish proprietors received so much coverage in the non-arts press that some skeptics doubted the seriousness of the enterprise. And there was no shortage of LES hipster mayhem during openings, as the crowds of would-be beautiful-and-damned kids spilled out of the exceedingly modest space and into the street, leading to frequent visits from the police. Unlike Maccarone, "the girls," as Bent and Marden are still sometimes referred to, started out with no gallery experience at all, but they shared a keen desire to show the work of their friends, and the gallery soon attracted "real" attention (reviews in the New York Times, critical coverage in the art press) for exhibitions of Dan Colen, Hanna Liden, Lansing-Dreiden, Mathew Cerletty, Carter Mull, and Dash Snow. They also began to work the art fairs, those necessary evils through which specialty sensibilities are deracinated for acquisition within the global art market and "hot" new galleries brush up against blue-chip megaliths. Rivington Arms, as the corporate identity of Bent and Marden, is the subject of the latest issue of Me magazine, itself a demimondaine-studded, crystallized symptom of scenesterism through its tessellation of youth-culture art, fashion, music, cooking, dog-walking, you name it. Sample questions to Me interviewee Liden, who shows with Rivington Arms: "When and where did you meet Mirabelle and Melissa? Not sure, but probably on the Lower East Side in the late '90s, maybe in some bar full of skaters and beer and graffiti or some apartment full of skaters and beer and graffiti or on some sidewalk full of samo. What was your first impression of them? 'Wow, those are the most beautiful girls I've ever seen, what the hell are they doing in this dump!?'"

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There's something droll about the proximity to Rivington Arms of Orchard gallery, which debuted this year. A "co-operative" endeavor, one hesitates to say Orchard opened for business; instead, another kind of scene is on life support there, an "institutional critique" fragment of the program that the late Colin de Land sustained with such astonishing success as an "antidealer" dealer at the incomparable, now-defunct American Fine Arts, Co., itself perhaps the quintessential scene gallery, where disparate sensibilities (Andrea Fraser, Art Club 2000, Alex Bag, John Waters, Mark Dion, Christian-Phillip Muller, not to mention celebrity photographer Greg Gorman) were held together by the overarching persona of de Land; kids would work there for pennies just to be part of the AFA clique. While the artists involved with Orchard are no doubt rigorous--Fraser, Muller, and Gareth James (all from the AFA stable) are among the principals--and while any number of shows and performances the co-op has put on were eminently worthy of our attention ("May I Help You?," "September 11, 1973," the sole screening of Michael Asher's film no title, 1973/2005), personally, I find Orchard creepy: This "scene" reminds me unpleasantly of the original black-and-white Night of the Living Dead, suffused with necrophilia and necrophagy. Call it nostalgia. If you live in the past, you die a little every day, and I want to live.

If a single gallery achieved a particularly dazzling succes d'estime this year, it's Reena Spaulings, located in a strip mall on a dismal stretch of Grand Street in Chinatown. The gallery opened in January 2004 as an underground project that wasn't even open to the public. "It was very elitist," as proprietor Emily Sundblad describes the first events at the gallery, her tone one of sincere irony. The first show consisted of a ripped-up Michael Krebber catalogue, the pages taped to the walls in homage to the German painter, cult figure, and fuck-up. The exhibition "Robert Smithson" followed. "We wanted to do a show about Robert Smithson at a moment when the reverence for him, and all the knockoffs of his work, was really overwhelming, around the time of the last Whitney Biennial," Sundblad explains. "Mirrored letters outside the gallery spelled out his name, and inside we glued mirrored tiles to the floor; it looked like a gay jewelry store. Every time someone came in you knew because you could hear a mirror cracking." Tellingly, the show itself made no explicit reference to Smithson beyond decor; instead, there were performances--Ei Arakawa did his first-ever performance in New York--parties, bands, and a screening of Niki de Saint Phalle's 1973 film Daddy, during which guests drank opium tea and Michele Maccarone got very sick to her stomach (the tea, perchance?). Reena Spaulings also did an exhibition of works by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth. "It was great to show Kim when we were in Basel," Sundblad continues, "because all the Europeans were so excited that we had a rock star in our gallery."

But Reena Spaulings mounted even better shows this year, preeminently an installation by Klara Liden (Hanna's younger sister), built out of two thousand sheets of cardboard that she had scavenged from the street; her videos were screened within. Roberta Smith reviewed the show in the Times, displaying an enthusiasm that is seldom her style: "It doesn't sound like much, but it is. Ms. Liden is the real deal, possessed of a fierce, concentrated energy that infuses everything she does. She is as engaged with her time as she is with form and materials, and approaches both with a very real but elegant sense of economy." Nothing short of a rave. The underground hit the mainstream hard, and subsequent exhibitions at Reena Spaulings--of Josh Smith's "mirror paintings" (actually "reject" canvases repainted black, and not conventionally pretty) and of Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy's mock-newscast video, New Report, 2005--received enthusiastic notices from Smith and Holland Cotter, respectively. Hardy and Greenwood played anchors/in-the-field reporters Henry Stein-Acker-Hill and Henry Irigaray in what could be characterized as a half-scripted/half-improvised lesbian version of Alex Bag. "We are pregnant with information," anchor-womyn Henry says. "Our audience is always willing to admit when the facts are not the facts." In an investigative report, Henry--cum--Christiane Amanpour delves into the crisis of feminine anxiety. "Anxiety has a long psychological history with women, dating back to Freudian history," s/he comments, before moving on to an anxiety victim's personal account. How does she deal with anxiety? Cigarettes, Xanax, Ambien, Sonata, Bedtime Tea, television, valerian, a shot of NyQuil, and so on. "I think my anxiety stems from a feeling of powerlessness."

Deitch Projects, on Grand Street in SoHo, remains the grandest thoroughfare for the transmission of young scenesterism to collectors, curators, and museums. Jeffrey Deitch started his art-world career behind the desk of the John Weber Gallery in 1977, and was an eyewitness and active participant in the "first wave" of New York scenesterism, i.e., the East Village art scene. Deitch, who cofounded (with art historian Patrick Cooney) Citibank Art Advisory Service in 1979, and who managed the business end of the enterprise and all contemporary-art acquisitions, wrote "Report from Times Square," about the legendary "Times Square Show," for Art in America (September 1980): "The 'Times Square Show' was a challenge to dealers and curators of advanced art who continue to feel that the discreet display of a few pieces in an elegant gallery is enough. But it is even more of a challenge to artists who think their work stops when the piece leaves the studio, and who leave its presentation to others." Deitch's critics usually suggest that he is the avatar of the vampire-dealer leeching the energies of young, untried, even unworthy artists and repackaging them as chattels for the demon market. In fact, Deitch has remained remarkably consistent in his aesthetic affiliations, in particular his penchant for youth culture; he's the Arethusa of scenesterism. Live Through This: New York in the Year 2005, edited by Deitch and Kathy Grayson, is without doubt my favorite art book of the year. It's pointless to summarize the thirty-odd artists and artist collectives represented therein--e.g., Dan Colen, Dash Snow, Terrence Koh, Ryan McGinley, Jules de Balincourt, Bec Stupac, Tracy and the Plastics--and it's certainly not a matter of liking them all, but the book serves a more documentary function, and like all documentaries, the enterprise inevitably fictionalizes its subjects. That's why the extensive party pics and fucked-upness pics--dirty, sexy, fashionable, stupid, drunk, druggy--serve the overall project as much as the sections devoted to individual artists.

Voyeurism, you say? "Consuming" youth?--as if that were something new and disturbing. Curiously, I'm reminded of a passage from Chris Marker's 1982 film Sans Soleil, itself a consummate meditation on the truth and lies of documentary. Japanese culture reigns as the cynosure of Marker's "tourism": "The youth that get together every weekend at Shinjuku obviously know they're not on a launching pad toward real life. That they are life, to be eaten on the spot, like fresh donuts. It's a very simple secret. The old try to hide it, and not all the young know it. The ten-year-old girl who threw her friend from the thirteenth floor of a building, after having tied her hands because she had spoken badly of their class team, hadn't discovered it yet."

The seepage of Lower East Side sensibilities to Chelsea perhaps suggests further development in the eat/elevate-the-young vein. Last summer, Neville Wakefield organized an ambitious group exhibition, "Bridge Freezes Before Road," at Gladstone Gallery, a blue-chip paragon if ever there was one, that took as its premise the ongoing influence of Robert Smithson on younger generations. Works by Smithson, John McCracken, Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein, and Martin Kippenberger commingled with the latest runway models, among others Lowman, McEwen, Colen, Kelley Walker, Banks Violette, and Steven Shearer. McEwen's recent group show at Nicole Klagsbrun, "Interstate," assayed another generational mix-tape: Lucio Fontana and Josh Smith, Larry Johnson and Dan Colen, Polaroids by Dash Snow and Lucas Samaras, et al. The rumble in lower Manhattan has reached even the far north of Europe: Witness "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium" at Oslo's Astrup Fearnley Museum for Modern Art, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist and featuring works by numerous New York artists--young artists, Greater New Yorkers, scenesters of one species or another--Lowman, Young, Smith, Bouchet, Seth Price, Guyton\Walker, Mika Rottenberg, Matthew Day Jackson, Matthew Brannon, and Devendra Banhart, among others.

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As we prepare to go to press, I dash off to attend the opening and dinner for Nate Lowman's first solo show, at Maccarone Inc., 45 Canal Street. Quite a crowd. On my way there, I receive a text message from a friend, a curatorial rising star: "Are you coming? In Michele's office, hiding. Serious social Panic Attack." And that's life in New York City, November 6, 2005.

David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Artforum.

DAVID RIMANELLI

Los Angeles

LA'S ART SCENE continues to propagate with unwarranted optimism, like the palm trees that we natives call "volunteers," the ones always poking through the cracks between the curb and the sidewalk. One simply can't keep up with all the sprouts and weeds, let alone the bushes and trees. We have no fewer than nine art schools in the region with competitive MFA programs, meaning that every year an average of about 180 (mostly) young artists complete their studies. So every two years LA churns out 360 degreed individuals--and that makes for a massive circle. That vastness doesn't even account for the city's cadre of legendary artist-teachers, who are in the business of exhaling those circles like so many dissipating smoke rings. Whether the teachers inhale or not is the metaphorical-rhetorical question we'll have to save for later.

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Who can deny that fits of nostalgia occasionally prompt us to long for smaller circles, for times when connecting dots and creating ties was somehow more organic? A small museum show about a circle of considerably druggy beatniks acted as perfect catalyst for such a nostalgic fit. Then some very familiar anti-art school grumbling in the local press, perhaps borne of a similar nostalgia, snapped me back out of it. A large museum show on drugs surprisingly offered a better perspective, as did the news that yet another art school would be opening in LA. This new school, however, promises to be free and hold all its classes in a "disappearing" classroom on top of a mountain (figuratively speaking, that is).

I've been involved in numerous conversations about starting schools--I've dreamt it as much as the next guy: something small, affordable, possibly even free--after which I've said, "Forget it, it's too much work. If people want an alternative to school, why offer school as an alternative?" I had to ask myself if this preoccupation with formal education isn't some kind of deferral of maturity, never mind all the practical benefits of school, because ultimately I really believe that art school is nothing short of utopia. The biggest problem is how much it costs to attend. I've often wondered if the astronomical tuition couldn't be better spent if people with like-minded concerns and ambitions pooled their resources to organize a salon, an ambiguous venue, or publish a journal.

The beatnik Wallace Berman didn't spend any time or money on art school. Semina, the loose-leaf journal he started in the '50s, was the subject of an exhibition this fall at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (organized by guest curators Kristine McKenna and Michael Duncan). Showcased were Berman's friends and collaborators, through both photographic portraits by Berman himself and various artworks and printed matter from the likes of Joan Brown, Diane DiPrima, Jess, George Herms, and the late, great Walter Hopps, and many other contributors, famous and not so famous. One of these perhaps lesser-known figures was poet and artist Marjorie Cameron. Her intense, impossibly manly yet elfin face graces the cover of the debut issue. I've repeatedly heard the story of her "arrival": Rocket scientist Jack Parsons, in cahoots with his transatlantic mentor, Aleister Crowley, was conjuring the whore of Babylon and she--by magick--appeared in the form of red-haired, green-eyed Marjorie Cameron on Orange Grove Boulevard. (That's the posh Pasadena street, site of the New Year's Day Rose Parade, the broadcast of which was always said to be partially responsible for the never-ending influx of newcomers seeking a frostless paradise. It's also the site of LA's very first contemporary art museum, which was originally headed by Hopps.) Cameron became Parsons's wife and, after his death in 1952, continued her role as artist-muse, appearing in films by Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. When Berman exhibited the contents of his Semina on the floor of the Ferus Gallery in 1957, a sexually energetic, if not explicit, Cameron drawing subtitled "Peyote Vision" was cause for a bust by the LAPD on obscenity charges. After the subsequent trial, Berman and Cameron vowed never again to show work in commercial galleries, but they continued to unite and inspire odd characters across regional and disciplinary boundaries. The newly reconsidered assemblage sculptor George Herms, who had his own solo exhibition at the Santa Monica Museum earlier this year, said of Cameron, "She molded and formed me." Why is it so hard to imagine that sort of witchy cross-pollination today?

As the Berman exhibition made clear, subcultural or countercultural activities needn't rely on an elaborate system of mentors-for-hire, but rather flourish or perish through a transmission of influence channeled through unmitigated motivation, mutual fascination, and support.

It is my guess that people both inside and outside of academic circles look, with this thought in mind, at LA's surplus of art education with differing degrees of disdain, and this dynamic may shed light on LA's contemporary psyche and its relation to the ever-lengthening shadow of the city's artistic legacy. Both insider and outsider may easily accuse those seeking expensive degrees of buying their way into pre-legitimized circles. Insiders may also ever so slightly resent having to repeatedly channel all their critical energy and enthusiasm into those who come after them--as opposed to, say, keeping rigorously abreast of what their peers are doing. But the difference is that if you're inside the academy you pretty much have a responsibility to work through this frustration in direct discussion with students and fellow artists and teachers. If you're on the outside, or at least profess to be, you can continue imagining that the art institutions are simply hothouses of pretension and self-congratulation. The latter is, of course, a case of the most extreme disdain, but any Angelino will attest to the annoying fact that this cliched exasperation crops up pretty much on a weekly basis in our local newspapers. Here's a crude sample from just last month: "Art theory has begun to play such a dominant role in art school that I feel it has lobotomized many young creative minds," Aaron Rose wrote in LA Weekly (October 28). "Young MFAs are required to read endless texts, many written more than twenty years ago by stuffy Frenchmen with navel-gazing theories holding little or no relevance to life in Bush's America. They are then asked to somehow relate their work to these deconstructionist theories and then be judged by how successfully they do this."

This type of caricature is continually being redrawn in the regional press. The worst part isn't that it's out of date or misinformed--the Frenchmen in question weren't writing art theory, for example--but rather that it implies that critical thinking, reading, or even knowledge in general is somehow irrelevant and threatens vitality. It assumes that only a small number of fashionable or canonical texts are being circulated in school, all of them assigned by proselytizing teachers who want the students to believe everything written in those texts. (This is hardly the case; in fact, theory in general has lost its footing--or footnoting, as the case may be--in many art schools, leaving students, ironically, with a desire for not less theorizing about art but more.) A more refined version of this disdain is persistently dished out by Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight, who even managed to discuss this year's big Basquiat show at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art in terms of Conceptual art's prejudiced favoring of mind over matter. Basquiat may owe something to Conceptual art, Knight admits, but his work is Conceptual with "a difference," that difference being that his work is supposedly meant to parody "intellectual pretension--[the] stock in trade of the academy."

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Given my weakness for nostalgia, I am not in the best position to defend the academy by saying it doesn't have the potential to engender pretentiousness. But at the crux of the matter is a dilemma within LA's art world and its discourse, reflected, at least in part, in the LA art media's managing to form a convincing backdrop of public hostility toward any sort of complexity, and indifference toward the growing interest in the pursuit of a life as an artist. Connoisseurship in the arena of pop culture is encouraged; it's acceptable to reference the record collection, but not the bookshelf. So what it seems we have in LA (recognizable in its art-making, its conversation, its criticism) is a subtle re-rifting between high culture and low culture--low being matter, high being mind.

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Oddly enough, it is a German cultural critic (but no stranger to LA), Diedrich Diederichsen, who recently offered me a very helpful reframing of the false dichotomy that haunts us here--and this in an essay accompanying curator Paul Schimmel's "Ecstasy: In and About Altered States" at LA MOCA. (It had occurred to me that if Schimmel's "Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 1990s" had obtained a sense of paradigmatic importance back in '92, then maybe "Ecstasy" would give me a read on the present. In truth, the first image that came to my mind--not a pretty one--was of the rich hipsters at the Tate house totally high on mushrooms while being slaughtered by the middle-class Manson kids who were ostensibly high on acid. But then I turned to the show catalogue.) In "Divided Ecstasy: The Politics of Hallucinogenics," Diederichsen begins by writing, "Drugs stand in yet another cultural- and intellectual-historical relationship to the arts and specifically to the debates around issues of immediacy and mediality, debates that are important in the theory of media and the history of the avant-garde." He continues:

   Drug use ... forms part of a tradition that privileges immediacy,
   from gnosis to rock and roll. This thinking, of course, stands in
   classic conflict with all of the modern aesthetics that emphasize the
   specificity of the medium and the artistic genre, from Clement
   Greenberg to Theodor Adorno, as well as with structuralist and
   poststructuralist aesthetics and theories of media, which are based
   on the materiality of language.

For me, something about the idea of expanded consciousness set against two opposing theories of aesthetics seemed to underscore the usefulness of both academic debate and the loose dissemination of, say, peyote visions. And I wondered if there could be any contemporary corollary in LA life for a sculptural work by Klaus Weber featured in "Ecstasy": a fountain made of Victorian crystal that pumped not water but LSD. Documents accompanying the piece explain that the fountain is meant to be at the center of a simple building of unidirectional glass, which, when plopped down in a city, would transform a public space into a, well, public space. From inside one could see out, but from the outside one couldn't see in. This--along with the acid, I presume--would, according to the artist, facilitate the viewer's seeing "the weirdness of daily life, which through repetition has lost its meaning to the local inhabitants."

The newest art school in LA might in fact be achieving something similar in its project. Artist Piero Golia, who studied engineering in Naples, is the cofounder of LA's new Mountain School of Arts. He said, "It's impossible to demonstrate you're alive in Los Angeles--that's why I came here." He and fellow artist and cofounder Eric Wesley are ready to start classes as soon as the new year begins--offering, for example, a course on Mannerism, taught by Steve Hanson and Jorge Pardo, the owners of the bar where the gatherings are held. Wesley and Golia emphasize that when classes aren't in session, upstairs at the Mountain, the school doesn't exist, though I presume the living and studio spaces they are offering outside of the bar are permanent. They recently held their first event, a lecture by German artist Franz Ackermann, who happened to be in LA to install his work in the "Ecstasy" show. That night there was a good classroom-size crowd, many of whom I recognized as students already enrolled in or graduated from other schools. Instead of a slide show, the lecture was accompanied by dim visuals because they had to resort to an opaque projector to show pages from one of Ackermann's catalogues. While the psychedelic quality of his drawing style was necessarily diminished, the nomadic internationalism of what is mapped in practice came through pretty clearly. A few days after the lecture, I asked Wesley and Golia point blank, What's the difference between your school offering an artist lecture series--the backbone of any serious MFA program and the cause of the dominance of language in the field--and any other? They said their artists are travelers, not visiting lecturers, and it would be a two-way street, insofar as the students would have access to Ackermann in Berlin if they wanted. This access is all granted and given free of charge, beatnik style--but with a difference.

Frances Stark is an artist based in Los Angeles. (See Contributors.)

FRANCES STARK

London

AS I EMERGED FROM the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale this July, the air-conditioned drafts that trailed me out the door were less chilling than the news I received upon reaching the building's terrace overlooking the Giardini: A second wave of bombs had just gone off in London--and this while the rhythmic chanting of the phrase "This is so contemporary, contemporary, CONTEMPORARY ..." drifted over absurdly from Tino Sehgal's project in the German pavilion next door. The initial reports located the attack on Hackney Road, one of the main arteries in the network of East End streets frequented by many members of the city's art world, including Gilbert & George, the artists who represented Britain at the Biennale this year. (As it later turned out, of course, the attack was botched and the bombs mostly harmless, but that did little to soothe the nerves of jittery Londoners just two weeks after the events of July 7.)

In the moments preceding this disturbing revelation, I had fixated on Cited Gents, 2005, possibly the most convincing work in "Ginkgo Pictures," Gilbert & George's uneven but rewarding exhibition showcasing their relatively recent interest in digitally manipulated imagery. Recalling the sharpness of observation in some of their strongest work about London, such as the gritty "Dirty Words Pictures" of three decades ago, Cited Gents depicts the artists' trademark bespoke suits morphing into security-camera surveillance footage of Bangladeshi men roaming the streets near Brick Lane. Gilbert & George have resided in the East End's Spitalfields district since the late '60s, when the neighborhood began its transformation from a predominantly Jewish enclave to a stronghold of the city's Bangladeshi community. In recent years, the area's fashionably decrepit Huguenot dwellings have become some of the most desirable housing in London, pushing the previous inhabitants into council estates further afield. The once Dickensian slum, which was frequently used by filmmakers to depict the blight of inner-city London, now follows, with alarming intensity, the familiar script of urban gentrification.

Gilbert & George have consistently drawn on the spirited multicultural disposition of their surroundings to develop unique strategies for merging art with daily life. Amalgamating the duo's self-portraits with the closed-circuit-television images through which their community is increasingly observed and managed, Cited Gents is immediately appreciable as a painful emblem of the artists' identification with the area and, perhaps, their inadvertent role in its transformation. In the aftermath of this summer's bombings, the work has become a prescient icon of London's heightened climate of fear and control. The forensic, legislative, and journalistic use value of surveillance imagery reached blue-chip levels this year, making it impossible for the average Londoner to ignore the long-prophesied collapse of digital and physical space. Nor can London's artists afford not to critically reconcile a historical perspective on the city with the urgent and global responsibilities confronting them as contemporary Londoners.

For all the column inches that have bemoaned Britain's navel-gazing, parochial tendencies over the decades, 2005 was a year in which London's international stakes became more apparent. As the city returned, with characteristic efficiency and resolve (and a healthy dose of denial), to "business as usual" after the summer violence, one couldn't help but have a renewed awareness that much of that business was driven by the influx of cheap labor that has poured in from Eastern European countries recently admitted to the EU. If Israeli-Palestinian discord has replaced the Berlin Wall and the cold war as the defining conflict of our moment, there is still a palpable post-Soviet aura to London, as Baltic and Slavic cultures increasingly inflect the city's already polyglot mix.

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The show that offered the most comprehensive gloss on London's (and the UK's) ever more cosmopolitan makeup was actually held, as it happens, in the northern city of Gateshead. "British Art Show," a substantial survey exhibition that takes place every five years, opened at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art this autumn with work by approximately fifty artists and collaborative groups. Almost half of the participants in this year's show, which was curated by Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker, were born outside the UK, and most now live and work in London, including Ervin Cavusoglu, a Turkish video artist whose statement in the show's catalogue seems a relevant corollary to the city's emotional tenor in 2005. Cavusoglu suggests how being under surveillance makes one more acutely conscious of one's location and movement in space: "When I came to live in Turkey and then in London, under totally different conditions, I had to define a new territory, and define myself within that territory."

Attempting to define and map the different positions and movements within the infinite territory of the capital became the province of more exhibitions and artists' projects than usual this year. Farquharson and Schlieker, while acknowledging the much-elaborated pitfalls of putting national identity on display, forged ahead with a show that classified work into three categories, or "discussions": "Revisitations: Ideology, Fiction, Style," "Love and War: Geopolitics and the Camera," and "Relations: Audiences, Institutions, Values." In many ways the relational impulse behind this last grouping pervaded the entire show. The curators delineated a dichotomy within recent practice between "overtly aesthetic, subjective, and physical" work and art that was "political, social, and dematerialized" and were especially concerned with "desegregating" these tendencies and facilitating discourse between them. The first camp included the appealingly dysfunctional utopian reverie of California-born Daria Martin's engaging films, which reload the "aggressive avant-garde thinking" of the early twentieth century and incorporate references ranging from Oskar Schlemmer to Carolee Schneemann. Foregrounding the less tangible but more user-friendly quality of the second camp were Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska's foray into the use of Creative Commons's public-domain copyright licenses and Carey Young's training course in negotiating skills for the exhibition's curators. Within the show's various taxonomies, and the curators' attempts to connect them, a distinct longing for community manifested itself, whether through critical nostalgia for the mythologized experimental collectives of the past, or through deadpan witnessing of--or playful interventions in--the social spaces of the present.

Compared with this concise, analytical topography of recent practice, the Institute of Contemporary Arts took a distinctly more subjective approach to defining indefinable London. Driven by ICA exhibition director Jens Hoffmann's curiosity about the paradoxes of London's political (or more specifically apolitical) and cultural situation, "London in Six Easy Steps" staged, in rapid-fire succession, six individually curated, one-week takes on the city. Hoffmann, who moved to London just under two years ago, has made his mark through conceptually "delegational" shows constructed from multiple viewpoints, and his examination of London followed suit. The first installment was Catherine Wood's elegant "Emblematic Display," a thoughtful engagement with London's heraldic past that offered tempting, highly aestheticized models for thinking through its complex present. In its address to London's monumentality and excess, the installation of work by Cerith Wyn Evans, Pablo Bronstein, David Thorpe, and others reminded me of a phrase in a text accompanying Rem Koolhaas's 1972 collaborative project about London, Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture: "It is the hedonistic science of designing collective facilities that fully accommodate individual desires ... [T]he life inside produces a continuous state of ornamental frenzy and decorative delirium, an overdose of symbols."

Much like "British Art Show," the ICA exhibitions grappled with questions of how to facilitate a more vital sense of community in a city that tends to thwart such efforts with aloof ambivalence. Wood's show was followed by generally engaging curatorial offerings by the collective B+B, Tom Morton and Catharine Patha, Guy Brett, and Gilane Tawadros. Gregor Muir closed the series with the importation of a bit of East End debauchery from the fabled George and Dragon Public House, which was resituated in the ICA's galleries. Over the years I have met more Scandinavian curators at the original location of this boozer than one might on a residency at IASPIS and more Latin American artists than I met during my ten years as a resident of Los Angeles (and more than my lifetime quota of London fashion stylists). Its reconstitution here was clearly more than an attempt to promote Tom Marioni-inspired pint-swilling. After more than a decade of anonymous "platforms" for social engagement endlessly filling well-funded art spaces across Europe and North America, the George and Dragon's West End moment offered the chance to transpose what some would consider the single most colorful slice of London to an institutional situation that obviously and inevitably should have killed it. Such symbolic suicide was a perhaps inebriated but poignant admission that the elusiveness and impossibility of representing London is still its greatest strength.

The lifespan of many projects and exhibitions this year was brief, as curators and artists alike discovered that nomadic and temporary situations are often better suited to London's particularly daunting makeup. The city is so freighted with history, how better to inhabit structures that can never really be one's own? Morton and Patha steered their roving "Man in the Holocene" project across London, touching down in Trafalgar Square, at a boxing club in Dalston, and at a series of East End spaces and culminating at ex-Gagosianite Jonathan Viner's recently opened DIY kunsthalle, Fortescue Avenue. Curators Emily Pethick and Kit Hammond's publishing fair, "Publish and Be Damned," was situated in a church crypt in Clerkenwell for only a single Sunday afternoon. But the lively selection of independent printing presses and laptop upstarts, ranging from Amsterdam's DOT DOT DOT to Zurich's WeAreTheArtists, generated a tremendous energy which spilled into the pubs for the evening and then into the hearts, minds, and bookshelves of those with a few pounds to spare.

This kind of initiative stole the thunder from more traditional artist-run spaces, many of which seemed primarily concerned, over the course of the year, with figuring out how to cram their wares into the tight spaces at the Zoo Art Fair or the only slightly more capacious confines of ~scope and Pilot. These miniexpos all piggybacked onto Frieze during a mid-October week that challenged even the most accomplished multitaskers. But in many ways the fairs have the potential to be more beneficial to London than one might wish to admit, and not only in the sense of developing collectors, high sales, and civic boosterism. After all, London is a market town. For every hyperbranded megastore on the high street, there remain a handful of ancient weekly bazaars that fill the contours of small byways throughout the city and play out the fragments of London's past against the rising tide of gentrification. For every outpost of Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Spruth Magers Lee, or the numerous other top-drawer international galleries that have taken root in London in recent years, there also now seems to be an art fair. These fairs, though they may not always present the most scintillating work, attempt to counter the intimidating experience of navigating the vast expanses (and expenses) of London, consolidating brief moments of collectivity vital to such an unknowable city. If artists could learn to exploit such temporary structures for more than simply commercial gain, the fairs could become a viable model of opposition to the deeply solidified real-estate situation in the city, providing stages for more dynamic international exchange and creating apertures of possibility for the active engagement of London's uncanny fluidity.

Outside the tents, zoos, and hotels, the old white-walled galleries had few very surprising debuts this year, although Daniel Sinsel's sweetly sadistic paintings at Sadie Coles still resonate. Blow de la Barra--newly opened across the hall from Coles--promised a steady stream of young Latin American work; Stefan Kalmar's summer show "I REALLY SHOULD ..." at Lisson Gallery included London's introduction to Mathias Poledna; Steven Claydon made heads spin happily at Hotel; Rosalind Nashashibi showed a brave face at Counter; and Alexandra Bircken's woolly constructions warmed up both Herald Street and Maureen Paley. Bircken has been an occasional presence in photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans, whose exhibition "Truth Study Center" at Paley's gallery was a tour de force and the best installation art of the year.

Most of these galleries are located in the East End, which continues to boom, and new ventures are pushing the neighborhood's parameters deeper into Hackney. Whether the commercialization of an old bohemian quarter will help artists remains to be seen. On the other end of town, Chelsea awaits the imminent arrival of the Saatchi Gallery, which, in the wake of a nasty tenant-landlord dispute, announced plans to close shop on the Thames. As the art world's borders expand, so do the number of projects compelled to traverse the distances between them, including those by non-Londoners trying to come to grips with the city. This year witnessed Francis Alys's superb Artangel commission "Seven Walks" and New York collective 16 Beaver's fascinating challenge to the conventional clock, C of the Willing, 2005, a twenty-four-hour series of "countercar-tographies" and "chimerical walks."

But the highlight of all this perambulating was positioned in a show about tourism--during a year in which the powers that be feared tourists might not come at all. Matthew Buckingham's clever film installation A Man of the Crowd, 2003, included in the Hayward Gallery's manifestation of Francesco Bonami's exhibition "Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye," was a revelation. The work has been circulating internationally for over a year, with stops in New York and Vienna (where it was shot), but here seemed finally to have found its rightful home. The film roughly recreates Poe's 1840 short story "The Man of the Crowd," which was a strong influence on Walter Benjamin's conception of the flaneur and, as it happens, is set in the first industrialized metropolis: London.

The narrative, and Buckingham's camera, details a circular journey, an impenetrable mystery in which a man follows another, older man through the streets of the city in order to categorize him within a system he has devised to classify passersby. Eventually returning to the point of departure outside of a cafe before separating from his quarry, the younger man gazes directly into the wanderer's face, but his glance goes unnoticed and is not returned. The fellow he has been following becomes an emblem of the unreadable city in Poe's archive of urban phenomena. Each man provides a shadow double of the other, facilitating a reflective glance between the past and the present which is forever looped without closure. Rather than concern itself with a realistic picture of the city, the story prioritizes the ambivalent experience of the narrator-protagonist, who remains an observer, a reader of traces uprooted and abandoned in an unknowable metropolis. Buckingham's use of mirrored glass in his installation implicates the viewer in a game of doubling and shadows that, during a year in which the past haunted the present more than usual and pressing questions of community abounded, seemed remarkably profound.

Stuart Comer is curator of film and events at Tate Modern, London.

STUART COMER

Paris

A BEAUTIFUL EARLY OCTOBER DAY IN PARIS. The hottest (in degrees centigrade) of any fashion week this season has just begun, and the annual FIAC extravaganza is about to open in its frenzied wake. Yet as tightly scheduled fashion shows spread from the Louvre's commercial annex to more spectacular venues throughout the city, and as fair exhibitors add the last touches to their booths, a particularly loud and massive throng crashes all the parties, threatening to paralyze the city and disrupt the international buyers' carefully tailored agendas. A day and a half of strikes in the public and private sectors, along with a series of demonstrations, is in full effect. They start, as protests often do, at Place de la Republique and follow the traditional route along Boulevard du Temple to Place de la Bastille, brandishing the usual artillery--smoke, megaphones, flags, and banners.

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But the demonstrators fail to incite the usual rendezvous with chaos. The new minimum-service policy that's being tested on workers in state-run companies proves to be effective. Or is it simply that a majority of people doesn't even bother trying to get to work--or even to demonstrate--since daily chaos, labor strife, and resignations are overwhelming enough to make them just stay home? In any case, the Parisian art and style crowds make it to the fair on time--with a hint of indecision over the various fashion parties and exhibition openings. And so do several agents of the cultural authorities, including the prime minister himself, with briefcases full of fiscal promises and encouragements directed toward French collectors. Just a few days after all this, in a neighborhood bookshop on the same boulevard where the protesters were marching, philosopher Jacques Rancieres presents his much-awaited La haine de la democratie published by La fabrique, while a day later Fresh Theory (a pop anthology of texts enhanced with artworks and published by Leo Scheer) is celebrated at the headquarters of a notorious pastis brand. Well, isn't this combination of overlapping events, this flow of releases, just how you'd expect a decent French kiss to feel? Or at least a quintessential Paris tale that could be wrapped up from the heights of a Ferris wheel--such as the one that happened to be installed inside the imposing nave of the Grand Palais throughout these harried festivities?

What else could one list as far as recent events Made in Paris? Nothing that one couldn't find in any other European or North American capital. Over the span of a year a dozen young galleries opened, their only surprises being the uncanny fact that nothing differentiates them from their elder brothers (other than their smaller size), and that they only seem to reproduce the same frigid models and artistic formats over and over again. These are nonevents, as are most institutions and the few corporate spaces that have emerged in the city, striving only to fill spaces, programs, press junkets, and didactic missions, paraphrasing the market beneath a touch of corporate varnish--nowadays a force of legitimization--rather than working to produce contexts, situations, critiques, and identities (not just visual ones), while backing up artists in such endeavors.

But such possibilities seem to be emerging outside Paris. At the fair's opening party at the Grand-Palais, in the midst of an exhilarated crowd of thousands running from an artist-designed open bar to a Jean Prouve construction that people seem to think is a bus stop, I run into Pierre Bal-Blanc, head of the suburban Bretigny Contemporary Art Center (CAC). I ask him about his entanglement in the discreet fuss (not being covered in the French newspapers) over the current project by architects Francois Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, and John Navarro of R & Sie(n), and he invites me to come to the art center to see for myself.

Arriving at Bretigny after a thirty-minute train ride southwest of Paris one experiences the ambivalent feeling of awkwardness such off-center art-world sites can trigger. Director of the CAC since 2003, Bal-Blanc has made his primary program the commissioning of artists to produce specific projects that successively alter aspects of the art center's spaces. As part of an agglomeration incorporating a media library and theater space, the art center's intervention alters the building's use not only by its audiences but also by its future invited artists. Adding up with time, these seemingly minimal interventions subtly inform the ongoing and rather unauthorized history that is effectively being written between the walls. David Lamelas, for example, constructed a concrete corridor for a film installation, which stretches outside the premises of the center and has become a permanent sculpture after the show, while for Common Grave, 2005, Teresa Margolles brought waste water all the way from Culiacan, Mexico, to cast the concrete floor of the CAC. By pursuing such long-term, durable projects, Bal-Blanc has effectively devised a curatorial strategy that opposes the inscription of a cultural institution within the whims of local politics and vacillating community support.

This summer R & Sie(n) pushed things a bit further with "The Void," a project involving not just the CAC but the transformation of the surrounding urban area. Appropriating the consultative urban-planning procedures used by public authorities, R & Sie(n) launched "The Void" with a public survey concerning the development of the no-man's-land of a parking lot right outside the CAC, itself located between a high school and a field. As it turned out, most residents wanted the area to remain a parking lot, although improved with trees. Next an urban-planning proposal based on the results of the study was presented on a large billboard installed in the middle of the actual dead zone. The sign, on view as part of the project until the middle of this month, reads in French, "If you don't like this world, you should make other ones" (a twist on the title of a 1977 Philip K. Dick essay), and announces an experimental biotransformation operation including a "phytoregeneration" of the cultural center. A digital rendering shows the CAC covered by what looks like a giant bush and a parking area modeled on and functioning as several giant skateboard ramps.

Quite unexpectedly, R & Sie(n)'s project triggered an Orwellian-Wellesian panic among some of the local inhabitants who immediately turned to the authorities for explanation. If the initial intention behind this more or less fictitious scenario was to capitalize on an existing urban "void" in order to sponsor dialogue between the population and its elected representatives, the latter responded with unjustified offense and threats directed at the CAC for having trespassed the limits of its mission. Incapable of reappropriating the debate (let alone the project) to their advantage, the politicians opened up a more blatant void in discourse than there had been before. And whether or not this conclusion--already inferred in R & Sie(n)'s script--was predictable, it played out at the expense of the community. Nevertheless, the political fracas flies in the face of those who might decry the futility (or better, the fiction) of contemporary art outside larger cities with manifest cultural ambition. The project created a public incident, a situation the bigger institutions in Paris and elsewhere are largely incapable of--or not interested in--producing.

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There is undeniably a certain schizophrenic inertia in the institutional air right now. On the one hand, there is the cultural tourism industry (also known as the French Cultural Exception), which evinces a certain fascination for Anglo-Saxon, arty-entrepreneurial success stories, and whose underlying ideology was easily summed up in a statement uttered by LVMH impresario Bernard Arnault at the opening of his new Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Elysees: "Luxury is the French Microsoft." On the other hand, there is the apparatus of cultural tools available (the French Ministry of Culture, its stipends, production or research grants, network of art centers, etc.), which was originally created in a quite different spirit and is currently trying to resist mounting pressure from within.

In the meantime, on a domestic scale, this tension spreads a serious confusion whereby contemporary art, in order to be capitalized on, must necessarily take the form of proliferating consensual events. Nuit Blanche in Paris, for instance, showed us how to consume most of the city's annual cultural budget in an orgiastic one-night stand of art in the streets--a populist intercourse ready-made for live broadcast on public television. The fiction that such packaging creates is also evident in more international gatherings, such as the Biennale de Lyon, which this year was boldly titled "Experience de la duree" (Experiencing Duration). We might compare events like these to the much less schizophrenic and longer lasting total experience found in projects such as Thomas Hirschhorn's "Swiss-Swiss Democracy" at the Centre Culturel Suisse. Here Hirschhorn once again demonstrated an artist's capacity to take charge of a complex issue politically and aesthetically through a one-month-long marathon that included an exhibition, a play staged by Gwenael Morin, conferences and readings, and the publishing of a daily newspaper.

Another example of engagement taking place in the shadow of institutional glamour is the program of an independent art space located in the old center of Lyon. In a few years, La Salle de bains has distinguished itself with concise but sharp solo exhibitions alternating between French artists (including Ingrid Luche and Agnes Martel, Pierre Joseph, and, soon, Bruno Serralongue) and debuts in France of more well-known international artists (such as Jeppe Hein, Pae White, and Kelley Walker). As elementary as it may sound, La Salle de bains proposes a straightforward frame or context that one can relate to simply--a surprisingly precious refuge from the ambient confusion of event-making genres that most of the time preempt the actual visibility or experience of artists' projects.

This conflict between artistic practice and (its) representation is perhaps one explanation for the sudden appearance of ghosts haunting exhibition spaces around town. Quite coincidentally, this past year the much-anticipated shows of Loris Greaud, Saadane Afif, and Rirkrit Tiravanija (featuring Philippe Parreno and Bruce Sterling) all summoned this spooky figure as procurator for the artist, avatar of the work, scenographer or guide. Drawing on a well-justified urge to escape ready-made formats (exhibitions or otherwise), this inscription of the artistic endeavor and spectatorship within other space and time unveils a sense of timely detachment. And, perhaps ironically, it might even make some of us want to turn toward the more live and disturbing fringe of self-declared zombies. Here let us pay homage to those exemplary kids who have lately turned out quite fearlessly on the streets outside Paris.

But for those who still like to believe in the materialization of local artistic scenes, Paris certainly remains confounding, although I'd be tempted to say relevant, in its lack of clear signals. However, two drastically different exhibitions--and stories--this winter might help you make up your mind. First, "Le voyage interieur," an exhibition on the subject of decadence, that included both Paris- and London-based artists, curated by Alex Farquharson and Alexis Vaillant, opened last month at the bourgeois Espace Electra (the French Electricity Foundation). Then, this January, Nicolas Bourriaud and Jerome Sans will throw themselves a farewell party in the form of a (still secret) thematic show gathering artists who have emerged in France during the '90s. Hopefully, this new year (and era for the Palais) will make way for more demanding and reflexive situations--a confrontation audiences certainly deserve.

Paris-based critic and curator, Eva Svennung is editor of the free French and English quarterly Pacemaker.

EVA SVENNUNG

Berlin

MY YEAR CAME INTO FOCUS in someone else's flashback. At a summer party in a socialist-era tower on Karl-Marx-Allee, the British artist Mark Wallinger reminisced about one of his performances at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie the previous October: It's sometime after midnight, and he's shuffling about inside Mies van der Rohe's iconic structure in a mangy bear suit, his sight framed by a snarling mouth (which is the only family resemblance between this creature and its intended cousin, Berlin's mascot, ursus rampant). The suit is sweltering, and Wallinger pauses his performance for clandestine time-outs in his boxers to escape his private sweathouse. Tonight he can see no audience as he stands looking over an empty plaza at the stagy skyscrapers (lit up but largely unleased) of the new Potsdamer Platz, where, presumably, people crowd the few tourist restaurants and twin megaplexes. Suddenly, Wallinger later recalled, none of it made sense. All the steps leading to the moment were clear, but he couldn't imagine what he was doing there at the very center of the city, somehow so strange and unmoored.

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From the balcony at the party where Wallinger told his story, the city looked unspeakably appealing, glittery and distant. I mulled over his experience: just another Brit in a bear suit. Funny because during the performance he had seemed a sad and mysterious figure, no longer a national alien but an otherworldly one on whom we could project our fantasies and expectations. Yet Wallinger's private experience of his piece strangely evoked my own--and, I'm sure, many artists'--experience of Berlin, a city of disappointments and random surprises. A site for public discourse with room for eccentricities and solitary epiphanies. A place of boredom and disjunction. And, by the way, Wallinger's poignant Sleeper rightly marked--albeit a few months early--the start of a sleeper year.

Berlin has apparently clung to its status among the world's art capitals. At least people keep arriving. Many are drawn--as I was a few years ago--by hopes of a messed-up city, a supposed site of possibility. (And, of course, you've all heard about the rents, the Zeno's Paradox of Berlin being that no matter how high they rise, they never quite reach expensive.) Moving here we expected to join a party in progress, a city with a local scene rocketing forward. What we found was a slump, a pleasant place where afternoons of coffee or beer could stretch and devour studio time, if not our bearings. Instead of a city in the process of becoming, Berlin just is, forever spinning in a sloppy cycle of retooling and renewal. Countless articles will tell you that the city is in flux, so the artists love it, and I can't dispute the boilerplate (it's true that any egoist can make rent here), but that's not enough. The hard part has been making a way.

Even back in the golden '90s, Berlin was foremost a magnetic ruin--always more import/export than homebrew--and by now, internationalism is part of the city's self-image as a crossroads for the art world. What would it mean to be a Berlin artist? It's hard not to be struck by the fact that this year three of the four nominees for the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art (Berlin's attempt to copy the Turner) were non-German, one in residence for barely over a year. "Local" is whoever happens to be in town: artists who have come on grants like the DAAD and settled, out-of-towners doing shows or just plain showing up. Even the many German artists who call Berlin home are often identified by other pedigrees: Leipzig, Dresden, or Hamburg. Berlin is a base, rarely an origin, which can make the city feel ungrounded, at times painfully intractable. As the years turn over, whole circles of friends come and go. (Sure, everyone passes through eventually, but only for a day, a week, a little residency or two.) It's glamorous occasionally--if you romanticize coal heat, gray skies, and smoky parties you could have skipped--but often it's just boring. Leave Berlin, however, and you'll hear of the scene and a dozen artists who live here (and you had no idea!), and that, of course, is the slip that keeps Berlin in play. A friend who recently moved back to Los Angeles now reports a renewed buzz of hype in his ear. Berlin glows again with unfulfilled expectation, and it depresses him to think he has already used up his allotted time there. In ways, Berlin exists best as an option, a potential energy. It's the Schrodinger's cat of hype, always both dead and alive, as long as no one looks inside the box.

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In this regard, 2005 has been exemplary. For a while, Schroder himself was the political living dead, and it's been a year of transition and uncertainty all over Germany. Here in the "Culture Capital," we saw the Beuysian equation of Kultur=Kapital tested as the city wearily pondered its lack of real capital. Weekly protests against Hartz-IV (the government's program for cutbacks in social welfare) passed close to the Palast der Republik, the former East German parliament, which is slated for demolition to make way for a reconstruction of the old royal palace. The building has become a rallying symbol for the idea that Berlin needs to resist total renovation, to preserve its layers of historical ruin. A regular procession of last-ditch exhibitions and events there seemed to delay, but never banish, the fleet of cranes. In August, artists and architects built a synthetic mountain of scaffolding and tarps, which filled the gutted assembly hall and burst out the roof. Far from a radical squat, the effort, tellingly, was a bureaucratic maze of logos, collectives, and design firms; and while the kids have their clubhouse, the Prussian heritage people have the money. Yet, throughout the year, a few projects there did manage to eloquently formulate this nineteenth- vs. twentieth-century preservationist dilemma. Lars Ramberg's huge sign of the German word for "doubt" made a fitting graphic crown for the shabby former statehouse, while a film by Tacita Dean, shown at the Venice Biennale, transformed the reflections in the building's copper-tinted windows into a sober reverie on time's passing. By this time next year, the Palast may finally be gone.

This kind of limbo seemed to seep into life, and the year lurched along in a parade of fanfare quickly forgotten. January saw the high, late decadence of bars posing as private clubs: hangouts like White Trash (in an ex-Chinese restaurant) and the art-world-run Munzsalon (in a former urologist's office). A wave of police raids in the early summer busted the latter and pushed the former to close down. By September, they had simply reformed and reopened. No big deal. If we're not careful, the fashion for recreation and renovation may become a house style. Late in 2004, Martin Klosterfelde returned to his former address in Mitte to establish a project space. Within eight months, the artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset had already ripped the new gallery out and carefully installed a gated passageway to the courtyard. It looked just like any other recently renovated building in the neighborhood and weirdly echoed Pawel Althamer's much-admired 2003 demolition job on Neugerreimschneider, which returned the gallery to its derelict, pre-New Mitte state. Suddenly, renovated is the new trashed.

So what actually happened in 2005? Every evening ended in a night. Shows opened loud, then fizzled. The Flick collection, which generated such rage last year for its unholy mix of state museum, contemporary art, and Nazi gold, quietly shut the doors on its first hang and moved on to other shows--surveys of Urs Fischer and of Minimalism--drawn from the collection. At Kunst-Werke, "Regarding Terror," long stalled by controversy over its treatment of the RAF terrorists, opened with a big scene and little follow-up. The show managed to be neither focused nor comprehensive, neither jagged nor stately, and the ark of overly illustrational works simply sailed on. At the Neue Nationalgalerie in April, there were lines out the door for Vanessa Beecroft's performance starring "real" women, yet no sooner was the documentation in the can than VB55 was quickly filed away. Douglas Gordon eulogized his own tastes--from Warhol Polaroids to self-lubricating Matthew Barney frames--in his curated project "The VANITY of Allegory" at the Deutsche Guggenheim, but for most denizens of this sleepy metropolis there was merely the rumor that the attendant film program was worthwhile.

By my tally, the year saw good things ship out and good things ship in. Thomas Scheibitz went to Venice, and Thomas Demand to MOMA. The overheated international market for German paintings seemed, thankfully, beside the point at home (perhaps because there aren't enough collectors here to sustain the heavy breathing). At Galerie Neu, Manfred Pernice assembled documents, observations, and leftovers from a razed apartment complex and showed how an artist can be specific to a place by keeping the fragments of vanishing structures in precise but open-ended circulation. Among the foreign imports, much felt rehashed or B-list, but in some cases the lower pressure made for riskier moves. Tal R overloaded Contemporary Fine Arts, revealing amid the clutter some of his best cards (clusters of colored lights and dumb abstractions). Arturo Herrera (a newly minted Berliner) eschewed tamer presentations in favor of the all-or-nothing gambit of simultaneously showing major wall drawings at the daadgalerie, Max Hetzler, and on the side of a building overlooking remains of the Wall. Foreign dealers came, too. LA mogul Javier Peres papered the town with ads for his giant new gallery in Treptow. He punched a showy hole through the roof for the first opening--Terence Koh--then let the crowds eat cake. On the other extreme, in a tiny space nestled among old Eastern Bloc apartment towers, Italian Isabella Bortolozzi has developed a subtle and thoughtful, if sometimes oblique, program. With room for such range, how do we find traction?

Let me say it here: I love Berlin. Our very inability to muster a center, the sense that we can have action without means--these things that originally lured us here actually do thrive. Let Berlin be a book, so I can recommend it to you; but I'll be embarrassed to watch you read it. It's hard going at times, and the reasons to love it must be particular and your own. As you shuttle from one side of town to another, it often seems as if each venue has its own little circle and that Berlin is just a vast pool of overlapping ripples. Accidents add up only on the sly. More established artists can use the city as a base from which to travel to projects elsewhere. But what of the emerging artists, Berlin's much-vaunted, much-imported youth? The pressures and competitions that come with urbanity are undoubtedly powerful levers for young artists, and a clear discourse provides a context in which a gesture or manifesto can carry meaning. So what's there for us in this far-flung amalgam without hierarchical ladders? Does Berlin resist orthodox global capitalism? No. Is it a backwater? Not really. As it would anywhere, being a foreigner engenders a self-sufficiency, an ability to be alone and unknown, but here we have a world of foreigners, a decentralized cacophonous society. This is reason enough to be in Berlin, for here we rub elbows with questioning and self-awareness.

We have to value what's casual and confounding. Commercial spaces like Giti Nourbakhsch's feel necessary precisely because the shows sometimes seem like home experiments. Dutch Berliner Joep van Liefland's show at Guido Baudach opened with the enormous gallery full of signs for the artist's "Video Palace," but van Liefland was nowhere to be seen. He was parked out back in a van, regaling the crowd with a fridge of beer and a video of a wild boar being slaughtered. (Another night to remember was the annual Oktoberfest at Autocenter, an exhibition space van Liefland and fellow artist Maik Schierloh run in the eastern district of Friedrichshain. Truly independent, they don't clamber to seize the center but simply run amok with programming how and when they want it.) Meanwhile, artist Josef Strau's Galerie Meerrettich, in a tiny glass house beside the Volksbuhne, looks better than ever. Julian Gothe built a jagged screen for a video (made with Antje Stoffler-Hamad) that conflates nostalgia, theater, and design with mesmerizing slow pans over production stills and superimposed Spirographs, all assembled with economy and poise. In the early summer, a huge crowd gathered to watch Paulina Olowska and friends on the roof performing an alphabet of full-body poses (with roots in Czech modernism) before spinning out into a yoga of words.

Here in Berlin we can have our hype and leave it too. This year new avatars arrived in the form of Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick, the curators of the 2006 Berlin Biennale. They came and went and visited the studio of almost everyone I know, building expectations as if 2005 were meant only to be the year before the-year-of-the-biennial. Indeed, they kicked things off early--and in drag--at a new venue they're calling Gagosian Gallery. Is it only coincidence that the trio's inaugural show was titled "Berlin Beauties" and concerned what else but "the friendship that has tied together three extraordinary artists and fascinating characters"? Whatever the case, "Beauties" turned out a worthy document of correspondence between Dieter Roth, Dorothy lannone, and Emmett Williams--the latter two both old-time Berlin transplants--and promises a radically self-reflexive biennial, or else a mixed and rich one.

The truth is, we're not always sure what we're doing here. But we like it, and, more importantly, it works. I've finally begun to feel how the city's broke-down ethos and maddening multiplicity have enriched my practice. My American, East Coast background and education have found slippery footing in a slop of Swedes, Poles, Italians, pre- and post-Saatchi Brits, and pre- and post-Wende Germans. Above all, Berlin has decentered my criteria, shaken up a clear sense of what could be valued and how. It's a place to fall a bit off track, a place to live without a consensus of ways but not without convictions. Ultimately, the city's underlying strength is not at all its bohemianism, but rather a simple kind of malleability, an overlay of practices and social ideas that deflects didacticism and forces things to pile up. This is Berlin's promise: an aimlessness that doesn't close in. Few places can maintain this through so many cycles of buzz. It takes a certain unknowing. So, it may be that the city is actually best in the off years, those sleepy years like this one in which there are no hot new things, just grand nothings and the fortuitous coincidence of overlapping byways and continuous asides.

Matt Saunders is a Berlin-based artist.

MATT SAUNDERS

MOSCOW

IN 2005, THE RUSSIAN ART SCENE was marked by encounters with official politics, money, and the media, which taken together constituted a confrontation primarily with power. The year began with the first Moscow Biennale and ended with "Russia!" at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Putin regime, with its mania for absolute control, finally accepted art as an essential element in its cultural and ideological program. This year capital, too, collided with art's commercial spaces: In the fall, the galleries that were created at the dawn of the economic reforms and survived the difficult '90s began their second season in league with new and ambitious venues, including Stella Art, Ru Art, and Gary Tatintsian, among others. In addition, a group of galleries, taking the name of Art Strelka (or "art point"), set up shop in a former factory on the Moscow River by the walls of the Kremlin. Suddenly art, which post-Soviet society has looked on with some suspicion and even disgust, became fashionable, setting the stage for its encounter with the mass media. Stability emerged after an unfortunate transition period, and the depression of those on the margins turned to euphoria.

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However, the Russian state has its own traditions, and, having arrived at the shores of art, it immediately provoked a battle for control. Reviving practices from the Stalinist era, curators and artists ran to the Ministry of Culture with information on each other, allowing state bureaucrats to operate in the art world through chicanery and manipulation, methods that have served them well in their dealings with businessmen. This had the noticeable effect of diminishing the art world's newfound optimism, a situation compounded by the fact that state initiatives in the artistic sphere (as in others) were far from ideal. Setting aside the example of the Moscow Biennale, which aroused such disappointment that it seemed almost as if the collective depression from the past had returned (my personal involvement in the event's early stages prevents me from elaborating further), artists representing Russia at the Venice Biennale came to publicly lament the failure of their project, regretting that they had heeded the curator-bureaucrats' demands for empty spectacle. And finally, after the Guggenheim show was labeled by experts as pure propaganda, it became apparent that "Russia!" would more appropriately be followed by a question mark.

In the midst of all this, Alexander Sokolov, the new minister of culture and mass communications, publicly accused his subordinates of financial abuses, a trend that recent sociological findings would appear to confirm--in two years Russia witnessed a tenfold increase in corruption. This really wasn't news to anyone in the art world: The ministerial budget for the Moscow Biennale was announced at the press conference as $2 million, but it was hard to imagine the event costing more than $300,000 to $400,000. And so, the chief reference point of the state was affirmed to be not ideology, as in Soviet times, but cash--not only that which the state dispenses, but that which it withholds and seizes. Accordingly, state museums, even the most respectable like the State Tretyakov Gallery, established the practice of selling artists (or their dealers) the rights to mount their own personal exhibitions.

Alongside money, the mass media exists as the fundamental tool for bureaucrats. Taking control of culture, they behave as pure managers or sponsors who are interested not in the content or illuminating ideas of cultural initiatives, but in their ability to function as conduits of information. According to this logic, they direct their attention only toward ephemeral actions that allow for the manipulation of large flows of capital and that generate plump press dossiers. Thus, the Russian authorities strive to make the world of art a fact of state politics, contrary to the traditions of Anglo-Saxon countries and divergent from the European practice of leaving art to its own experts and autonomous initiatives. The authorities are suspicious of the latter situation, regarding it as a breeding ground for independent and critical thinking.

But, truth be told, all this does not seem to be jarring to a certain moral majority. To this day, Russian viewers are bewitched by the culture of the spectacle, and they interpret any alternative phenomenon as a recurrence of the moralism of Soviet times. After the economic nightmare of the '90s, the relative stabilization (fed by petro-dollars, not by a natural rise in the economy) has induced a feckless desire for "entertainment." Moreover, for all the liberal reforms, a rather unsubtle ideology has been imposed by the authorities: the market. The only alternative to barracklike socialism, it is part and parcel with democracy, and, therefore, engaging in commerce is seen as a moral stance for the progressive artist and intellectual. Leading up to 2005, the first appearance of an art market was accompanied by the emergence of a commercial mainstream directed at a new connoisseur (and buyer), whose artistic temperament was molded by the Soviet era's canonical socialist realism and by commercial advertising, which has become commonplace in recent years. This type of artistic language, premised entirely on pure spectacle to the exclusion of analytical or critical intentions, does away with inner complexity and antagonism and makes a hard sell for what could be called "imitation" contemporary art. It would thus seem perfectly fitting for a culture in which authentic political debate and criticism are overlooked, a culture that the Russian political scientist Dimitry Furman calls an "imitation democracy."

Nevertheless, some antagonisms are beginning to take shape, and it is growing more and more difficult to cover them up. Players in the art market are beginning to understand the importance of doing away with the ubiquitous conflicts of interest and interested parties. And it is not simply that they no longer want to pay bureaucrats for the right to organize noncommercial exhibitions, a practice which obliterates any hope for vital critical commentary. They are also beginning to realize that the everyday mass media is somewhat fickle and that there can never be blind trust in ephemeral artistic events and spectacular exhibitions, since only fixed and uncorrupt institutions are capable of establishing stable reputations. Therefore, despite the current market euphoria, the enduring cachet of local star artists does not appear to be on the rise.

Appropriately enough, throughout the course of 2005, the problems of resistance (to the authorities, money, and the media) came to the fore in discussions in the art world. If in the '90s (when art and politics were tangled in the general chaos) a critical position was treated as an affected posture, then today it has true meaning. At the risk of oversimplification, this developing discourse was defined by the collision of two main positions. The first was put forth by proponents of direct political activism, such as the artists and intellectuals of the group Chto delat'? (or "What is to be done?"), who have propagandized the ideas of the Western Left in the pages of their eponymous publication. The second was put forth by proponents of the autonomy of art, in particular the artists Anatoly Osmolovsky and Dmitry Gutov, who pay attention to the fact that a critical stance in art risks making a mockery of itself if it is deprived of complexity and inner antagonism. As was the case years ago, kitsch and mass-media propaganda are once again provoking a political reaction in artists and find them withdrawing toward the purity of formalism. In fact, in the 2005 issue of Moscow Art Magazine, Clement Greenberg's 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" will be published in Russian for the first time, along with commentary from advocates from the two opposing camps. This legendary text was written with the experience of Soviet cultural politics particularly in mind. Today, however, it is beginning to be used in Russia as a critique of post-Soviet cultural politics.

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Viktor Misiano is a Moscow-based critic and curator. He is founder and editor in chief of Moscow Art Magazine and an editor of Manifesta Journal. (See Contributors.)

VIKTOR MISIANO

Tokyo

NOTHING HAPPENS SUDDENLY on Tokyo's contemporary art scene. The city's art community is relatively small and evolving, maintained largely by those few galleries representing a handful of local artists who also show outside Japan. There is no market to speak of on the home front, so these galleries survive mostly by selling work at international fairs, even as they depend on Japanese media coverage of their artists to sustain popular interest in their enterprises. Thus, any shock of the new--a recognized recipe for commercial success in the West--here stands to upset a delicate economic ecology. And in turn, for the better part of the last ten years, the Tokyo scene has revolved around the ascendance of Japanese postmodern art and a few principal practitioners--artists who, though most were born before the mid-'60s, may still be divided into a first generation (Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tatsuo Miyajima, Yasumasa Morimura, et al.) and a second (Takashi Murakami, Kenji Yanobe, Mariko Mori, et al.). One could argue that this second generation of postmodernism has still other branches--the oneiric figuration of Yoshitomo Nara and his ilk, and the drolly conceptual interventionism of Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Yutaka Sone, and the one-name Shimabuku--that have also lately received their due on the global circuit. But it may safely be said that from the '90s until now, it is the Sugimotos and Murakamis--that is, the postmodernists proper--who have constituted the most visible face of contemporary Japanese art.

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Recent developments, however, suggest that significant changes are afoot. Exhibitions in galleries around Tokyo this year have displayed a new diversity of approaches among younger artists--relational art, politically charged postcolonial critiques, and, most notably, highly subjective expressions of the zeitgeist that seem to emerge from obscure cocoons of private thought and desire. This last tendency toward individualism, even hermeticism, presents a particularly marked contrast to the collaborative sensibility of the previous generation, which gravitated toward loose collectives like Murakami's Hiropon Factory or The Group 1965, aka Showa 40Nenkai, a cadre of artists who style themselves as a kind of absurdist anticollective.

Indeed, and perhaps most importantly, the work of these younger artists signals a departure from the strategies often used in the late '80s and early '90s to grapple with overblown capitalism and commodity fetishism, dense urbanization and suburban sprawl, and the proliferation of media images in public and private space--the contemporary Japanese condition, in short. The previous generation, following the lead of "classical" Western postmodernism, regularly deployed Minimalist repetition, neo geo-style appropriation of mass-produced industrial and consumer products, and the tactical intermingling of high (poststructuralist theory) and low (pop culture) in order to underscore the replacement of the country's indigenous culture by a hybridized, imported modernity. Those artists' use of kitsch and simulation in response to a particular historical moment paradoxically positioned them as the "originals" of their own time--a phenomenon that reached its apotheosis in the critical and institutional acceptance, both abroad and within Japan, of Murakami's Superflat program.

The new work in Tokyo may be reasonably construed as a reaction, right on cue, against this mainstream postmodern aesthetic. While not necessarily jettisoning their predecessors' interest in pop culture and vernacular forms, artists are turning away from both theory and coolly analytical appropriation. And, in their privileging of emotion and subjective perception, they use inexpensive materials and minimal techniques in a manner that bespeaks a culture of reduced expectations. (After all, these artists, born mostly around 1970, came of age during Japan's extended recession.) As a kind of third wave, this new group can also be roughly divided into two camps, each indebted to one of the aforementioned alternative branches of second-generation Japanese postmodernism.

Continuing and extending Nara's project, for example, is a new crop of figuration: Zon Ito and Ryoko Aoki (see Artforum, January 2005), and Kaoru Arima, who all make modest, delicately beautiful drawings interweaving personal and popular iconography. Also in this coterie are two artists with significant exhibitions last summer: Makiko Kudo, whose paintings at Tomio Koyama suggested a child's dreamworld (which sometimes turns nightmarish); and Chihiro Mori, whose pictures at Kodama, while similarly dreamlike and associative, conveyed a radically disintegrated brand of subjectivity.

In the second camp, under the interventionist aegis of Ozawa, Sone, and Shimabuku, are a number of artists who react to their cultural sphere in a physical way, insisting on an apprehension of reality grounded in sensory perception--and in a body that is always contextualized (or caught) in the banalities of day-to-day life. Two of the strongest new-comers in this vein are Koki Tanaka and Taro Izumi. Last winter at the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Tanaka installed ten short videos on monitors within a mazelike structure made from discarded vitrines. Each video captures a moment in which everyday objects provide an epiphany of sorts. (In one, Salad Bowl Meets Waterfall, 2004, a container of vegetables and dressing is thrown over a waterfall, thus "tossing" the salad. Elsewhere, in Floater, 2004, the bubbles in a sink full of dishes take on the optical intensity of Yayoi Kusama's "infinity nets," demonstrating the artist's particular attention to the geometrical forms and patterns in the world.) Izumi, in his solo exhibition at Hiromi Yoshii Five last spring, improvised simple yet obsessive actions--trying to unlock a door with a "key" drawn in pen on his hand, attempting to cut a piece of paper by making a scissoring motion with two fingers, etc.--within the gallery during the show, documenting his daily activities on video. Each of these performances conveyed a sense of suppressed anger, as if the artist were subtly annoyed by the tedium of his life and had invented these strange diversions in order to cope with impending despair.

More generally, then, the current Tokyo art scene is undergoing a shift in terms of its relationship to postmodernism. There is a newly established willingness on the part of critics, curators, and scholars to recognize the significance of recent decades' art--whose recourse to the quotidian, including media images and commodities, enacted the dialectical inclusion of kitsch in aesthetic and critical practice. But accompanying this development is a new possibility for art's engagement with contemporary experience. These signs of change are a welcome indication that, for Japanese art, there is indeed life after Superflat.

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Midori Matsui is a Yokohama-based art critic and scholar.

MIDORI MATSUI