ART/EXHIBITION

Art seems to be the only field in cultural production that has not yet been touched by the piracy politics of free access and the exchange of information. Artistic authorship and museum ownership are still bound up with discourses of copyrights, courtesies and so on, while nowadays the Internet offers thousands of images, songs, films and digital media, going beyond any debate of freedom and restriction. How are artworks to be shared and valued in today’s society? Van Abbemuseum posed this question to the Danish collective SUPERFLEX and invited them to “play” with the museum’s collection. They responded with the exhibition “In-Between Minimalisms”—looking at the way in which artists such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd built their own practice on the dispute between issues like industrial mass-production and the opposing issue of intellectual property. In the context of this research, SUPERFLEX created a new work FREE SOL LEWITT: in a workshop hosted in the museum’s rooms, a couple of workmen work daily on reproducing LeWitt’s Untitled (Wall Structure). The copies will be distributed to the public through a random system that museum visitors can sign-up for. LeWitt once declared: “If someone borrows from me, it makes me richer, not poorer.” So, never mind if one of his seminal works is being replicated in dozens of copies. MICHELE D’AURIZIO

ART

In his essay, “Some politically incorrect reflections on urban violence in Paris and New Orleans and related matters,” the Croatian philosopher Slavoj Zizek recounts the autumn 2005 riots in the Paris banlieues as episodes without any content except the demand to be recognized. Zizek read this phenomenon through the lens of the French TV talk show, C’est mon choix (It’s my choice), where people were invited to discuss their particular choices in life: for Zizek, urban violence is the only choice that remains for people living under a lack of rights, a desperate acting out in the name of affirmation. So what happens when these mechanisms meet those of traditional iconography, when the issues of the French suburbs are portrayed in the manner of classical painting, that of Delacroix or Gericault? The Algeria-born, Paris-based artist Mohamed Bourouissa carefully stages his photographs of young people living in the banlieues in order to depict the tensions that shape their daily lives: in his series “Périphéries,” his documentary style is infused with emotional friction, framing stress at its most extreme and violent, ready to explode. Bourouissa’s sight conceptualizes the dynamics of power that subject inhabitants of the modern city. Acclaimed at the New Museum exhibition “Younger that Jesus,” Bourouissa will show in the context of the 6. Berlin Biennial and at Manifesta 8 in Murcia. MICHELE D’AURIZIO

DESIGN/PUBLISHING

Metahaven’s 2008 publication, White Night Before a Manifesto, a rumination on the conditions of current design practices, posed a small yet significant political question: Can a design manifesto be written in a post-manifesto age? Having paid tribute to the utopian legacy of the manifesto, Metahaven’s newest publication Uncorporate Identity is an anthology of their projects, ideas and models to date. Launched in 2010 by Lars Müller and co-produced by Jan van Eyck Academie, Uncorporate Identity is a follow-up to their 2008 work, acting as both manifesto and manual for contemporary design, particularly as it concerns branding and building visual identities in contemporary society. The book describes corporate identity as it is inextricably entwined with geopolitics, speculation and information networks. Metahaven depicts a world that is engaged in an almost automatic and unquestioned alliance with the virtual. The publication, which has been authored by the collective (Daniel van der Velden, Vinca Kruk and Gon Zifroni) and edited by writer Marina Vishmidt, takes a look at the ways in which our visual world is carved out from the paradoxical leftovers of ancient regimes and their ruined ideologies. Metahaven’s studios in Amsterdam and Brussels are a locus for contemporary design and research, and the list of contributors and collaborators reflects this, with texts by Boris Groys, Sean Hastings, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Taussig, Pier Vittorio Aureli and many others. ALHENA KATSOF

ARCHITECTURE/WEB

This story began in Holland in faraway 1929 and is (not) ending today. The story is of The Catholic Building Magazine, founded in the aforementioned year, and it is the same story for Magazine for Architecture and Visual Arts, TABK, Wonen,Wonen TA/BK, Archis and Volume: many names and lives for a single magazine that has
written the history of architecture publications. Let’s start at the beginning: Action! Creating Knowledge through Practice is a newborn blog dedicated to theoretical processes that follow design rather than precede it, and is led by Edwin Gardner and Rory Hyde. It may be found on the website of the magazine Volume (the inheritor of Archis, a monthly founded in 1986), an English-language architecture quarterly, published by the Archis Foundation with the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam (aka Rem Koolhaas) and the Columbia Laboratory for Architectural Broadcasting (C-Lab). Its mission is to be “a global idea platform to voice architecture anyway, anywhere, anytime.” And, in fact, the magazine is expanding, taking as much advantage as possible of the potential of the web as an open container. Not only in terms of innovation, but also as an archive, archis.org is one of the few sites that tells its own web history, citing designers who have edited it, database renovations and layout, the site’s first defeats. It is even possible to watch a slideshow of the homepage from 1996 to today (for those who believe there is no future without a past, even on the web). Keep an eye on the lastborn: archis.org/action, because that’s a story that remains to be told. CHIARA COSTA

ART/EXHIBITION

There are some exhibitions that cultivate the tension of waiting, maintaining their mystery until they open. “Always Be Elsewhere,” an exhibition of works by Klara Liden at the Jeu de Paume, is one such show. At the time of writing this text (these are the rules of the press), no one can say more than that: the young Swedish artist will work on and with the site in question, as she is accustomed, challenging the architecture of the institution. Additionally, together with the band Tvillingarna, she has created a video for the occasion. A single vague indication: she will generate a “haunting atmosphere.” Not a word more. But after all, many things indicate
that the project will catch some attention. Invited by Elena Filipovic, the artist’s works to date include a video in which she begins to dance a ballet in the subway, another in which she beats herself for each household chore that she does not perform well, and a stint running an alternative postal service system. She is also known for her amazing “reorganization” of spaces, as she did in 2008 at Reena Spaulings in New York: the space was significantly reduced in order to create an outside space for pigeons (in Swedish, the title of the show—translated as “Heating the Crows”—is a popular saying meaning to waste human energy). Using all kinds of “on-site facilities” for her installations, transmitting a certain intensity in her videos, she proposes multiple ways of understanding space and gestures, always with the strong desire to disrupt routine and our lifestyles. The Jeu de Paume has decided to host this rebellious spirit, but is keeping its institutional lips sealed. Are they afraid? JEAN-MARIE GALLAIS

FASHION/DESIGN

For the premiere of BLESS N°40, the studio’s A/W 2011 collection titled Whatwasitagain, “textfighters” pranced around a Paris loft, warming up for the big fight: a catwalkas- boxing match. The models, all adorned in the studio’s casually draped knitwear, boxing gloves and trench coats, approached center stage, boxing an installation of punching and speed bags, each jab prompting a central screen to produce corresponding letters, which the audiences merrily announced. This raucous fun, captured on film by Purple Journal’s Sébastien Jamain, is an absurdist comedy reminiscent of the mime-bookends of Antonioni’s Blowup. By embracing the farcical mime, we enter into an agreement: with Bless, the event is no longer a theater, it is an active dialogue celebrating the ever-teetering lines that seek to encase definitions of art, design and fashion. For the past fourteen years, Bless has been accessorizing this conversation with objects and ideas, creating wearable probes that challenge preconceived notions of utility and form. Disposable t-shirts, furlined hammocks, hand-knit leather boots and a serious penchant for mutant sunglasses, the studio’s whimsy aesthetics are paired with a contemporary mindset—an embrace of the near nonexistent lifespan of fashion but the endurance of ideas and images. Splashing into ambiguous waters, Bless—founded by Ines Kaag and Désirée Heiss—has released their forty-first project, an exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz: “Bless N°41. Retroperspective Home” (until 29 August), supplemented by a book of the same name put out by Sternberg Press. Using the museum’s collection as tools combined with their metamorphic approach to objects, the studio presents yet another iteration of their carnivalesque tightrope walk, always bouncing the line, implying a fall but fearlessly dancing way above ground. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART

The Swiss artist David Hominal was a recognized figure in his native town’s slam poetry scene. In fact, he has never lost that performative approach to his art making, and the paintings and sculptures he produces still reflect on how language works: Office Baroque, the Antwerp gallery that has presented Hominal’s work in a couple of solo shows, even wrote that “aesthetically and poetically Hominal’s practice calls to mind the work of Marcel Broodthaers.” If this rouses your interest, don’t miss Hominal’s solo exhibition “L’Après-midi d’un faune,” on view at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva until 15 August, where he will present his interrogation of traditional art discourses: if on the one hand Hominal stresses the historical stability of pictorial representation, countering the understanding of the canvas as a reified commodity, on the other he strives to force the painterly act to be, as artist Martin Kippenberger once said, “beside itself.” Hominal will present a new monumental sculpture, Landscape (half hard) (2010)—a gigantic mirror that reflects the summer’s sunshine in the exhibition space, disturbing the viewer’s gaze—and a new video, L’Après-midi d’un faune (2010), in which the camera follows the artist’s hand in close-up as it nervously feels its way across his studio and other domestic spaces. Not far away from Geneva, in Zurich, an exhibition of Hominal’s work is on view at Karma International until 10 July. MICHELE D’AURIZIO

ART/PUBLISHING

In the early 1980s Peter Friedl wrote a large number of essays on theater and its aesthetics. The theatrical has been an oft-recurring paradigm in his work, spanning from an interest in the genres of representation to the search for new forms of narration. His attention to strategies of exposing, bracketing and editing brought him to embrace tools of theory, criticism and curatorship, without disdaining to translate his artistic research into formats like that of the book. His Working at Copan—a collection of interviews with workers and employees at Edifício Copan, a landmark modernist building in the center of Sao Paulo—provides one of the deepest readings of the leftovers of the modernist dream in Brazilian society. The Berlin- and New York-based publishing house Sternberg Press has just released a selection of Friedl’s texts and interviews, including everything from his contributions on theater and film history to portraits of emblematic 20th-century personalities such as George Sand, Clarice Lispector, Alighiero Boetti and Jean-Luc Godard. Edited by Anselm Franke, Secret Modernity: Selected Writings and Interviews 1981–2009 offers more than a few cutting remarks about the cultural history of modernity and its resonance in the present, introducing the insights of one of the most brilliant minds of our time. MICHELE D’AURIZIO

FILM/FASHION

In Chic’s 1979 disco hit Good Times, the band sings out, “We want the best / We won’t settle for less / Don’t be a drag / Participate / Clams on the half shell / And roller-skates / Rollerskates.” For Halston, née Roy Halston Frowick, the iconic American designer and the subject of a newly released documentary, Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston, the roller-skates and clams were in fact flowing chiffon (and ultrasuede) dresses and 500,000 dollars worth of mirrors adorning his twenty-second story office. His lavish lifestyle—partying at Studio 54, traveling with an entourage of models and “beautiful people,” and sparing no expense on sequins, sex or stimulants—is the glamorous (though unavoidably tragic) lens through which we experience the ’70s, all thanks to first-time director Whitney Sudler-Smith. Interviews with the likes of André Leon Talley, Liza Minnelli and Ralph Rucci shed light on the impact Halston had within the fashion world, but the interviewees often avoid the not-so-glamorous aspects of the designer’s professional and personal life, including his “selling out” to JCPenney (making his mainstream line perhaps too mainstream) and his death in 1990 caused by AIDS-related cancer. Instead, Sudler-Smith, who appears as a character in the film, and his informants celebrate the saccharine naiveté of the bygone era, and who can blame them? Don’t we all just want to take instruction from Chic: “Leave your cares behind / These are the good times.” LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART

With the structures that surround, support and comprise our existence constantly threatening to give way, to prove their instability, the curators of this biennial season can’t seem to ignore the vague facts of immanent collapse and sustained restructuring. Call it “Handlung” (as Felix Vogel, the Bucharest Biennale’s curator does, eliciting the ambiguity of the term, which translates to “action,” “story” and “deceit”), or “The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age,” the title of the seventeenth Biennale of Sydney. Whatever the heading, the theme of the season is undoubtedly the tension between façades (storytelling) and action (or “reality”). Even at the Venice Architecture Biennale, SANAA cofounder and this year’s curator Kazuyo Sejima has given near free reign to the participating practitioners, in the hopes that the forty-three architects, artists and engineers will express their “true” voice and vision. In doing so, Sejima seeks to ground architecture in the scope of effectiveness, in the realm of human-spatial interaction. And while Venice focuses on the spatial side of the conversation, Massimiliano Gioni, as Artistic Director of the Gwangju Biennale, entitled “10,000 Lives,” takes on the human aspect, exploring a history of portraiture in relation to “our need to create substitutes, effigies, avatars and stands-in for ourselves and our loved ones.” Moreover, both the Gwangju Biennale and the Bienal de Sao Paolo, which opens in mid-September and is titled “There is Always a Cup of Sea to Sail In,” take their names from literature: the former lifted from a yet-tobe- completed epic poem by the South Korean political prisoner, Ko Un, the latter, from a line in Invençao de Orfeu by the Brazilian poet Jorge de Lima. Citing literature, particularly poetry, heightens the sense of reality-play, extracting the far-gone blur between image and fact. Summarizing the haze is Kathrin Rhomberg, the curator of 6. Berlin Biennial, who states: “Let’s talk about the cracks in reality, about the gap between the world we talk about and the world that’s really there…. Let’s talk about the self-deceptions where reality becomes too painful. Let’s talk about the fictional arsenal of the mass media and consumerism, about the rhetoric of distraction and appeasement.” Discuss. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART/PUBLISHING

In 1975 the poet and mail artist Ulises Carrión opened the seminal art bookshop, Other Books and So, in Amsterdam. The shop was the first to promote artist books and publications—opening after Carrión sent a mail blast to artists internationally, requesting books and pamphlets to feature in the space. Other Books and So, which closed its doors after four years, was also a gallery, celebrating printed material as objects, spaces for exploration. In the same year the space was founded, Carrión published a text in the magazine Kontexts titled “The New Art of Making Books,” in which he began: “A book is a sequence of spaces. / Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment—a book is also a sequence of moments. / A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words. / A writer, contrary to the popular opinion, does not write books. / A writer writes texts.” Curators James Langdon and Gavin Wade have taken this manifesto as a decisive lens through which to contextualize the form of the book in their exhibition, “Book Show.” Featuring the work of Nina Beier and Marie Lund, Daniel Eatock, Martino Gamper, Nina Katchadourian, Radim Pesko, Rollo Press, Simon Starling and Werkplaats Typografie, among others, the founders of Eastside Projects—Langdon, a graphic designer, and Wade, an artist—are also producing a catalogue for the exhibition, which includes a reprint of Carrión’s text as it originally appeared, in addition to works by artists not included in the exhibition, like Langdon himself, Tauba Auerbach and the graphic design collective, Abäke. Open through 4 September, the artist-run space will exhibit framed precious moments grounded by the reliability of the structure of the serial page, the publication. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART/EXHIBITION

Those in charge of the great nave of the CAPC in Bordeaux have proved their exhibition-making mastery with the current exhibition, “Jim Shaw: Left Behind.” The museum seems to continue its fascinating exploration of subcultures, popular culture and margins (previously explored in shows including “If Everybody had
an Ocean: Brian Wilson, an Art Exhibition” or “Less is Less, More is More, That’s All”). Invited by Charlotte Laubard, Shaw decided not to play the profusion card, but instead to engage in monumentality (or rather, to play profusion in monumentality), installing fifteen paintings, a giant inflatable sculpture and his “labyrinth” in the nave. The fifteen paintings, on canvases more than ten meters wide, are astonishing: Shaw has collected totally obsolete and outmoded stage curtains from theaters and musicals and for ten years, has added “painted apparitions” to these scenes—Superman and Shrek at the supermarket, a haunting interpretation of Laocoon titled Ticker-Tape Laocoon and much more. Shaw offers a vision of America, its imagery and its symbols, its recent history mixed with episodes from the religion he initiated, Oism, and a few personal episodes. As Shaw has said, it’s about “the death of the labor movement, due to Reaganism and globalization, and their displacement by born again Christians, as well as the burial of the New Deal era small town capitalism, replaced by the casino-capitalism of the ’00s.” The Californian’s paintings provide as much enjoyment as they cause discomfort. At CAPC in Bordeaux they find a place “à leur juste mesure.” JEAN-MARIE GALLAIS

ART/SPOT

Since she began her activity as a gallery owner in the 1960s, Lia Rumma had only one moment of hesitation: in 1979, like every year, she hired a booth in Basel, but this time to hang an announcement that read: “no longer dealer, but collector of new culture,” a definition that still fits today. Lia Rumma is a key figure in the last fifty years of Italian art: it is enough to remember that the spaces of her Amalfi gallery hosted the first review of Arte Povera in 1968, curated by Germano Celant. From Amalfi, she moved to Naples in 1974 to a gallery-home where art and life would intermingle for years in vital symbiosis. In 1999 she decided to leave for Milan, but it is today that her dream of giving the city a temple for art will come to fruition (something that—and it should be remembered—the institutions are unable to do), a place where artists are able not only to exhibit but also work, meet, eat and live. A place where above all, the works are never sacrificed, but exhibited at the center of classic and discrete architecture: a white cube on four floors, where natural light dominates. The project grew out of the superposition of elementary volumes with different proportions. The outside of the edifice appears compact, and within the space its more complex character can be found. The new space on Via Stilicone inaugurates its activities with an exhibition of the sculptor Ettore Spalletti. In the mid-’70s, this artist created a language suspended midway between painting and sculpture, with attention to light and space, recalling both modern abstraction and the geometries of Renaissance painting alike (until September 18). CHIARA COSTA

ART/PEOPLE

The preparation for the thirteenth edition of documenta in Kassel has just begun, two years in advance, starting with its editorial planning. Hatje Cantz Verlag, having published all related editions for the past three occurrences of the art event, has once again been confirmed as the official publisher, and Bettina Funcke, known for her deep interest in printed matter and artists books, will direct the project. The German born, New York-based Funcke earned her PhD from the Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM in Karlsruhe, and has been active in New York for more than a decade as editor of both Parkett and at the Dia Art Foundation. Her essays and articles have been published in Artforum, Texte zur Kunst and Afterall. Among the major voices of the new appropriationist scene in New York, Funcke wrote theoretical introductions to the monographs of artists including Wade Guyton and Kelley Walker, and co-founded Continuous Project and Leopard Press, which published Seth Price’s How to Disappear in America. Known also for her collaboration with Maurizio Cattelan’s Charley magazine and his notorious Caribbean Biennial, Funcke has recently published Pop or Populus: Art Between High and Low with Sternberg Press, where she reflects on the relationship between contemporary art and spectacle and the blur of high and mass culture. Pop or Populus takes into account how much art history is influenced by image production and reproduction, arguing that pop functions as a key to understanding our time. FRANCESCO SPAMPINATO

PUBLISHING

The 80*81 Book Collection: What Happened? marks the beginning of writer George Diez and film director Christopher Roth’s attempt to uncover how 1980 and 1981 changed the world. The first of eleven volumes chronicles a day-by-day timeline of January 1980 and December 1981. 1980 will follow a linear trajectory, while the year 1981 will travel in reverse. They will, in theory, meet somewhere in the middle. But why obsessively ruminate over these two years? For Diez and Roth, one reason is based on a typology: “A gang of Nike-wearing thirty somethings who took cocaine and proclaimed that youth is a consumer choice invented our contexuality.” The early ’80s launched GPS, CNN and MTV; it was the onset of AIDS; American Gigolo came out to the public; and so did Boy George. Diez and Roth are in search of “set-ups, plots, locations, and parties” that could be seen as symptoms and traces for a future condition, a future that we are now living in. So what exactly happened in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected and when Pope John Paul II met Lech Walesa? In 1981, what was “October surprise”? Who was really behind these plots and parties? Spanning the globe, the eleven volumes are filled with interviews, scraps, images and writings, featuring, to name but a few, philosopher Slavoj Zizek, artists Robert Longo, Andy Warhol and Mei Lun Xue, filmmakers Eric Michel and Paul Schrader, disco legend Giorgio Moroder, AIDS virologist Françoise Barré- Sinoussi, and the former Iranian president Abdol Hassan Bani Sadr. Diez and Roth are in search of an aesthetic form adequate to capture the series of strange stories they have collected while doing their retro-visionary research. Their solution: staging a series of operas in New York, Johannesburg and throughout Germany. MELINDA BRAATHEN

ART/EXHIBITION

Some people just seem to be able to do everything with impeccable taste and an acute sense of timing, and Oscar Tuazon oozes that air of infallibility these days. He is an extremely well-regarded artist with an exhausting international exhibition calendar, and he can also pride himself on being a founding member of castillo/corrales. This small gallery is partially responsible for putting Belleville in a privileged position on the Parisian art map and for offering an engaged and experimental approach in a city whose art scene is often deemed conservative and safe. Section 7, the bookshop within the gallery space, and the publishing house, Paraguay Press, complete the activities of the castillo/corrales collective, turning it into a Gesamptkunstwerk of sorts. Tuazon is also a close friend and collaborator of Vito Acconci, as Tuazon worked in his studio while attending the Whitney Independent Study Program. This spring, New York’s Maccarone Gallery hosted “My Flesh to Your Bare Bones,” a collaborative project between the two, who share an interest in working with architectural language while coming from a non architectural background. In the way in which he delves into a sensuous yet raw dialogue with natural and industrial materials, Tuazon’s work owes as much to New York conceptual artists (such as Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson) as it does to Arte Povera. The American-born, Paris-based artist opens his second solo show in London after his successful show at the David Roberts Foundation last year. This time, the ICA is responsible for giving a home to a new site-specific project, which will push the physical boundaries of the institution, incorporating, penetrating and infiltrating the ICA’s lower gallery and concourse. LORENA MUÑOZ-ALONSO

ART/PEOPLE

Curator Martin Clark would appear to be a small town guy at heart. Born in Chelmsford, UK, his professional career, while launched in London at the Royal College of Art, London, has developed throughout Britain’s smaller cities: first in Canterbury as curator at University College of the Creative Arts’s Herbert Read Gallery, later in Bristol where he worked at Arnolfini and currently as Tate St Ives’ Artistic Director. Clark is dedicated to working as an active spokesmodel for these institutions, introducing their rigorous programming to a global art scene and simultaneously bringing an exquisite balance of UK and international artists to the modest cities. For his first curatorial project at Tate St Ives, where he began working in 2007, Clark presented the work of Adam Chodzko in the solo exhibition, “Proxigean Tide.” Clearly a champion of Chodzko’s work, Clark organized the artist’s 2003 exhibition, “Strangers to Ourselves,” while at the Herbert Read Gallery. His second exhibition in the seaside town—a historic artists colony that noted modernists Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Naum Gabo all called home was relatively radical: he invited Austrian artist Heimo Zobernig to dig through the Tate’s collection, the artist selecting works by, among others, Picasso, Schwitters, Hepworth and Gabo to contextualize his interventions in the museum. Clark is surely keeping himself busy, and while he shares the position of director with Mark Osterfield, he is steadily organizing exhibition after exhibition, each garnering significant critical praise. His project last winter, “The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art,” which he co-curated with Alan Rowlands and Michael Bracewell, proved to be quite a coup when they exhibited Damien Hirst’s unicorn in formaldehyde, The Child’s Dream, work by Cerith Wyn Evans, Mark Titchner, John Stezeker, Derek Jarman and others in dialogue with British Neo-Romantics, surrealists and modernists. At thirty-four, Clark is just beginning to flex his curatorial prowess, so watch out. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART/EXHIBITION

Michael Schmidt’s elegiac photographs of deserted urban landscapes depict pre-war architecture and post-war concrete buildings as well as apartment blocks and their inhabitants. Up until the 1990s, Schmidt focused his lens almost exclusively on Berlin and the Wall, which defined life in the divided city where he grew up. In 1988, he was one of the first living German photographers to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where he exhibited again in 1996. Exploring the symbolic language of politics while subtly questioning the predetermined roles of individuals, Schmidt is fascinated with the weight of history upon the German citizen. His body of work includes re-photographed images that are resonant in collective German memory, photographs of the reunited German provinces and the populace, as well as stark, poetic images of the sea. Schmidt’s austere photographs experiment with and maximize the potentiality of black-andwhite photography by employing an infinite range of gray. His methodology further develops the complexity of his works, which are often brought together in enigmatic publications. Working with an archive of his own images, Schmidt creates new constellations of photographs, rearranging them for each of his exhibitions and thus leaving them open to different interpretations. As an artist and founder of Werkstatt für Fotografie at Volkshochschule Kreuzberg, Schmidt’s influence on contemporary photography is vast. The first comprehensive survey of his work at Haus der Kunst in Munich, “Grey as Colour: Photographs until 2009,” is not to be missed. ALHENA KATSOF

ART/EXHIBITION

Looking back at previous editions of “Greater New York” at MoMA PS1, those of 2000 and 2005, the lists of artists are a roster of the past decade’s most interesting names: from the downtown hipsters to the new appropriationists to neoconceptualists. If the Whitney Biennial has become more authorial and self-celebratory, with its tributes to consecrated artists and an eye on the museum’s collection, the quinquennial event held by MoMA’s affiliate proves to be the most comprehensive in presenting young art emerging from the city. Despite the shift from 140 artists of the first edition to 68, “Greater New York” still offers the broadest and most objective vision of the emerging art community, thanks to a selection process that includes the opportunity for artists to submit their portfolio online. It looks like the curators Klaus Biesenbach, Connie Butler and Neville Wakefield have screened about 750 of them, not counting the studio visits and meetings with artists who have already had previous exposure. Major expectations are for Tauba Auerbach, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Sharon Hayes, Alex Hubbard, Nick Mauss and Emily Roysdon, recently seen at the Whitney and the New Museum’s newly inaugurated triennial, but there are several “unknowns” we’ll surely be hearing about soon. To accompany the event the curators have created Rotating Gallery, an element with micro shows handled by young curators as well as screenings and performances, and 5 Year Review, a backward journey through the most significant cultural and subcultural events through which this new generation has taken shape, fashioning a living history. FRANCESCO SPAMPINATO

ART/PUBLISHING

Agency is simply defined as the capacity for and realization of action, both on one’s own behalf and on that of others. In its own words, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi acts as such, using resources from its namesake fashion house to radically promote contemporary art, weaving it through the city of Milan with zealous civic duty. The foundation has recently published an in-house bible, What Good Is the Moon?, a reflective look into their interventions from 2003, when they officially abandoned their permanent space in the name of art in public space, and simultaneously named Massimiliano Gioni as Artistic Director. Reinvigorating forgotten piazzas and neglected parks, the institution has brought challenging contemporary art to the forefront of their urban base. Discussing such projects which include Maurizio Cattelan’s installation of noosed puppet-children hanging from trees (Untitled) (2004) and Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Short Cut (2003), a car and trailer wedged into destruction at the iconic of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele—Stefano Boeri, Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist, among others, consider the active legacy that the foundation continually enacts through each ambitious project. Parallel to the release of the book, titled after a piece by Peter Fischli and David Weiss of the same name, Fondazione Nicola Trussardi has opened the monumental Paul McCarthy installation, Pig Island, in the Palazzo Citterio. Described as a “treasure island in reverse,” McCarthy’s ongoing work, which has thus far been seven years in the making, is a rowdy theme park, an assemblage of wayward swine-seamen. The sprawling 100-square meter installation follows in a lineage of the foundation’s bold work to date, celebrating controversy and conservation: a true civic institution. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART/EXHIBITION

Konrad Fischer opened his thirty-square-meter exhibition space in Düsseldorf in 1967 with a floor sculpture by Carl Andre. He didn’t even talk about it in terms of a “gallery,” simply calling the exhibitions presented in the space “At Konrad Fischer’s.” In a few years, Fischer became the catalyst of the conceptual and minimal art scene in Europe, his gallery’s activities leaving marks on the major museum collections around the continent. The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) is currently presenting the exhibition “With a Probability of Being Seen. Dorothee and Konrad Fischer. Archives of an Attitude,” which brings together artworks and documentation surrounding the figure of Konrad Fischer as artist, gallerist, collector and curator. From the early paintings, made under the name of Konrad Lueg, his mother’s maiden name, at the art academy in Düsseldorf to documentation of the event “Living with Pop – A Demonstration for Capitalist Realism,” organized with Gerhard Richter in a furniture store; from artworks belonging to the Fischer’s archive—sculpture by Nauman, Andre, Judd, Flavin, Beuys, Penone and Merz; conceptual pieces by LeWitt, Darboven, Manzoni, Kawara and Long; paintings by Ryman and Mangold; photographs by Bechers and Dibbets; early works of Gilbert & George—to archival material on the exhibition series “Prospect,” organized at the Düsseldorf Kunsthalle in 1968, 1969, 1971, 1973 and 1976, “With a Probability of Being Seen” spotlights, for the first time in the history of exhibitions, one of most significant characters in the development of art discourse in Europe. MICHELE D’AURIZIO

WEB

On 5 May 2010, Charlotte Cheetham posted an upcoming exhibition on her blog Manystuff, after spotting that ten London-based and ten Berlin-based design studios were playing a virtual game of Chinese whispers. For exhibitions at Idea Generation Gallery in London and Program Gallery in Berlin, each participant is presented, via Skype, with an idea or work created by the previous participant in an ongoing chain. They can interpret, reinterpret or diverge on a tangent in any medium they fancy; their only mandate is to forward it onto the next participant in three days. This process is not unlike Cheetham’s own approach to her graphic designbased blog. After incessantly researching various websites, portfolios, events, workshops, launches and publications, she responds to the various cultural influences from that day with a daily (if not more) pick, which she then posts in an effort to show, develop and discuss new graphic design. Set up in January 2007, her practice is contingent on time, and therefore wildly varied, which is most likely why Manystuff has become a go-to platform and superlative archive for emerging and established designers, artists and aesthetic aficionados alike. Outside this portal, Cheetham is also a publisher, curator and contributor: Manystuff’s own publications consist of #0 More Real than Fiction, #1 One Possible Catalyst and the Manystuff Yearbook 2008, in which Cheetham invited all the graphic designers featured on her blog in 2008 to appear in a yearbook. She has also collaborated on numerous publications, including GRAPHIC magazine: for their twelfth issue, the South Korean publication moved Cheetham’s archive from the digital to the physical, reprinting every post to date. Fixed or virtual but never static, this hotspot spans the globe, promoting loose or lasting interactions between people who are defining the graphic design world today. MELINDA BRAATHEN

ART/PUBLISHING

The first substantial monograph on the artist Seth Price is finally out, thanks to the publishing house JRP | Ringier, Kunsthalle Zürich and the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Price (born in East Jerusalem in 1973 and based in New York) is known for his relentless exploration of the production, dissemination and valuation of the work of art. His cultural curiosity seems to know no limits and he plays it out in a wide range of disciplines: writing, curating, filmmaking, sculpture and music. The endless possibilities of re-appropriation shape Price’s artistic playground, and materialize, for example, in the recycling of iconic illustrations or videos, the casting of objects by vacuum-formed techniques, the assembly of eight-hour long mix-tapes of experimental music and collaborative ventures such as Continuous Project. These works, in his typical open-ended style, can be encountered in either commercial galleries like Friedrich Petzel or Reena Spaulings, or as free downloads through his website, Distributed History. In his preoccupation with how technology and new media have influenced both current artistic output and social interaction, he moves in a realm also inhabited by fellow New York artists Jordan Wolfson and Cory Arcangel. His essay “Dispersion” (ongoing since 2002) is pretty much a cult piece for all those who understand contemporary art as a tool to think through the ideas of society, mass media and the production of meaning in images. This monograph includes an essay by Michael Newman as well as Price’s own critical take on his practice, given in the form of a videotaped conference that structures the presentation of his works. LORENA MUÑOZ-ALONSO

FILM/ART

In some ways, the work of Carlos Casas (b. 1974, Barcelona) recalls novelist Bruce Chatwin’s experience: he associates not only with Chatwin’s quest for the planet’s geographical (and emotional) extremes, but also pays special attention to the world of primordial sounds. The most official part of Casas’s production is the trilogy “End,” documentaries in three episodes set in faraway lands: Fishing in an Invisible Sea (Aral) (2004) is told across three generations of fishermen on a lake between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, one which the Soviet Empire stamped out “a mistake of nature,” leading to the near complete desertification of the region. The following film, Solitude at the End of the World (Patagonia) (2005), is the story of three men who live in isolation in Patagonia, probing into their worlds of emotional and physical strain and seclusion. The final chapter is Hunters Since the Beginning of Time (Siberia) (2008), set in a small community of whale hunters in Siberia. Parallel to his films, Casas also maintains an ongoing project about soundscapes, “Fieldworks,” which the artist presents in the form of live media, with projections and recordings. From June 10, Milan’s Hangar Bicocca presents a video installation, curated by Andrea Lissoni, who reassembled images and sounds from the documentaries on three screens in a non-cinematographic but purely contemplative manner. Also present are the “Fieldworks” realized in Patagonia, Uzbekistan and Siberia, and a collection of static films, radiofrequencies and archival material. It is an anthropological and visionary x-ray in continuous transformation animated by a kind of nostalgia for a past world inevitably destined to disappear. CHIARA COSTA

SPOT

There is a corner in Zürich with two addresses, Langstrasse 84 and Brauerstrasse 37, where, in a former textile shop, Perla-Mode, a stacked set of endeavors find a base for collaboration and support. Operating since 2006, Perla-Mode has been home to many a Zurich-based arts initiative, acting as a near incubator for projects as they grow into sustainable ventures. Included in the roster of previous inhabitants is Nieves, the book and zine publishing house, which recently moved to a nearby location, and Freymond-Guth & Co. Fine Arts, which relocated, only doors down, in 2008. Current residents include Perla-Mode co-founder message salon downtown, a project space started by Esther Eppstein showing the work of Zürich-based artists, and Corner College, a community, “quasiacademic” space hosting workshops, readings, and screenings. Run by Urs Lehni (graphic designer and Rollo Press founder and publisher), Benjamin Sommerhalder (Nieves) and Stefan Wagner, the space is the true cornerstone of Perla-Mode and, as of March 2010, the new home of the Swiss magazine distributor Motto’s Zürich retail outpost. With a shop in Berlin and an itinerant identity (temporary shops have popped up in Paris, Moscow, Chicago, Amsterdam and Vilnius, among other cities), the new space, designed by Zürich’s Kueng Caputo, will host release parties, readings and other events celebrating contemporary magazine and zine culture. Stop by on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, when Motto is open, or on Tuesdays, for Corner College’s Theory Tuesdays, a weekly discussion around pre-assigned critical theory texts—check the website for your homework. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART/EXHIBITION

The fifth edition of the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’Arte – EnterPrize, which seeks out curators under the age of thirty, has been awarded to two French curators, Élodie Royer and Yoann Gourmel, collaborators at the gb agency gallery in Paris. As the winners of this year’s prize—which consists of the realization of an exhibition at Bergamo’s GAMeC— Royer and Gourmel have curated an exhibition titled “The Crystal Hypothesis,” opening in the museum’s Spazio Zero this summer. “The exhibition could have been called ‘Present is a Thing of the Past, Now,’” they admit, claiming, among other references, the inaugural lecture by Giorgio Agamben at the University of Venice on the nature of the contemporary. From their exploration of our relation to time and the present, the duo became interested in artists engaged in practices surrounding “time-intervals,” artists attracted to the appropriation, the re-enactment, the quotation, historiography or other artificial temporal connections. Royer and Gourmel have selected works by ten artists including Ulla von Brandenburg, Isabelle Cornaro, Ryan Gander, Adrian Ghenie, Benoit Maire and Bojan Sarcevic. The works are presented in relative darkness, some of them (projections) illuminating others (sculptures and paintings), and so on. The exhibition catalog and the vinyl record published for the occasion are part of the whole ensemble. Finally, the selected title, quite mysterious, refers to a variety of calcite that demonstrates double refraction—an object placed behind this crystal appears doubled, and this vision may be due to a temporal phenomenon: light rays travel through the crystal at two different speeds, so one of the two images is older than the other. This hypothesis of the coexistence of a double-temporality echoes the artists’ works in the exhibition, “in which certain anachronisms seem to exist to better express the present of which they are a part.” JEAN-MARIE GALLAIS

ART/EXHIBITION

Cosima von Bonin’s latest exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz is the artist’s first major institutional solo show since 2007, when she took both Documenta 12 and Los Angeles MoCA by storm with her playful mélange of textile paintings, choreographed environments and collaborative practices. Born in Kenya and based in Cologne, von Bonin gained notoriety in the early 1990s when she used her own exhibitions to invite other artists, musicians or art critics to perform or show their own works. Her first exhibition in the United States took place in 1991 at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. In such a key moment for her international career, she chose to curate a group show instead. Martin Kippenberger, one of her friends showing work, ended up buying his own painting, but at the price of a von Bonin. She has tirelessly questioned the notions of authorship and participation since then, and plays at giving and, in turn, taking away the importance of the role of the artist and art itself, a destabilizing dialectic aimed at opening up a space for reflection. The presentation at the Kunsthaus Bregenz marks the beginning of a new and extremely active period for von Bonin. Right after the show ends, Witte de With in Rotterdam will be dedicating yet another solo exhibition to the artist. However, the show in Bregenz exclusively features new and site-specific works created for the Kunsthaus, making it her largest exhibition to date. LORENA MUÑOZ-ALONSO

ART/PUBLISHING

For those of you who adore Afterall Books’ publication strand, “One Work,” be on the look out for their new series, “Exhibition Histories,” to be launched in Autumn 2010. It will follow the format of the first collection, which offered a library of small books, each title focused on one important work of contemporary art through one text. “Exhibition Histories” will contemplate exhibitions from the past fifty years that have changed the way art is seen and made. In doing so, it will draw attention to the exhibition as a format. It’s certain to be an invaluable contribution to the increasing number of volumes dedicated to recent exhibitionmaking. Theme-based publications, each topic will be elucidated via visual documents, commissioned essays, interviews and primary texts (critical essays and reviews from the time). The first few volumes in the collection are gathered around pivotal moments in the history of 20thcentury exhibitions, which took place during the late 1960s, and later in the late 1980s, coinciding with significant social movements and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Seminal exhibitions like Harald Szeemann’s “When Attitudes Become Form” at Kunsthalle Bern and the ICA, and Lucy Lippard’s “number shows” (1969–74) will be scrutinized under the lens of history, both pre- and post-exhibition. The series, which was developed in partnership with the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, is sure to have a cherished place on our bookshelves. ALHENA KATSOF

ART

If architecture acts both as a reflection of and medium between structure and society, a critique of said relationship reaches into each element, unthreading the fabric that nominally unites them. The artist Monika Sosnowska’s installations are seam rippers that poetically remove the stitches from architecture’s hems, rendering near familiar forms cumbersome and chimerical. Working from the socialist architecture of her native Poland, Sosnowska, who represented her country in the 52nd Venice Biennale with the piece 1:1, uses minimal forms to express rupture, architectural failure and spatial potential. Applying her historical commentary to the present, Sosnowska has designed the scenography for the exhibition, “The Promises of the Past,” at Pompidou (through July 19), which crookedly snakes through the works by two generations of artists from Central and Eastern Europe, suggesting a non-linear timeline and the incongruity of storytelling. Additionally, the thirty-seven-year-old artist recently installed a large scale installation at K21, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. Referencing the winding staircases that were often built into the facades of buildings in socialist Poland, Sosnowska has constructed a steel stairway twisting up the side of the museum’s atrium, ultimately spilling over into structural nonsense, reminding the visitor of the unraveling of socialism behind the Iron Curtain and the remnants, particularly architectural, that continue to retain a grain of tragic utopian hope. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART/INSTITUTION

Just an hour and a half outside Paris in the center of Reims, a city often thought of as the capital of Champagne-Ardenne, sits Frac Champagne-Ardenne, a regional contemporary art center (or Le Fonds régional d’art contemporain, as they say in France). Founded in 1984, the center is quietly ambitious, seeking out and exhibiting younger artists with a knack for giving them a platform for expression as they’re entering the eye of their career’s storm. The space, which since 1990 has been located on the site of a former Jesuit college, plays host to both exhibitions and residencies, many of the latter feeding content to the former. Past residents include Mircea Cantor (whose time there was followed by his solo exhibition, “Variable Sky”) and Ann Craven (“Shadow’s Moon”), among others. While most of the institution’s exhibitions are solo shows, they present a yearly group exhibition, the work of which is culled from their permanent collection. Over six hundred pieces deep, the collection, which includes work for nearly every artist who has exhibited at Frac Champagne-Ardenne, spans genres and styles, from Franz Ackermann to Chris Burden, Tom Burr to Frances Stark. Dating back to the beginning of their curatorial efforts in the mid-’80s, the space has produced accompanying publications and catalogues that seek to illuminate and promote the artists and work on view. Another keepsake from the small city in the northeasterly reaches of France are their artist multiples, released slightly irregularly but always charmingly affordable—future collectors, take note. LEAH WHITMAN-SALKIN

ART/EXHIBITION

Think about the typical modernist, rational, homogenized house. Good: stirring at the other end of the home spectrum is “The Surreal House,” an exhibition at the Barbican Centre from June 10 to September 12. If on the one hand Le Corbusier defined the house as a “machine for living,” in this case we are faced with an eclectic moving “stage for living,” where the dreams and unconscious meet reality: an exhibition for those who are not scared of haunted houses. More than 150 works on display along with an equally surreal list of artists that ranges from 20th-century masters (Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Giorgio De Chirico) to more contemporary works by Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Gordon Matta-Clark, as well as films by Andrei Tarkovsky and Buster Keaton, and even architecture by Rem Koolhaas, Diller & Scofidio and, ironically, Le Corbusier. The labyrinthine installation conceived by the studio Carmody Groarke reproduces a veritable house with several floors, where the doorbell is represented by Duchamp’s Prière de toucher (1947): a mounted relief of a breast on a black velvet cloud, made for the cover of a luxury edition of a surrealist book. The exhibition closes with a sequence from Tarkovsky’s last film, The Sacrifice (1986), in which the protagonist, Alexander, threatened by an imminent and mysterious catastrophe, offers the symbol of what is most dear to him in sacrifice to God, and decides to set his house afire. In addition to the exhibition, the Barbican also presents a film program, “Surreal Film House,” in which surrealist thought is reinterpreted by filmmakers such as Luis Buñuel, Jean Epstein, Terry Gilliam and David Lynch. CHIARA COSTA

ART/EXHIBITION

Very few people know that the English poet John Keats died in Rome. He moved to the Italian city as suggested by his doctors, in order to escape the wet climate of London that was seriously threatening his already poor health. On his gravestone in the non-Catholic cemetery, his friend Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Today, Keats’ house on Piazza di Spagna has been turned into a memorial, housing an outstanding collection of books and documents on English Romanticism. The exhibition “Strange Comfort (Afforded by the Profession),” on view until 25 September and organized by the Istituto Svizzero di Roma in collaboration with the Keats-Shelley House and Kunsthalle Basel, and curated by Adam Szymczyk and Salvatore Lacagnina, draws inspiration from the British writer Malcolm Lowry’s eponymous short story about a visit to Keats’ house in Rome. Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession was published posthumously, but it tells of the magic when encountering other authors’ lives, constantly sought by Lowry and traced by the exhibition curators in the practice of many contemporary artists. Maria Thereza Alves, Ross Birrell and David Harding, Nancy Davenport, Moyra Davey, Jimmie Durham, Dunja Herzog, Cécile Humme, Goshka Macuga, Franco Vaccari and Danh Vo bring visitors on an emotional tour around five venues in the city of Rome, offering new interpretations of codified cultural histories. If you miss its incarnation in Rome, note that another version of the show will be presented at Kunsthalle Basel. MICHELE D'AURIZIO

WEB

To look through someone else’s library is an intriguing practice that involves a certain dose of voyeurism. The books reveal personality. For those involved in scientific culture, books age quickly as new discoveries sweep away the past. The books of a scholar, a historian or an artist, however, become affective objects not easy to part with. And the more you have, the more you buy, as is the case with Donald Judd who collected 13,000 volumes (3,000 of which are duplicates) in forty languages over four decades. Sixteen years after the death of one of the fathers of American minimalism, his foundation has completed the valuable digitalization of his books. This is not a computation of the individual volumes, but a virtual transposition of the whole library. The most fascinating effect of new technologies is that of displacement that allows us to travel if not physically, at least with the eye, to far places like Marfa, Texas where these books are kept. To visit Marfa and read a text in ancient Greek by Procopius in Judd’s library, sitting on one of the chairs he designed, is certainly an exciting experience, but we must admit that even to peek with the mouse in the private archive of this great artist gives a certain satisfaction. FRANCESCO SPAMPINATO

ART

The relationship between art, modernist utopian architecture and ruins is probably the topic of the season. From Ulla von Brandernburg videos to Brian Dillon or Gilda Williams’ essays, a large portion of the art world seems to be compelled to explore a subject matter whose nostalgic pathos resonates with these uncertain economic times. The last chapter of the “ruin saga” is currently taking place at Wiels, where Elena Filipovic has curated the aptly titled exhibition, “Rehabilitation.” This group show brings together an exciting, international cluster of young artists dealing with the legacy of modernist architecture and design. The artists featured in the show—Leonor Antunes, Alexandra Leykauf, David Maljkovic, Manfred Pernice, Tobias Putrih, Falke Pisano, Pia Rönicke, Oscar Tuazon, Armando Andrade Tudela and Up (Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Kris Kimpe)—all work across a varied range of media and engage in a discourse that oscillates between the tribute and the challenge to a modernist heritage. “Rehabilitation,” a term that refers to the renovation and historical preservation of architecture in order to give it new life, comes to life in a recently reformed building itself, offering a meta-discursive context in which to critically examine how modernism is a persistent reference for a number of artists that were born after the decline of the architectural period. LORENA MUÑOZ-ALONSO

ART/PUBLISHING

How many books on Jeff Wall fill bookstores around the world? More specifically, how many books on Wall are surveys of his photographs starting from the late 1970s and ending sometime in the 2000s? How many publications attribute their pages to his writings, or sell us with never-beforereleased interviews? When we have access to more than our fill of Jeff Wall monographs, catalogues, collected writings and interviews, why do we need Jeff Wall: The Complete Edition? Phaidon’s newest publication on the artist pays tribute to recognizable images: his signature “cinematographic” pictures and “near-documentaries.” Spanning from the late 1970s until present, Phaidon has assembled 185 color illustrations and 30 black-and-white illustrations which include his allegorical still lives from the ’90s (Some Beans and An Octopus) (both 1990), historical pictures (Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)) (1992), fantastical works (The Vampires’ Picnic) (1991), surrealistic works (The Giant) (1994), literary illustrations and landscapes. Ranging from near realities to blatant artifices, his tableaux photographs are linked by a varying register of believability. Seen side by side, his oeuvre is as elusive as any single one of his photographs. Not held together by any thematically or uniformed coherence per se, it is rather his formal precision that generates such controlled, signature compositions. The comprehensive monograph includes a compilation of texts and interviews with Wall by Thierry de Duve, Arielle Pelenc, Boris Groys, Jean-Francois Chevrier and Mark Lewis. MELINDA BRAATHEN

ART/EXHIBITION

Who better to bring in the hazy, lazy days of summer than Croatian artist, Mladen Stilinović ? His current New York solo exhibition has been organized by e-flux, taking place at their outpost on Essex Street. It focuses exclusively on a selection of Stilinović ’s artist books, which he has been producing prolifically since the 1970s in small handmade editions, using uncomplicated materials such as photographs, newspaper clippings and writings in crayon or pencil. Stilinović, who has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows worldwide since 1975, also makes collages, paintings, installations, actions, films and video works. He was member of the Group of Six Artists (1975–79) and ran the PM Gallery in Zagreb from 1982–91. Throughout his oeuvre one can find an interest in history and time, a lingering melancholia and an impish sense of humor. The snarkily titled Artist at Work (1978) consists of a series of images of an artist at rest, or deep in thought—you decide. During the communist regime, work had particularly strong symbolic connotations and Stilinović investigates the relationship between the color red and the notion of work with a subtlety that exposes the absurdities of rigid structures in society. After the collapse of communism, Stilinović directed his interest towards more contemporary hegemonies in works such as An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist (1994–96). While these reflections on the symbolic meaning of labor take on different connotations in New York City in 2010, Stilinović ’s gentle satire is as poignant as ever. ALHENA KATSOF