Who are the artists to watch during the year ahead? For the fourth year running, artforum asked a dozen critics, curators, and cognoscenti--including, for the first time, several artists--to introduce the work of an up-and-comer they feel shows special promise for the future.

A HABITUAL COMPILER OF LISTS AND AN AMATEUR Cartographer, Simon Evans seeks, through his self-consciously rough-edged art, to impose a semblance of order onto the chaos of his daily existence. Born in South London in 1972, Evans arrived in San Francisco in 1994 as a professional skateboarder, though he would soon distance himself from the world of pro skating and turn his attention to making art. Self-taught in both vocations, Evans draws an analogy between the skater's and artist's daily negotiation of his immediate surroundings--an activity Evans identifies as "problem solving."

His "list" works--text pieces that collide the humdrum aesthetics of a handwritten shopping list with a strong dose of adolescent existentialism--read like furtive memorandums. Among the twenty individuals who comprise the roster of People You Must Be Nice To, 2003, Evans identifies not only his doctor but "all those that make your food" and the "Jesus type with the good resume." The twelve-item list of Things That Don't Exist, 2002, includes, reasonably enough, "slow motion." All that's wrong with sex, 2002, begins, somewhat gloomily, with "death and babies" and eventually poses the conundrum "What about the fact that at some point sex has to include another person."

For his debut show in 2002--held in the closet-size back-room gallery at San Francisco's Adobe Books, a secondhand bookstore that doubles as a drop-in community center for itinerant artistic and literary types--Evans developed a satire based loosely around Gulliver's Travels that ultimately charted his own emotional landscapes. Popular T-shirts, 2002, for example, a drawinglike collage that masqueraded as a mail-order form for crudely rendered slogan T-shirts, privileged the somewhat dysfunctional aspect of Evans's outlook. Among the merchandise provisionally offered for sale were shirts bearing such sad-sack slogans as "Everyone wants to have sex with a teenager but no one wants to date one" and "very sad." This misanthropic posturing was apparent in a number of works in the artist's 2003 solo at San Francisco's Jack Hanley Gallery. Central to that show was Evans's most ambitious work to date, The World, 2003, which reimagines San Francisco--or something that passes for San Francisco--as an island fringed by a ring of piers like broken teeth. Employing the free-associative method of an aspiring psychogeographer, Evans set about renaming virtually every city block and street. The financial district has thus been reinscribed as "Currency HQ"; elsewhere, neighborhoods such as "Medium Poor" and "Immigrants Stink" speak of social divisions that still predominate in the Bay Area. Created from line drawings made on several hundred fragmentary pieces of notebook paper and precariously held together with clear adhesive tape, Evans's island kingdom appears positively entropic, as if teetering on the verge of collapse. In Counting the Dead, 2003, more than a hundred dead flies were stuck onto a sheet of paper in specimen fashion, each named for someone or something departed: a cryptic list that included Anne Frank, the "Dog I Mistakenly Walked to Death," and "Uncle Brian who drowned in his Cab." In 1,000 Smiles, 2003, a thousand Hollywood grins have been divorced from the pages of magazines like Teen People and arranged in grid fashion to form a permanent sampler of insincerity.

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Evans acknowledges a debt to Paul Klee, whom he claims to admire principally for his titles. However, it's not difficult to read in Evans's work echoes of Klee's scratchy, outsiderish mannerisms and also to detect a simultaneous desire on Evans's part to follow Klee's famous impulse to "take a line for a walk." Simon Evans's works take great pleasure in their self-immersed, ambulatory logic--a logic chock-full of neurotic detours and shortcuts and, inevitably, a few wrong turns and dead ends.

YOU'RE WALKING DOWN A LONDON STREET ONE evening and you spot a man wearing a weird, sci-fi backpack--a humped piece of bottle-green, sparkle-finish fiberglass inset with halved tennis balls and a circular loudspeaker that's chiming out the chords to Lou Reed's "Perfect Day." A female passerby is singing the lyrics (they're flashing up on a video screen in a nearby shopwindow) in a tiny, squeaky, heartfelt voice; watching, fascinated and apparently longing to take a turn, is a pretty young man wearing a butcher's apron and the surly pout of a young Joe Dallesandro. This slice of plein air karaoke is being filmed, which is fortunate. It's a very Guy Bar-Amotz moment.

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The Israeli-born, London-based artist (wearing the funky mobile sound system in this 2001 performance, entitled Positive Vibration and held outside the Architecture Foundation) has made several works involving karaoke and weirdly mutated loudspeakers since graduating from Goldsmiths College in 1997. Burning Love, 2000, a contribution to a two-person show at Deptford's APT gallery, invited visitors to sing along to Elvis--the lyrics again shown on-screen in authentic karaoke style, the backing music and the audience's vocal efforts booming through suspended speakers in the shape of rockets. For a 2002 solo show at East London's One in the Other, Bar-Amotz went further, leaving the equipment for a whole, as-yet-unformed band--keyboards, bass, drum machine--lying around and plugged into molded fiberglass backpack-speakers in the shape of dragons, slugs, and grasshoppers: a seductive, wrong-footing aesthetic seemingly designed to distract one from stage fright.

But Bar-Amotz's interest in coaxing unconventional performances from gallery visitors does not rest simply on some formal idea of turning artworks into audience-led matrices of possibility: He sees karaoke in particular, in its ideal state, as an extension of the Barthesian concept (see "Musica Practica" in Image-Music-Text [1977]) of "growling," an affirmation of human corporeality in an increasingly virtual and homogenized world. And he describes his use of homemade loudspeakers, inspired by hanging around the hyperspecific sound systems created by dub DJs, as a "stand against the approach of hi-fi's Brave New World, which is a universal sound system that can play all music and any sound but will ultimately average their qualities." Bar-Amotz and fellow artist Fabienne Audeoud spelled this out, wordlessly, in a performance in 2000 at W139 Gallery in Amsterdam. For fifteen minutes nonstop he groaned and she ululated, the sound emerging from white speakers that resembled cartoon star shapes, their woofers made out of black plastic buckets.

The acme of his production so far, however, shown in 2003 both in a one-off performance at Tate Britain and subsequently at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, is Dance Machine. Easier to operate than to describe, this is a sound-producing system activated by bodily movement; as they register in the eye of the camera, different motions and different colors trigger specific samples, ranging from a slammed car door to gunfire and from rich orchestral pads to sexual noises. At Tate Britain, dancer and choreographer Jasmin Vardimon demonstrated the machine, playing it like a multitimbre harp and recalling Clara Rockmore's extraordinarily melodic performances on the theremin, an electronic device better known for producing a tuneless whoop. That, however, was an expression of Vardimon's innate litheness. If you get in front of the Dance Machine (it's appearing in Bar-Amotz's solo show at Project, Dublin, in May) and fear you'll produce a musique concrete cacophony, don't sweat. The important thing is to remember the ontological necessity of making a spectacle of yourself and, as James Brown would say, get up, get into it, and get involved.

IN AN INTERVIEW IN THESE PAGES LAST SUMMER, French theorist Jean-Claude Lebensztejn invoked Duchamp's elusive, lyrical notion of the "infra-thin" as one way to think about the complex relationships between Photorealist paintings and their source materials. The evocative neologism expressed Duchamp's fascination with finely pitched distinctions between apparently identical objects or conditions; with the way closely related things tend to seep together across their shared edges yet somehow remain distinct and integral (among his poetic examples: the warmth that lingers on a seat after someone has risen from it). More than simple adjacency, infra-thin association proposes patterns of causality, of transition and exchange, between extremely similar but nevertheless discrete things or situations--like a Photorealist canvas and the photo on which it is based. In fact, the concept suggests, it's precisely in the subtlest slippages between seemingly analogous formal, psychological, or temporal states that the richest creative possibilities are generated.

Elaborating the processes of the first-generation Photorealists from whom her approach descends, New Yorker Judith Eisler has found room to work in this territory of generative recapitulation, in the razor-thin spaces between the "original" and the faithful copy. Her technically accomplished paintings emerge from a working process built around a dizzyingly interdependent constellation of re-presentations: A film buff, Eisler spends hours watching videos (typically psychologically complex and formally offbeat films from the '60s and '70s) with a camera by her side, pausing the tape periodically to photograph the screen. She then grids the resulting photos and painstakingly re-creates the images in oil on large canvases.

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Though she started as an abstract painter, Eisler had begun experimenting with realistic images, based on nature photos, by the early '90s; her initial works in this mode were paintings of animals. Within a few years, however, Eisler determined that only film imagery could provide the possibilities for motion and surprise--what she calls "apparitions"--with which she wanted to imbue her paintings. Emerging from an intricately telescoped succession of subtly deforming iterations--from the cinematographer's lens to the film in the camera to the final edit of the film; from finished film to videotape; from videotape to television screen to photograph; and, finally, from the photograph to her painting--Eisler's new technique produced images layered with echoes and fleeting presences, traces of the mediations they'd previously endured. Her work translates cinematic effects into moments of painterly bravura: Controlled bursts of rich color balance against virtually monochrome passages whose hues seem to have been wrung out from too many trips over the VHS heads, and the indeterminate, complexly lit reflective surfaces Eisler favors in her chosen frames often suggest the phantasmal figural phasing of a lap dissolve.

As a blizzard swirls outside her windows, Eisler is revisiting several recent paintings in the run-up to her solo exhibition at Chelsea's Cohan and Leslie gallery this month--the seductively disorienting spatial treatment and saturated ocher palette of Smoker (Cruel Story of Youth ), 2003, echoing the florid mise-en-scene of Oshima's classic tale of disaffection; the trippy monochromatic mirroring and partitioning of Car Surface (Performance), 2003, suggesting both the skinny-tie London mob milieu and identity games of Nicolas Roeg's controversial cult favorite. Tacked on the wall between them is a Polaroid of what the artist calls one of her most fully realized paintings: Car Trouble (Evil Dead), 2003--a fragment of a female figure from Sam Raimi's creepy masterpiece, buzzing with atmospheric light effects that seem to envelop her silhouette like wisps of damask smoke--is Eisler at her most subtle and compositionally complex. Like the images reproduced here, the photographic stand-in can only hint at the experience of the actual painting. Yet what it lacks in fidelity, it makes up for in conceptual serendipity--presenting us with yet another iteration, another space between the thing and its duplicate, in which the multiple infra-thin correlations of Eisler's work can be seen in dynamic operation.

IF A YOUNG ARTIST HASN'T ATTENDED ONE OF THE big-name grad schools, his or her work needs either a miracle or a very catchy hook to make any impact on the art world. For LA artist Matthew Greene, that hook is so-called new gothic art, the genre of transgressive, violence-soaked, heavy metal--flavored work currently piquing the interest of American gallerists and critics for what has been termed its "post-9/11, post-Columbine" aesthetic. But while Greene's flair for romanticizing the horrific has made his work and new gothic a cozy fit thus far, there's too much distance between his intricate, subtext-laden, inferno-like compositions and the scenery-chewing artworks that have defined (and stigmatized) this genre to leave his efforts stranded under that gross rubric for long.

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Trained as a sculptor at the Atlanta College of Art, Greene switched to drawing and painting when he realized that effectively synthesizing his disparate fascinations with radical politics, plant biology, and the particular head rush caused by disturbing and/or pornographic imagery would require more power to suspend disbelief than sculpture, with its physical literality, could provide. After moving to Los Angeles in the late '90s, Greene discovered that his content-weighted objects were at odds with the prevailing interest in overt abstraction; he spent the next few years in self-imposed solitude, reinventing his process until the art world's newfound taste for the quasiteenage and nihilistic brought a wave of curators to his door. Greene's work was first showcased last summer in the director's office at the Los Angeles gallery Sandroni Rey, whereupon its quality and timeliness--combined with the novelty of a fresh arrival on the art scene sans the usual pedigree--made him one of the city's most talked-about new artists.

Greene's recent work takes its stylistic cues from the apocalyptic, pre-CGI-enhanced realism that characterizes horror films and rock-album illustration of the early '70s. His busy, carefully executed pictures portray a world in which nature has run amok, corrupting normative social behavior and effectively reducing humans to sex-crazed, warring playmates. Each drawing and painting organizes one chaotic scene into a distinct, eye-popping pattern, at once impressively precise, unwieldy in its design, and ruptured by the visceral effect of its sensational subject matter. These crude, strangely seductive, trippy graphics are themselves embodiments of the primitivist nightmare Greene depicts--their elaborate amateurism a kind of aesthetic monster forcibly revising the rules for what constitutes a sophisticated contemporary art practice.

In a typical Greene painting or drawing, a crowd of female or transgendered figures is fused into a puzzle-like, orgiastic clump, enmeshed within the structure of a foreboding forest landscape. Often the crowd is flanked by a monumentally rendered rock guitarist whose feral sonic thrashing fuels the figures' hedonistic and/or violent interactions. For Greene, such decadent, paranormal visions constitute arguments against Western society's abandonment of the magical beliefs and ecologically derived philosophies of so-called primitive cultures. His art hallucinates miniworlds untouched by capitalism, patriarchy, and class issues--contemporary variations on the seductive dreamscapes that preoccupied the imaginations of premodern artists. Greene's are romantic reveries cramped and damaged by a context from which pure romanticism has been expunged. Their "objectionable" content, psychedelic simulacra, and rebellious rock-music timbre might be misconstrued as bratty, in-your-face theatrics, but to Greene they are illustrations of the few remaining ways in which passionate truth-seeking plays out in an era devoid of character.

Matthew Greene's meticulous, raucous work can be seen this month in group shows at Anton Kern Gallery in New York and Ingalls & Associates in Miami. In February he joins fellow neo-goth Banks Violette in a two-artist show at the Los Angeles gallery Peres Projects, where he also solos next fall.

GARETH JAMES SAYS HE WANTS TO CREATE OBJECTS that possess the "complexity of a bent spoon." That statement, like James's art, reveals a deadpan humor that masks surprising depth. It's an apt metaphor, too, for someone who refers to his artistic practice as a "topographical system"--a continuous flow of recurring ideas about labor, failure, the politics of property, and a cultural complex dominated by global capitalism. A Welsh artist who grew up in London and lives in New York City, James explores these concepts through sculptures, installations, publications, and miscellaneous hard-to-classify activities. Connecting these diverse practices is a consistent attitude combining wit and pathos.

One primary focus has been works made from white paper and black marker that oscillate between drawing and sculpture and range from postcard-size dioramas to immersive environments. These works' loose, cartoonish outlines evoke an affectionately pathetic, almost comic sensibility that belies their underlying sophistication. In most cases, their complexity derives from James's self-imposed challenge: to create three-dimensional forms from a single sheet of paper. Consequently, the construction process becomes part and parcel of the sculptures' irony, akin to a send-up of romantic notions of artistic struggle.

The content reinforces their humorous underpinnings. For example, The Department of Finding the Strength to Carry On, 1997, is a small paper maquette of an imaginative cross between a mundane office cubicle and a tropical desert island. James's sculpture of a hospital gurney, part of Patent Palace, 2000, sags in the middle from its own weight, requiring real wooden crutches beneath its base to support it. A wry commentary, if you will, on the ailing state of art, the gurney also exemplifies how James's paper works have lately assumed darker undertones, depicting references to injury, violence, and disaster. The results are a bit Virilio-meets-Beckett, merging speculation on the generative potential of the "accident" with the need to persist despite absurd circumstances. Often exhibited along-side the paper sculptures are the intricate templates James designed to build them, which can seem like maps of fantastical locations, whereby the lines initially used to demarcate folds and cuts become boundaries delimiting real estate. The templates, in this way, riff on the notion of formal properties, making evident the sculpture's structure while providing an implied story line.

Narrative transposition is engaged in other works as well, such as an artist's book consisting of bizarre anecdotes written by hand-"correcting" published exhibition reviews from an arts magazine (renamed Polieze in the spirit of double entendre). James appropriated the book's title, Kill the Idiotz (1998), from graffiti he documented that reversed the terminating s. He borrowed this coyly self-implicating statement again for his participation in the 2003 Havana Biennial, arranging for the phrase to be anonymously painted onto scaffolding as a protest against the hypocritical politics that complicated mounting the exhibition in Cuba and prevented many artists, including James, from traveling there.

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James's iconoclasm has been more extreme. For his 2001 exhibition at American Fine Arts, titled "wRECONSTRUCTION," James's fictional alter ego, Storm van Helsing, a European color theorist and curator, closed down the gallery. Van Helsing did, however, create an installation--walls painted different store-bought colors with ridiculous names: Just beyond Deep Forest, next to Golden Laughter, was Chelsea Prize (a gorgeous, saturated red). Invited guests could access the vibrant potpourri only by making appointments to talk with Storm (a role played by both James and the gallery's late owner, Colin de Land) about the possibilities and limitations of running a gallery within a commercially driven art world. Van Helsing succinctly summed up his resistant position: "Just because you can, ... doesn't mean you should." Looking ahead, let's hope James will.

GREAT MEN WITH BEARDS: SOCRATES, JESUS, LEONARDO, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Dostoyevsky. Crazy men with beards: some of the above, Ivan the Terrible, Charles Manson, Ted Kaczynski, Osama bin Laden, John Walker Lindh. Bearded Dionysian revelers, spiritual visionaries, and/or megalomaniacal kooks: G.I. Gurdjieff, Anton LaVey, Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Facially hirsute revolutionaries, often Communists: Lenin, Trotsky, Che, Fidel, some of the above. At apexart last summer, Nate Lowman assembled images in various media--photos, found objects, paintings, photocopies--of bearded men covering a wall thirty-odd feet long (More or Less, 2001-2003). His own father appeared, as did Lindh, Kaczynski, the Shoe Bomber, Manson, Jim Morrison, Ice Cube, Kurt Cobain, et al. Almost all of those depicted derive from the extended terrain of popular culture and the daily news. (Only one picture displayed a great beardless one, Robert Smithson, who was vertically bisected by the legend, courtesy Tina Turner/Barbara Kruger, "We don't need another hero.") A snapshot showed a friend of Lowman's wearing a gas mask, "a kind of proxy for the beard," he says. The clean-shaven artist shies away from any autobiographical/oedipal import suggested by the presence of his own father, but the psychological symbolism of the beard seems obvious: masculinity, power, authority, wisdom, but also dirtiness, sloth, marginality, insanity--a chain of signifiers blandly incorporating numerous authors from the Loeb Classical Library, nameless homeless guys, and scruffy art boys. The beard functions as a fetish in the classically Freudian sense (i.e., penis stand-in). But as Freud remarks in his 1940 essay "Medusa's Head," "a multiplication of penis symbols signifies castration." Ergo, beard equals potency, but in its proliferation of hairs connotes the scary possibility of the opposite.

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Attesting that Lowman's work is "about" the group psychosis of American life a la Natural Born Killers is easy but spoils the fun, whereas psychoanalytic boiler-plate proves strangely liberating. In Untitled (Thug Love), 2003, at Nicole Klagsbrun last fall, the artist juxtaposed Xeroxed images of the messy corpses of Bonnie and Clyde with a familial snapshot of DC snipers Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad. A hand-painted (and misquoted) lyric of Ja Rule's unifies the couples: "Baby say yeah, would you kill for me?" Another piece--History of the SUV/No Blond Jokes, 2003--doubles Xeroxes of Sharon Tate and Nicole Brown Simpson, while also including a painting of a mug shot of the teenage (and thin) Linda Tripp, arrested for loitering. Lowman pasted some bumper stickers on canvas, with messages like "In Goddess We Trust" and "Denial Works for Me." His own painted text reads BLOND JOKES VERY NOT IN STYLE. Lowman: "Free association isn't free. And it isn't free, either!" Baby say yeah ...

Warhol, Richard Prince, and Cady Noland perambulate in the genealogical background of Lowman's practice, although his dispersal of images through various media even within the same piece, as well as their often striking material cruddiness, signals a departure, a deliberate falling apart. It would be wrong, though, to assert that his works are "anti-aesthetic" in a way somehow at odds with his evident precursors. The persistent, well-nigh obsessive collection, collation, manipulation, and arrangement of pictures on a wall implies its own aestheticism, its own low-tech opulence, the luxury of decrepitude and desuetude, the abundance of replete, depleted media figures. A digitally enlarged color Xerox of a National Enquirer photo of Michael Jackson's chimp Bubbles crops up in More or Less. The latest Jackson scandal, tiresome yet fascinating yet deja lu, demonstrates this very process of symbolic superflux and vacuity working in tandem. And as Lowman has no fear of trafficking in the obvious, or rather the inevitable, our greatest living work of art (as attested by his recent mug shot) might as well enter the artist's corpus more fully, perhaps in an excavation of depilation.

MODESTY AND IRONY HAVE LATELY PROVED POPULAR, if unfortunately tedious, replacements for now-deflated master narratives of painting. Tomma Abts's independent, self-contained canvases eschew these alternatives; their appeal rests rather on intensity, a concentration of affect and accomplishment in a distracted age.

Raised and trained in Germany, Abts has worked in London since the mid-'90s, in part because it offers her independence from the dominant German painting tradition and the Berlin art scene. Her early work encompassed structuralist film and Color Field painting, but for the past several years she has been making smallish easel paintings, which she has exhibited in one-person shows in Europe, including two at greengrassi gallery in London, in 1999 and 2002 (her New York track record consists of one painting shown at the Wrong Gallery last year).

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These recent works combine heavily worked surfaces, slightly off colors, and quasi-geometric images, a description that is, perhaps, less than riveting--but already we've run up against an interesting question: Can abstract painting have an image? Not imagery in the sense that Peter Halley's ironic, referential work depicts "abstraction," but imagery in the sense of a picture that seems separate from the material surface of the painting. In works such as Mennt, 2002, which featured in the artist's one-woman show at greengrassi that year, heavily layered brushstrokes and underlying linear forms--the textural elements--do not obviously align with the visual design that we perceive. Abts treats the image as an object--not, a la Stella and Judd, as the physical painting per se, but as painted shapes that float above the surface, catching the light, or dip in and out of a ground that has its own, often independent topography.

This optical illusionism can be quite illogical; often the images throw shadows that aren't where you'd want them to be for it all to make sense. Abts's work calls attention to the relationship between literal physicality and illusionistic image, between process and product. The relationship is insistently neither literal nor reductive: She offers imagination, of a materialist rather than a surrealist sort. Abts creates a little world in which image and surface don't match up, in which shadows appear where they shouldn't, in which what looks like it's below is really above.

This world is not static. Several of the canvases, such as Tedo, 2002, have a central focus or point from which a starburst of imagery explodes, the movement out from center reversing the usual direction of perspective in toward a vanishing point. The blades of these central compositions seem to rotate as well, and once you imagine the image rotating, you realize that certain of these "arms" are longer than others, and that if they began spinning, some of them would spill over the edge, or crumple against its boundaries.

While Abts's paintings are difficult to date, these starburst paintings run the greatest risk of period reference, to psychedelia, but they never quite stray over the line. Ert, 2003, the best, most complicated and idiosyncratic of these central images, looks completely new and fresh. Its outward swirls refuse neat geometries and unified design; rather, different sections seem to move at different rates, as if the image were a circulating fan whose rotation interrupted and distorted glimpses of the scene behind it, a seemingly simple, rounded diamond shape.

Abts's work embodies the life of a painting, its internal relations, and its finish as if there were plenty of room for new relations and solutions (which of course there is), as well as a very insistent personal sensibility. These paintings describe something rare and valuable in their complex relations between surface and image, between process and product, between her touch and our vision: the difference between the privateness of her experience and the publicness of ours, respected, not effaced, and held in tension.

MICOL ASSAEL IS DEVOTED TO ROCK CLIMBING AND hiking along cliffs in rugged countryside, an endeavor that demands enormous self-control, a great deal of balance, and a touch of madness. The view from above can be breathtaking: One feels as though at the edge of the world, in a dangerous zone between land and its end. Assael--who became intrigued by mathematics, physics, and their relation to art while in high school in Rome in the mid-'90s; who, still a teenager, knocked on arte povera artist Jannis Kounellis's door to discuss tragedy and the notion of necessity; who later studied the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger at university; and who now, an artist in her own right, has particular enthusiasm for the work of Bruce Nauman, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Serra--creates inspiring artworks that re-place the body and authentic experience at the center of artistic practice after years during which digital art and the idea of virtual reality seemed to hold the art world in thrall. Similarly, she does not typically deploy documentary video or photography in her work because of their mediated nature but rather creates environments that are truly extreme.

Last summer's Venice Biennale was famously hot and humid. Simply visiting the show felt like a test of one's endurance. But when you entered Assael's untitled installation in "The Zone" (Massimiliano Gioni's show of young Italian artists), you felt thrilled by how utterly unbearable an environment could be. The artist built a thirteen-by-thirteen-foot room out of massive sheets of iron. The only openings were the entrance and exit. Assael then furnished the room sparely, with a bed, a cabinet, a table; if such items normally evoke a domestic setting, here they were found objects made of iron (the kinds of things you'd more likely find in a factory). Ten electrical transformers sat on the table under a glass box, each boosting its 220 volts up to 9,000 volts and sending power surging through a maze of wires to glass bulbs underneath the furniture, making them spark. Gale-force fans blew the stultifying air around in the space--under the bed, below the table, and into the closet--which somehow had the effect of making the room even hotter. Interestingly, on a cool day at the end of the show, the fans created a cold wind that made the place feel icy.

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Assael's installations heighten our senses while suggesting risk and resistance as interesting mental and physical loci to explore. Although her works are also truly dangerous at times, she does not really focus on danger. Rather, she explores what risk taking means, especially as it opens up insights into the psychological and philosophical area where agency--intentionality and the responsibility and awareness of acting (or of choosing)--meets other mental realities, such as memories and dreams, that interfere with our intentions. This sort of interference occurs, for example, when a physical stimulus causes a psychological reaction such as fear, which then modifies our bodily experience, often resulting in a loss of self-control. Assael's world is certainly a visual one, but it is first of all tactile, atmospheric, and acoustic. In Naidalur, 2000, an early work that was still metaphoric, she placed transparent glass semispheres over holes in an outdoor wall to encapsulate air--in part alluding to a shelter called Naidalur in a deserted area of Iceland she had just visited. In The Theory of Homogeneous Turbulence, 2002, metaphor came true in a nighttime winter installation in the woods at the Villa di Medici in Rome (at Chiara Parisi's invitation): Assael hid three powerful fans behind bushes; a white light rotated and flashed high in the trees while its electrical frequency was miked and amplified. With this oblique reference to Heidegger's Holzwege (Off the Beaten Path; 1950) and perhaps even to Shakespeare's King Lear, Assael wanted her audience to experience being lost in the elements, nearly out of control, in a storm.

IN A SENSE THIS IS A SECOND TAKE. ELEVEN YEARS ago, Scott Grodesky was the subject of an Openings column in these pages by the artist Peter Halley. Halley was interested in a group of younger painters working in the interstices between popular image sources, Conceptual strategies, and a detached relationship to the physicality of painting. He saw the twenty-four-year-old Grodesky's work as evidence of the beleaguered medium's viability in a climate skeptical of painting's relevance. But times have changed (millennia have changed), and from our early-twenty-first-century viewpoint it seems a bit defensive even to address that endgame model of painting's plight. The whole issue feels like a phantom limb of modernism, still consuming our attention but functionally departed. Aspects of what interested Halley in Grodesky's approach remain, but there has been an enormous evolution in his work--and in our reasons for engaging it.

His recent paintings are surely some of the oddest being made today. They can be hard to see when you first look at them, and they feel lame until their demure rigor asserts itself. Both structured and flimsy, they embody a combination of careful plotting and wan execution (curiously reminiscent of both trecento Italian masters and the illustrational branch of Conceptual art) that locates them in a place all their own.

The clunkiness of the work is redeemed by a central fact: Grodesky has a System. He constructs his subjects within a matrix best described as reverse perspective; normal conventions of scale and distance are inverted, so the elements of the scene that are nominally closer to the picture plane are smaller than the more distant things, which loom strangely at the most recessive layer of the image. Furthermore, he doesn't repaint or overpaint anything. After mapping the image in jittery pencil lines, he adds color in watery membranes of acrylic paint, leaving the weave of the canvas fully visible and giving the hues the quality of translucent tints. The finished paintings are transparent in every sense of the term (except, perhaps, emotionally).

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Grodesky paints the things he knows: his family, his apartment, his city (his eyes?)--and his unrepentant filtering of these immediate psychic objects through the System at first appears stubborn, then brave. When he applies reverse perspective to images of the city, the results are like colorized mechanical drawings; because there is no way to interpret them expressively, they seem either incompetent or the by-product of a different cultural value system--much in the way that the space of traditional Chinese painting can look wrong to us.

Far more unsettling and full of potential aesthetic energy are Grodesky's paintings of family, domestic scenes, and the disembodied human eye. Loved ones framed within his system suffer egregious fun-house alterations: Distended bodies appear to slip off improbably proportioned furniture, babies become demented giants, relations of loving equals are unbalanced and take on connotations of dominance or worship--not unlike drawings by children of deadbeat dads, where Mom is huge and Dad ant-size. Considered psychologically rather than formally, Grodesky's systematic perspectival skewing bespeaks a lonely world of lost intimacies and looming estrangements.

The small paintings of eyes may inscribe the programmatic core of Grodesky's art. Cyclopean, reflective, somewhat gross, they depict the special hardware of our corporeal selves, which is the construction and relay site for all that we see. He shows this ubiquitous orb as a relentless power. With lashes like worms and irises like gasoline on water, it hangs unblinking behind the situations that are the fodder for his images. Beyond this last physical barrier the mind itself is constructing these pictures within its own reference frames.

Today, with so much attention being paid to arguably retrograde painterly efforts, Grodesky's exploration in the forbidden zones between areas previously thought to be categorically exclusive exerts a strong fascination. The unique combination of conceptual rigor, disregard for traditional notions of technique, and direct connection to subject matter forms a peculiar vision whose depth is revealing itself over time.

IN THE FALL OF 2003, THE YOUNG ARGENTINE ARTIST and architect Tomas Saraceno made a public announcement, amply quoting Buckminster Fuller, who set an appropriately cosmological tone: "Spaceship Earth was so extraordinarily well invented and designed that to our knowledge humans have been on board it for two million years not even knowing that they were on board a ship." Saraceno was inviting us to witness an artwork of our own making, Projection, which would be realized on the evening of Saturday, November 8. Time: 6:32 to 8:31 PM EST. Place: Planet Moon. It was the day of a total lunar eclipse--a perfect moment for experimentation in the field of radically extended cinema. And indeed, everything came off as planned: "We" projected our earthly shadow on that other, smaller, celestial body. It turned black. For a moment it even seemed to disappear.

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Saraceno arrived in Europe in 2001, after studying art and architecture in Buenos Aires and attending a workshop there with the late Catalan architect Enric Miralles. He has since occupied his time studying with the visionary architect Peter Cook (in Frankfurt), assisting the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in his Berlin studio, and producing his own work, which has been included in any number of shows on the Continent, including the most recent Venice Biennales for architecture (2002) and art (2003). For "Utopia Station" at last summer's Biennale he designed a poster with a long and perplexing essay that includes a report from a birthday party in the vault of the legendary Max Planck Institute for Brain Science in Frankfurt: "I went into the basement to see Walter Hofer (artist) who runs the Electronic Microscope since 20 years ... One could see a 20,000 times enlarged synopsis in a rat's eye ... --I could see Molecules and Atoms! ... O boy ... From the bottom to the top this world is beautiful!" This childish sense of wonder and fascination with natural processes may be typical of Saraceno, but not all of his works involve advanced scientific devices. In fact, many of his projects are attractive precisely because of their simplicity: For his installation [infinity], 2001, he installed mirrors on the ceiling and floor of an elevator at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, then removed all the numbers from the buttons. At Belgrade's "Real Presence" show later that summer he exhibited, in a "gallery" on a public bus, Line 83, 2001, a suite of twenty-three black-and-white photographs of people who regularly traveled on that very line.

Is there a more elemental fantasy than that of weightlessness and elevation? I'm enthralled by Saraceno's whimsical collages of people lingering in the skies--resting, conversing, perhaps even living and working in the spaces created by semitransparent membranes hovering like clouds. As it happens, Saraceno has patented a new skin for so-called Lighter Than Air Vehicles (patent no. 202 06 527.8 SAR 7940 GM, granted in Munich in 2002). Taken quite seriously by European architects and a few major engineering companies, Saraceno's invention is based on a pioneering application of Aerogel, a material that, as the artist informs me, has the highest thermal insulation value, highest specific surface area, lowest density, smallest pore size, lowest refractive index, and lowest dielectric constant of any solid. One gram of Aerogel is enough to cover a football field. Saraceno believes it possible to produce very large bodies that could hover in the air for long periods, powered by solar energy alone. His contribution to a forthcoming show in Bonn will include a flying human being, he claims. You laugh, but we'll see. Maybe next time "Utopia Station" will take place not in Venice but somewhere a few kilometers above the lagoon.

"THE BEAUTIFUL BEND" WAS DONALD URQUHART'S first gallery show (at Magnani, in London, last year). "Gallery" is the key word here, as the artist has been in one show or another ever since he moved to London from his native Scotland in the early '80s and became part of that decade's high-camp club scene, which revolved around dressing up and could claim Leigh Bowery as one its central figures. In 1993 Urquhart and Sheila Tequila started their own "performance" club night (at Central Station) called the Beautiful Bend, where original artworks were painted directly onto the club's walls as decoration. When Central Station's owners got fed up with their space being repainted weekly, Urquhart began making ink drawings, which he photocopied and used as decoration illustrative of the club's ever-changing themes. After a five-year break--during which, among other things, he toured with Nicola Bowery's band Minty and wrote for the Modern Review and qx magazine--he restarted the Beautiful Bend in 1999 and kept it going until 2001. During that time I was a regular visitor to the club, and, amid the mayhem, I took great pleasure in studying the walls Urquhart had turned into one-off exhibitions of exquisite absurdity. One night was dubbed "The Plague Doctor," and the artist linked depictions of gay sex with Dickensian imagery of medieval doctors wearing protective leather hoods and beaks filled with herbs--the better for breathing among festering sores and decomposing corpses. At the end of the night I snatched a copy of his Plague Fuck drawing and took it home. These photocopies taped onto the moldy walls transcended their environment; though perfect within it, they were, at the same time, self-assuredly autonomous.

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It was a great joy to see the "mother drawings" of these "Plague Doctor" photocopies in Urquhart's second outing at Magnani, "A Present from the Zoo," an exhibition of the framed ink drawings on which all of the Beautiful Bend ephemera were based. Having survived the change of context, the work proved to be both of its time--a single night--and yet possessed of a broader, more lasting cultural relevance. The originals feature intricate details in jet black ink, fine outlines, and densely structured surfaces; such attention to texture and line is no doubt irrelevant to drawings made to be photocopied, but they were executed meticulously nonetheless.

The exhibition took its title--appropriately enough, given the importance Urquhart's work attaches to giving and receiving--from chapter 10 of P.L. Travers's Mary Poppins, in which the nanny with magical powers takes the children to the zoo one night, where they find a world turned upside down, with humans inside the cages and animals strolling freely about. At the end of the night the king cobra gives Mary Poppins a present--his own skin. Next morning when the children bring up their visit to the zoo, Mary Poppins denies that the nocturnal trip ever took place, but the children notice that she is wearing a snakeskin belt inscribed "A present from the zoo." This is also the source of Urquhart's inspiration to give away secondhand clothes at the Beautiful Bend ("the zoo of my imagination"). He wanted all his club-goers to "have evidence of having been there. They could take an article of clothing away from it," he explains, "so they'd wake up the next morning with an item they didn't remember as being theirs."

Urquhart also took part in "Bootleg," a one-day event in Spitalfields Market, London, last summer; there he further explored the relationship between his original artwork and photocopies of it. He recently completed his third play, Noel Noir, which was produced by London's Artangel in collaboration with young members of Cardboard Citizens, a homeless actors' collective, and performed at the Horse Hospital in London last month.

IN THE PAST YEAR, THE BALKANS HAVE BEEN THE subject of three major group exhibitions in Europe: "In Search of Balkania" at the Neue Galerie Graz, Austria; "Blood and Honey" at Sammlung Essl Kunst der Gegenwart, Vienna; and "In the Gorges of the Balkans" at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel. From what I could glean during a brief visit to the region last summer, this sudden glut of exposure has made many young artists there self-conscious and not a little resentful at having become fashionable en masse. And it brought new urgency to questions as to how--not to mention if--a sense of national belonging could be transcended. Between the Scylla of exoticism and the Charybdis of collective identity (a particularly dubious notion in that part of the world), returning to one's roots was a difficult option to entertain, as regionalism had become terrain ripe for exploitation rather than for healthy exploration.

Adrian Paci's work was a staple in all three of the Balkans shows. Since 1997 he has produced twelve video-based works, the majority of which openly investigate his status as an Albanian emigre living in Italy. Paci's story, however, is hardly unique. The conflict in Kosovo intensified what was already a steady stream of refugees fleeing general hardship. Paci became interested in exploring his circumstances only after observing his three-year-old daughter Jolanda reciting a series of improvised fairy tales, prompting him to pick up the video camera. The result was Albanian Stories, 1997, a seven-minute video that has since been widely exhibited in Europe, perhaps most prominently at Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana in 2000.

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Seated squarely before the camera, Paci's darling daughter meanders through a series of tales about a cat, a cow, and a rooster. The patronizing, feel-good sense one gets from indulging a child's endearingly convoluted narrative evaporates when Jolanda hails the arrival of "international forces" to whom the main characters in her story are grateful for rescuing them from the "dark forces." The allusion to the situation in Kosovo is startlingly clear, and its gravity is inversely proportional to her innocence. Whereas the conditions of exile specific to the Balkans are only one of numerous examples that together form a global narrative of displacement, the last place one would want to find proof of that narrative's universal character is in a fairy tale made up by a child.

Paci's daughters seem at home with what for their father was a state of rootlessness. Jolanda would be featured in another video, A Real Game, 1999, in which she is interviewed about her parents' circumstances before and after leaving Albania. Her younger sister, Tea, three years old at the time of filming, would appear in Apparizione, 2000, an installation in which a children's folk song is recited in call-and-response fashion by Tea and a group of aging relatives from Albania, who appear on opposing video projections. But why stop at the familial when Apparizione links generations through its transmission of a folkloric remnant of some greater collective memory?

As for roots, Paci's generation must negotiate between a nostalgia for Communism--"Ostalgie," as the Germans call it--and the very things Communism disavowed, such as the biographical and folkloric. In Vajtojca (The Weeper), 2002, Paci has chosen to explore the latter, cleverly predicating the video on his own death. After giving a professional weeper a cursory summary of his life, he lies corpselike while she weaves an arrestingly beautiful lament on his behalf. The performance ends when Paci sits upright and gives her a hug and a handshake for a job well done. The sudden introduction of a Balkan allegretto, however, retroactively casts the piece as slapstick. Paci rises from the dead, not as an artist, but as Roberto Benigni, whose film Life Is Beautiful required a large dose of schmaltz to carry off its shameless mixing of humor and Holocaust. The Weeper, on the other hand, manages to be sentimental without being ironic or cloying, simply by knowing how to place a maraschino cherry on a quiver of emotion centuries deep.

Matthew Higgs on SIMON EVANS

Matthew Higgs is a curator at the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, and a frequent contributor to Artforum.

Martin Herbert on GUY BAR-AMOTZ

Martin Herbert, a writer and critic based in Whitstable, Kent, most recently coauthored (with Hamza Walker) the first major publication on the work of British artist Darren Almond.

Jeffrey Kastner on JUDITH EISLER

New York-based critic Jeffrey Kastner is senior editor of the cultural journal Cabinet and a frequent contributor to the New York Times.

Dennis Cooper on MATTHEW GREENE

Dennis Cooper is a contributing editor of Artforum. His sixth novel, My Loose Thread (Canongate), was published last May.

Debra Singer on GARETH JAMES

Debra Singer is associate curator for contemporary art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where she is currently coorganizing this year's Whitney Biennial, which opens in March.

David Rimanelli on NATE LOWMAN

Artforum contributing editor David Rimanelli most recently curated "Women Beware Women," which appeared at Deitch Projects, New York, last November.

Katy Siegel on TOMMA ABTS

Katy Siegel, a contributing editor of Artforum, teaches contemporary art history and criticism at Hunter College, CUNY. She is currently completing Art & Money, coauthored with Paul Mattick and forthcoming this spring from Thames & Hudson.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev on MICOL ASSAEL

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, where she most recently curated a retrospective of the work of William Kentridge.

Carroll Dunham on SCOTT GRODESKY

New York-based artist Carroll Dunham, senior critic in painting at Yale University's School of Art, received his first major museum survey in 2002-2003 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.

Daniel Birnbaum on TOMAS SARACENO

Artforum contributing editor Daniel Birnbaum is director of the Stadelschule art academy in Frankfurt, cofounded its new Institute for Art Criticism, and also heads its Portikus gallery.

Wolfgang Tillmans on DONALD URQUHART

London-based artist Wolfgang Tillmans was recently named a professor at Frankfurt's Stadelschule art academy. (See Contributors.)

Hamza Walker on ADRIAN PACI

Hamza Walker is director of education at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, where he most recently organized "New Video, New Europe," on view through February 22.