Winter 2004; three times a year artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between January and April.

Donald Judd

Tate Modern, London

February 5-April 25

Curated by Nicholas Serota and Marianne Stockebrand

In recent years, the Minimal installation initially developed by Donald Judd (1928-94) and others in the early '60s, consisting of simple, whole shapes calibrated to the experience of a body, has transmogrified into a spectacularized encounter. The precise relationship between artwork, gallery, and viewer, once known as scale, rarely obtains in those purported temples of Minimalism, the Guggenheim Bilbao and Dia:Beacon, where the orchestration of a giganticist aesthetic intended to dominate and impress, in distinct opposition to Minimalism's body-based phenomenology, has found its apotheosis.

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Organized by Tate director Nicholas Serota in consultation with Chinati Foundation director Marianne Stockebrand ten years after Judd's death, this exhibition could not come at a better time. What will undoubtedly be a sensitive installation--the rather unexquisite Tate Modern interiors notwithstanding--by two curators who worked closely with the artist may serve to remind us why we should still care about Minimalist practice. While not the full retrospective Judd deserves (the artist's oeuvre included painting, printmaking, architecture, and furniture design), this show, comprising about forty works in all, promises a rigorous exposition of his most important contribution: the Specific Objects he produced from 1962 until 1994. Famously defined by Judd as "neither painting nor sculpture," the object was not a media hybrid as we might assume but, as Thierry de Duve has insisted, a radical negation of these categories. Judd, unlike those of his peers who described their work as sculpture, developed his version of Minimalism on the basis of his dissatisfaction with what he felt to be modernist painting and sculpture's inherent illusionism. Inspired by the wholeness, vivid color, and bodily scale of the paintings of Newman and Rothko, he brought these innovations into "real space" while avoiding the relational aesthetic of Abstract Expressionist sculpture. His search for the Specific Object was relentless, requiring the enlistment of fabricators as early as 1964 and a growing cadre of manufacturers and artisans in the United States and Europe in the '70s and '80s. In his later work, Judd developed new forms or inflected old ones in new materials. The restricted palette of his youth gave way to polychromy and variation, and the work became more composed than he cared to admit. His is a complex story, one that Serota, Stockebrand, and fellow catalogue contributors David Batchelor, Richard Shiff, Rudi Fuchs, and David Raskin are more than qualified to tell. --James Meyer

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NEW YORK

Fashioning Fiction in Photography Since 1990

MOMA QNS

April 16-June 28

Curated by Susan Kismaric and Eva Respini

Although MOMA has included its collection of fashion work by Steichen, Beaton, Penn, and Avedon in various themed shows, "Fashioning Fiction" is its first exhibition devoted to fashion photography. As such, it makes no attempt to recapitulate the genre's history, focusing instead on recent, often self-consciously cinematic developments. MOMA's curators have selected nearly one hundred photographs by a dozen "crossover" artists like Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Tina Barney, Steven Meisel, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, and Larry Sultan to examine the disintegrating line between art and commerce over the past decade. Even if this lineup just scratches the surface, MOMA recognizes that the fashion avant-garde has been crucial to the advancement of staged narrative photography. --Vince Aletti

John Waters

New Museum of Contemporary Art

February 8-April 15

Curated by Lisa Phillips and Marvin Heiferman

"Change of life"? Surely it's not a question of menopause for filmmaker and, since the early '90s, artist John Waters, but the louche suggestion of this exhibition's subtitle perfectly suits the sensibility of the director of Female Trouble and Desperate Living. Juxtaposition remains at the core of his oeuvre, as in Edith Tells Off Katherine Hepburn, Lana Backwards, or Movie Star Jesus. Certain works go further in their investigation of inescapable ickiness, e.g., Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot. The show includes seventy-six photographs and five sculptures from the past decade as well as three '60s short films and assorted ephemera. Shock, titillation, camp, trash, prurience--convulsive beauty? --David Rimanelli

HarlemWorld: Metropolis as Metaphor

Studio Museum in Harlem

January 28-April 4

Curated by Thelma Golden

Thelma Golden continues to reinvent the themed group show as a curatorial statement, further establishing the Studio Museum as the paradigm for the small, tightly focused exhibition space that acts locally and thinks globally. Here, she examines the quintessentially twentieth-century city neighborhood--cradle of jazz and street preachers, riots and regentrification--as a field for twenty-first-century urbanist and architectural thinking. Inviting seventeen prominent black architects to present proposals for various Harlem sites, Golden promises a multimedia meditation on public space. Photographs by such Harlem chroniclers as Alice Attie and James VanDerZee are also featured; the catalogue includes essays by Golden, Greg Tate, Mabel O. Wilson, and others. --Frances Richard

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Paradise Now? Contemporary Art from the Pacific

Asia Society and Museum

February 18-May 9

Curated by Melissa Chiu

The punctuation in this show's title offers a clue to its intention. This first-ever US survey of contemporary work from New Zealand and the Pacific Islands aims to provide a counternarrative to perceptions of these places, too many of which still resemble Gauguin's edenic Tahitian delusions. The fortyfive works on view describe a cosmopolitan and complex region by addressing such issues as youth hip-hop subcultures, interisland diaspora, and the confrontation of indigenous traditions with Western influence. Featuring painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance by fifteen artists, including Mohini Chandra, Michael Parekowhai, and Peter Peryer, "Paradise Now?" promises a variety of answers to its own question. --Lisa Pasquariello

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Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina

International Center of Photography

March 12-May 30

Curated by Margarita Tupitsyn

It doesn't matter who did it first--Dadaists or Soviets--but why it was made. Photomontage, for Gustav Klutsis, was indivisible from communist ideology. Content preceded form in importance, and it was this, he claimed, that differentiated Dada photomonteur from Soviet. He and his wife, Valentina Kulagina (both were involved with VKhUTEMAS), created a vast number of agitational objects; roughly 150 posters, photomontages, books, photographs, and preparatory designs from the 1920s and '30s feature here. In addition to an extensive essay by the curator, the catalogue includes the artists' letters and diaries and the first English translation of Klutsis's key manifesto. The Soviets may or may not have done it first, but Klutsis did it best. --Nicole Rudick

Open House: Working in Brooklyn

Brooklyn Museum of Art

April 16-August 15

Curated by Charlotta Kotik and Tumelo Mosaka

Pop-cultural tastemakers may pride Williamsburg as contemporary Brooklyn's heart and soul, but there's more to New York's most populous borough than trucker hats and electroclash. From Greenpoint to Red Hook, Fort Greene to DUMBO, there's a lot going on. Touted as the first substantial overview of Brooklyn's sprawling art scene, "Open House" details both its historical significance and current vitality. This show comprises more than 250 pieces by over 180 artists and positions work by longtime residents such as Vito Acconci and Martha Rosler alongside that of an emergent generation including Yun-Fei Ji, Nina Katchadourian, and Emily Jacir. The BMA curators' vision is an expansive one; this timely guide is guaranteed to be useful. --Michael Wilson

OUT OF THE PAST

Tim Griffin Talks with the Whitney Biennial Curators

On March II, the Whitney Museum of American Art unveils its biennial survey of contemporary art, co-organized by museum curators Chrissie Iles, Shamim Momin, and Debra Singer. Featuring 108 artists, this installment is only slightly smaller than the gargantuan 2002 version of the show yet is not broken down into any categories, thematic or otherwise. Rather, as the curators explained in an interview with Artforum editor Tim Griffin last November, the artworks will remain in fluid dialogue, their exchanges often steeped in artists' pregnant looks back to history at a moment made uneasy by the ever-swifter advance of technology and continuing conflict in Iraq.

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TIM GRIFFIN: What conversations did you have about your conception of the Biennial before you began traveling around the country to visit artists' studios?

SHAMIM MOMIN: One thing we discussed from the beginning was that we wanted an intergenerational exhibition. Many exhibitions have emphasized youth for its own sake. While we certainly weren't going to ignore the young, we wanted to emphasize the new, regardless of age--to distill a sense of what's happening now.

CHRISSIE ILES: When we finally came back to the table, we all noted that younger artists are very interested in the work of older artists from the '60s and '70s. There is also renewed interest in the '80s--in figures like Richard Prince, Jack Goldstein, and Robert Longo. At the same time, older artists are extending their own practices looking back, in some cases, thirty years.

TG: Can you describe the quality of this intergenerational exchange? Are there even specific pairings you can point to in the show?

CI: Morgan Fisher has been a very important figure for a number of young artists in Los Angeles, such as Sharon Lockhart. Both artists are in the show with new film works. Elizabeth Peyton and David Hockney are another obvious example. Less obvious is the way in which the '60s and '70s in general are influencing younger artists. It's been very interesting to observe, for example, Sam Durant's concern with the Black Panthers and with placards from '60s demonstrations. I think it's significant that we're showing his work immediately after seeing mass demonstrations against the war in Iraq.

DEBRA SINGER: There's also, say, the influence of Smithson's writing on younger artists like Mark Handforth and Wade Guyton. But, as Chrissie suggested, the idea of looking back here is based not just on matching specific artists intergenerationally but also on political and social events. Whether particular artists experienced the 1960s or '70s firsthand or only as received information, there is a complex understanding of nostalgia right now that has varying used for artists--whether they're taking up that era's political context and civil activism, its art-historical movements, or a countercultural, popular aesthetic. In her work for the Biennial, Mary Kelly, for example, is recuperating an image from her own participation in those earlier movements, excavating history in order to comment on present-day concerns.

TG: Is it somewhat unique that a younger generation interested in art, culture, and politics would turn to previous decades instead of dealing directly with the here and now?

SM: I would say that these artists are using the past to deal with the here and now. The impulse to turn to the late '60s and early '70s--whether in popular culture or art history--is a strategy that responds directly to contemporary circumstances. Even where the work seems to sidestep a direct translation of culture or events today, it is certainly influenced by a cultural landscape that is tumultuous and uncertain--and therefore similar in certain respects to that previous moment.

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CI: Which differentiates the present from the '80s, when a nostalgic, near-romantic conservatism triggered the resurgence of figurative painting. The current appearance of figuration in painting and drawing is driven by a very different psychological impulse.

DS: You can also think about these uses of history within the broader context of appropriation. For example, artists like Robert Longo provide the precedent of appropriation as a sort of allegorical procedure, with references to cinematic or advertising images. Among the younger generation of artists in this Biennial, you see a shift in strategies of appropriation, where the references are more particular or the modes of production and the formal qualities of the art are quite distinct from their art-historical predecessors.

SM: Right. Are you thinking of a Tom Burr or a Wade Guyton?

DS: Exactly. Such as Burr's idiosyncratic fusing of Pop and Minimalist histories with popular culture, using frequent references to specific artworks to address issues not originally invoked by the cited work--in Burr's case, often issues of sexuality or surveillance.

SM: And again, there are multiple interpretations for this approach. You could look at it in the new sculpture by Dario Robleto, who is very specifically addressing the '60s in the context of the failed utopian gesture and asking what might provide us that lost sense of investment or give people the same sense of social conviction. Unlike Burr or Guyton, he describes his work in alchemical terms, a process akin to that of a DJ remixing.

TG: You're curating on the heels of Venice, where there was a deep consideration of previous conceptions of utopia. How does the work in this Biennial stand in contrast?

CI: Venice has always been a fundamentally European show, while the Whitney Biennial is about America's image of itself, which is perhaps one reason it's such a contested show. In terms of utopianism specifically, perhaps the works in this show are less didactic and theoretical.

SM: I think that there's a much broader understanding of utopia as a kind of implicitly failed project, one which doesn't necessarily imply that utopian ideas are a dead end. They remain necessary. Artists like Andrea Zittel, in her project in Joshua Tree, California, are still investigating conceptions of community, looking for that ideal one in which, as she puts it, individual agency coexists with the desire for community.

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CI: There is also Liisa Roberts's project about the city of Vyborg--a border town that switched from Finnish to Russian rule in 1947--and the failures of Communism. We learn about the degeneration and physical decay that took place during the Communist years, seen through the eyes of a group of teenagers living there now. Roberts spent a long time working in direct collaboration with the teenagers and the staff of the Alvar Aalto library. The idea of social space becomes very important, as it does in Zittel's project.

DS: In that regard, there are several examples of collaborative process in the show. For example, Velvet-Strike is a collaborative Net-art project led by Anne-Marie Schleiner with Brody Condon and Joan Leandre. The team created a "hacktivist" artwork relating to the violent and popular multiuser Internet game Counter-Strike; the piece enables you to spray "peace" graffiti within the game environment instead of shooting bullets. There is a sense of collective agency as well because anyone can download their protest graffiti and participate.

CI: There is a lot of painting and drawing in this show, which isn't surprising given the current strength of the two media. I think this is related to a shift in our perception, through being over-exposed to technology, particularly regarding the photographic image, which has become completely dislodged from its material form. It is becoming what video was to us in the '60s--completely immaterial. Take a picture from your cell phone and e-mail it to someone. And now that photography has no material substance, the materiality inherent in painting and drawing is reasserting itself with a force, because with these media there is a certain kind of control over the image, which is impossible with something dematerialized and fluid.

SM: Throughout the work in the exhibition, there is a deep investment in materiality and process, but there is also a kind of internalization of the metaphorical and conceptual structures of technology, which becomes part of the work without the work being explicitly about technology. You often encounter a kind of hypertextual approach to narrative and form used by artists today.

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TG: On that note, the special catalogue you've devised extends the structure of the Biennial.

DS: The catalogue is a two-part project, with a book of essays and a box of artist's projects. Within the book, in addition to each of our catalogue essays, we provide a set of historical and contemporary essays about related themes.

CI: The catalogue is inspired by an issue of Aspen magazine, from winter 1967, which was a box of artist's projects. We wanted the catalogue to have a strong critical aspect and an artist-based concept. So for example, we have Anais Nin's description of her first experience with LSD, which is interesting given the psychedelic thread within the show.

DS: And a fictional excerpt by Samuel Delaney, because of the influence of science fiction on artists now and his connection to psychedelia.

TG: Both of those examples point to the importance of mythmaking, which is another theme you're pursuing. But these interests can be seen over the previous ten years or more, not just two.

SM: It's certainly not a new impulse per se, but it is ever more present in the particular way in which contemporary society is structured right now. Visual culture is replete with these mythmaking impulses--in everything from the popularity of movies like Lord of the Rings or The Matrix to the extraordinary fantastical worlds of video games. Again, this creation of alternative worlds--by artists like Amy Cutler or Ernesto Caivano--seems an internalized response to the simplified, overdetermined narratives we're given in a hypermediated environment.

DS: So, for example, Shamim writes in the catalogue about the resurgence of a gothic sensibility and the uncanny within current artmaking practice--noting that you can trace these renewed interests back a few years to, for example, the 1992 LA MOCA show "Helter Skelter" and Anthony Vidler's The Architectural Uncanny, which was published the same year. You can look as far back as 1985, when Mike Kelley wrote an essay called "Urban Gothic."

CI: In the early '80s, Umberto Eco asks in Travels in Hyperreality what it is about American society that makes it constantly revisit the gothic and the medieval. We're not trying to say that anything emerged in just the last two years; we're saying that, within the work created in the last two years, there might be an excellent articulation of something that's been going on for a decade.

SM: The work often points to a sense of decline. You can see it in Aida Ruilova's videos or the sculptural installations of Banks Violette. The idea of the gothic sensibility is a historical occurrence, evident at moments like the current one, when the need to create another kind of enigmatic, discursive alternative space comes to the foreground.

DS: Andreas Huyssen recently pointed out a great irony about our time in his book Present Pasts: that even as our capacity for digital memory expands, digital technologies grow obsolete at an ever-increasing rate, meaning we could quickly become an era without a memory, without a history. This accelerating rate of obsolescence has led to the transformation of our sense of the present, creating in particular a sense of compression of time and space. This, in turn, has triggered conscious and unconscious attempts to slow down time and to find grounding in a relationship to history. You really do often find that emotional tenor in artmaking today. Through various critical displays of nostalgia, there are references not just to another time but to other notions of temporality.

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CI: Which is why you have artists such as Bruce McClure and Luis Recoder working with the materiality of film in a hybrid of live projection and installation. Cecily Brown is also dealing with painting's history, making direct references to Goya and erotic nineteenth-century prints.

DS: Sharon Lockhart's film installation NO also references nineteenth-century landscape painting traditions, as much as it does the bodily presence and poetic simplicity of everyday movements used by the Judson Dance Theater from the late '60s.

TG: Given this kind of looking back, what would you say this show is articulating about today?

CI: I think that all Biennials can hope to do is articulate a critical moment. We are looking at this particular period of contemporary art history through the lens of three individual curators with very different ideas, brought together to create a dialogue that brings out a number of important dynamics. This show is a kind of weather report: a moment of crisis; forecast uncertain.

SM: It's specific threads coming together as a response to a moment in contemporary society marked by turbulent international politics and an economic downturn. But one critical aspect of that pervasive intensity, even anxiety, felt in the work is that there is a sense of the necessity of renewal and purpose in the work right now.

CI: Perhaps the strength of the Whitney Biennial is that America is a kind of flash point for larger changes occurring in the world. America is all about the future. It has never been afraid to explore what another future might be. I think that's striking in the work that we're showing.

As Shamim said, there's a sense of a body politic grappling with the decline of its empire--a sense of decay mixed in with a feeling of extreme vulnerability. The challenge is to understand the paradoxical combination in America of right-wing tendencies--be they political or religious--and an anarchistic and rebellious impulse for change.

SM: To my mind, conservative forces in culture have increased dramatically over the past ten years. So at this moment there are ruptures happening in art that are necessary to find a more ambiguous, fluid space in which to think about the future.

CI: And yet that's in contrast to the '80s. Within that period of right-wing government, there was a certain kind of art made in response, whereas the art that's being made now that responds to the political situation is very different. It offers another kind of engagement.

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TG: Maybe, given our conversation, "virtual" is the word to describe it.

DS: There isn't so much work within the exhibition with direct political commentary, but, especially among younger artists, you see different rhetorical strategies--more masked and coded. Things are not so issue-based on the surface, but you have works by David Altmejd, Terence Koh, or Christian Holstad that are overtly foregrounding formal concerns such as the aesthetics of psychedelia, camp, or the gothic but which have underlying content about civil activism or issues of sexuality or critiques of mainstream American cultural conservatism.

SM: The engagement is weirdly distant and yet simultaneously more immediate. It seems very influenced by the shifts in modes of communication engendered by technology at large. Think of flash mobs as a structure. Or online chat rooms, which create that kind of tension between immediacy and distance.

CI: It's interesting to see how the new work of older artists who came of age before fax machines, cell phones, or the Internet reads to a new generation for whom interconnectedness is a given. There is a profound difference in the perception of materiality, space, and speed. It's almost impossible to remain fully in the present. This has deep implications for artmaking.

DS: I don't know if it's a category that we've articulated, but it is related to everything we've discussed: There's a strain in the show that pertains to the sublime--whether it's Yayoi Kusama's sense of hallucinatory obliteration and transcendence in her work Fireflies in Water or the kind of technological sublime of someone like Dike Blair or a certain hysterical sublime that you get in Holstad's work. The challenge of the Biennial is to put together a constellation of ideas while at the same time leaving things open.

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SM: Something we discussed before going to artists' studios was that we did not want thematic groups with strict parameters. We really want to treat that multiplicity of ideas as a kind of large Venn diagram, with overlapping sets and any number of possible groupings. The challenge, of course, will be how to present that physically so that those themes come out and make sense and have some cohesion for the viewer, but also with enough fluidity to allow seeing those things in different ways. So the dialogue that Chrissie talked about is very much a multiperson conversation.

There is a complex understanding of nostalgia right now that has varying uses for artists--whether they're taking up that era's political context, art-historical movements, or popular aesthetic.--Debra Singer

Perhaps the strength of the Whitney Biennial is that America is a flash point for larger changes occurring in the world. It has never been afraid to explore what another future might be.--Chrissie Iles

BOSTON

Made in Mexico/Hecho en Mexico

Institute of Contemporary Art

January 21-May 9

Curated by Gilbert Vicario

A healthy dose of skepticism should be mandatory to anyone confronting an exhibition of contemporary art that employs the name of a country in its title. Will "Made in Mexico" reward such critical examination? Now, this show gathers thirty-five recent works by nineteen Mexican and international artists to examine "Mexico's growing influence as a contemporary artistic center." In the late '80s Mexico City became an experimental playground for then-emerging artists like Gabriel Orozco, Francis Alys, and Melanie Smith, whose work engaged popular culture and the urban condition. This show promises an intriguing, if partial, sample of the art being produced in and about that part of the world. Travels to the UCLA Hammer Museum, June-Aug. --Carlos Basualdo

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CAMBRIDGE, MA

Gary Schneider

Arthur M. Sackler Museum

February 28-June 13

Curated by Deborah Martin Kao

The ethereal and luminous quality of Gary Schneider's photographic portraits resembles the flickering of silent films. The artist rejuvenates practices from photographic history and joins them to the most advanced photographic technology--long shutter speeds, platinum printing, medical imaging. These exquisite prints redefine portraiture as a rendering of temperature, of body heat that becomes the emotional mapping of an individual, a ghostly afterimage that renegotiates presence and absence, past and future. This exhibition comprises thirty-three works from the last thirty years and includes Salters Cottages, Schneider's 1981 film. The catalogue features an essay by the curator and excerpts from her interviews with the artist. Travels to the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Aug. 13-Oct. 10. --Stephen Frailey

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NORTH ADAMS, MA

James Lee Byars

Mass MOCA

January 17-June 7

Curated by Pan Wendt

James Lee Byars started every day by writing a letter to someone, often an artist (he sent about 150 to Joseph Beuys alone) but also collectors, dealers, intellectuals, even public figures. The roughly thirty letters on view date from 1973 to 1980 and are, according to the curator, representative of Byars's larger practice. Addressed to art historian and painter David Sewell and to art historian Charles W. Haxthausen, they are intimate poems and abstract objects at once: written on a variety of papers, tissue and toilet included, typically in gold or white pencil. Byars's lifelong project of self-mythologization, evidenced by these letters, is epitomized by his gold suit, which is also on display. To be an artist is to be a higher being, Byars thought, and he lavished his art on remaining one. --Donald Kuspit

CINCINNATI

Renee Green

Contemporary Arts Center

February 28-May 16

Curated by Thom Collins

From Tinguely's clattering machines to the Happening and much Conceptual practice, the use of sound in art is a history waiting to be written. Renee Green has long infused her art with an aural dimension. Extending this interest, these five new video and sound installations, making up the series "Wavelinks," address such tendencies as computer music, electronic music, and the political instrumentalization of sound. One provocative project, The Aural and the Visual, promises to consider the role of "auditory experience in the history of art and criticism," a work of obvious interest to survivors of Acoustiguide-filled blockbusters and College Art Association meetings.

--James Meyer

CHICAGO

James VanDerZee

Art Institute of Chicago

January 24-April 25

Curated by Colin Westerbeck

James VanDerZee's seventy-five-year career as a portraitist in Harlem spanned most of the twentieth century and took in almost every African American of note, from Marcus Garvey to the literati of the Harlem Renaissance. But his bread and butter consisted mainly of walk-in clients of a less celebrated sort. Curator Colin Westerbeck, who recently left the Art Institute after a nearly twenty-year stint, has selected 105 prints--many borrowed from the collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem--that put the focus on what he calls VanDerZee's "everyday working methods as a storefront photographer." In some cases, poses and backgrounds stay the same while the subjects change, hinting at the underlying codes that govern portraiture as a whole.

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--Andy Grundberg

Laura Letinsky

Renaissance Society

March 7-April 19

Curated by Suzanne Ghez

Laura Letinsky scrutinizes the intimacies of the domestic in probing photographs that bring a contemporary relevance to the familiarities of genre painting. This exhibition of thirty prints from the mid-'90s to the present surveys her interrogation of romanticism in emotionally complex works that are as voluptuous and elegant as they are feverish and remote. In their depictions of the remnants of shared meals, the photographs play on fragments of activity: Melon rinds, withered bouquets, and scattered bread crusts lie quietly against the geometry of the table plane and articulate the moment when the quotidian becomes transcendent. With formal intelligence, Letinsky's images suggest libidinal rituals and the mapping of longing, fulfillment, and decay in lush and silent repose. --SF

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SAINT LOUIS

Yun-Fei Ji

Contemporary Art Museum

January 23-March 27

Curated by Shannon Fitzgerald and Paul Ha

Fame has come upon Yun-Fei Ji with the subtly breakneck speed of a thunderstorm: A solo show at Brooklyn's Pierogi gallery in 2001 led to inclusion in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and now the Contemporary presents six large-scale paintings in his first one-man museum exhibition. Amid misty crags appropriated from classical Chinese landscape, "The Empty City" unfolds a dystopic visual ballad of a community abandoned; only scavengers are left among the ghosts of local dead and vanished refugees. Catalogue contributions include essays by critics Gregory Volk and Tan Lin, as well as an interview with the artist by Asia Society curator Melissa Chiu. Travels to the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, Sept.-Nov. --FR

OMAHA

Fabulism

Joslyn Art Museum

January 31-April 25

Curated by Klaus Kertees

It's fitting that curator Klaus Kertess has coined a snappy neologism to title this group show, which highlights contemporary explorations of and expansions on myth, allegory, and fable. The five painters brought together here are, by all accounts, some of the most accomplished dream weavers and yarn spinners today. Including meaty samplings of recent works by Carroll Dunham, Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, Neo Rauch, and Matthew Ritchie, "Fabulism" reveals just how complicated the vocabulary of fantasy has become--infused with questions of national identity, politics of race and gender, co-opted scientific formulas, and a dollop of Freudian id. In the accompanying catalogue, Kertess christens this bunch the latest in a long lineage of "geographers of the imagination"--but let's just call them Ab Fab. --Johanna Burton

HOUSTON

Luisa Lambri

Menil Collection

March 12-June 27

Curated by Matthew Drutt

Luisa Lambri's elegant, often monochromatic photographs of isolated architectural details like facades, corridors, and venetian blind-covered windows could represent any number of buildings anywhere. That they are always untitled adds to the mystery. But Lambri is engaged in a dialogue with the iconic, not the anonymous--the subjects of her photographic investigations include Corbusier, Niemeyer, and Neutra. And now Philip Johnson: A photograph of the Houston residence he designed for John and Dominique de Menil was commissioned on the occasion of this solo exhibition, Lambri's first at a US museum. The thirty-three works on view and seventeen previously unpublished photos feature in the catalogue with an essay by Menil chief curator Matthew Drutt. --Meghan Dailey

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Anne Wilson

Contemporary Arts Museum

January 9-April 11

Curated by Valerie Cassel

Anne Wilson's captivating form of stitch witchery conjures works from string, hair, and cloth, offering a fresh, foreboding, and fetishistic take on textile-based media. Her mutable Topologies, an epic landscape of odd constructions made from black lace, thread, and pins strewn over a white wood support, was a highlight of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. Now, as part of CAM's Perspectives series, the Chicago-based artist displays a trio of installations dating from the last four years that expand on feminine/domestic notions to include allusions to sex and death, the organic and the electronic. Organized by associate curator Valerie Cassel, who also contributes an essay to the catalogue, the show unveils Wilson's most recent work, Errant Behaviors, a video and sound installation. --Julie Caniglia

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LOS ANGELES

A Minimal Future?

Art as Object

Museum of Contemporary Art

March 14-August 2

Curated by Ann Goldstein

"On the cover of Arts in March 1967," says MOCA senior curator Ann Goldstein, "there was this question: 'A Minimal Future?' Minimalism was in the process of being canonized and assessed, and the writers were asking whether it was just another ism or more of a structural change in artmaking. I'm interested in posing that question again." And it's about time: These 150 works by forty artists constitute the first large-scale reexamination of Minimalism at an American museum. Goldstein's sweep runs from 1958 to 1968; surprise inclusions like Claes Oldenburg appear alongside canonical names. The catalogue features essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, James Meyer, and others. Expect to find more than one Minimalism and a detailed understanding of a consequential body of ideas. --David Frankel

BERKELEY, CA

Ant Farm

Berkeley Art Museum

January 21-April 26

Curated by Constance Lewallen and Steve Seid

Europe in the 1960s and '70s was a heady hodgepodge of radical utopian architectural groups such as Archigram, Utopie, and Superstudio. But the US had renegade architects Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Curtis Schreier--aka Ant Farm. Deprived of a centuries-old architectural history to rebel against, the Ant Farmers integrated architecture with art, design, and video, all with a singular wittiness. This, their first museum retrospective, features over two hundred components dating from 1968 to 1978, including blueprints, architectural models, collages, video, and sculpture. Travels to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, July 2-Aug. 14; ICA, Philadelphia, Sept. 10-Dec. 12; Blaffer Gallery, Houston, Jan. 15, 2005-Mar. 13, 2005; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Apr. 30, 2005-July 24, 2005. --Annette Ferrara

TORONTO

Rodney Graham

Art Gallery of Ontario

March 31-June 27

Curated by Jessica Bradley

The subtitle of this retrospective, "A Little Thought," suggests an intellectual approach leavened by modesty and self-deprecating wit. It is well chosen. Rodney Graham is a connoisseur of the fragment, an inveterate snapper-up of trifles from literature and music, technology and psychology. Flitting between research and daydreaming, he employs film, video, and sound to construct teasing referential loops (and some great tunes). This show charts Graham's development from 1976 to the present and across some two dozen works, including a new projection piece and a wealth of related objects and photographs. With an extensive catalogue to boot, the exhibition finishes its tour on the artist's home turf. Travels to MOCA, Los Angeles, Nov. 7-Mar. 13, 2005; Vancouver Art Gallery, spring 2005.

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--MW

LONDON

Raoul de Keyser

Whitechapel Art Gallery

March 30-May 23

Curated by Hendrik Driessen, Ulrick Loock, and Anthony Spira

Raoul de Keyser bloomed late in Belgium, beginning an astonishing forty-year career at the age of thirty-five. The curators have put together fifty paintings from the early '70s forward, mixing older works among recent ones. The largely abstract canvases often begin with a simple, domestic image overlaid with gesture, monochrome, or a grid. For de Keyser, who explores painting's expanse rather than cataloguing its finite categories, nothing is inevitable, and many things seem possible--a state of affairs that feels right, right now. Travels to the Musee de Rochechouart, June-Aug.; De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, Sept. 11, 2005-Jan. 9, 2005; Fundacao de Serralves, Porto, Jan.-Apr. 2005; Kunstverein St. Gallen, May 15, 2005-Aug. 2005.

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--Katy Siegel

Vivienne Westwood

Victoria and Albert Museum

April 1-July 11

Curated by Claire Wilcox

God save the queen--of fashion, that is. Ever since she and Malcolm McLaren swung open the doors of their London boutique Let it Rock in 1971, the name Vivienne Westwood has been synonymous with British style. This retrospective of about 150 works from the '70s to the present is the most complete to date: It covers everything from the punk T-shirts she created for the Sex Pistols to her latest high-concept runway shows. The V&A has long accumulated Westwood's designs, and she has gleefully pillaged their collection of historical dress as inspiration for her outrageous send-ups of classic British tartans, tweeds, and Gainsboroughera gowns. Claire Wilcox, senior curator of modern fashion at the V&A, has also written the accompanying--and first-ever--book-length study of the designer's creations. --MD

DUBLIN

High Falutin Stuff

Irish Museum of Modern Art

April 8-August 1

Curated by Catherine Marshall

You can almost hear Stephen Dedalus's voice echoing in the halls of this hospital-turned-museum located on the edge of Phoenix Park. To commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Bloomsday (June 16, 1904, as all Ulysses fans know), the IMMA presents an exhibition of seventy-five works--drawings, book illustrations, paintings, lithographs, and a number of recent artworks--related to James Joyce, the literary giant of Dublin who lived almost his entire adult life abroad. This show gathers works by fifteen artists, including Matisse, Lucy Richardson, Richard Hamilton, and Sean Scully; the catalogue features an essay by Joyce scholar Terence Killeen. And what of the exhibition's humorously dismissive title? It's from Leopold Bloom's interior monologue in Ulysses's windy "Aeolus" chapter. --Nico Israel

PARIS

Giuseppe Penone

Centre Georges Pompidou

April 21-August 23

Curated by Catherine Grenier

Well known in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, Giuseppe Penone has never been altogether accepted in the US: Perhaps his sense of nature is too classical for us, too aromatically Mediterranean. (In fact, the Pompidou might think about putting Ovid's Metamorphoses on the Acoustiguide.) We prefer American contemporaries like Robert Smithson who deal with nature as a brute and impure force. Penone's sculpture can sometimes appear kitschy, but this arte povera artist can also make exquisitely lyrical studies of humankind's intricate embedment in the natural world. The eighty works in this retrospective, as well as the curator's essay and the interview in the catalogue, should supply the argument for the European sensibility. Travels to CaixaForum, Barcelona, Sept. 21-Jan. 16, 2005.

--DF

Orlan

Centre National de la Photographie

March 31-June 28

Curated by Regis Durand

Long the most daring artist in her use of the body as medium, Orlan is both inspiration and freak. In sync with today's ever more technologically assisted bodies (with retooled personas to match), the Paris-based performer rules as the foremost cyborg in contemporary art. From late-'70s parodies of conventional feminine roles to body-altering plastic surgeries in the '90s and beyond, Orlan's importance has yet to be calculated. The CNP aims to find out, devoting its entire space and part of the Centre de Creation Contemporaine de Tours to her first retrospective. Some eighty works (from 1964 to the present) in photography, video, installation, and sculpture will be on view, with documentation and relies of her early-'90s surgeries at the CCC (Apr. 3-June 6).

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--Jan Avgikos

Marc Newson

Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain

January 24-May 2

Curated by Herve Chandes

Sydney-born, London-based designer Marc Newson once estimated he spent at least one hundred days a year on airplanes. Small wonder, then, that his designs--soft, anthropomorphic, cocoonish--should so often sketch the seductive contours of a lost dream-world of jet travel. From his rivet-dimpled Lockheed Lounge to his sleek, segmented Qantas Skybed seat to his new Eero Saarinen-inflected, honey-combed Lever House Restaurant interior, Newson rescues the luminous aeronautic future we almost had. Now he unveils Kelvin 40, a "concept jet" in anodized aluminum that also has something under the hood--an engine provided by French aerospace giant Snecma. An essay by Paul Virilio and an interview with Louise Neri occupy the catalogue.

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--Tom Vanderbilt

Anri Sala

Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

March 25-May 16

Curated by Laurence Bosse, Julia

Garimorth, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist

In a 2000 interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Anri Sala spoke poignantly of contemporary life lived between--between his native Tirana and his adopted home of Paris, between the ancient language of his childhood and the cosmopolitan tongues of the art world. Whether observing the preparation of traditional Albanian pastry in a Brussels kitchen or documenting an eerily depopulated zoo in his hometown, Sala explores this existential indeterminacy with a combination of clarity and wistfulness. He is now the subject of a solo exhibition that includes five recent video works and which occupies the museum's temporary venue of the Couvent des Cordeliers. Travels to Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, May 6-July 25.

--Jeffrey Kastner

STRASBOURG

Michel Journiac

Musee d'Art Moderne et Contemporain

February 20-May 9

Curated by Emmanuel Guigon

La generation 1968 still wields cultural clout, especially in a country where intellectuals and artists are not considered irrelevant to political discourse. Beginning as a painter and moving toward body-centered performance and what he terms the "degree zero" of art, Michel Journiac has made coolly ironic and erotic photographs, films, videos, assemblages, artist's books, and prints of all kinds. Filmic and graphic documents predominate in this forty-work retrospective--the first Journiac has mounted in France--which continues the historical reinscription of the '60s. The exhibition is accompanied by an omnibus catalogue with a panoply of contributors, including Vincent Labaume, Julia Hountou, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Fabrice Hergott, and Catherine Millet.

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--FR

BARCELONA

Vito Acconci

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona

March 10-May 20

Curated by Corinne Diserens

It's well known that the artist Vito Acconci was active in the mid-'60s as the poet Vito Hannibal Acconci, but until now not much has been made of his move from the page to the gallery and beyond. This exhibition aims to show how his poetry, in which the page was treated as a field of action with words as props, led to the performative occupation of real space--physical, psychological, and architectural. The curator has gathered close to fifty works for this purpose: film, video, and installations from the late '60s to the late '70s, as well as his complete audio works and three new films on the early years of his studio. The catalogue includes a selection of Acconci's poetry and an interview by Thurston Moore. Travels to the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, June-Sept.

--Barry Schwabsky

Behind the Facts: Interfunktionen

Fundacio Joan Miro

February 19-May 2

Curated by Gloria Moure

Structured around some of the most scrupulously unscrupulous projects highlighted in the twelve issues of the groundbreaking international journal Interfunktionen, this exhibition captures the enormous transformation of art that took place between 1966 and 1975 and crystallizes the exchange of ideas between Europe and the US in those years when both ends were burning. The one hundred works on view, by Gunther Brus, Richard Long, Yvonne Rainer, and thirty-six other artists, were made during the journal's run (though not all were featured in it) and were inspired by the events of the same period. The catalogue includes essays by, among others, Interfunktionen's founding editor, Friedrich Heubach. Travels to Fundacao de Serralves, Porto, July 23-Oct. 24.

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--Alexander Alberro

MADRID

Hannah Hoch

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

January 20-April 4

Curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga

Hannah Hoch was not a "good girl." She was, as curator Juan Vicente Aliaga notes, a "total woman." Staking her claim among the male Berlin Dada group with grotesque photomontage hybrids that critiqued stereotypical gender relations, Hoch continued, until her death in 1978, to propose a heterogeneous approach to art. The nearly two hundred objects on view--spanning the five decades of her productive life and including photomontages and lesser-known paintings, watercolors, drawings, etchings, and dolls--attest to this; catalogue essays by Aliaga, Ralf Burmeister, Karoline Hille, and others address the entirety of Hoch's creativity. In any case, her arguments are as relevant to current debates on women's identity as they were in 1920s Germany, when the New Woman first realized her dilemma.

--NR

Dream Work

After honoring Delvaux, Magritte, and Ensor with major retrospectives, the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, celebrate the mysterious and fascinating work of Fernand Khnopff (January 16-May 9; travels to Salzburg and Boston). Born in 1858 in Grembergen-lez-Termonde but raised in Brugge, Khnopff grew up in a Belgium haunted by symbolism--as it had been ever since Wagner created his Lohengrin there at the Theatre Royal de La Monnaie, in 1850. Influenced first by the literature of Georges Rodenbach and Emile Verhaeren, and then initiated into painting in 1875 at the Brussels studio of Xavier Mellery, Khnopff actively participated in a symbolist international then in full flower. The man who inscribed the motto "On n'a que soi" (You only have yourself) on his studio wall was nevertheless fully engaged in the artistic life of his era, from his friendship with the Pre-Raphaelites to his celebration by the Secession. He died in 1921.

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Like a Henry van de Velde, Khnopff tackled all fields of creation. Photography, sculpture, architecture, costumes for the stage, poetry, and mural painting accompanied his production of oils and pastels. These multiple aspects will be represented along with his most striking works: Khnopff shared with Magritte an extraordinary capacity for creating images that would enter the collective imagination. One cannot easily forget the sphinx of Des caresses, 1896, the strange group portrait Memories, 1889, or the red-haired woman in I Lock My Door upon Myself, 1891. From the troubling beauty of the deserted landscapes of Brugge to the gravity of his remarkable portraits of children, 265 of the artist's works will be assembled, together with a handful of masterpieces by contemporaries Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, and Edward Burne-Jones. The moment seems particularly ripe for rediscovering Khnopff, finally rid of the cumbersome theoretical finery that has accompanied his work until now--whether the starched grandiloquence of the Rosicrucians or the psychoanalytical raptures of the 1970s--and for carving out a place for him at the root of a broadened modernity.

--Anne Pontegnie

Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.

FROM THE VAULT

IN THE FLESH

Svetlana Alpers on "Rubens"

IN MARCH, THE MUSEE DES BEAUX-ARTS IN Lille, a northern French city, once part of Flanders and designated a European Cultural Capital for 2004, will host a major exhibition of the work of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). The Flemish painter was featured in "The Age of Rubens" (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1993-94), and a choice group of his oil sketches is on display in the Hermitage Rooms, Somerset House, London, until February 8. But this will be the largest gathering of works by Rubens since 1977, when Antwerp marked the four hundredth anniversary of his birth.

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"Why Rubens now?" is a question that won't go away. He has been the quintessential art historian's artist--making style; using iconography; running a large workshop; designing everything from history paintings, altarpieces, and ceilings to book frontispieces and tapestries; and producing astonishing landscapes and spectacular drawings. Rubens was also an art collector, a man of learning, and good company to boot. He assured himself a place in the history of art by accomplishing what a northern predecessor like Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617) wanted to do but could not: He devised a way to paint that united the expansive, painterly accomplishments of Italy with the detailed depictions of the Netherlands.

But despite the fact that for sheer skill as a draftsman and painter he has few equals, not many people today linger in the Rubens rooms at the Met, nor does he come to the lips or the brushes of many artists. There are problematic things: He served, without apology, as painter to the rich and powerful of his time--kings, the Catholic Church, and merchant princes--and he imparts a furor to painted bodies such that war and peace as he depicts them look rather the same. However, seen together, a large group of his works will reveal extraordinary confidence in painting as representation and as a way to make things happen in the world. There is nothing ironic or jokey about Rubens.

He may have emulated Titian, but Rubens's nudes, his fleshy women and also his men, have long been objects of criticism. Thomas Eakins, for instance, wrote from Madrid in 1869, "Rubens is the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived." Looked at in another way, it is rather the similarity between his men and his women that impresses. (See, for example, Sine Baccho et Cerere friget Venus, 1612-13, which will be among the 160-plus paintings, oil sketches, drawings, and tapestries on display in Lille.) The tenor of this merging or identification between the genders of human flesh is distinctive, but the phenomenon is not new to art. It is indeed a feature of the European tradition, one that goes against the current emphasis on difference, that artists (male artists as they once mostly were) identify with the female such that there is a tendency in art for male and female bodies to be assimilated one to the other. Donatello, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Tiepolo, Manet, and Freud, to name only a few, all display this in distinctive ways. When the human body is central to the artist's medium, flesh as common matter is an irresistible recognition. If you want to test this out for yourself, the Rubens retrospective in Lille would be a fine place to begin.

"Rubens" will be on view at the Musee des Beaux-Arts de Lille, France, Mar. 6-June 14.

Svetlana Alpers, Professor Emerita of the History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Decoration of the Torre de la Parada and The Making of Rubens, among other books. Her Vexations of Art is forthcoming.

PORTO

Julia Ventura

Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves

January 23-April 4

Curated by Christian Bernard

Julia Ventura has been a steady presence in the Netherlands, where she lives, and in her native Portugal (this is her second show at the Fundacao de Serralves), but she's less known outside Europe. One wonders why, given the length of her career (over twenty years) and the potency of her photographs; in a piercing self-portrait from 1985 Ventura snarls slightly, holding a blooming rose in one hand and making a fist with the other. That work and about sixty others from 1982 to the present will be on view. The catalogue boasts contributions by curator Christian Bernard as well as Philippe Cuenat and Carol Armstrong. Travels to the Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castello, Valencia; Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, dates TBA. --MD

TURIN

Carol Rama

Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

March 8-June 6

Curated by Guido Curto and Giorgio Verzotti

Carol Rama might be Italy's equivalent to Louise Bourgeois or Yayoi Kusama, only it's taken longer for her to receive her proper recognition: At eighty-five, she was just awarded the Golden Lion at last year's Venice Biennale and is now being given the most complete retrospective of her work to date, with 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints from 1933 to the present. No wonder she's said, "I don't think there's anyone in the world that's been more pissed off than me." Best known for the raw, violently erotic watercolors she began producing as a teenager, the Turinborn artist is equally adept at eliciting the sensuality of materials through abstraction. Don't miss it. Travels to the Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento, Rovereto, Sept. 10-Nov. 28. --BS

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William Kentridge

Castello di Rivoli

January 10-February 29

Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

William Kentridge's animated films and drawings are many things to many people: a principled eye on post-apartheid South Africa, an exercise in medium-specificity, a rare expressive adult sensibility. This retrospective surveys all the Kentridges in one show. Older, politically oriented films evolve into recent works that push into formal issues of film and narrative. Most exciting is the debut of Tide Table (Eckstein on the beach?), a film that brings us into a South Africa haunted by AIDS. The catalogue features essays by South African writer Jane Taylor and others. Travels to K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Mar. 27-May 31; MCA, Sydney, Sept. 1-Nov. 28; Musee d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, Feb. 10. 2005-Apr. 23, 2005; Johannesburg Art Gallery, July 1, 2005-Oct. 31, 2005. --KS

MODENA

British Pop Art of the 1960s

Galleria Civica del Commune di Modena

April 17-July 17

Curated by Walter Guadagnini and Marco Livingstone

Pop art is usually regarded as an especially American phenomenon, but a British critic, Lawrence Alloway, coined the term, and several British artists of the '50s (e.g., Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi) antedate the US efflorescence. This exhibition includes some sixty sculptures and mostly largescale paintings, by eighteen artists who run the gamut from the famous (Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield, Peter Blake) to the fairly obscure (Colin Self, Gerald Laing, and the delicious Pauline Boty, whose canvases are startlingly prescient with respect to David Salle's work). "The 'conceptual' basis of Pop aesthetics were founded in the UK, even if the 'purest' Pop art works are probably to be found in the USA," remarks Galleria Civica director Walter Guadagnini. --DR

PRATO

Francesco Lo Savio

Centro per I'Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci

February 22-May 9

Curated by Bruno Cora and Stefano Pezzato

Working for only five years before his death in 1963, Francesco Lo Savio anticipated much American Minimal sculpture and European analytical tendencies of the '70s. His art is qualified by its engagement with space, light, and real phenomena. Lo Savio's study of light refraction led to series of paintings in which the canvas acts as a vector of formal elements that expand beyond its structural limits. His metal "articulations," constructed according to internal spatial relationships, project outward, the body of the work opening up to and finding virtual completion in space. This retrospective, presenting some forty of Lo Savio's objects, comes thirty-odd years after the last substantial showing of his work. --Giorgio Verzotti

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

BERN

Chloe Piene

Kunsthalle Bern

January 31-March 21

Curated by Bernhard Fibicher

Recently selected for this year's Whitney Biennial, Chloe Piene is also in line for a significant European showing. The Kunsthalle Bern dedicates its entire space to her recent gender-dysphoric, sonically hypnotic videos and haunting, gothic-erotic works on paper. Playing on genres as disparate as feminist performance art, heavy-metal videos, and the death-and-the-maiden drawings of Munch and Schiele, Piene's examination of concepts of violation and desire draws a fine line between meditation and provocation; it should be interesting to see whether the critical mass of these works upsets their individual balance. A catalogue is planned with essays by Lee Triming and Kunsthalle director Bernhard Fibicher.

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--FR

VIENNA

Wassily Kandinsky

Kunstforum

March 18-July 3

Curated by Evelyn Benesch

In 1936, when MOMA director Alfred Barr famously charted the evolution of abstract art, he drew a Picassoid bull in which a bulging "Cubism" shaped the head and "(abstract) Expressionism" squeezed into the tail, followed in tiny letters by "1911 Munich." The reference was to the founding of the Blaue Reiter by, among others, Wassily Kandinsky, the painter, in 1910, of modernism's first full abstraction. American historians were notoriously swayed by Barr's model, but how striking that nearly a century later this show should bill itself as "Europe's first large exhibition of work by Kandinsky." Showing roughly one hundred paintings, watercolors, and drawings made between 1901 and 1921, the Kunstforum can cleverly still be first by being late. Travels to Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, July 31-Sept. 12. --DF

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BERLIN

3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

Kunst-Werke, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Cinema Arsenal

February 14-April 18

Curated by Ute Meta Bauer

The high expectations for a flourishing gallery scene that accompanied Berlin's inaugural biennial in 1998 have since been tempered by a stubbornly stagnant economy. Despite the setbacks, the city's relatively unpolished, do-it-yourself approach makes it a key site of European art production, if not always consumption. The artistic director for this third biennial, Ute Meta Bauer (a member of the Documenta II team), has invited five guest curators and roughly forty-five artists to address what she calls thematic "hubs"--Urban Conditions, Sonic Scapes, Migration, Fashions and Scenes, and Other Cinemas--that should provide ample room for reflection in a new capital still redefining itself. --Gregory Williams

HAMBURG

Mona Hatoum

Hamburger Kunsthalle

March 26-May 31

Curated by Christoph Heinrich

Most commentators on Mona Hatoum (Edward Said among them) invoke figures of exile and displacement, and not without reason: Explorations of national and cultural identity preoccupy the work of this London-based Palestinian artist. Over the past decade the dispossession she has charted has been of a more intimate and corporeal sort, such as endoscopic video footage of her own body. This midcareer survey--Hatoum's largest solo show to date and her first in Germany--features over sixty works from the past thirteen years: video, performance, photography, sculpture, and posters. The catalogue includes essays by curator Christoph Heinrich and others. Look for a new installation created specifically for the Kunsthalle's massive central dome. Travels to the Kunstmuseum Bonn, June 17-Aug. 29. --LP

WUPPERTAL

Giorgio Morandi

Von der Heydt Museum

January 11-March 14

Curated by Tomas Sharman

Tomas Sharman, an English art historian based in Florence, is more than qualified to curate an exhibition dedicated to the still lifes of Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). The fact that this show takes place beyond Italy's borders, in Wuppertal, indicates how much interest the Italian master continues to arouse abroad. Tracing fifty years of the artist's activity, from 1914 to 1964, and bringing together 127 paintings, drawings, and etchings, the exhibition succinctly illustrates the stylistic variations Morandi applied to his favorite theme (which he varied solely with some landscapes and the very rare portrait). The catalogue includes texts by Ursula Bode and by two luminaries of modern Italian art history, Andrea Emiliani and Mimita Lamberti. --GV

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Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

BONN

Georg Baselitz:

Pictures Turning the Head Topsy-Turvy

Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der BRD

April 2-August 8

Curated by Susanne Kleine

Georg Baselitz's art is about retrospection. By distancing himself from a recent past, he draws nearer to it in order to cease hankering after it. Comprising roughly 130 paintings and sculptures from 1959 to the present, this retrospective, organized in close cooperation with the artist, will indeed turn your head around. By juxtaposing older and newer works, it zeroes in on key ideas and motifs in Baselitz's oeuvre. His well-known upside-down paintings signal his supreme subject: the genre of art itself. Not content simply to dismantle its techniques, styles, and icons, Baselitz has gone about reinventing its categories--the nude, portrait, and landscape--for forty-five years. The catalogue includes essays by Werner Hofmann and others. --Pamela Kort

FRANKFURT

Julian Schnabel

Schirn Kunsthalle

January 29-April 25

Curated by Max Hollein

The Schirn Kunsthalle is giving Julian Schnabel a retrospective covering the past twenty-five years and comprising over fifty paintings, many of them no doubt very big. While the artist lately seems omnipresent in the media, a serious consideration of his art has thus far been lacking. Will the Schirn exhibition deliver in this respect? Did the '80s begin with Schnabel's first solo painting show at Mary Boone Gallery in 1979? Is the artist's real future in Hollywood? Catalogue essayists Max Hollein, Robert Fleck, Alison Gingeras, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Kevin Power, and Maria de Corral also attempt to put Schnabel in context. Travels to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, June 3-Sept. 6. --DR

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ROTTERDAM

Yinka Shonibare

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

February 21-April 25

Curated by Jaap Guldemond and Gabriele Mackert

A hot spot at Documenta II, Yinka Shonibare's three-dimensional tableau Gallantry and Criminal Conversation featured fucking mannequins dressed in ancien regime costumes sewn from exotic material not quite as "African" as it seemed. The installation fused the topics of sex and the (global) city, history and travel, fabrics and fabrication--and it was major, provocative fun. This Boijmans exhibition uses Gallantry as its point of departure, around which ten installations, two new groups of paintings, and a selection of photographs are organized. The catalogue includes contributions by specialists on the myriad issues raised by the artist's ongoing affair with dandyism and difference. Travels to the Kunsthalle Wien, May 14-Sept. 5.

--Tom Holert

Rem Koolhaas

Kunsthal Rotterdam

March 27-August 29

Curated by Andres Lepik, Kayoko Ota, and Cristina Steingraber

Rem Koolhaas and his doppelganger offices OMA and AMO (practice and research, respectively) are the subject of a retrospective that began its run at Mies van der Rohe's Neue National-galerie Berlin last November. A large number of projects and innovations from 1996 to the present are now installed in one of Koolhaas's earlier buildings, the Kunsthal Rotterdam. The exhibition, designed by Jens Hommert of OMA, is curated by Kayoko Ota, also of OMA, and Andres Lepik and Cristina Steingraber, both from the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. An accompanying publication about OMA-AMO is edited by Brendan McGetrick (from OMA and AMO). Critical distance is hardly expected, but the Koolhaas collective deserves a comprehensive treatment.

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--Kevin Pratt

BRUSSELS

Jean Arp

Palais des Beaux-Arts

March 5-June 6

Curated by Maria Lluisa Borras

In Europe in 1915, making art was nothing less than staging a revolt: As Jean Arp later wrote remembering those heady days in Zurich, "While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance ... we aspired to a new order that might restore the balance between heaven and hell." Arp's abstract reliefs and collages may not have upended the bourgeois, but they were certainly conducive to a formal revolution. Independent curator Maria Lluisa Borras has revamped the checklist of her 2001 Arp show at Barcelona's Fundacio Joan Miro, bringing Belgium its first-ever retrospective of the artist. On view are nearly 120 paintings, collages, drawings, and sculptures from 1912 to 1965. The catalogue includes essays by, among others, Alain Gheerbrant and Walburga Krupp. --MD

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MONS, BELGIUM

Fausto Melotti

Le Grand-Hornu

March 21-June 20

Curated by Laurent Busine

Within the context of Italian art, sculptor Fausto Melotti (1901-86) had as profound an impact on his time as Lucio Fontana. Working as an abstract sculptor during the 1930s, a period that saw a return to figuration, Melotti radically changed the language of traditional sculpture, eliminating its weight in aerial metal constructions that appear threadlike and vibratile. Above all he rejected the Fascist rhetoric of the monument and the conventional use of marble and bronze. Recognized as a master in Italy, Melotti still remains under-appreciated elsewhere. Perhaps this retrospective, comprising over one hundred works, is a first step in correcting this serious oversight. --GV

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

ON THE ROAD

LISTED BELOW ARE PREVIOUSLY PREVIEWED EXHIBITIONS ON TOUR BETWEEN
JANUARY 1 AND APRIL 30.

                                    VENUE

NEW YORK

James Rosenquist                    Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

John Currin                         Whitney Museum of American Art

Dieter Roth                         MOMA QNS and P.S. 1

PITTSBURGH

Strangely Familiar:                 Carnegie Museum of Art
Design in Everyday Life

PHILADELPHIA

Manet and the Sea                   Philadelphia Museum of Art

GREENVILLE, SC

Past Things and Present:            Greenville County Museum of Art
Jasper Johns since 1983

MIAMI

Kerry James Marshall                Miami Art Museum

COLUMBUS, OH

Splat, Boom, Powl!: The Influence   Wexner Center for the Arts
of Comics in Contemporary Art

CINCINNATI

Polly Apfelbaum                     Contemporary Arts Center

CHICAGO

Rembrandt's Journey:                Art Institute of Chicago
Painter, Draftsman, Etcher

Lee Bontecou                        Museum of Contemporary Art

HOUSTON

Matthew Ritchie                     Contemporary Arts Museum

SAN DIEGO

Baja to Vancouver: The West         Museum of Contemporary Art
Coast and Contemporary Art

LOS ANGELES

The Last Picture Show: Artists      UCLA Hammer Museum
Using Photography, 1960-1982

Diane Arbus: Revelations            Los Angeles County Museum of Art

SAN FRANCISCO

Romare Bearden                      San Francisco Museum
                                    of Modern Art
SEATTLE

Christian Marclay                   Seattle Art Museum

UNITED KINGDOM

Cindy Sherman                       Scottish National Gallery
                                    of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Philip Guston                       Royal Academy of Arts, London

Edouard Vuillard                    Royal Academy of Arts, London

FRANCE

Philip-Lorca diCorcia               Centre Nationale de la
                                    Photographie, Paris

Cy Twombly: Fifty Years             Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
of Works on Paper

Robert Filliou                      Musee d'Art Moderne Lille
                                    Metropole, Villeneuve-D'Ascq
GERMANY

Richard Artschwager                 Staatliche Graphische
                                    Sammlung, Munich

Paul Klee 1933                      Hamburger Kunsthalle

Medardo Rosso                       Wilhelm Lehmbruck
                                    Museum, Duisburg

The Photography of Charles Sheeler  Stadelsches Kunstinstitut
                                    und Stadtische Galerie, Frankfurt

The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and    Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
Fragonard: Masterpieces of French
Genre Painting

SWITZERLAND

Francis Bacon and the Tradition     Fondation Beyeler,
of Images                           Riehen/Basel

THE NETHERLANDS

Martin Kippenberger                 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

LUXEMBOURG

Gerry Schum                         Casino Luxembourg--
                                    Forum d'Art Contemporain
SWEDEN

Nedko Solakov                       Rooseum, Malmo

RUSSIA

Berlin-Moscow/                      State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
Moscow-Berlin: 1950-2000

                                    DATES

NEW YORK

James Rosenquist                    through Jan. 25

John Currin                         through Feb. 22

Dieter Roth                         Mar. 12-June 7

PITTSBURGH

Strangely Familiar:                 through Feb. 15
Design in Everyday Life

PHILADELPHIA

Manet and the Sea                   Feb. 15-May 31

GREENVILLE, SC

Past Things and Present:            Mar. 24-May 23
Jasper Johns since 1983

MIAMI

Kerry James Marshall                Feb. 6-Apr. 25

COLUMBUS, OH

Splat, Boom, Powl!: The Influence   Jan. 31-Apr. 30
of Comics in Contemporary Art

CINCINNATI

Polly Apfelbaum                     through Feb. 29

CHICAGO

Rembrandt's Journey:                Feb. 14-May 9
Painter, Draftsman, Etcher

Lee Bontecou                        Feb. 14-May 30

HOUSTON

Matthew Ritchie                     through Mar. 14

SAN DIEGO

Baja to Vancouver: The West         Jan. 23-May 16
Coast and Contemporary Art

LOS ANGELES

The Last Picture Show: Artists      Feb. 8-May 9
Using Photography, 1960-1982

Diane Arbus: Revelations            Feb. 29-May 31

SAN FRANCISCO

Romare Bearden                      Feb. 7-May 16

SEATTLE

Christian Marclay                   Feb. 5-Apr. 25

UNITED KINGDOM

Cindy Sherman                       through Mar. 7

Philip Guston                       Jan. 24-Apr. 12

Edouard Vuillard                    Jan. 31-Apr. 18

FRANCE

Philip-Lorca diCorcia               Jan. 14-Mar. 15

Cy Twombly: Fifty Years             Jan. 21-Mar. 29
of Works on Paper

Robert Filliou                      through Mar. 28

GERMANY

Richard Artschwager                 through Feb. 8

Paul Klee 1933                      through Mar. 7

Medardo Rosso                       through Mar. 28

The Photography of Charles Sheeler  Feb. 4-Apr. 11

The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and    Feb. 8-May 9
Fragonard: Masterpieces of French
Genre Painting

SWITZERLAND

Francis Bacon and the Tradition     Feb. 8-June 20
of Images

THE NETHERLANDS

Martin Kippenberger                 through Feb. 1

LUXEMBOURG

Gerry Schum                         Mar. 27-June 6

SWEDEN

Nedko Solakov                       Apr. 17-June 13

RUSSIA

Berlin-Moscow/                      Apr. 3-June 15
Moscow-Berlin: 1950-2000

                                    NEXT STOP

NEW YORK

James Rosenquist                    Guggenheim Bilbao, July-Oct.

John Currin

Dieter Roth

PITTSBURGH

Strangely Familiar:                 Musee de l'Hospice Comtesse, Lille,
Design in Everyday Life             Sept. 4-Nov. 28

PHILADELPHIA

Manet and the Sea                   Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam,
                                    June 18-Sept. 26

GREENVILLE, SC

Past Things and Present:            Scottish National Gallery of Modern
Jasper Johns since 1983             Art, Edinburgh, July 10-Sept. 19 *

MIAMI

Kerry James Marshall                Baltimore Museum of Art, June
                                    20-Sept. 5 *

COLUMBUS, OH

Splat, Boom, Powl!: The Influence
of Comics in Contemporary Art

CINCINNATI

Polly Apfelbaum                     Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art,
                                    Kansas City, MO, June 4-Sept. 5

CHICAGO

Rembrandt's Journey:
Painter, Draftsman, Etcher

Lee Bontecou                        MoMA QNS, New York, July 28-Sept. 27

HOUSTON

Matthew Ritchie                     Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA, Apr.
                                    10-Mar. 2005

SAN DIEGO

Baja to Vancouver: The West         Vancouver Art Gallery, June 5-Sept.
Coast and Contemporary Art          6

LOS ANGELES

The Last Picture Show: Artists      Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo,
Using Photography, 1960-1982        June 4-Sept. 19 *

Diane Arbus: Revelations            Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, June
                                    27-Aug. 29*

SAN FRANCISCO

Romare Bearden                      Dallas Museum of Art,
                                    June 20-Sept. 12 *

SEATTLE

Christian Marclay                   Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland, June
                                    12-Sept. 6 *

UNITED KINGDOM

Cindy Sherman

Philip Guston

Edouard Vuillard

FRANCE

Philip-Lorca diCorcia               Museum Folkwang, Essen, Apr.-June *

Cy Twombly: Fifty Years             Serpentine Gallery, London, Apr.
of Works on Paper                   17-June 13

Robert Filliou

GERMANY

Richard Artschwager

Paul Klee 1933

Medardo Rosso

The Photography of Charles Sheeler  Detroit Institute of Arts, Sept.
                                    8-Dec. 5 *

The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and
Fragonard: Masterpieces of French
Genre Painting

SWITZERLAND

Francis Bacon and the Tradition
of Images

THE NETHERLANDS

Martin Kippenberger

LUXEMBOURG

Gerry Schum                         Fundacao de Serralves, Porto, July
                                    23-Oct. 10 *

SWEDEN

Nedko Solakov                       O.K. Centrum fur Gegenwartskunst,
                                    Linz, Austria, Dec. 2-Jan. 30, 2005

RUSSIA

Berlin-Moscow/
Moscow-Berlin: 1950-2000

                                    ORIGINAL VENUE

NEW YORK

James Rosenquist                    Menil Collection and
                                    Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

John Currin                         MCA, Chicago

Dieter Roth                         Schaulager, Basel

PITTSBURGH

Strangely Familiar:                 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Design in Everyday Life

PHILADELPHIA

Manet and the Sea                   Art Institute of Chicago

GREENVILLE, SC

Past Things and Present:            Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Jasper Johns since 1983

MIAMI

Kerry James Marshall                MCA, Chicago

COLUMBUS, OH

Splat, Boom, Powl!: The Influence   Contemporary Arts Museum
of Comics in Contemporary Art       Houston

CINCINNATI

Polly Apfelbaum                     ICA, Philadelphia

CHICAGO

Rembrandt's Journey:                Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Painter, Draftsman, Etcher

Lee Bontecou                        UCLA Hammer Museum

HOUSTON

Matthew Ritchie                     Contemporary Arts Museum
                                    Houston

SAN DIEGO

Baja to Vancouver: The West         Seattle Art Museum
Coast and Contemporary Art

LOS ANGELES

The Last Picture Show: Artists      Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Using Photography, 1960-1982

Diane Arbus: Revelations            San Francisco MoMA

SAN FRANCISCO

Romare Bearden                      National Gallery of Art,
                                    Washington, DC

SEATTLE

Christian Marclay                   UCLA Hammer Museum

UNITED KINGDOM

Cindy Sherman                       Serpentine Gallery, London

Philip Guston                       Modern Art Museum
                                    of Fort Worth, TX

Edouard Vuillard                    National Gallery of Art,
                                    Washington, DC

FRANCE

Philip-Lorca diCorcia               Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

Cy Twombly: Fifty Years             Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
of Works on Paper

Robert Filliou                      Museu d'Art Contemporani
                                    de Barcelona

GERMANY

Richard Artschwager                 Kunstmuseum Winterthur,
                                    Switzerland

Paul Klee 1933                      Stadtische Galerie im
                                    Lenbachhaus, Munich

Medardo Rosso                       Kunstmuseum Winterthur,
                                    Switzerland

The Photography of Charles Sheeler  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and    National Gallery of Canada,
Fragonard: Masterpieces of French   Ottawa
Genre Painting

SWITZERLAND

Francis Bacon and the Tradition     Kunsthistorisches Museum,
of Images                           Vienna

THE NETHERLANDS

Martin Kippenberger                 Museum fur Neue Kunst/ZKM,
                                    Karlsruhe

LUXEMBOURG

Gerry Schum                         Kunsthalle Dusseldorf

SWEDEN

Nedko Solakov                       Casino Luxembourg

RUSSIA

Berlin-Moscow/                      Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin
Moscow-Berlin: 1950-2000

* Exhibition will travel to additional venues

Travels to the K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrbein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, June-Sept.; Kunstmuseum Basel, Sept.-Jan. 2005.