On the ground.

The map is not the territory: Mindful as ever of this classic admonition, Artforum nevertheless offers a provisional atlas of the year in contemporary art. For our third annual installment in this series, we asked six artists, curators, and writers in cities around the world to survey the lay of the land as it has appeared to them over the course of the past twelve months.

New York

FAR FROM THE DEAFENING BUZZ that continues to emanate from the auction houses, and even further from the glossy pages of Vanity Fair, whose "art issue" hit newsstands in November, one of the most intriguing--and least commented on--narratives in the New York art world continued to unfold this year. The underreported story I refer to revolves around the unprecedented number of personnel changes that have taken place, or are about to take place, at the city's better-established, and indeed historical, "not-for-profits" (a literal term that handily serves as both a mission statement and a manifesto, of sorts). Considered as a whole, these changes can't be dismissed as a mere human-resources shakeup. Rather, they constitute a profound shift in both ambition and attitude, one that suggests an equally profound opportunity, even a mandate, to reimagine and reanimate an entire culture. The crop of recently appointed curators and administrators includes, in no particular order: Debra Singer, executive director and chief curator of The Kitchen; Gianni Jetzer, director at Swiss Institute; Benjamin Weil, executive director of Artists Space; Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman, and Massimiliano Gioni, curators at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (whose new building will open on the Bowery in 2007); Rochelle Steiner, director of the Public Art Fund; and artist AA Bronson, director of Printed Matter, Inc. (And then, I guess, there's me--for the past two years I have been the director and chief curator of White Columns, New York's oldest alternative art gallery.) With the exception of Singer (formerly a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art) and Bronson, all these people left jobs in other cities, and, in many cases, other countries, for their new positions in New York. Tellingly, about half forsook curatorial roles at major museums. Add to the mix the fact that as of this writing the Drawing Center, Art in General, and the Dia Art Foundation are all looking to appoint new directors, and you begin to perceive a historically unparalleled situation in which the opportunity--and desire--for change is contagious. It's a groundswell that could exert a broad and lasting influence on the cultural topography in and beyond New York. While much is still in flux, the general prognosis is better than good.

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Indeed, a renewed focus on artist-centric activity has been discernible in New York for the past couple of years. One particular aspect of this activity--cooperative practices--was very publicly privileged in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, "Day for Night." Cocurators Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne presented a number of collaborative contributions, including the Wrong Gallery's show-within-a-show "Down by Law" and the coauthored artworks of Reena Spaulings. Elsewhere, RoseLee Goldberg's biennial of live art, PERFORMA, which debuted in 2005, has single-handedly reinvigorated a genre-performance--that seemed to have gone underground, though "single-handedly" is probably not the right term for an endeavor that includes innumerable partners throughout the city. Printed Matter's inaugural NY Art Book Fair, held in November at the now (sadly) defunct Dia Art Foundation building on Twenty-second Street, will--I hope--kick-start a similar resurgence in independent publishing. Galvanizing projects that have each, in their own highly individual ways, occupied interstitial spaces between the commercial galleries, the traditional not-for-profits, and other platforms include Matt Keegan and Sara Greenberger Rafferty's North Drive Press, which publishes artists' paper-based projects; Fia Backstrom's various and nefarious activities, including the event series "Herd Instinct 360[degrees]" and the sly design project "Tablecloths for Commercial Galleries"; Gareth James, Sam Lewitt, and Cheyney Thompson's elusive publication/"drawing" project, Scorched Earth; and the artist-run gallery Orchard, which this year presented projects ranging from Nicolas Guagnini's slide show Middle Class Goes to Heaven, 2005-2006, to "Around the Corner," a kind of psychogeography of the Lower East Side organized by Christian Philipp Muller. Maverick commercial enterprises such as Miguel Abreu Gallery, Terence Koh and Javier Peres's Asia Song Society (aka A.S.S.), and James Fuentes LLC evince an attitude close to that of their not-for-profit peers. Many of these initiatives are operating in the geographical and ideological space mapped out by Lower East Side pioneers such as Reena Spaulings Fine Art or Maccarone Inc. The latter's new space will soon debut in an area that has the makings of a true "post-Chelsea" neighborhood: the lower edge of the West Village, already home to Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Harris Lieberman Gallery.

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With respect to the changes afoot at the established not-for-profits, my feeling is that this unusual scenario reflects a serious reinvestment by an idiosyncratic group of artists, curators, and administrators--each with his or her own motives and intentions--in the future viability and potentiality of smaller artist-focused organizations. In the recent past, such organizations have struggled to distinguish and (re-)define themselves in the face of the pressures exerted by an overheated and, it has to be said, territorially aggressive art market. (The year was also notable for high-profile articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about the predatory habits of certain art dealers and collectors, for whom the region's most visible graduate programs have become a hunting ground.) Put simply, there seems to be a renewed urgency around the idea that we can't trust market forces to nurture art and artists, and that, consequently, it is absolutely imperative--once again--to find other outlets for, and means of supporting, culture. My guess is that even the most ardent boosters of the current art market are aware that the situation looks increasingly undesirable and unsustainable. (Certainly many people would agree that the art world is a lot less fun than it used to be.)

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And while the processes of economic and logistical consolidation--e.g., the accelerated free-market movement of successful artists from large to even larger galleries--continue, many of New York's public institutions and museums find themselves in something of a quandary, a state of limbo perhaps, that seems to have induced both a sense of inertia and a crisis of confidence. The current direction of both the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art were each the subject of lengthy "soul-searching" articles in the New Yorker in 2006. In recent years, the complexities and pressures that accompany working within larger institutions have increased: Staffs face heavier fund-raising responsibilities and must negotiate the desires of ever-more-influential board members, even as they attempt to assimilate the rapidly shifting parameters of contemporary art as well as the relatively new historical category "twentieth-century art." It is not difficult to imagine why so many high-profile curators, such as Robert Storr, Saskia Bos, Russell Ferguson, Okwui Enwezor, Lawrence Rinder, and Hou Hanru, have recently elected to work--both curatorially and as scholars--from within the more elastic framework of the art school. In light of this general sense of flux, it really does seem like an opportune moment for artists and artist-centric organizations to seize the initiative and create new, autonomous approaches to the production, display, discussion, and dissemination of art.

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In fact, one model of this kind of approach turned out to be my personal highlight--and possibly my personal epiphany--of 2006. And, in what could be considered an encouraging reflection of the general dispersal of influence from the institutions, and cities, where it has traditionally been concentrated, this experience transpired not in any of the established centers of attention (London, Berlin, New York, etc.) but rather in Milwaukee. A week after the Frieze Art Fair kicked off, in early October, the midwestern city hosted a kind of samizdat version of the London jamboree: the inaugural Milwaukee International, a new, bona fide art fair--of sorts. Conceived and organized by an informal collective of Milwaukee-based artists and galleries (among them Kiki Anderson of Jody Monroe Gallery; Nicholas Frank of Hermetic Gallery; John Riepenhoff of Green Gallery; and Tyson Reeder, Scott Reeder, and Elysia Borowy-Reeder of the General Store), it opened more modestly than Frieze, in the Polish Falcons Beer Hall in the city's Riverwest neighborhood. The fair temporarily displaced the hall's typical goings-on--cribbage, dart-ball (a game that "combines darts with baseball," according to my local guide), spaghetti dinners--but, even though the space had been tricked out for the weekend to look like a typical art fair, the spirit of these activities remained as a spectral ambience. The exhibitors, who each paid $150 for one of the white-painted booths, constituted a curious, ad hoc group of thirty-odd galleries and projects, both commercial and otherwise, from Oslo (Willy Wonka Inc.); Zurich (Karma International, in collaboration with Mark Muller); San Juan, Puerto Rico (Galeria Comercial); Winnipeg, Canada (Paul Butler's Other Gallery and its affiliated Collage Party); Los Angeles (Ooga Booga); New York (Canada, Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Zieher-Smith, Swiss Institute, and White Columns, among others); Miami (Locust Projects and Bas Fisher Invitational); Oak Park, Illinois (The Suburban); and elsewhere. What distinguished the whole affair was that selling art didn't seem to be anyone's primary--or possibly even secondary--concern. Instead, the weekend seemed--in the most straightforward yet profound sense--to be about hanging out. Cannily employing the format, and exploiting the ubiquity, of conventional art fairs while eschewing the civic (and corporate) ambitions of, say, a biennial, the organizers put together a genuinely organic "grassroots" gathering that mimicked the form of a marketplace to create a porous social event. Turnout was excellent: Over the course of the weekend, a steady stream of visitors, seemingly of all persuasions, braved the inclement weather simply to check out the fair and listen to its house band, Vern and the Originals.

The Milwaukee International felt simultaneously fundamental, magical, and possibly even a little subversive. Certainly it felt like something significant was happening, even if the exact nature of that significance--still--remains elusive. The event's informal structure reminded me of some of the pioneering art fairs of the early and mid-1990s, fairs that, in hindsight, can be seen to have helped shape international networks of artists, dealers, critics, curators, and, indeed, collectors that persist to this day. Like the original Unfair, held in Cologne in 1992, for example, or the early manifestations of the Gramercy International Art Fair (1994-98), held in the guest rooms of the Gramercy Park Hotel in New York, the Milwaukee International served a function that went beyond the merely commercial: It provided an occasion, a platform, for sympathetic individuals to meet--in person--to share information and ideas in a manner that was both convivial and communal. The fair also reminded me of how and why, as a teenager in the North of England in the late 1970s, I started to become tentatively interested in art via the independent, DIY music scene that emerged in the aftermath of punk. Like that scene, the Milwaukee International proposed a viable, self-sustaining model of culture, one that was rooted not in social or economic one-upmanship but in the pleasures of self-determination, friendship, and cooperation (reasons that, I imagine, partly motivated Jeffrey Lew and Gordon Matta-Clark to start White Columns, or 112 Greene Street as it was then known, in 1970).

Returning to New York in a state of mild post-Milwaukee euphoria, I find myself more optimistic than ever about the new possibilities and potential of New York's alternative art spaces. Central to the processes of reorientation and reinvention that are already under way will be the creation of new networks, new conversations among different kinds of artists, writers, curators, and others, of all generations--conversations that simply didn't exist or hadn't taken place before. Obviously, the more people involved, the better. Of course, this is not an occasion for consensus building--quite the opposite: It is an occasion to call for and celebrate difference. The Milwaukee International provided a tangible example of one way to proceed. Its "lessons," such as they are, can be readily applied everywhere--including New York. As both the Milwaukee fair and the newly energized not-for-profit community in New York testify, art does not need to be expensive (or even necessarily for sale) to operate as an agent and catalyst for change. All that is required now is for every town and city in the United States (and elsewhere, of course) to create its own "International," its own context for dialogue and exchange, and shape it according to prevailing local needs and desires. And before you know it, the polarized present-day art world--of "them" and "us," of the "haves" and the "have-nots"--might be no more than a distant memory.

MATTHEW HIGGS IS DIRECTOR AND CHIEF CURATOR AT WHITE COLUMNS, NEW YORK, WHERE THE EXHIBITION "LOOKING BACK," CURATED BY HIGGS, IS ON VIEW UNTIL DECEMBER 20.

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MATTHEW HIGGS

Los Angeles

I'LL BEGIN WITH THE BULLET HOLES. They were small, but by no means discreet, and surely everyone who visited the UCLA Hammer Museum in early 2006 saw them, pocking the lower flanks of Jean Prouve's prefabricated steel-and-aluminum Tropical House, 1951/2005-2006, which had been retrieved from its original site in the former French Congo and reassembled in the museum's courtyard. At first glance, the structure had a quaint dioramic quality, like a life-size colonial dollhouse for a make-believe attache, an impression that was only enhanced by the leafy bamboo plants that surrounded it. But then I noticed the holes, ominous punctures in the logic and presentation of an otherwise perfectly self-contained architectural relic. Given the meticulous restoration, it was clear the perforations had been left intentionally unrepaired, as if to preserve the contradictions inherent in memorializing such a prototype, whose innovations and "functionality" pertain pointedly to France's colonial past: Prouve's "machine for living" was easily shipped, quick to put up or take down, and equipped with a ventilation system that promised comfort to the European unused to equatorial climates.

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A museum press release acknowledged the damage, but only in a parenthetical aside, citing it as testament to the building's "hard life" amid "endless civil war." In fact, the holes suggested something more complex, and even uglier: imperial hangover. Even without knowing the history--for instance, that French petroleum investment played no small part in the "endless civil war"--the bullet holes unmistakably resonated with our own government's disastrous foreign occupation. The thirty-foot bamboo stalks (a permanent feature at the museum) further complicated the whole affair. On the one hand, the simple fact of the structure's modularity worked to neutralize its identification with any single (and singularly problematic) locale, meaning it could easily belong here, in a city with its own proprietary claims on midcentury design. Then again, the bamboo suggested sites that were all too historically specific--this mobile prototype resituated in, say, Dien Bien Phu?

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As it turned out, the year, or at any rate, my year, was to revolve around a cryptic Paris-LA axis articulated by Prouve at the Hammer and "Los Angeles 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capital" at the Centre Pompidou, and presaged, in late 2005, by a screening of In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire), Guy Debord's 1978 lamentation for a Paris that "no longer exists." The long-awaited box set of Debord's films was not yet available, and the screening, organized by artist Marie Jager and Semiotext(e) coeditor Hedi El Kholti, was a bootleg affair at the Mountain Bar in LA's Chinatown. Those who wandered in for a quick drink wound up staying, mesmerized by the pitiless immediacy of Debord's voice as he disparaged '70s consumer society ("paltry") and the moviegoing public ("mystified ignoramuses ... with the delusion that their vote means something") and then segued into reflections on history, loss, and the misrepresentation of his own ideas. "The petty people of the present age," he says, "seem to believe ... that I am a builder of theory--a sort of intellectual architecture which they imagine they need only move into as soon as they know its address, and which, ten years later, they might even slightly remodel." He seemed to speak directly to those in the room--an artistic community that has repeatedly turned to his notions of psychogeography and drift, and labeled what often seems mere appropriation "detournement." The attraction is easy to understand, even as the desire to find a way out of "spectacle" leads to a cul-de-sac--Debord commodified and vulgarized along with everything else. The second, autobiographical half of the film is narrated over a montage of Hollywood reenactments of horrific battles (specifically Little Bighorn and Balaclava), alternated with images of Venice canals. In girum imus nocte's two great themes, Debord explained in a 1977 production note, are water, which he equates with time, and fire, which he describes as "the bursting of the instant" in the form of "revolution, Saint-Germain-des-Pres, youth, love ... and the unfinished endeavors in which men go to die." Fire, he says, is always borne away and extinguished by the water of time.

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Watching the film, I wondered, Where is the Debord who identified himself with Custer? Who studied Clausewitz's military strategies and invented a game, Kriegspiel, to illustrate them? Instead, what is so often invoked is a fictively ludic figure. "How about the Debord," a friend recently asked, "who came of age intellectually during a war France was fighting against a Sunni Muslim population?" This is a Debord I'd be interested to see, given a careful accounting of difference between France's "savage war of peace" in Algeria and ours in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is rich material to be mined here, provided the proper critical distance is maintained. But Jutta Koether painting one of his slogans or Brandon Lattu maneuvering between the "questioning" and showcasing of spectacle isn't going to cut it. These aren't the worst offenders, but simply examples of what is perhaps inevitable: radicality as value-enriching "content."

On the other hand, Jason Rhoades's Black Pussy Soiree Cabaret Macrame, 2006, where I encountered a truly weird Situationist citation, was so saturated with its own alien glow that questions of "enrichment" seemed moot. A few companions and I attended this invitation-only installation/speakeasy in a Filipinotown warehouse one night in June and found the cavernous space occupied only by Rhoades and a German friend of his, the two of them standing around like they were the last two bachelors at a trashed after-hours club. At one point during the evening, the German friend casually mentioned that he knew Gianfranco Sanguinetti. Sanguinetti, the Italian Situationist? Yes, he said, explaining that Sanguinetti had even written a text, "La chatte, hier et aujourd'hui" (The Pussy, Then and Now) for Rhoades's book 1724 Birth of the Cunt. As the artist played host (by serving yogurt out of a boot) and my cohorts got a poker game going in a clearing amid the towering shelves of cowboy hats, dream catchers, and other Rhoadesian crud, I pondered the fact that this important member of the SI--founder of its Italian wing and author of a famous hoax-polemic "advocating" state terrorism as the "last chance to save capitalism"--was now penning odes to the chatte. What does Sanguinetti say about Rhoades, or even the cunt, whose apparent birth date, 1724, is also Kant's? Alas, the book was published as a limited collector's edition, and at $2,000 a copy it's unlikely I'll ever know. The larger imponderable, of course, is how the late, possibly great Jason Rhoades, who died in August at the age of forty-one, was going to proceed. Like Sanguinetti's advocacy of terrorism, Rhoades's lunatic embrace of consumerism was to be taken with more than a grain of salt. He once toyed with the idea of putting bar codes on all his artworks, and did put them on some; he drove a Ferrari, though the pedals, he said, were too narrow for his puffy leather Nikes. But Sanguinetti was embroiled in high-stakes politics, a very different world from that of Rhoades's swaggering gestures and prodigiously scoped projects, which were never meant to be instrumental, but instead irreducible, mysterious and absurd, claiming not only their own opposite but numerous things besides.

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IN MARCH, MANY OF US WENT to Paris (existent or not, by Debord's standards) in search of a bygone Los Angeles, courtesy of the Centre Pompidou. Though a dazzling exhibition, "Los Angeles 1955-1985" offered few surprises unless it was the fact that the show's panoramic perspective, providing as it did the chance to assess the genealogy of the city's art scene, led me to wonder if from the radical milieu of "Helter Skelter" we've now moved on to a kind of efficient guild structure in which younger artists reverently study their teachers' originality before being funneled into the gallery system. Los Angeles was not just at the Pompidou; it was everywhere. Ed Ruscha at the Jeu de Paume. Mike Kelley at Galerie Ghislaine Hussenot. But the real connection with LA was an undeniable political parallel that suddenly erupted between the two cities. France was facing its largest political demonstrations since May '68. On the morning I arrived, the university was barricaded, and along the perimeter of the closed Place de la Sorbonne were hundreds of police officers, waiting for demonstrators protesting the CPE, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's much-maligned youth-employment law. The state, more or less invisible in daily life, was "making its show of strength," as Chris Marker says of the events of May '68 in his 1977 film Le Fond de l'air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat), "with all kinds of gear and contraptions you didn't know existed." Meanwhile, on the front page of the International Herald Tribune, there were unbelievable photos from home: half a million people flooding the streets of downtown Los Angeles--California's massive Latino population, emerging to demand immigrants' rights. Of course, far more was at stake for the newly consolidated Latino bloc than for the French protesters. The Angelenos were taking a stand against a future in which they would be deemed felons by virtue of their presence on US soil. Conversely, the French students, adorable as they were, are from a class that wants to preserve its place in the status quo, and in a way they represent precisely what the Arab casseurs (wreckers) who blazed through Paris in November '05 were rejecting: La France, postcolonial and stratified by class, a nation in which immigrants and their children are guaranteed no place at all. In any case, there was one inarguable commonality between the mobilizations in both cities: They were equally anticlimactic. In France, the CPE was scrapped, but its defeat enabled Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy--head of the conservative UMP party and nemesis of the casseurs--to consolidate his position on the right. Here, the debate over immigration amnesty has all but vanished, and instead we're somehow getting a fifteen-foot wall along the border with Mexico.

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IT JUST SO HAPPENS THAT THE reassembly of Tropical House was documented by LA artist Christopher Williams, whose show at David Zwirner in New York, "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Societe Industrielle," overlapped with the Hammer exhibition and included, as one of its "lecons," a photograph of Prouve's sun shutters, stacked and in transit. But perhaps a more powerful lesson was to be found in a book with tin pages and a binding of ball bearings, designed by F. T. Marinetti, who surely would have loved the bullet holes in Prouve's house. Marinetti's mechanical book was part of the Getty's "Tumultuous Assembly: Visual Poems of the Italian Futurists," a show (curated by JoAnne Paradise and Annette Leddy) whose fifty-odd works practically sent off sparks, despite the movement's troubling association with fascism and the uncomfortable correlations between futurist and contemporary predilections for "precision" and violence. The objects seemed not only radical, but a daunting upping of the ante, an exhortation of young LA artists to match the punch and the slap of the futurists' totalizing conception of aesthetics, as well as their caustic wit--which flung ice water in the face of goth almost a century before its return. ("We hate Wagner," they announce in the 1914 manifesto "Down with Tango and Parsifal," not only for his "mystical bog of tears [but also] because he is dead.") With the current state of affairs, in which interventions in real life take the form of relational dinner parties, what seems most valuable to consider is the futurists' manner of alloying figurative and literal into a mysterious third substance, in which politics was treated as theater, theater was so politicized that performances ended in bloody-nosed riots, and war was not just the all-too-dubious reality toward which they sped (and from which they returned, if they returned, limbless and limping), but a code word for drastic aesthetic change. Now we have war abroad but no aesthetic rupture at home. No silver bullet is going to revitalize art (even if a bullet--or its trace--may speak mute truths about modernism). But we could sure use the futurists' dead-serious buffoonery.

ANOTHER WRITER MIGHT HAVE focused on what, of quality, she saw in the galleries this year. Raymond Pettibon at Regen Projects, say, remaining a category unto himself. Fritz Haeg's Edible Estates project, in which suburban volunteers have their tidy chemical-green front lawns replaced by family-size subsistence farms. Or William Jones's video All Male Mash Up--a montage of "interstitial" moments from vintage porn films, whose cumulative effect is like a '70s San Francisco version of Proust's induction into high gay code in Sodom and Gomorrah. (And as cinematic nadir: Francesco Vezzoli, whose "built-in critique," lately evinced in his "Gore Vidal Trilogy" at Gagosian Gallery Beverly Hills, is more like ecstatic complicity.) As sweetest summer group show, I vote for "Selections From My Wardrobe" at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in LA, with Mari Eastman, Anna Sew Hoy, Katherine Bernhardt, and Rebecca Morris--the last of whose large-scale painting, White Triangle, 2005, seemed a proposition for a new nonobjective, feminine and strident. I could go on in this manner, but as an organizing principle, annual highlights and lowlights seem to inventory too soon and too recursively market-friendly designations of worth.

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Debord's image of fire, "the bursting of the instant," is what he shares with Marinetti--the former a final avatar of the avant-garde, the latter one of the avant-garde's earliest figures, both pressing the question of risk, praising the moment of the charge and plunge, even (or especially) in acts doomed to failure. The two together, in the context of an art world bloated with cash, presented a parallax of attitudes toward war, humor, and violence. "Bring the War Home," as bicoastal curator Drew Heitzler's provocative group show (at QED in LA and Elizabeth Dee in New York) was titled, can mean several things aside from its obvious association with Vietnam and the Weather Underground. Marinetti's method of bringing it home is perhaps best illustrated by his manifestos, which were meant not as discrete artworks but to be taken seriously, as prescriptions for action (odd but true: Gramsci marveling, in a 1922 letter to Trotsky, that "four out of five issues" of Marinetti's magazine Lacerba had "circulated among workers"). For Debord, the "torpedoing" of society would never be engendered by a theory, but by a "game, a conflict, or a journey." "Risks must be taken," he says in In girum imus nocte, "and you have to pay up front to see what comes next." In a sense Marinetti and Debord were equally militant, but Marinetti remains remote and radioactive, while Debord has been defanged and romanticized.

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Who took risks in 2006? And what qualified as risk? Based on these criteria, my best-of-'06 pick, sadly, is an object from 1932, Parole in liberta futuriste olfattive tattili termiche (Olfactory Tactile Thermal Futurists Words in Freedom)--Marinetti's metal book, which telegraphed astonishing force and originality even in the sterile confines of sun-glittering oil-trust luster. (Grab a "tasteful" beige parasol--complimentary while you're on the grounds.) The sun prevails here, not just over the Getty's Pacific Ocean promontory, but everywhere. The only variable is whether one likes it or hates it--a simple matter of taste. Melville's Ahab wanted to harpoon it out of the sky. Blaise Cendrars called it a wound. Guy Debord, who said revolution brings sunny weather, was perhaps in favor of it. But sunny weather brings no revolution. Not this year.

RACHEL KUSHNER IS A LOS ANGELES-BASED WRITER.

RACHEL KUSHNER

London

WHEN REVIEWING THE PAST YEAR IN LONDON, it's tempting simply to start with the Tate Triennial, London's recently instituted showcase of contemporary art in the United Kingdom. But to do so would provide insight less into any local trend than into a veritable condition of art-making everywhere. Triennial curator Beatrix Ruf (on loan from her post at the Kunsthalle Zurich) took appropriation as her subject, which she loosely defined in the catalogue as "the reusing or recasting of cultural materials"--hardly a uniquely British approach. That said, the technique was in ample evidence throughout the Tate galleries, whether in Jonathan Monk's use of found, anonymous drawings from the '20s and '30s; Daria Martin's film Wintergarden, 2005, based on the ancient myth of Persephone and set in a modernist pavilion; Pablo Bronstein's performance inspired by Minimalist dance, executed with postmodernist staging; or Cosey Fanni Tutti's work from the '70s ("New British Art," indeed), in which she takes up photos of herself modeling in porn magazines. In fact, this triennial was a smorgasbord of appropriation, spanning the broad gap in practice between Ian Hamilton Finlay's conservative, classicist sculptures and paintings and John Stezaker's engrossing found-image collages of forests interpolated into human faces--to say nothing of Lucy McKenzie's Untitled, 2005, a pointed refiguring of comic-book porn into the image of a painting hanging in a restaurant above an impassive diner.

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Yet a real clue to artistic production today was made evident in this apparent curatorial hopscotch: Part of the triennial's premise was the idea that every era's art has been engaged in this kind of recycling--a suggestion that here risked recasting appropriation as merely a recombinatory process. Largely gone, it seems, is the critical character of the "Pictures" generation, whose quotations of commercial culture questioned social and economic representations. As argued by catalogue essayist Jan Verwoert, the mourning of history's end that attended postmodernism--an ending whose "dead language" gave rise to the pervasive artistic use of allegory in appropriation--has recently given way to an "excessive presence of history" felt by artists, who subsequently desire to reanimate the "dead" and leave open the possibility for innovation (what Ruf called "new narratives" and "fresh meanings"). In other words, artists have a greater awareness of the "unsuspected effects and affects" that might result from employing materials from the past and therefore evince a purportedly novel, "performative" approach in orchestrating those materials' return. However, in the Tate Triennial, as in the broader global trend of appropriation, the works that quote in compelling and relevant ways were outnumbered by others steeped less in matters of representation than of reproduction--or more accurately, production. Many artists, that is, are freely partaking in a realm of obliging semiotic abundance (some without even perfunctory, vestigial connotations of criticality), such that appropriation seems a remarkable catalyst for the continuation and worldwide proliferation of art. Earlier appropriation strategies, if not antagonistic to commodity culture, nevertheless explored the conditions of its all-consuming nature--whereas nowadays appropriation seems increasingly at its service.

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In this regard, then, a consideration of the Tate Triennial might provide a crucial insight into London, whose well-documented, yet unprecedented, proliferation of commercial galleries reflects with ever more clarity a global explosion in artistic productivity and--along with growing popular interest in contemporary art--an expanding market that seems perfectly able to absorb this increased production. Now even public institutions are going into overdrive, announcing numerous site and program overhauls: This year, only six years after opening, Tate Modern announced an eleven-story addition to its building, a 60 percent increase in size; the Whitechapel Art Gallery is annexing a neighboring public library; and the National Film Theatre, traditionally a cinema, is opening a gallery for film and video installation.

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This kind of expansion is very much on people's minds in London, and if the critical assessment of commerce has perhaps assumed less of a role in art, this criticality is perpetually disinterred in talks held by art institutions. One might even argue that the growth of the art world here has been mirrored by an increasing number of events trying to make sense of the broader implications. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Serpentine Gallery, where new arrival Hans-Ulrich Obrist--a figurehead of sorts for art's worldwide expansion (his recent books of interviews speak volumes)--hosted discussions and screenings in what writer Claire Bishop recently called the "speech bubble," an architectural pavilion built by Rem Koolhaas next to the gallery in Kensington Gardens. Consisting of a massive inflatable orb hovering above a circular seminar room (not a few Londoners remarked upon its seeming an appropriate home for hot air), the building provided the setting for Obrist's highly publicized "Interview Marathon Series"--the first of which was an exhausting twenty-four-hour occasion featuring a roster of more than sixty local and internationally known figures such as Brian Eno, Peter Saville, Doris Lessing, and Hanif Kureishi, all interviewed by high-octane communicators Obrist and Koolhaas.

More to my point (and less exhausting) was a second, shorter "Post-Marathon" coinciding with the Frieze Art Fair and billed as an examination of corporate sponsorship of cultural events, business management's use of critical theory, and hedge-fund billionaire investment in art. The questions posed in a press release for the "art, money, and power" event were provocative enough: "Is this interest [from the corporate and financial sector] shaping a new cultural and economic scenario?" and "Why are finance and capital so interested in the ... cultural industry?" Unfortunately, the answers--by world-renowned artists, academics, and entrepreneurs such as Jeff Koons, former Art Basel director Samuel Keller, Frieze's Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, Iwan Wirth of Hauser & Wirth, Tobias Meyer of Sotheby's, and designer Miuccia Prada--were often the exact opposite of provocative, playing a rhetorical game of hot potato. (To wit: "Money has never mattered to me"; "If I had wanted to really make money, I would have gone into another business.") Several among those interviewed were on Art Review's Power 100 list, but while they were well acquainted with the holy trinity of art, money, and power, few seemed equipped (or at least inclined) to analyze its inner workings, meaning that in lieu of "live research" (as promised by the Serpentine) there were only occasionally informative, often humorous by-products of the discussion. Asked if he had any projects that he has yet to realize, Keller replied that his ideal future endeavor would be based on his first Art Basel Miami Beach--canceled in the wake of 9/11. Many art-world figures and collectors had traveled to Miami nevertheless, and, staying in the hotel rooms they had prebooked, they enjoyed a leisurely few days networking unencumbered by a literal object--that is, art--for their activities. (A worrisome twist on relational artistic practices?) Dan Graham abandoned the Q & A format to deliver a short diatribe against Koolhaas's architecture, punctuated by an attack on the professionalization of art: "There's a disease, and it's called Goldsmiths." (A memorable one-liner, for certain, but is it really fair to blame the prescriptive quality of much art today solely on education?) And Koons, answering Koolhaas's inquiries about recent commissions for powerful art patron Francois Pinault, waxed poetic about a sculpture for Pinault's Palazzo Grassi in Venice inspired by the Incredible Hulk--a figure Koons, with an almost spiritualist bent, called a "guardian" for the building. When Koolhaas asked the artist how many people were in his employ, Koons gave a number exceeding that of all Hauser & Wirth's businesses internationally.

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The interviewers' questions were generally cast in terms of commerce's interest in culture, and yet the interviews might have more compellingly brought up art's instrumentalization in the public sphere, especially in the UK. Today not only is the art world infused with cash and subsequently enmeshed with the mass-market public, but art is used also by the state to encourage economic activity and social cohesion, and even to deal with the decreasing governmental provision of social services. The novel hyperpresence of art in everyday life here is, of course, immediately discernable in the gargantuan, interactive, art-as-entertainment ethos of Tate Modern--the most popular contemporary museum in the world, with four million visitors each year--as well as in events such as the Beck's Futures prize at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, which recently incorporated public voting terminals. (The ICA's Jens Hoffmann called the latter an invitation for people "to contemplate the visual arts in general and to give them a voice in the discussion surrounding contemporary art.") But as important as it is for these institutions to expand the consumer base, art has a new, more significant status as a fix-all tool for society at large and a proxy for now-vanished public forums. For instance, a reality TV program soon to be on Channel 4 allows participants to nominate artists to build a public art piece. A Soviet-scale, state-funded performance such as this year's Margate Exodus provides a caricatured example of the prevalent "socially engaged" community projects springing up with the decline of the welfare state: Appealing for the better treatment of people seeking asylum in the UK, the work involved a community pageant-cum-film shoot with local volunteers constructing an eighty-two-foot-tall Antony Gormley sculpture from the "detritus of consumer society."

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It's a perfect example of how the state uses art as an exercise in community cohesion and a benign form of autocritique, giving cosmetic aid to the underprivileged. In such cases artists often unwittingly prep these places for the oncoming waves of gentrification; elsewhere the effort is more overt, taking the form of "creative hubs" (modeled after the former East London artist colony Shoreditch) that are financially supported by the government. It is, however, also worth noting that certain artists are addressing these developments in their own work. At the risk of doing what most year-end surveys do--identify the young up-and-comers--I would like to point to London-based German artist Anja Kirschner's Polly II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands, 2006, which resists the assumption that aesthetic or political benefit necessarily arises simply from educating viewers about gentrification or from working with communities. Screened in April at the Whitechapel Project Space, this video continues a saga begun in John Gay's 1728 play The Beggar's Opera: Part sci-fi, part Lehrstuck, the film depicts a futuristic East London submerged by floodwaters that leave scant land and resources for the surviving working-class residents, many of whom turn to piracy to fight the private interests expropriating the remaining lands. (For many, this deluge will call to mind Hurricane Katrina, although the work was conceived prior to that cataclysm.) Polly II is shot in a style at times reminiscent of popular British soaps, yet this genre is made strange by the use of Brechtian tropes of narrator and chorus, as well as by visibly artificial video effects that create a striking patchwork verisimilitude of the sunken city.

But here again, the radical change in art's relationship to the public leads us back to commerce. While this year The Guardian proclaimed that knowledge of art has become de rigueur for "anyone who wants to think of themselves as remotely on the cultural radar," such statements are part of a more general trend, identified by writer Anthony Davies, toward the cultivation of a "New Art Consumer" in the UK.* After years of lessons in art collecting and connoisseurship provided by numerous public art institutions, for example, a major push to encourage art buying has been initiated by the government's Arts Council, which is now offering an interest-free lending program for art buyers, called "Own Art." The scheme helps those who normally would not have the cash to buy art, but it must also be seen in the context of major governmental restructuring in arts funding, since, like other current arts policy changes, it shifts the state's responsibility for supporting individual art projects onto private sources--in this case, the commercial art market. The enormous presence of the Frieze Art Fair is undoubtedly part of this shift. It was, after all, on the occasion of the fair last October that The Guardian published the above observation, along with instructions to first-time art buyers on how to collect; the paper also ran a feature discussing how many young professionals are leaving the public arts sector for the creative freedom of commercial galleries. With the tides appearing to turn so dramatically, it is no wonder that the centripetal pull of the Frieze Art Fair's black hole exerts itself year-round. This year saw unprecedented prices under the Frieze tent and a feeling of increasing citywide dominance. For instance, flyers for a Frieze-commissioned architecture tour by Bronstein were handed out with Oyster cards. The numerous talks, commissions, Resonance FM radio programs, and screenings by the LUX film and video archive attested to the fair's total-absorption policy. In this context, the "art fair art" so prevalent at Frieze, calculated to give the rapacious market stimulating doses of indigestion, seemed mainly like so many gestures indicating that critique in our time is always already a complicitous tool of the market.

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Yet despite the operative assumption that all possible aesthetico-political challenges to the fair will produce, at best, only a fleeting market fluctuation, something more than that emerged from this year's welter of artist's projects. As part of the LUX screening series, K2 Aufbau Organisation (K2AO, a collaborative out of the Kunstakademie Munchen) presented Bohemian Lobotomy, 2006, a work made as a specific response to Frieze that wasn't smooth and spectacular like value-adding "art fair art." Bohemian Lobotomy is a film-performance that came out of the group's research on Munich's bohemian period, which culminated in the Munich Soviet Republic of 1919. Superficially, the film echoes the appropriation theme of the Tate Triennial, assembling fragments from old film, theater, and literature into deftly orchestrated, disjunctive, uncomfortable combinations of live performance, film strategies, and polemic texts. Structured as a series of vignettes orbiting this period of revolutionary aesthetic and spiritual ideas, but also referencing Frieze, Art Basel, and Oktoberfest, the work's power resides, perhaps, in its departure from the premise that the early twentieth-century bohemians and their critical outsider position vis-a-vis bourgeois society now provide the model and lifestyle for today's status quo. Theorists have alternately identified this paradox as "commodified dissent" and as the recuperation of artistic critique within the "new spirit of capitalism." Strikingly, the historical theater, music, and dance performances that the group reperforms often occur as mise en abyme: For instance, when an audience files into a theater within the film, in order to watch the film we are already watching--either within the film or through performances in the cinema--the duplication gives a sense of second-order remove, encoding a distance and self-reflexivity that implies critique, which in turn, crucially, brings us back to the absorption and com-modification of the bohemia/avant-garde. At one point, live performers stand in front of the screen, holding up mirrors so as to reflect the beams of light from the film projector back onto the audience like spotlights, asking, at the same time, "Where are you?" and intoning the names of a series of dead political agitators and bohemians. The past is mirrored continuously and becomes a means to scrutinize the boho art fair audience, on whom it is dawning that they are implicated in the work's theme. Here the dead, the revenants of history, maintain their hold on the present and inform the present. But just as much appropriation serves as a kind of life support, if you will, for art, the centrality of bohemian marginality embodies another persistence--the way in which critical positions feed and reinforce the present system. Another vignette spoofs art fairs--two cartoon silhouettes of professional artists meet at the fair and deal each other blows while bragging about their recent shows and achievements. Growth, transformation, and undead states of art abound this year. Beware the zombies.

MELANIE GILLIGAN IS A LONDON-BASED ARTIST. (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)

NOTES

*Anthony Davies, "Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000-2004" (Mute, issue 29, Winter/Spring 2005; http://www.metamute.org). Mute has been crucial in fostering such debates since its inception in 1994.

MELANIE GILLIGAN

Milan

MILAN PROBABLY DOESN'T EVEN EXIST. Though still called Italy's "moral capital," the city has become slightly irrelevant, surpassed by Turin and Rome as a center of cultural participation and production. Or, more accurately, Milan has turned itself into an expensive luxury item, an accessory powerful in its beauty yet strangely unnecessary, even unreal. Little by little, Milan could easily come to resemble one of Italo Calvino's invisible cities: Anastasia, the metropolis that awakens desire only to suffocate it.

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Milan is a city of broken promises and frustrated dreams. In recent years, each new municipal administration has heralded ambitious plans for museums and cultural centers. But nothing has ever come of these proposals, and Milan remains one of the few large cities in Western Europe without a contemporary art museum. Private investors have therefore taken on the role of public institutions: Collectors and foundations are of crucial importance in keeping contemporary art alive here, as is an extremely active set of galleries. However, it is also important to note that numerous Italian artists now exhibiting prominently in Milan actually live elsewhere, and it's increasingly common for those who do reside in the city to spend at least part of their time abroad, with Berlin, London, and New York becoming temporary homes or destinations for art-world pilgrimages. And so while Milan remains host to a thriving artistic community, this community is nevertheless fluid, mobile, and hard to pin down according to any geographic parameters.

Put another way, the art scene here is alive and buzzing, but it's mostly hidden in the trenches, strangely unable to penetrate the mainstream cultural life of the city--although the past year witnessed many attempts to change this situation. In fact, reaching out to a larger public might have been the unifying principle of the Milan art world's 2006. More than thirty galleries recently joined forces to form a consortium called START, which organizes special events and joint vernissages for which the exhibition spaces stay open late into the evening. For all its simplicity, START seems to work, having attracted the attention of both the public and the press--something of a coup, particularly in the latter regard, as the city's art writers usually focus on exhibitions organized by private foundations. (This year, the foundation shows that garnered the lion's share of ink included Marina Abramovic at Hangar Bicocca, Martin Creed at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Jannis Kounellis at Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro, and Tom Sachs at Fondazione Prada--but of course, most of the discussion took place only in newspapers and fashion magazines. Competent art criticism is not common on the Italian information circuit.) Also, in order to increase their visibility, some of the city's most interesting dealers--including Massimo De Carlo, Manuela Klerkx, Francesca Minini, Ida Pisani of Prometeogallery, and Paolo Zani of Galleria Zero--have opened up new venues in an industrial area called Lambrate, a strange, homemade version of New York's Chelsea that occasionally hosts group exhibitions and public events in bare loft- and hangarlike spaces.

But Milan is not New York; it lacks the latter's honesty and brutality. Milan, it seems, is more interested in simulation, which is probably why the city is slowly turning into a province of television. In the past few years cultural politics have been dominated by commissioners and city councillors who appear as guests on talk shows and embarrassing programs, shouting and drooling in front of the camera. It's as if television were imagining our city, not vice versa.

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Perhaps, then, one best grasps and judges Milan's art world not by its geography or demographics, and not by the movements among its galleries and collectors, but rather by its qualities--and, in particular, by the ways Milan's fantasy world is reflected and distorted in contemporary artworks. The younger artists of the city are engaged in an art that appears to be intentionally oblivious, as though self-expression were to be obtained only in a form of extreme artificiality. Theirs is an art engaging the superfluous and representing it as such--an art that has nothing to do with imagining a new future, but which attempts instead to come to terms with an affluent society that seems tired, showing the symptoms of an imminent breakdown, suffocated by a surplus of multicolored commodities and inessential products. It's certainly not a coincidence that Francesco Vezzoli has become one of Milan's most recognized young artists on the international scene, with his peplum extravaganza Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's "Caligula," 2005, appearing first at the most recent Venice Biennale, and then this year at the Whitney Biennial before landing at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills. Vezzoli's unreality shows and trailers for imaginary movies are--for better or worse--the most accurate representation of Italy's current state of mind, which is to say, infatuated with anything that is trivial, fake, and vulgar.

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It seems apt, too, that colorful plastic has lately become Milanese artists' material of choice. While certainly still connected to the tradition of Italian postwar art and design, the material as it is used today no longer embodies the kind of optimistic faith in the future that typified the city's adopted son Lucio Fontana and his friends during the '50s. It seems to have more to do with the artificial bubbles we create for ourselves to block out the traumas of the present--suggesting that today's artists have a more problematic relationship with the future and are more skeptical about its potential, or perhaps they are simply less naive.

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Consider, for example, the work of Massimo Grimaldi: He creates hypersynthetic universes, worlds without oxygen, by using computers, iPods, and images downloaded from the Internet to fabricate frigid displays of commercial desires. In his show this year at Galleria Zero, a highlight was a live performance, titled Egypt, in which the artist reconstructed the choreography of a Daft Punk video, underscoring the absurd mechanisms of televisual seduction by replicating them in real life. A similar impulse could be observed in Patrick Tuttofuoco's first large solo show--held last spring at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin--where he displayed videos and sculptures made from materials gathered on a recent trip to seventeen megacities throughout Asia, South America, and the United States. Like Dave Eggers in his whirlwind travelogue You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002), Tuttofuoco had crisscrossed the globe at incredible speed to execute his project. With his sculptures in particular--a parade of objects with shiny, hypnotic surfaces--the artist conjured the frenzied sensibility of a binge consumer who desperately fills up an existential vacuum with an explosion of possessions. This dark, sardonic sensibility also pervades the assemblages and strange appliances appearing in Pierpaolo Campanini's paintings, which are often seen at Francesca Kaufmann's Milan gallery: His macabre still lifes are the product of a slow, meticulous painting process, but they speak of a world in which objects have short lives, quickly becoming mere waste.

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Such industrial materials have been taken up by some artists attempting to create social spaces and situations, as did, for example, Riccardo Previdi in his ephemeral contribution to the Green Light Pavilion, a temporary exhibition space in Berlin that was active during the past couple of years. Lara Favaretto's festive environments and carnivalesque celebrations similarly bring people together, creating joyful interactions that are nevertheless tinted with dark undertones--as though she were presenting a strange, premonitory ritual that precedes some terrible end. This ominous tone is even found among artists with more strictly object-based practices, such as Alessandro Pessoli, whose 2006 appearances in New York (Anton Kern Gallery) and Milan (Studio Guenzani) delved into "minor" genres such as comics to depict historical figures and ghostly creatures inhabiting a world seemingly on the verge of melting away.

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Indeed, another dynamic among Milan artists has been hermeticism: They retreat from the world, or see it only through the prism of their personal obsessions and memories, creating a contemporary grotesque. Pietro Roccasalva, whose morbid, introspective work was included this year in a number of group exhibitions in Milan, distinguished himself as one of the city's most convincing artists. Influenced by the monstrous physiognomic studies of Marisa Merz and Gino De Dominicis, he has developed a completely closed iconographic system, as the same images--human figures with masklike visages--appear and reappear in his paintings, pastels, and photos. This sensibility has also taken a reverse course in artistic practice, with an internal psychology seemingly projected onto the objects of the real world with paranoiac intensity. The sculptures, installations, and collages of Christian Frosi, for example, incorporate industrial materials in a way that draws them close to the biomorphic. One of his best-known works, Foam, 2003, is a foam machine that at once evokes ecstatic entertainment spectacles and the menacing substances of chemical warfare. The sense of approaching catastrophe similarly looms in the works of Micol Assael, a Rome- and Berlin-based artist who also spends time in Milan, where she shows with Galleria Zero; Assael assembles rusty and broken machinery into threatening installations, in which sparks and sudden gusts of air keep viewers in a state of constant alert.

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Finally, there is the sinister shadow cast by the work of Roberto Cuoghi, who has been engaging the act of metamorphosis in a series of animations, paintings, and personal transformations of both himself and his art-world friends. Cuoghi first gained attention for a real-life performance, spanning years, in which he turned himself into the living image of his father; since then, he has extended his practice to include a wide variety of media. His most recent project, exhibited this fall at Galleria Massimo De Carlo, comprises a series of songs (mixing the artist's own voice and random sounds) that sound foreign but are not. Mei Gui, 2006, is Cuoghi's version of traditional Chinese music; Mbube, 2005, is based on a very European, slightly colonial idea of what African music might sound like. Tweaking stereotypes and audience expectations, Cuoghi creates an ersatz exotic universe--a Walt Disney sound track that plays on our simultaneous fear of and desire to assimilate distant cultures.

Such a near-hallucinatory approach to reality may be found among Milan's young photographers as well, although, as if in deference to stereotypes about Milan itself, their work is often coolly detached. Paola Pivi, for example, submits life to sudden manipulations, turning reality into a stage set for a surreal television commercial with her images of zebras on snowy mountains and donkeys at sea--or of crocodiles playing with whipped cream, on view this year at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin's Miami space. And Luisa Lambri explores monuments of modernist architecture: Her 2006 solo shows at Luhring Augustine in New York and Studio Guenzani in Milan focused on buildings designed by Walter Gropius, Luis Barragan, and Marcel Breuer. In her photographs these solid structures, portrayed through marginal details or lateral views, become mirages hovering in the desert--traces of a past whose dreams for the future never became a reality. A perfect mirror, perhaps, for the plastic dreams with which Milan is so obsessed, and for Milan, the invisible city.

MASSIMILIANO GIONI IS A CURATOR AT THE NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NEW YORK, AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI, MILAN.

MASSIMILIANO GIONI

Mumbai

AT THE KABUTARKHANA intersection, a major traffic nexus in Mumbai, thousands of lights sparkle on buildings silhouetted against the night sky. These strings of lights, the kind normally used for festivals and weddings, are everywhere at the crossing, illuminating the General Post Office (a glorious example of Mumbai's Indo-Saracenic architecture) and adjacent stores and restaurants, draped over trees and across streets, blinking on and off. But while these lights might look like the trappings of an extravagant civic celebration, they actually comprise artist Ashok Sukumaran's Glow Positioning System (GPS), 2005. Using a software-controlling hand crank that, when turned by pedestrians, powers the lights, Sukumaran (who presented his work this year at the first Singapore Biennale) has transformed the busy thoroughfare into a fantastic panorama--and indeed, into a kind of beacon for a new Indian art scene whose denizens deploy electronic and digital media, as well as video, film, and interdisciplinary research practices, to address the urban landscape and population.

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There are many megalopolises in India, but Mumbai is the one that showcases the country's economic growth--and its internal rifts. Its cityscape has undergone massive development in recent years, and the trend continues: According to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the Mumbai-Shanghai plan, a controversial development scheme designed to pack the city's skyline with the starchitecture of a globalized metropolis (enabling Mumbai, per the plan's name, to compete with the glitter of modern Shanghai), will have completely transformed the city by 2010. And yet 60 percent of Mumbai's sixteen million inhabitants presently live either in Dharavi--home to more than a million people, making it the largest slum in all of Asia--or in one of the city's many other impoverished areas. This reality does not match up with the municipal self-image being fostered by Mumbai, of course, and so countless slums are being torn down. (Further underlining the divide between image and reality, Maximum City, home of Ramoji Film City--the largest film production company in the world--actually abuts Dharavi.) Paradoxically enough, the Mumbai-Shanghai plan's focus on the visible symptoms of overpopulation and poverty, rather than its causes, has thus far recapitulated many of the Chinese city's urban-planning failures--already leaving, for example, at least two hundred thousand people displaced in the slums' deconstruction.

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Appropriately, many artists and interdisciplinary groups here specifically engage the problems of the city with both public projects and more conventional works of art--creating a unique theoretical link between urbanism and critical artistic production. There is, for example, the artist Sharmila Samant, cofounder of the collective Open Circle (whose work focuses on the impact of economic reforms on the working class). This year, Samant notably made Shanghai Tales, a documentary video showing the demolition of a slum from the point of view of a little boy, intercutting his narrative with photocopied images of anti-displacement protests from media NGOs and television networks. (Prominent on the Mumbai scene, Samant may also be familiar to some Western audiences, having studied at Rijks Academy in Amsterdam before appearing in the 2005 exhibition "Indian Summer" at L'Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in 2001's "Century City" at Tate Modern in London.) More steeped in research is the innovative nonprofit institution PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research), founded in 2001 by globalization theorist Arjun Appadurai to develop collaborations among theoreticians, architects, artists, and city dwellers. Mumbai itself provides the conceptual impetus behind PUKAR's numerous ongoing projects, which typically analyze the local ramifications of globalization via conferences, lectures, publications, and exhibitions. For a project titled "Gender and Space," for instance, the group assembled a traveling show with works by four photographers: Among them, Abhinandita Mathur portrays the changing daily habits of a young girl who moved from a village to Mumbai, and Neelam Ayare follows women in the city who are newly working side by side with men on construction sites. In 2006, PUKAR sponsored the study "Post-Industrial Landscapes," examining and documenting the global economic shift from manufacturing to service industries. A key element of the project was a documentary titled The Forgotten City of Girangaon: Featured in this year's Juhu Film Festival in Mumbai, the piece dwelled poetically on the cylindrical skyscrapers rapidly replacing the chimneys of the city's old cotton mills.

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This filmic endeavor is close in spirit to the "on the ground" efforts of another organization, CRIT (Collective Research Initiatives Trust), a similar network of architects, scholars, and artists who blend theory and practice in what they call a "critical urbanism." Currently, the group is organizing neighborhood committees to help stem the forces of development threatening the tenements of Mumbai's Betwala Chawl, which has been squatted by a migrant group from Allahabad for more than seventy-five years; CRIT is hoping to create in its place a legal, community-oriented housing complex combining apartments and work spaces that could serve the real needs of this low-income group. Finally, there is Majlis, the Centre for Alternative Culture and Rights Discourse, a production facilitator and archive for documentary film that also provides advice on civil rights issues to women and minorities. One of the center's most ambitious works to date was this year's Seven Islands and a Metro, a feature-length documentary by the organization's director, Madhushree Dutta. Shot in a dark, moody palette, Dutta's video narrates the history of the city from its sixteenth-century founding as Bom Bahia, to its colonial incarnation as Bombay, to its new life as Mumbai, the polyglot, postindustrial metropolis. Reminiscent of Chris Marker's travel films in its essayistic approach, idiosyncratic use of film genres, and poetic use of oral history, Seven Islands confirms Majlis's international reputation as a film center facilitating first-class productions even without ample means.

While globalization is unmistakably shaping urban space, its harsh economic imperatives make it increasingly difficult to live off the land--a fact that preoccupies artist Chintan Upadhyay, who has since 2002 organized site-specific workshops and monthlong residencies for Indian and international artists in the Vagad region of Rajasthan. In 2006, Huseyin Alptekin and Scott Martin were among the artists who sojourned there, working on projects with villagers that were much in the vein of the "social turn" among contemporary artists around the world--including street theater as well as a small museum displaying objects donated by locals. Significantly, in creating this program intended to effect communication between urban and rural areas, Upadhyay eschews the traditional figurative painting he studied in the prestigious art program at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda, Gujarat. In this respect, he is arguably part of a larger groundswell of Indian contemporary artists distancing themselves from mainstream forms of Indian art (especially painting and sculpture that, by drawing on age-old pictorial conventions and religious iconography, seem to endorse traditional values). This cohort includes Sukumaran and his Glow Positioning System, but also such increasingly recognized artists as Shaina Anand and Shilpa Gupta. Among Anand's more interesting investigations of film and television genres is Rustle TV, 2005, a project for which the artist asked people working and shopping in an indoor market in Bangalore to produce, star in, and broadcast game shows, speakers' forums, and song-and-dance production numbers over the course of three days. For her part, Gupta, a participant in four biennials this year--Shanghai, Sydney, Havana, and Liverpool--examines a culture steeped in consumption, militarism, and human-rights abuses with such interactive video projections or Internet projects as blessed-bandwidth.net, which she created in 2003 for Tate Online. Suggesting that religion today must be seen in the broader context of commodifiable lifestyle choices, the piece asks users to select a religion--say, Hindu, Sikh, or Buddhist--from a drop-down list, and then have themselves and their computers electronically blessed. Her untitled installation for the 2006 Biennale of Sydney, meanwhile, used touch screens in its exploration of the conflict in Kashmir.

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Such projects represent only one end of Mumbai's contemporary art spectrum, of course. The city is also the center of India's small but thriving commercial gallery scene and, in addition to all the projects mentioned above, there are also the so-called Bombay Boys--a group of successful young painters including Bose Krishnamachari, Riyas Komu, Justin Ponmany, and Jitish Kallat, who could often be found this year smiling from the newspapers' gossip pages, standing next to film stars at glittery parties. Like the stock exchange, the market for their work is booming, nourished by the profits of Bollywood and the fast-growing IT industry. Business this year was brisk at the Sakshi Gallery, which sells much of the Bombay Boys' eclectically postmodernist, frequently figurative work. It is important to note that the city's public art museums look particularly etiolated compared to this high-rolling milieu, mainly showing traditional painting (such as last year's retrospective of Jehangir Sabavala, organized by poet and curator Ranjit Hoskote) rather than playing an active role in the nurturing of contemporary work. One venue trying to fill this void is the "semiprofit" Gallery Chemould. Founded by the husband-and-wife team of Kekoo and Khorshed Gandhy in 1963, the gallery promoted then-controversial work, like the paintings of Bhupen Khakhar (1934-2003), whose imagery alluded to popular culture and was often explicitly homoerotic, and that of the anticolonialist Progressive Artists' Group. Today the founders' daughter, Shireen Gandhy, shows adventurous work such as the ironic self-portraits of photographer Pushpamala N.--these look a bit like Bollywood production stills--and invites guest curators to organize group exhibitions, providing one of the few places in Mumbai where artists might have a space for experimentation.

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Gallery Chemould notwithstanding, the more general economic disparities of India are perhaps reflected in the divide between the artists who show and sell within the gallery system and those who actively engage political realities. Like any other major city's, Mumbai's art world mirrors the fragmented state of contemporary art in general--except perhaps even more so. It is the Maximum City, after all, its every quality exaggerated. But to at least provisionally locate a center in this multifaceted heterogeneity, initiatives like PUKAR, CRIT, and Majlis, by directly confronting the aesthetic, economic, social, and psychological conditions of the hyper-hypertrophied megalopolis, may well constitute the city's most robust and compelling artistic activity. Perhaps best seen, after all, as the Mumbai-Shanghai plan's opposing force rather than as the antithesis of Bombay Boy painting, the practices of these groups illuminate the potential of "critical urbanism." And as students of demography or readers of, say, Mike Davis's Planet of Slums might agree, that is a concept that should be of interest far beyond the outskirts of Mumbai.

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NINA MONTMANN IS A HAMBURG-BASED CRITIC AND CURATOR.

Translated from German by Jane Brodie.

NINA MONTMANN

Beijing

OVER THE COURSE OF A FEW DAYS LAST APRIL, a group of artists in Beijing shot Chinese Crackers, a ten-minute film based on Ed Ruscha's Crackers (1969)--a book in which the artist's photographs illustrate a short story by Mason Williams, "How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers." (In this instruction manual-style text, the reader is told to seduce a woman and, after taking her to a "skid-row flophouse," convince her to lie down on a bed laden with salad, pour dressing over her, and then leave in a chauffeured car for a "suite of rooms in the finest hotel in town" to enjoy a box of crackers alone.) Set far from Ruscha's Los Angeles, the film's geography is immediately recognizable to the Beijing art world: For the "finest hotel in town," the Chinese team chose the Lido Holiday Inn, the logistical hub of the neighborhood where most of the city's galleries and studios are located. The "skid-row flophouse" is a hotel attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The grocery store where the film's leading man, played by artist Liu Wei, buys the salad and dressing is where you would likely run into Fang Fang--the gallerist behind the country's "Cartoon Generation" of Murakami-esque young painters--buying his morning baguette. And the bar in which Liu first woos his date is Eudora Station, a cheesy but unavoidable umbrella-and-terrace number not far from the postindustrial Factory 798 gallery district--an establishment where you might encounter gallerists Max Protetch and Leng Lin discussing their next deal by day, or auction-darling painters Zhang Xiaogang and Yang Shaobin playing pool and drinking by night. The actors themselves are no less familiar. Both Liu and Chen Wenbo--who plays a bellboy here but is in fact a painter and veteran of the groundbreaking "Post-Sense Sensibility" basement exhibitions of late-'90s Beijing--saw works sell for $66,000 at Sotheby's New York in September. Pi Li, cofounder of UniversalStudios-Beijing, the most important space to open here this year, plays the chauffeur. (He is behind the wheel of a BMW belonging to Zheng Lin, director of Tang Contemporary Art, whose Beijing branch opened in June.)

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However, the very colloquialism of the film--its seemingly cozy familiarity with places and players well known to hometown audiences--belies the fact that the project provides a singular illustration of the complex tensions underlying this pivotal year for the Beijing art world, in which everything seemed to evidence an upheaval in China's relationship to the West. Indeed, Chinese Crackers was anything but a simple act of appropriation: It was commissioned not in Beijing but in Berlin--by Jonathan Monk, under whose name it appeared just a couple of months after its making, as part of Art Basel's "Art Unlimited." That such a knowing portrayal of the scene here and now was presented in Basel as a Chinese reinterpretation of a Western work--but credited to a Western artist who did not participate in its production--points to more than simply the postcolonial tensions arising when one locale speaks for another, or when China functions as a site of cheap outsourced production for a more heavily capitalized international art world (although both points are relevant). Rather, this film project, from its conception to its presentation, underscores a broader scheme of issues inherent to bringing China and its art scene into the global fold--a process now driven above all by a heated market for contemporary Chinese art.

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The art world here has grown crowded, with new Chinese money, domestic and foreign auction houses, major international museums and art fairs, Western collectors who came early to Chinese art, and even various subsets of the PRC government all competing for chunks of a pie that seems to be getting bigger by the day. Just around the time Chinese Crackers was filmed, the third edition of the China International Gallery Exposition, Beijing's major art fair, brought together mostly Asian galleries for heavy trading; Council, one of the savvier of the homegrown auction houses, held its first sale; and Lu Jie and his Long March Space declared with great fanfare the opening of a Chinese branch of the Artist Pension Trust. Elsewhere, Sotheby's New York this year presented its inaugural auction of Asian, mostly Chinese, contemporary art, selling Zhang Xiaogang's Bloodline Series: Comrade No. 120, 1998, for $979,200, then the highest price yet paid for a work by a PRC artist. (This sum would be surpassed twice in the September sales, first by Chen Danqing in New York, then by Zhang, again, in Hong Kong.)

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But the ascendance of the market in Beijing made 2006 a year not only of new cars and apartments but also of deep-seated neurosis and anxiety among artists, curators, and gallerists trying desperately to shore up their places in an ambiguous new order. It seems inevitable that the current scene will evolve into something more stable, an art world where different players, Chinese and foreign, maintain distinct spheres of action and influence. The mechanics by which this might be achieved, however, are still only partially clear, leaving everyone in Beijing in conflicted relation to the very concept of "Chinese contemporary art," which has largely ceased to be a point of pride and come to seem merely an advertising slogan, bound to fade over time. The unspoken question at every art-world gathering is how to consolidate a position that can outlast the current infatuation with Beijing and its artists, which seems certain to expire on August 8, 2008, when the Olympics-countdown clocks positioned around the city reach zero.

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The renegotiation of Beijing's relationship to the West was also spoken to eloquently in a yet-untitled film by Ai Weiwei, the artist, architect, and curator who has functioned as tastemaker and godfather figure for the local art scene since his return to Beijing in 1993 after a decade in New York. The work takes as its subject a late-May tour of the city by the International Council of New York's Museum of Modern Art--an institutional trip planned long before the auction houses jumped into the game, and anticipated by many older artists and galleries as the moment when Beijing would truly arrive on the global stage. The group's journey was filled with studio visits to painters like Fang Lijun and the Luo Brothers, and included the standard trip to collector Guan Yi's private museum, a greatest-hits collection on the outskirts of town. On the third day, the council visited Ai, who had, unbeknownst to his visitors, rigged his home with five surveillance cameras, hidden beneath shrubs and behind grates. In the resulting video work, the eighty dignitaries from MOMA are seen parading across the artist's gray brick courtyard and into his critically acclaimed living space, their movements documented with entomological precision. One camera angle shows only the councilors' shoes--here, say, the loafers of a Japanese industrialist, there perhaps the pumps of a German duchess. Another captures only torsos as the visitors gaze upon a studio shelf, which on that sunny afternoon held Neolithic vases covered in industrial paints: Ai's Colored Pots (24 Parts), 2006, which would soon make its way onto the cover of the Sotheby's New York catalogue. Is the implicit violence of surveillance here a tool of the underdog or the overlord? Put another way, is the ritual pilgrimage to the House of Ai--now a required stop on every foreign art-world itinerary of any renown--a gesture of respect or condescension, an exploration or an imposition? Ai's work was a catchy stab at the nascent realities of a rebalancing system--questioning Chinese artists' rote reliance on disconnected outsiders for recognition, as well as laying plain the unease currently at the heart of the Beijing art world, where everyone seems to be watching everyone without letting on.

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The idea of the local scene's increasing self-sufficiency hinted at in Ai's video seemed borne out by several shows later in the year. After a lazy summer, Galleria Continua, one of the best of the Western galleries in the city, opened "A Continuous Dialogue"--an eight-person multigenerational group show including work by Ai as well as Cao Fei, Kan Xuan, Gu Dexin, Lu Chunsheng, and Yan Lei. (Just a few weeks later, most of these artists again appeared together in the "China Power Station: Part I" exhibition organized by Oslo's Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art and London's Serpentine Gallery, consolidating their status as the group that has obtained a real domestic and international curatorial consensus.) And this fall, Tang Contemporary's series of Guangdong-focused shows, as well as the prominence UniversalStudios-Beijing's first few exhibitions have given to southern artists like Zheng Guogu, Xu Tan, and Chen Xiaoyun, have marked another significant trend--Beijing's acceptance of creative centers beyond itself.

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In mid-September, no less an entity than Art Basel made its first foray into China, with a slickly produced panel discussion titled "China: New Opportunities in the Global Art Arena." It brought the whole Beijing family to the National Art Museum of China in proportions likely unseen since the epoch-making "China/Avant-Garde" exhibition opened in 1989 (and then was immediately closed down, after the artist Xiao Lu shot her own installation with a pistol). Hundreds of well-dressed Beijingers drank champagne on the veranda of the museum, now clearly no longer a symbol of government repression. Inside, after cocktail hour was over, museum director Fan Di'an--the most important champion of contemporary art inside the Chinese political system--chaired the conversation as Ai, Fei Dawei, Elena Foster, Huang Du, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Ou Ning, Craig Robins, and Wang Hui held forth. The museum's staid Socialist atrium had been bathed in international cool by means of a giant backdrop in the Art Basel font. Some speakers called for the importation of one or another model from abroad; others insisted on China's uniqueness, or asserted its coming power. And yet the event proved less important for any single comment than as an instantiation of where things stand right now--somewhere between the inchoate 1990s and a big, bright future that seems to be taking shape even though no one really believes in it. Translating for the speakers from a glass booth at the back of the hall, I could not help but recognize what an extraordinary moment this is for Beijing's art world: As of 2006, the city no longer feels peripheral, its artistic infrastructure no longer seems fragile, and yet everyone still knows one another's names. The evening ended with a euphoric dinner at--where else?--Qu Na'r, a restaurant designed by Ai on the East Third Ring Road. Its name, appropriately, means "where are we going?" If the surveillance cameras were running, no one noticed.

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PHILIP TINARI IS A BEIJING-BASED WRITER AND CURATOR.

PHILIP TINARI