TAKE FIRST.

A feature on new artists? It's the oldest trick in the art-magazine book: Ring in the new with a preview of "fresh faces" and "raw talent" to watch in the year to come. If the conceit seems, well, a bit '90s, we nonetheless gave in to time-honored tradition-and our own curiosity-and asked fourteen critics and curators who always seem to know what's next to tell us whom they're looking to for new ideas and new art in 2001.

Daniel Birnbaum ANNEE OLOFSSON

Bob Nickas AMY O'NEILL

Clarissa Dalrymple RICHARD WRIGHT

Dennis Cooper JOHN WILLIAMS

Douglas Fogle HALUK AKAKCE

Katy Siegel ANDREA BOWERS

Ralph Rugoff SHIRLEY TSE 

David Frankel DELIA BROWN

Susan Kandel LOS SUPER ELEGANTES 

Matthew Higgs OLIVER PAYNE AND NICK RELPH 

Vince Aletti HIROSHI SUNAIRI

David Rimanelli DARIA MARTIN

Hans-Ulrich Obrist ANRI SALA

Herbert Muschamp WINKA DUBBELDAM

Daniel Birnbaum on ANNEE OLOFSSON

THE FIRST PICTURE BY ANNEE OLOFSSON THAT REALLY made an impression on me, The Mourners--My Last Family Photo, 1996, depicts the Swedish artist surrounded by her family. The image conveys sorrow and loneliness: six elderly people dressed in black, a young woman in the center all in white. It took a while before I realized she was wearing a polar bear costume, holding the animal's head in her lap. Silly as it sounds, the image radiates dignity. The young woman is an outsider in many ways, a creature who no longer belongs to the group and must be sacrificed--or is it she who wants to distance herself from the crowd?

After almost a decade of exhibiting in Europe, Olofsson now seems to be getting the attention she deserves. In her most recent series of photographs, "God Bless the Absentees," 2000--which debuted at Schaper Sundberg Galleri in Stockholm and is currently on view in the artist's solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York--the sitters seem to meld into their immediate surroundings. In one photo, a bath mat's shag pile seems to have crept up and covered a young woman's pajamas; in another picture, a woman wearing a horse-patterned outfit is almost indistinguishable from the horse-patterned bedclothes on which she lies. These are witty images, and they return to a recurrent theme in the artist's work: the strangeness of that which is very close. Olofsson has worked intensely with her own family ties. In a recent video, for example, the artist's mother watches over her sleeping daughter while reading aloud the most private of documents: love letters meant for the daughter's eyes only. In a series of photograp hs from 1997, Olofsson appears in strangely intimate, even incestuous poses with her father, creating an ambiguous feeling of closeness and icy distance at once. Wherever there is natural belonging together, there is also an implied rift, an underlying sense of isolation. Most often, Olofsson's works are about herself and about solitude. Hers is a vulnerable ego, alone, haunted by demons.

In the series "Demons," 1999, a bodyguard follows a young blond woman--the artist herself--wherever she goes. Shot in Gdansk, these photographs capture the blonde in various semilegible situations, outdoors in the dark of night or in a cheap hotel room. Like a menacing shadow, the man is omnipresent--but is he her guardian or her tormentor, a shield against the demons or a projection of the woman's agitated mind?

There is a core of strange silence in Annee Olofsson's work. The situations presented in her images may be comprehensible on a superficial level: Power relations, family connections, bonds of affection, and intense emotion present themselves in a straightforward way. But something else makes itself felt only after extended viewing, an inexplicable echo that, worrisomely, eludes translation into words. The woman haunted by demons is protected by a bodyguard, so nothing will happen to her. Why, then, do we have the feeling that it's already too late?

Bob Nickas on AMY O'NEILL

IF THE PROM SCENE FROM CARRIE HAD BEEN STAGED by jack Smith as an episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, it might have looked something like Amy O'Neill's Post-Prom, an installation for a group show in Dijon in 1999. Instead of blood pouring down, there was a confetti rain machine. A rainbow of balloons hung limply overhead, and beer bottles rolled underfoot. The decorations had a homemade, happy-sad authenticity. Every so often during the opening, an unseen force shook the refreshment table. When people dropped a vote for prom king and queen into the ballot box, a hand would reach up (like Thing from The Addams Family) to shake theirs. When the hand poured drinks, glasses would inevitably overflow. At the end of the evening, O'Neill innocently emerged from beneath the table, perhaps unaware that she was still wearing a bat mask. The piece was a creepy tour de force and might have established the artist as our own Flaming Creature. But Post-Prom, like so much of O'Neill's best work, was realized in Europe and seen b y few of her fellow Americans.

Glacier and Murdered Snowball (both 1997) were made, appropriately, for shows in Switzerland, where O'Neill is currently living. In Glacier, she brought together Caspar David Friedrich's icebergs, Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and Mark Twain's travelogue A Tramp Abroad. As compacted as snow in a glacier, O'Neill's sources were given sculptural form--around a working hot tub--and overlapped in unexpected ways: the soaring, majestic ice caves from the Superman movie as sublime as any painted scene; its characters and story as fictive as Twain's "firsthand" account of a trip made mostly in his imagination. The headier side of her pop-comic sensibility is nowhere more apparent than in Murdered Snowball, a Styrofoam-and-resin replica continuously "melting" to the slow flicker of strobe lights beneath the floorboards on which it rests: a little movie reduced to a kinetic freeze-frame.

Recently, New Yorkers got a chance to see O'Neill's work, but as it appeared in a summer group show ("2[degree]" at Spencer Brownstone Gallery), it came and went more quietly than it might have. Hermit Crab Hut, 2000, constructed from giant telephone-wire spools, was a re-creation of one of those Free-Hermit-Crab-With-Cage-Purchase stands you see on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore. In place of live, crawling crustaceans, however, were seashells wearing sunglasses and miniature football helmets. (You can never get enough sunblock.) Kids at the opening were delighted, and O'Neill sold some toys for a dollar apiece--when the people from the gallery weren't looking.

Clarissa Dalrymple on RICHARD WRIGHT

RICHARD WRIGHT MAKES WALL PAINTINGS--immensely refined insignia that conjure the long history of human inscription. Wright's paintings burn a retinal hole. They are not pictures. They are clear, bright, painted markings. As in a Baroque chapel, they activate a mental architecture, the way stars can make a ceiling, and offer an unlimited horizon.

Born in England in 1960, Wright studied painting in Edinburgh and worked for some time in a figurative vein. Restricted by the form, he found himself ungratified and took on work as a sign painter and musician to make his living. In the early '90s, a potent neoConceptual art community was taking root around the Glasgow School of Art, where Wright was enrolled at the time, and it was there that he developed the sort of site-specific, conceptually oriented practice that has subsequently informed his contributions to such surveys as 1998's Manifesta 2, in Luxembourg, and "Intelligence: New British Art 2000," at Tate Britain. New York's first exposure to Wright came in 1999, when he executed works for group shows at The Drawing Center and Greene Naftali.

It's quite possible to walk into a room and not even notice the elongated, filigreed, doilylike form--half brown, half blue--lurking above the doorway. Or, in a tight corner, a tattoo--oxblood and black--siphoning up the wall. In this, Wright's works resist being received as paintings, as conventional art objects. One cannot hold them, own them, assess them, value them--they are washed over for the next show. As Wright has commented, "I think the best work has been when the time limit, the space, or my immediate feelings allow things to pop up that can't be fully assessed."

Affiliated with Glasgow's Modern Institute, Wright has realized a new installation in the offices of the Chelsea branch of Gagosian Gallery; come next month a pair of his wall drawings go on view at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in Douglas Fogle's "Painting at the Edge of the World."

Dennis Cooper on JOHN WILLIAMS

TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD JOHN WILLIAMS ISN'T THE easiest artist to introduce. With his expansive, fractured, visionary talent, he's something akin to an inventor whose energies just happen to fall within the scope of contemporary art. But whereas the quest for a better mousetrap can only lead to more insane ways to catch mice, Williams's dizzyingly imaginative videos, sculptures, and paintings prove how far these mediums can be stretched. His daring, highly personal work has been an inspiration and touchstone for LA's in-the-know artists and critics since 1998, when the Cal Arts graduate first began exhibiting his work. With a March show on the docket at London's greengrassi gallery and a New York appearance in the works, it's a safe bet that our local excitement is about to translate into much broader acknowledgment.

If so formally promiscuous a body of work can be said to have a core medium, it's video. Previously incorporated into Williams's precise, daydreamlike sculptures and used as the basis for the imagery in his paintings, video has lately become a medium of choice: The artist sneaks his own cassettes into demonstration cameras in the electronics department of local Wal-Marts, then exits the stores and allows the cameras to record customers' interactions with the products and employees. When the tapes are full, he returns to collect them. With the help of an eccentric mix of old and new, low- and high-tech video equipment, he isolates and reconfigures any moment that happens to catch his eye--slowing, accelerating, and creating hiccuplike repetitions in the footage to build laconic yet highly intricate remixed portraits in which the feckless, unsuspecting customers' body language and facial expressions metastasize into a kind of visual instrumental while fully maintaining the videos' status as casual, even accide ntal documents. Williams's brilliance lies in the peculiar harmony he is able to create between a random bit of throwaway reality and his almost overreaching sense of its formal possibilities. In his art, what appears to be a forgettable, seconds-long image--a father coaxing his infant daughter to wave at the camera, the chance close-up of a fat woman's cavernous elbow--is magically squared into an unrelenting graph of bizarre, farcical, yet strangely revealing physical tics. For the viewer, it's a little like watching an episode of America's Funniest Home Videos as reimagined by Maya Deren, then edited as though it had the evidentiary value of, say, the Zapruder film.

Tangentially associated with LA's "New Sculpture" movement, Williams's work fits just as neatly into the tradition of genre-defying iconoclasm established by veteran LA artists like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Williams shares his peers' exuberant interest in exploring the expressive possibilities of three-dimensional abstraction, as well as his forebears' acute, comedic use of Conceptual-art practice to manifest examples of psychological havoc. But, as I said, Williams's work is notable less for the company it keeps than for the singular thrills it delivers. A pair of back-to-back showings at Marc Foxx this month and next should prove the point.

Douglas Fogle on HALUK AKAKCE

IN THESE PAGES, ROBERT SMITHSON ONCE QUOTED Vladimir Nabokov's observation that "The future is but the obsolete in reverse." It is precisely this paradoxical sense of the future as a future anterior that pervades the work of Haluk Akakce. Born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1970 and currently based in New York, Akakce is a child of the digital revolution who works in a broad range of media, effortlessly moving from low-tech drawing and wall painting to, more recently, digitally animated video. But no matter the medium, Akakce takes us through the looking glass into a world where the future is often yesterday and flatness manifests a new kind of depth.

Over the last two years, Akakce has produced several series of works, including the more intimate automatic line drawings on paper and carefully staged mural paintings that redefine the walls that support them, suggesting a kind of biomorphic, digitally inspired Lascaux. In both types of work, Akakce's rendered lines create a Mobius-like folding of space and form in which figure and ground morph seamlessly together in a sea of flat pigment. The figures inhabiting Akakce's protoplasmic space are cybervisions of techno-organic hybrids that at least one critic has likened to Art Nouveau's merging of the technological and the biological but that also warrant comparison to the fluid morphology of the body in Japanese manga (comics), the contorted visions of Hieronymus Bosch, and the arabesques of classical Islamic architecture. In the end, it becomes clear in Akakce's work that what is new is old and what is old is new.

Akakce's move from wall painting to video is not as large a leap as one might think given his conception of the wall as a site of projection. One of Akakce's most recent works, The Measure of All Things, 2000, is a six-minute video loop realized using 3-D design software and live-action digital video. Opening with text that reads in part "The Future Awaits You Now," Akakce's animated video proceeds through a set of digital scenarios featuring an Edenic cybergarden, a virtual room with classical architectural details, including a mantle inscribed with the words "natura naturans" (the nature that creates nature, or God) that becomes the scene of a high-tech insemination. All the while, the film's pregnant, live-action protagonist poses questions about the value of the Internet and technology in general. Akakce's film closes with a scene in which a digital DNA-like structure ascends through the ceiling of a darkened space, rising into the city above, as the sound track exudes the soothing strains of Tony Bennet t singing "Stranger in Paradise." And a strange technological paradise it is that links "natura naturans" with the ontological space of a high-end PlayStation game. Fecund with possibility yet also falling apart? Is the future tomorrow or was it yesterday? Welcome to the digital age, to the "shock of the old" that Haluk Akakce has just begun to investigate.

Katy Siegel on ANDREA BOWERS

BACK IN MY WISCONSIN HIGH SCHOOL, I HATED THE girls who figure skated; the double axels of Tricia et al. contrasted too starkly with my double bass. But I'm a big girl now, and I can recognize the poignancy of Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers's images of amateur skaters, from an exquisite colored-pencil drawing of a fat and fabulous teenager to the funny little videos of young girls performing their routines dressed as superheroes and vamps. Awkward and touching, this is art for those who sided with Tonya Harding, not Nancy Kerrigan.

Still, the ice-skating pieces weren't what first attracted me to Bowers's art. In the summer of 1999, I saw a drawing in a group show at Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York (where Bowers currently has a solo show). A lone fan at a David Bowie concert, holding a giant Union Jack aloft, shouts or sings, eyes closed, floating on a sea of white paper, presumably torn from the fabric of similarly enraptured hordes. The drawing's appeal lay partly in recalling the sensation of losing yourself in live music, in its collective experience. Bowers's sharp observation of the oblivious fan renders his expression, stance, and clothing acutely real, exposing his ardor.

While many of her subjects are taken from concert photos, some are plucked from sporting events, others from raves, where the audience-performer line is fluid. Mining a similar vein, Bowers filmed people singing at karaoke bars for a video installation called I Love You Fuckin' People, 2000 (first shown at Goldman Tevis, her LA gallery). Here, the fan becomes the amateur, an unskilled (and perhaps untalented) performer. She at once imitates and deviates from a model, the "real" star; in this, the amateur resembles a work of art.

Modern artists have long looked to audiences (even before Guy Debord broke the news about our spectacular society)--Manet and Weegee, Andreas Gursky and Sharon Lockhart. Bowers hits the topic's established hot spots: mass identity, media culture, the exchange between observer and performer. But the awkward specificity of the subjects complicates her take, pushing individual expression against group identity.

Most recently, Bowers has been using reflective silver and gold grounds, a perhaps too-easy nod to Byzantine icons redeemed by the fact that the shiny stuff is T-shirt decal material. The drawings depict female music stars like Salt 'n' Pepa (Hot, Cool and Vicious, 2000); the best piece, Pretty on the Inside, 2000, pairs Chrissie Hynde and Courtney Love flipping each other off across a wide expanse of silver. These celebrity musicians (celebrated as much for their images as their voices), cult figures for women under a certain age, complete Bowers's circuit of fan-amateur-master (or, artistically, that of copy-interpretation-original).

Bowers herself learned to ice-skate last year. Highly accomplished as an artist, she nonetheless understands the passion of the less-than-professional, the confusion of emulation and expression, fan and star, on the ice--and in the gallery.

Ralph Rugoff on SHIRLEY TSE

SHIRLEY TSE CANNILY CELEBRATES THE PHANTASMA-goric possibilities of polymers. The Hong Kong-born, Los Angeles-based artist transforms Bubble Wrap, Styrofoam, and polyurethane into pullulating constructions whose sagging and dented surfaces alternately suggest organic growths and abject industrial architecture. And just as the commercially formulated plastics that Tse uses are typically associated with packing and shipping, her sculpture likewise conjures a sense of work in transit, as if it were continually redefining its ultimate destination or even figuring out whether its field of reference is two- or three-dimensional.

This last tendency is particularly evident in two series of large color photographs, from 1998 and 1999, that depict Tse's vaguely geometric constructions in wilderness areas. Made from ingeniously manipulated inflated plastic bags and sutured solar blankets, Tse's objects initially seem as comically out of place as national-park tourists dressed in fluorescent sweats, but after a longer look, their awkward, rumpled shapes appear no less "natural" than the wind-shaped rocks and desert surrounding them, their plastic hues no less appealing than the blue skies and red sandstone cliffs.

With a nod to Robert Smithson, Tse's work wryly sidesteps the dead-end logic that defines nature and culture as oppositional terms, instead embracing the complexity and hybrid morphology of our actual environment. Her chef d'oeuvre to date, Polymathicstyrene, 1999-2000, shown this fall at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica and Murray Guy in New York, develops this multiplicitous aesthetic to a brilliantly paradoxical pitch. Wrapped around the gallery in continuous segments, 135 pale blue polystyrene sheets bear elaborately hollowed-out forms that conjure everything from urban topographies to geological formations, from computer circuitry to imprints left by unidentifiable consumer goods, from archaeological sites to futuristic structures. Viewers peer down on the work, which is installed as a waist-high shelf, as if surveying an aerial diagram of a relentlessly overcoded planet, a disorienting landscape where the natural and built environments, as well as the micro and macro, seamlessly meld.

Suggesting something dreamed up by an offspring of Louise Nevelson and Gilles Deleuze, Polymathicstyrene reveals Tse's conceptual agility as well as her formal inventiveness. The work neatly collapses all kinds of seemingly contradictory elements: Its precisely scooped-out negative forms, carved with a router, fuse an aesthetic of the machined and the handmade, while its wraparound sequences conjure a narrative that is both linear and circuitous. As we walk around the sculpture, examining and comparing the myriad shapes that are the fruit of the artist's time-consuming labor, it becomes a meditation on the relation between memory and perception.

In other words, the sculpture's values are as plastic as that permanent yet permeable substance from which it is made. Like a faithful modernist, Tse consistently exploits her chosen art supply as the springboard for her fluid investigations. Yet in manipulating a material to reveal its multiple "truths," her work bypasses formalist credos and instead persuasively demonstrates art's status as an exhilaratingly heterogeneous endeavor where form, material, and reference collide.

This spring Tse's work will appear in SF MOMA'S "OIOIOI: Art in Technological Times."

David Frankel on DELIA BROWN

WHAT, ARE YOU JEALOUS? PERHAPS, YOUNG ARTISTS, that's because you didn't steal a snappy enough title for your first full New York show. Discovering a happy overlap between Valley-speak and art history, Delia Brown copped hers from Gauguin, no less, who called a painting of 1892 Aha oe feii?, a phrase he translated "What, are you jealous?" as part of a yarn about the good life in Tahiti. Brown too is a painter of the good life, but hers looks like it happens in Beverly Hills. Or if not Beverly Hills, anywhere there are pools and patios and plantings, and where the sun is warm enough for women to lounge in little but their shades. Or else it could be indoors, in expensive but not especially tasteful drawing rooms where bags of Doritos and cans of Coke clutter the coffee table alongside bottles of Moet. Now the women wear flimsy silk dresses or fur shawls or beaded pants, and they drink their Moet and they talk on their cell phones and they sit in each others' laps, and--you're not there.

Envy and exclusion: These are the standards of Brown's art. It is a devious premise, since envy and exclusion are as near to most of us as are the emotions we'd rather cherish (what am I saying--nearer), yet they're also a dirtier secret. In this and other aspects, like the fact that she paints women without their clothes on, Brown's pictures are calculatedly seductive. The images themselves are perfectly OK--many of them watercolors, more than competent though short of sensually gorgeous, in an illustrational style evoking tony magazines of decades past--but their real kick lies in their subject, an indulgent comfort level that might suppose itself an ideal if it only had any ambition. Their framing suggests photographs as their source, with sequential scenes implying a roving camera; and in fact Brown did stage these pool parties and cocktails, only to present their traces to a public she did not invite to them. In Los Angeles last year, in the New Wight Gallery at UCLA, she threw a party, then cordoned it off from its visitors with velvet ropes.

By serendipity, Gauguin got his Tahitian wrong: The closer meaning of Aha oe feii?, apparently, is "What, have you got a grudge against me?" Beneath its placid surface, Brown's work deals in grudges and resentments, and she could become a target of some herself; to celebrate her show at D'Amelio Terras last fall, the New York Times Magazine ran a group of her images as a fashion spread, the clothes and their prices scrupulously labeled--an appropriate fate for this coolly manipulative art. Were you feeling charitable, you might call these paintings corrupted pastorals, and imagine their maker as mourning a lost possibility: the kind of (arguably delusional) dream of a meaningful life that drew Gauguin to Tahiti. But that's not really their tone, though they're not just cynical either: They suggest a woman who pretty much has a handle on what she sees and is looking for knowing ways to talk about it.

Susan Kandel on LOS SUPER ELEGANTES

I'M JUST WILD ABOUT MILENA MUZQUIZ AND Martiniano Lopez Crozet, the brains behind the casually absurdist, morphologically ambiguous entity that is Los Super Elegantes. Consider the Elegantes a theatrical extravaganza--cum-lifestyle, encompassing videos, CDs, backyard concerts--even studio visits, which are virtually indistinguishable from their super-freaky live performances (he's in recovery from a Rudolph Valentino addiction; she does a Silverlake housewife like nobody's business). What's the proper follow-up to "Viole Moi," their cover of Nirvana's "Rape Me" intoned like a hymn, in French? Perhaps an evening with the strangely mesmerizing "Angie" and "Eric," in what feels like a sitcom without the punch lines. Something gets lost in translation every time, and that's the point.

Milena (originally from Tijuana) and Martiniano (from Buenos Aires) met in San Francisco in 1992, when both were in art school. They eventually made their way to Mexico City, where they recorded Devorame (Devour me), 1997, a quadrilingual, quasipunk, ranchera-influenced album for BMG Latin, and surfaced a year later in Los Angeles, where they are starting to seem somehow emblematic. You can read Mike Davis on LA's "magical urbanism"--that newold fantasy of a banda-blasting, sorbet-hued, mestizo wonderland-or you can watch the Elegantes cackle through "Besame Mucho" while pretending to shoot up in a bathtub (imagine a Factory film dubbed for Telemundo and you're there). The Elegantes are not celebrating "Latino carnivality" (to quote Davis) but rather the universalizing banality of global pop. When Milena lip-synchs "Queda," a swoony tune sung in Spanish by the pop star Jeanette, she's as all-American as a middleaged middle manager playing air guitar to Hendrix.

The Elegantes' first videos owed much to the fact that Milena and Martiniano like to go crazy in the editing room and press all the buttons; hence the profusion of drips and wipes, and the fantastic, inexplicable sheep in white silhouette floating down the screen. Hollywood, 1997, a video miniseries that pays homage to the telenovela, is more sophisticated but no less frantic. The leads meet when he decapitates the man whose pocket she's just picked while fleeing jail for Hollywood to build a cathedral. Milena and Martiniano claim the series is loosely based on their lives, and indeed, one gets the sense that they've got stars in their eyes, i.e., would be as happy to meet with David E. Kelley as Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Until then, they are working on an abridged version of Miss Saigon-including the helicopter scene.

Matthew Higgs on OLIVER PAYNE AND NICK RELPH

THE BRITISH ARTISTS OLIVER PAYNE (B. 1977) AND Nick Relph (b. 1979) recently achieved the rare distinction of, respectively, being failed and dissuaded from pursuing their undergraduate art studies at Kingston University. At a time when British educational institutions are actively seeking to bolster enrollment, Payne and Relph's situation is all the more puzzling given that they are the authors of two of the most compelling works seen in London for some time: Driftwood, 1999, and House & Garage, 2000, shown simultaneously at the fig-I gallery last summer.

Payne and Relph make films that approximate the language of documentaries. Embracing wholeheartedly the dramatization of reality that the true documentarian strives but inevitably fails to avoid, Payne and Relph set about creating densely layered filmic essays that chart the ebb and flow of London's urban and suburban malaise and bring to mind earlier documentary works as distinct as Robert Smithson's seminal photo-essay The Monuments of Passaic, 1967, and Dan Graham's persistently influential video Rock My Religion, 1982-84. Driftwood, filmed on video in central London, is a tightly scripted twenty-five-minute derive through the concrete jungle, witnessed via the sidewalk-level lens of its skateboarding narrator. By turns romantic and bilious, the video borrows liberally from the psychogeographical musings of London literary chronicler Iain Sinclair, its underlying theme the routine alienation of contemporary urban life. Driftwood revels in the psychological potholes of a city struggling to embrace the futu re yet burdened by the legacy of its past.

House & Garage eschews the metropolitan savvy of its predecessor. Set in the hinterlands of the capital's southwesterly suburbs--home to London's white-collar commuters--and shot in video, 16 mm, and Super 8, it adopts a more intuitive, often contradictory style; think of Wolfgang Tillmans's encyclopedic eye set against a sound track provided by Erik Satie. Reminiscent of the short films that the late Derek Jarman made to accompany the Smiths album The Queen Is Dead, House & Garage's thirty-three-minute kaleidoscopic spectrum mirrors the social unease of its disenfranchised subjects, frustrated youths ultimately at loggerheads with their parents, a benign generation of weekend joggers and amateur line dancers. Wistfully melancholic, often hilarious, House & Garage acts as a rite of passage for its youthful constituents, climaxing with reverse footage of a millennial firework display played out over a barely audible take on the Sex Pistols' "No Future."

Currently filming Jungle, due to be completed this spring, Payne and Relph have set forth on an expedition into Britain's remote rural heartland. Pitched somewhere, according to the artists, between The Blair Witch Project and City Slickers, inasmuch as it will embrace the former's sense of verite and the fish-out-of-water absurdity of the latter, Jungle promises to be a sardonic lament of the fading of Britain's farming aristocracy, its subtext an exposition of the malignant sense of fear that lies beneath the surface of the rural idyll.

For those frustrated by a British art that may increasingly appear to be little more than a succession of conceptual one-liners or prurient double entendres, the precocious depth, willful complexity, and reckless ambition of Oliver Payne and Nick Relph's project inspires--even at this early stage--a renewed optimism.

Vince Aletti on HIROSHI SUNAIRI

I MISSED THE PERFORMANCE THAT ENDED WITH Hiroshi Sunairi pissing into a prop toilet at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in January 1999. I skipped the songs and outbursts at the February 2000 opening of his P.S. I studio space. I never listened to any of his cassette tapes. I did see his spread in the April 1999 issue of Playguy, in which the naked "young artist" (he claimed to be nineteen when he was in fact twentyseven) photographed himself in the shower with a plump hard-on, though that's probably beside the point, too.

But not entirely, because Sunairi's photographs-- or, more accurately, his photo collages and constructions--are the point. Like the Playguy pictures, which were sliced up and recycled into his artwork, the subject of virtually all of Sunairi's photos is a version of himself: not the Japanese-born artist who's been living in the United States (currently in New York) since he came here to study at the age of eighteen, but a pretty, pouting fantasy of teenage horniness. His pictures aren't about self-portraiture any more than Claude Cahun's or Cindy Sherman's are; they're performances no less theatrical for being conducted in private. Captured in a moment of swoony (if pointedly self-conscious) erotic display, Sunairi is both available and aloof. He offers his delicate, almost feminine boyishness along with a handful of pink cock, a puckered asshole, a spurt of cum.

This humid mix of innocence and perversity is whipped into an ejaculatory froth for Sunairi's neopsychedelic collages and installations. Tightly wound and explosive, these pieces are rarely confined to a conventional frame or a recognizable shape (although an installation in Frankfurt last fall featured a series of coiled and sinuous snakelike forms). Instead, they proliferate across entire walls like a hungry, self-replicating organism. Though some pieces appear shredded, with dangling bits and ragged edges, their construction belies their looseness: The work's delirious eccentricity is grounded in meticulously layered cut-and-paste, every piece of which began as a photograph. So Sunairi is both subject and subtext: His face emerges from ribboning swatches of his flesh or bubbles sampling the pattern of his T-shirt. The texture, drape, color, and print of his clothes--all fetishized, almost fragrant with body heat--provide most of the collages' purely abstract elements and recall Wolfgang Tillmans's photos of shucked-off jeans and rumpled jerseys. But Sunairi never allows individual images to become too significant, too weighty. He uses photos over and over in a shifting kaleidoscope of brightly colored shards that looks as if Jess had taken his scissors to vintage Jimmy de Sana or Dubuffet had had his way with Jack Smith.

Sunairi's artist's statements read like William Burroughs's cut-up texts, but, like the collages, their attempt to turn narcissism into myth is perversely charming. Though he's already designated most of his recent work "early Hiroshi," Sunairi teases the idea of the serious artist by dropping his pants and keeping things sexy, funny, gorgeous--and, incidentally, smart.

David Rimanelli on DARIA MARTIN

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED DARIA MARTIN'S ART IN A group exhibition at the Works on Paper gallery in Los Angeles. She was showing pencil and watercolor drawings, but I found out that she was also doing videos, about which there was a very favorable "buzz." At the time, Martin was completing the MFA program at UCLA, where she had studied with Lari Pittman and Charles Ray, among others. (Ray in fact lent her the camera for her first film, In the Palace, 2000, which she exhibited for the MFA show and at the Analix Forever gallery in Switzerland.) I was curating a group exhibition, "Sentimental Education," for Deitch Projects in New York, and as soon as I got a look at Martin's video and film work, I knew she was indeed a must.

In this era of omnipresent digital technology, special effects don't seem that special anymore. As if in response to the mundane extraordinary, Martin makes good use of the charms of the archaic in her films and videos, deploying what she calls "low-tech magic" to reinvigorate the art of the moving image. Or better, the art of the barely moving image--Martin's works feel rapturously sedated. In the videos Runaways and Shangri-La, both 1999, she situates her models within plainly fake, painted dioramas. The living figures remain almost still while the artificial landscapes gently move--in Runaways, the dust of snow; in Shangri-La, the languidly falling motes. The mood is foggy, distant, romantic, sensual. At the same time, the artist's reluctance to conceal the artifice--she seems to revel in phoniness--restores to these vistas a certain measure of self-consciousness. They sustain an invitation to bask in never-never-land dreaminess even as the nuts-and-bolts seams of the productions insist on their distance. Seduced and abandoned...

The subtle shifts between stasis and movement, historicity and timeliness, are even more pronounced in Martin's 16 mm film In the Palace. The title refers to Giacometti's The Palace at 4 a.m., its spindly, skeletal forms recast here as a cage for the actor-models, who strike exaggerated, balletic poses evocative of Martha Graham. If Martin relishes the seeming naivete of early modernist art, still she is wary of the dangers of uncritical nostalgia. So while she skirts the too-easy posture of camp, she is nevertheless unafraid of partaking in the thrill of a moment in history when the avant-garde was consumed by the problem of what it meant to be "modern people"--a mood very much in keeping with our own uncertainly forwarded-looking times.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist on ANRI SALA

ANRI SALA, A YOUNG ALBANIAN FILMMAKER, KEEPS surprising us with his mysterious, deeply personal yet insistently political films and videos. Intervista-- Finding the Words, 1998, which I first saw in Stockholm early last year at the Moderna Museet's survey "After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe," takes as its point of departure Sala's accidental discovery of documentary footage from the late '70s of his mother's official trip to Germany as an activist in the Albanian Youth Communist Union. The black-and-white film captures the artist's mother at rallies and award ceremonies as well as giving an interview, but the accompanying sound track has been lost. Hoping to reconstitute the missing dialogue, Sala tried in vain to dig up transcripts of the interview. Finally, a lip reader was able to resuscitate the mother's youthful voice. "Twenty years later, my mother has to face her words pronounced at the time. What would she say today?" the artist asks. Intervista explores the tension and contradic tions between past and memory, between Sala's personal family history and the collective history of his country.

In Nocturnes, 1999, shown at Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia, earlier this year, Sala teases out the feelings of solitude harbored by two quite different men--a former UN peacekeeper in the Balkans and a tropical-fish enthusiast who has strange visions. The theme of inner exile is further explored in Uomo Duomo, 2000, a short film loop of an old man waiting (for what?) in Milan's Duomo, like a character out of Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard, seemingly imprisoned in his own self-imposed silence.

Herbert Muschamp on WINKA DUBBELDAM

NINE OUT OF TEN ARCHITECTURE JOURNALISTS WANT to write about Winka Dubbeldam the moment they hear of her. Admittedly, most are just after an excuse to write her name down for the pure euphonic pleasure. Winka, Winka, Winka Dubbeldam. Sweet and Hot.

You can find both sweet and hot in the work, as well as the person, of this young architect; in fact you can find almost anything--save stupidity. Architecturally, the sweetness comes of Dubbeldam's receptivity to light, weather, views--not to mention environmental tangibles like zoning restrictions. The heat is in the seductive forms she conjures--and the fact that people are paying attention.

Dubbeldam, who was born in Rotterdam and now lives in New York, belongs to a group of young architects who have adopted the folded plane as a favorite spatial motif. Among the brainier ones, the motif holds ideological as well as formal value. Used to blur the border between, say, wall and roof, the fold makes physical the notion that a worldview is at every moment contingent, made up of a changing set of slices through reality. Sliced one way, the world appears divided, a vast gulf opens between black and white, male and female, north and south; sliced another way, the gulf is barely visible, a hairline crack. A grid is just a facet. Unfold a map, a rent stub falls out, a telephone rings, a cloudless sky; refold until you find a name, a brand, a hard, gemlike flame. Swallow.

Fold a polemic and find decorating tips for a hairdresser's shop. Dubbeldam has just remodeled the facade and interiors of Aida, a salon on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Bring Adam Phillips's On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored to read while you're waiting for your tint job. Dubbeldam conceived the space to relieve tedium. A continuous wrapper folds around the exterior and then inside the tunnel-shaped space, creating pockets for greeting, waiting, shampooing, and cutting. Each fold creates a different angle, a changed light, a fresh perspective, a new look, a chain of connotations--just a trim, or discontent.

It's taking a while to get Maashaven Towers, a residential project in Rotterdam, off the ground, or rather, out of the water. This three-tower complex, connected to an old grain silo on the shore, will rise from piers jutting into a harbor. The folded axis of each thirty-story tower responds to light conditions and views. Service and circulation functions thicken their middles. Approvals are pending. Why do we not have a row of towers like these on the riverbank of Manhattan?

Construction does begin this winter on a residential tower on Greenwich Street. An eleven-story parabuilding, with a folding facade of metal and glass, wraps around the side and top of an existing brick loft structure just north of Canal Street. Balconies everywhere.