Those who created the Artist in the Marketplace program recognized important, and relatively new, aspects of the art world in 1980: its increasing complexity and the differentiation of roles within it. Successful artists based in New York would henceforth have to negotiate not only with dealers, the small coterie that had been their professional face for decades, but also with curators, lawyers, critics, and others. To run a studio, the program’s founders suggested, required management skills that until roughly that time one could mostly avoid having. The title of the program, and particularly the use of the word “marketplace,” acknowledged another new reality. Despite the rapid proliferation of “arts professionals,” power, however one wished to define it, was increasingly concentrated in the abstract space of the “marketplace”—a space into which only a few people could see clearly. The definition of artistic success had been channeled into a narrower frame: market acceptance. Artist in the Marketplace aimed to demystify both developments. It would introduce emerging artists to the dense thicket of people they would have to engage and it would explain many of the ground rules for that engagement.

Critics sensitive to such systemic changes recorded them in print, though their tone was not often one of such pragmatic adjustment. Rather, they lamented the flight of power from their hands. Peter Schjeldahl inaugurated his column in the Village Voice in 1981, only one year after AIM’s founding. His opening salvo explained the ascendant dynamic with typical flair: “Such purposeful power as critics used to have disappeared with the time lag between the appearance of something new and its acceptance, a transition dealers manage now seemingly in a matter of hours. The art-worldly function of critics has become largely ceremonial: after-dinner speakers at the victory party. Thus critics tend to dig in their heels.” [1] Indeed they did, and in subsequent decades critical handwringing became its own art form, as evidenced in the contentious collections The Crisis of Criticism (1998) and Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice (2006). [2] Though each participant in these debates offered a different answer to the question of what is to be done, a majority voiced Schjeldahl’s concern that the elevation of artists to canonical status was no longer a slow, thoughtful process in which critics actively participated. What was to become of connoisseurship and taste?

Such rhetoric, of course, should be taken with a grain of salt. The glory days, for which the height of Clement Greenberg’s career in the 1950s and early 1960s is shorthand, were not always glorious. And the downward trajectory these critics lament hasn’t been a slide into complete irrelevance: Artists still seek thoughtful critical responses to their work; being selected for the cover of an art magazine remains an important career milestone; and critics are, after all, still invited to speak with AIM participants each year. One ironic result of this (at times overwrought) concern with supersession was that some critics unselfconsciously followed the dictates against which they railed. As one critic phrased it in a review of a group exhibition in 1987, “Few if any of these artists have yet staked out a personal territory. Partly, it is a matter of youth but mostly it has to do with the press’s view of artists as athletes and its compulsion to beat the bushes for ever younger champions.” [3] By seeking to ensure their own influence upon art, at least some writers felt they ended up playing the game by the marketplace’s rules.

The mild mea culpa offered by this writer was published in a review of the 1987 AIM exhibition. Tracing the developments outlined above through reviews of AIM exhibitions is difficult; The New York Times has been the only consistent venue for interpretation of these shows. (This fact in itself prompts useful thoughts about what is considered the proper object of traditional forms of art criticism.) The sample size is not only small—limited to a handful of the paper’s staff critics—but also atypical. Unlike trade magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, and Art in America, which often feature writing by congenital worriers who contribute to books on the state of art criticism, the Times has a mass audience. Its writers must demystify the arcana of contemporary art objects—in a manner akin to the AIM program’s mandate to explain the social milieu that surrounds those objects.

While one can’t precisely diagnose the health of art criticism through these reviews, reading thirty years’ worth of them does offer interesting lessons about the possibilities and limitations of the form. It quickly becomes apparent that AIM program exhibitions are a kind of Rorschach blot. The shows are large and include work in a range of artistic media. The artists are represented by only one or two objects and are often unknown to the writer. Times critics therefore have neither the ability nor the space to engage with any individual artist or object in depth. In many instances, they use the cross-disciplinary “representativeness” of the exhibition, as well as the selectivity of the AIM program, to make grand pronouncements about the state of art.

[...]

What remains unexplored in these texts is the unique structure of the AIM program itself. The newspaper review must adhere closely to the objects readers will encounter upon a visit to the gallery, and the trade magazine editor often won’t consider nonthematic group exhibitions of young artists worth analyzing in her pages. Yet these annual summertime presentations are not regular group shows; they are the culmination of an intensive, months-long educational and social process. Should the AIM program’s distinctive structure—and its effects, if any, upon the objects presented in the gallery—be analyzed critically? This is where a more broadly conceived criticism should step in. The singular nature of the AIM program calls out for equally idiosyncratic examination; critics should feel encouraged to explore the boundaries of the review format. The changing media environment that we are currently navigating—especially the proliferation of new distribution technologies—may provide opportunities for such efforts. What would it mean for a critic to “embed” with an AIM cohort for some time prior to reviewing the exhibition? Or to discuss the maturation process itself? The newspaper review remains an important rite of passage for young artists; it allows them to see how the ambiguousness and richness of their work is distilled by the mind of an astute viewer, and it introduces them to a wider audience than they might otherwise have found. But during the past thirty years, both criticism and the marketplace have undergone fundamental changes. Marking the anniversary of Artist in the Marketplace provides an opportunity to rethink the ways in which critics evaluate the capstone exhibitions. Doing so thoughtfully could provide benefits to both artists and critics.

[1] Peter Schjeldahl, The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl, 1978-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 63.

[2] Maurice Berger, ed., The Crisis of Criticism (New York: The New Press, 1998).

[3] Raphael Rubenstein, ed., Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of Their Practice (Lenox, Mass.: Hard Press Editions, 2006).

In 1961, meteorologist Edward Lorenz discovered the sensitive dependence on initial conditions now popularly known as the “butterfly effect” while attempting to simulate the weather through computer modeling. The year before, French mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot revealed that seemingly unpredictable fluctuations in the price of cotton conformed to larger sequences, and that these cycles held true no matter the scale at which he analyzed them: curves for daily price changes and curves for monthly price changes matched perfectly. Lorenz and Mandelbrot’s observations, along with the work of other pioneering researchers, quickly cohered into the study of what is now called “deterministic chaos”—a subset of the larger field of chaos theory. Contrary to the connotations the word chaos carries in the nonscientific mind, chaos theory is in fact devoted to discovering organized systems, albeit ones for which the organizing principle is difficult to discern. As research in this field has progressed, an increasing number of physical processes have been shown to conform to chaotic patterns.

Another term used to describe phenomena that seem complex and unrelated yet submit to physical laws is “self-organized criticality.” It is said that something about the intrinsic dynamics of such phenomena—the way they organize themselves—allows them to achieve the critical point at which they radically change their behavior; they don’t need an outside prompt to undergo a drastic metamorphosis. The quintessential example of self-organized criticality is the pile of sand that spontaneously forms an avalanche once a certain unpredictable number of grains is dropped onto it. Tsunamis, forest fires, and the water dripping from a kitchen faucet are all characterized by self-organized criticality, and can in some way be accounted for by mathematical models. But however great a swath of the world we are able to fit into discernible patterns, the desire to find truly random phenomena, events that cannot be explained by formulas, persists.

Installation view, Deitch Projects, New York.

This broad impetus animates many of Tauba Auerbach’s recent artworks. Auerbach has expanded her range of inquiry from an early focus on the semiotics of written language; now she frequently devises small-scale experiments in unpredictability to be carried out in the studio. She carefully designs criteria for these operations, disciplines the variables under her control (most of which are identified with artistic subjectivity), and then carries her investigations to their logical conclusions. That the resultant artworks do not always match up to the expected results—what should be truly random often in fact follows chaotic patterns—raises fascinating questions about chance, circumstance, and intention.

The most direct and seemingly rudimentary of these experiments involved making hundreds of photographs of television static. Friends and colleagues in the fields of science and mathematics had suggested to Auerbach that the cosmic background radiation rendered on television as static might be one of the few sources of true randomness. Yet in making her photographs, Auerbach quickly discovered patterns: coronas of bright light; concentrations of shadow; striations of color; and, most surprisingly, arrangements that closely resemble her earlier “50/50” series of black-and-white drawings. But if static is a depiction of radio energy that the television draws out of the air and tries to turn into an image, are these patterns simply the result of the mind’s own attempt to discern an image where there is only “background”? Or is the imperfect nature of Auerbach’s process itself the source of the repetitions she discovered? How could she be confident, for example, that there was no signal intermixed with the noise? Though her concern is primarily experimental and her inspiration scientific, these photographs enter into dialogue with such chance-based Conceptual photographic series as John Baldessari’s attempts, in the early 1970s, to discover with a camera patterns formed by red balls he tossed into the air. More obliquely, the distance between Auerbach’s avowed intent and the resultant images brings to mind similar gaps in many of Douglas Huebler’s “Variable” photographs, such as his ten-image “documentation” of birdcalls he heard while walking in Central Park in 1969. (It is as difficult to observe static systematically as it is to create a visual record of sounds.) Like these precedents, Auerbach’s photographs, despite their empirical bent, possess an affective charge. Some of that power may be rooted in the fact that analog television has just been succeeded by its digital replacement, depriving us of our most common window onto the cosmic radiation that surrounds us—and therefore onto randomness itself.

Tauba Auerbach, Shatter III, 2009, acrylic and glass on panel

The questions of perceptual bias and methodological rigor that haunt Auerbach’s recent photographs are also inscribed in her new paintings depicting shattered glass. To make these works, Auerbach places large glass panes on top of a panel and covers them with a sheet of cardboard. She is unable to see the fractures created when she strikes them—ostensibly creating random designs in the glass’s surface. Removing the glass fragments one at a time, she fills in the area beneath each shard with a uniform gradient that ranges from black to white. Like her earlier “50/50” series, these images contain a perfect balance of light and dark tones, though their highly irregular, bulbous forms hint at the inexact nature of Auerbach’s process: working by hand, she may apply the gradients imprecisely or may accidentally skip over a cell altogether. But, as Mandelbrot’s price studies and scientific investigations of natural phenomena remind us, even the seemingly unexpected can be governed by rules. Were Auerbach to continue the series indefinitely, it is safe to assume that errors distorting the compositions in one manner would be countered by others that redress the imbalance.

There is an indeterminate territory where chance and intention meet; Tauba Auerbach’s newest artworks navigate this domain and benefit from the ambiguity. Recent research fascinatingly suggests that these gray zones extend to gray matter: the human brain itself appears to occasionally move toward the edge of anarchy. “In the 1990s, it emerged that the brain generates random noise, and hence cannot be described by deterministic chaos. When neuroscientists incorporated this randomness into their models, they found that it created systems on the border between order and disorder” [1]—an instance of self-organized criticality, notes science journalist David Robson. In the last few years, researchers in the United States, Germany, and England have confirmed that “neural avalanches” follow patterns that likewise describe mountain avalanches, and have speculated that inhabiting the boundary between order and disorder is what makes the brain so adaptable. One wonders, unscientifically, whether there is a connection between the brain’s inability to create true randomness and human inability to perceive it in the world. Auerbach is particularly fascinated by scientific research that pushes toward unexpected convergences, and the artworks she creates evoke speculative thought that, in a quest for synthesis, borders on the mystical or spiritual—and effaces the distinctions between science and art.

Christian Holstad, Mt. Rushmore, 2003.

My essay “New York: Branching Out” is included in The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Catalogue Raisonné, just published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It focuses on developments in the New York art world from 2003 to 2005, the years in which the drawings collection was compiled, and begins this way:

In physics, the law of conservation of energy holds that the total amount of energy in any isolated system remains constant. Since energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only change from one form to another or move between bodies. For several decades after World War II, this law seemed to hold for the New York art world as well: as new developments sprouted in one corner of the city or another, already established artistic precincts would typically begin a slow fade. Fifty-seventh Street, then Soho and the East Village, then Chelsea. Now it seems this rule of either/r has been replaced by one of both/and. Behemoth Chelsea has given up no ground in the last five years as the lower end of the West Village and, with increasing visibility, the Lower East Side have sprouted their own conclaves of galleries.

As the long, steady climb out of the valley created by the last art market crash kicked into high gear during the years The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection was being put together—2003 to 2005—the city’s art world no longer remained, in any sense of the term, an isolated system.

The essay goes on to discuss the art world’s convergence with other artistic disciplines, artists’ collectives and  collaborative projects, the influence of non-profit galleries, and the revived careers of artists who had worked in (relative) obscurity for several decades. It ends with a plea for a more organic connection between the city itself and the art made here:

Looking back on these years spent traversing the sidewalks, what remains most difficult to discern, oddly enough, are the points of intersection between the art made in New York and the city itself. In this period, New York has rebounded from the tremendous disaster of September 11, 2001. We have cauterized the wound, though bureaucratic fumbling allows the site to fester, and have advanced along the path, which we began traveling after our near bankruptcy in the late 1970s, to becoming a stable, efficiently managed, “civilized” metropolis. New York’s physical infrastructure, not only in Manhattan but also increasingly in the outer boroughs, has begun to cleave to a vaguely modern, clean, corporate aesthetic. Enough time has passed that physical attacks are no longer at the forefront of New Yorkers’ minds; in fact, the city seems largely impervious to incitements of ay kind. Its shift to a postindustrial economy is nearly complete, and the invisible information-economy power that coursed up and down its avenues from 2001 to 2008 necessarily shaped the types of social activities that flourished in its public spaces. The New York art scene, similarly flush and also oriented toward a world stage, seems to have unintentionally mirrored these developments. In both arenas, we have traded spontaneity for stability and safety, and local detail for international legibility. Art’s grandest recent interventions into New York’s public space, and therefore its greatest inroads into public consciousness—Christo and Jeanne Claude’s installation The Gates in Central Park, Jeff Koons’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, Jenny Holzer’s projections on the facade of the New York Public Library, Olafur Eliasson’s East River waterfalls—have been spectacular gestures literally and conceptually underwritten by the same forces transforming the city. Many of the art community’s smaller gestures, exhibited in proliferating antiseptic spaces, could conceivably have been made anywhere. That more of this art is good, and made by a more diverse range of artists, is certainly true. But the art world is large enough, and art history capacious enough, to allow its denizens in New York to dissociate themselves from their immediate physical context. Paradoxically, then, despite the infusion of interest from other creative disciplines, in another sense the New York art world’s boundaries seem less porous than ever. Such claims, though indicative of implicitly held opinions, can hopefully be separated from value judgments. They are made simply so that one chronicler of a portion of this art can advance a hope for what is made in the immediate future: that it partake of, respond to, and complement what diversity and vitality remains in this city.

Sol LeWitt, A Photograph of Mid-Manhattan with the Area between The Plaza, Ansonia, Biltmore and Carlyle Hotels Removed (R 770), 1978.

Alongside my commentary there are essays on art and artists in Los Angeles by Jan Tumlir, in Cologne and Düsseldorf by Manfred Hermes, in Berlin by Isabelle Graw, in London and Glasgow by my friend Martin Herbert, and an examination of the drawing materials found in the collection by Scott Gerson. The book is one of two to accompany the exhibition “Compass in Hand: Selections from The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection,” on view at the Museum until January 4, 2010.

“I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum.” – Louise Glück, “Disruption, Hesitation, Silence”

“Conceptual Artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.” – Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art”

“You should never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” – Ian Gander, the artist’s father

Conceptual art is an open-ended gambit. Unlike the drive toward flatness that fueled the development of much modernist painting, which foretold its own end once pure depthlessness had been achieved, Conceptual art is most often underpinned by processes, by ways of seeing and thinking. As such, the term is by no means limited to the philosophical-linguistic explorations of Joseph Kosuth, the rule-based structures and permutations of Sol LeWitt, or any of the dry, seemingly abstract investigations promulgated by early avatars of the movement. Instead, Conceptual art embodies an approach to the world—or, better yet, extracts a core sample from the vast inventory of worldly experience, holding it up to new light.

Because nearly all art made today must in some way grapple with modernism—which, like capitalism, may never end—the core samples Conceptual artists draw out often incorporate aspects of the modernist legacy. This heritage necessarily comes down to us fragmented, incomplete. Glück, in the essay from which the epigraph quoted above is taken, continues: “All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.”

London-based artist Ryan Gander’s artworks frequently engage with this weighty aesthetic and ideological inheritance: architecture, typographic design, utopian city planning, other artists’ works, language, and the artist’s studio have all appeared in some form or another in his art. It may seem a small-stakes operation to make art that is, broadly, about other art or about artmaking, and for many artists working today, the air indeed seems pretty thin. Yet Gander doesn’t simply tease out the nuances of chair designs or bemoan the failure of this or that manifesto to correctly prophecy the present. Instead he frequently manages to inhabit or reanimate fragments of this tradition, offering not rote, judgmental commentary on what has past but rather a meditation on the conditions that brought such objects and ideals into being. He hovers in the gaps that have opened up between then and now, pointing out the static that interferes with any understanding of the context in which something was first created. As one critic phrased it, Gander offers “allegorical resurrection[s] of cultural ruins.” But by granting autonomy to these ruins—they are not mere illustrations of some thesis—his artworks avoid forfeiting the power of which Glück speaks.

The curator Douglas Fogle has claimed that at heart Gander is a sculptor; another curator, Bart van der Heiden, has posited photography as Gander’s core practice. I’d like to propose a quite different source for his alchemical ability to transmute received ideas and forms into compelling artworks: storytelling. Gander’s narratives blow life into modernism’s dying embers, reigniting the utopian striving and the restless, playful curiosity about the world that were indivisible from the creation of so much modernist art, architecture, and design but are now mostly lost to us. (Many artists working now, some of whom were included in a recent exhibition at the Hamburg Kunsterein titled “Formalism: Modern Art Today,” engage the form but not the spirit of the forebears to which they lay claim. At its least developed, this neo-modernism—forgive the term—is mere style, elegant yet vacuous.) The narrative impulse likewise ties together Gander’s quite varied artistic output: film installations, sculptures, sound pieces, drawings, a children’s book, public art, a television series pilot, lectures—even an invented word, slipped discreetly into the English language.

* * *

Storytelling is most clearly discerned in The Boy Who Always Looked Up (2003), a forty-eight-page children’s book that Gander wrote and illustrated. It whimsically narrates the life of Hungarian-born architect Ernö Goldfinger, in particular the construction of his thirty-two-story Trellick Tower. That Brutalist building, a public housing structure completed in 1972, is situated across the street from the Victorian house of Tom, the story’s narrator, who meets Goldfinger when several architects visit the site during construction. The friendship between Tom and the architect leads to the addition of basement doorways that act as portals to a utopian world symbolized by a paper model for the building. Gander’s mix of fact and fantasy contrasts not only the viewpoints of child and architect, but also the architect’s earnest intentions and the somewhat grim reality of the building itself. (Like many high-rise public housing buildings in England and the United States, Trellick Tower was for many years beset with crime and in a state of general disrepair.) The juxtapositions lead to a host of questions about the efficacy of such projects: Did Goldfinger’s aspirations—and, by extension, those of architects who created similar projects—founder in the face of decidedly non-idealistic residents? Is such aspiration childlike, or even misguided, in its naïveté? Can architecture effect social change?

This kind of storytelling is quite different from “back stories,” the information some artists share as a kind of legend or key to understanding the perplexing, hermetic objects they choose to exhibit. Whereas those tip-offs function to limit interpretation—“Oh, this accumulation of plastic tubes and women’s high heels is about unequal access to water,” or some such—Gander’s artworks consistently open outward. Another work in the same series as the children’s book is Bauhaus Revisited (2003), a re-creation of a chess set designed by Josef Hartwig in 1924 such that the shape of each piece indicates what moves it can make. Hartwig’s set, meant to eliminate the barrier to entry that kept beginners from understanding the complex game, was designed to be mass produced. Gander’s version, however, is necessarily a one-off and sunders any attempt at playing: It was carved from rare African zebrawood, the marbleized patterning of which makes it impossible to distinguish the two traditional “sides” or “teams” of the game. The gesture can be seen several ways: as an acknowledgment of the removal of such populist-friendly designs as Hartwig’s to the rarefied world of museum collections; as a Dadaist prank liberating the game from the constraints of applicable rules; or as a completion of the pieces’ migration from representation (of knights, bishops, etc.) to pure abstraction.

Both of these artworks are part of the series “An Incomplete History of Ideas” (2002–2006), a body of work that also, in another piece, deployed designer and socialist William Morris’s shambolic book of utopian socialism News from Nowhere. What unites these variegated touchstones is embodied in the word incomplete: Not only did each object end up operating much differently from how it was intended, but myriad new possibilities arise when they’re considered in relation to one another.  As Gander wrote about one work in the series, a novel meant to be written by fifteen separate authors then shopped by the artist to literary agents under a pen name, “I don’t know if it will be a good story. I’m just providing the possibility, the condition for things to happen.”

“An Incomplete History of Ideas” functions associatively, joining together fragments with a logic whose qualities as a fixative may in the end only be known to the artist. This has been Gander’s modus operandi since his time at the Rijksakedemie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, where he first presented his Loose Association lecture, a performance piece with which he has been closely identified ever since. Taking the form of a narrated Power Point slide show, the talk plausibly strings together seemingly offhand observations about a comically wide range of subjects, from “desire lines” to Captain Birdseye, from his late great aunt Deva to Klingons, and from Panopticon theorizer Jeremy Bentham to his late grandfather’s collection of QSL cards, which ham-radio and CB operators mail to each other to acknowledge that they’ve spoken over the airwaves. Like the children’s-book story of Ernö Goldfinger’s life, these talks blend fact and fiction, trading on the authority automatically accorded a lecture to grant provisional “truth” status to urban myths. (Bear in mind the lesson imparted to the artist by his father, quoted at the outset of this essay.) It’s slippery territory, but as Gander has noted, “The ability to find a logic in associating ideas isn’t for the lazy.”

That assertion was published in a catalogue of Gander’s Association Photographs (2005), which are intimately related to the Loose Association lectures. The series, comprising eighteen images, depicts carefully plotted arrangements of the 105 “personally significant” items that the artist collected over a two-year period. Each item—from self-evident objects like newspaper articles and a packet of salt to inscrutable inclusions like blank sheets of carbon paper—is annotated by a museum-style wall label that is itself depicted in the photograph. Printed at the same scale as the sections of wall they depict, these flatly lit compositions are what one critic called a “conceptual trompe l’oeil.” Each item contained therein is, likewise, potentially a starting point for an entirely new strand of Gander’s work. This possibility is confirmed by a closer look at image number seventeen. The photograph depicts an artwork by the artist Aurélien Froment consisting of an agenda for the year 2030, a date Gander recycled into the title of his 2005 Store Gallery exhibition “Somewhere Between 1886 and 2030.” (In a sound piece included in the show, Froment discusses his own artwork.) On either side of the agenda are a promotional sheet for an Eames chair on an “Eiffel Tower” base, a picture of two billboards for British Telecom that incorporate giant Post-It Notes, and a small sketch of the Eiffel Tower on another (normal-size) Post-It Note, all three of which the artist, at the time of this writing, is working into a stand-alone artwork.

But photograph number seventeen, titled What kind of a world, also depicts, in its lower-left-hand corner, a sketch on graph paper of “how best to annotate this work.” (This sketch itself is annotated in the depicted wall label; it is listed as number 105, the last in the series of evocative objects.) If Gander’s associative artworks are akin to strolls or rambles in a park, in which a succession of sense impressions cohere instinctually rather than by some force of reasoning, the idea behind the inclusion of such a sketch in the finished photograph is so tightly wound as to be a perfect circle. Loops, tautologies, and knots are the opposite of Gander’s more fanciful linkages, and function as counterbalances to the meandering side of his output. Perhaps the tightest spring he has wound is the word he invented, mitim. Not only is it an palindrome, but when set in capital letters in many sans-serif typefaces it is also visually symmetrical, a “physical palindrome.” Mitim means “a mythical word newly introduced into history as if it had always been there”—it is what it means. In a text published in the design journal Dot Dot Dot, Gander explained at length the difficulties he faces with regard to instigating and increasing its circulation, which must stem in part from this self-reflexive circumscription.

It’s worth noting here that the most significant element of our inheritance from modernism in the arts may be artistic self-consciousness about the characteristics (and limitations) of a given medium. Painters made paintings about painting; novelists wrote books that called attention to their construction. (In this vein, in 2001 Gander restaged the image from a Serge Gainsbourg album cover to investigate the pictorial information taken in by three different types of camera, presenting the results side-by-side.) Gander’s ceaseless and playful inquisitiveness is particularly fertile in this regard: Each aspect of his studio practice is fit to be pried apart and examined in the same way an engineer might investigate a watch or a computer programmer might probe a handheld gadget. This is not limited to individual gestures or artworks: The aforementioned sound piece, including in his 2005 exhibition at Store Gallery, narrated not only Froment’s 2030 agenda and details about the artworks that were included in the show, but also those ideas for artworks that Gander had considered for inclusion but ultimately discarded. The strategy once again functions in a manner quite opposed to museum-display convention, in which an Acoustiguide sound track anchors an exhibition visitor with concrete details about given works. In Somewhere Between, the sound track serves to pick apart the viewer’s assumptions while at the same time lead her to imaginatively create objects that are not present (or, in one case, is only present on the show’s invitation card).

In three recent video installations Gander has deployed his penchant for creating coiled and free-ranging structures at the same time. The balance between these modes is slightly different in each. Two, both titled Is this guilt in you too, possess a centrifugal force, moving outward from a central visual motif or situation; the third, titled Ghostwriter Subtext, features figures well known in the art world and is more centripetal.

The young girl narrating Is this guilt in you too (The study of a car in a field) (2005), which was made by Gander for presentation at the 2005 Art Basel art fair, has not only seen the video, but is in the process of seeing it at the same time as the viewer of the finished piece. “The voice”—meaning hers—“… makes it seem like somebody has already seen this.” At one point in the audio commentary about the minute-long digital video, she narrates what one watches like a play-by-play announcer. She describes the slow fade from black to white, the snowy field that comes into view, the stand of trees and powder-dusted mountains in the background, the four-door sedan idling in the midst of the scene, and the bluish shadow it casts on the ground nearby. If this were the extent of the girl’s commentary on the looped video, the work could be seen as ironically self-conscious, a humorous addition to the mass of artworks, films, theater productions, and novels that reflexively acknowledge the fact of their fabrication. But her quote continues: “…and they know what you’re watching, and they sort of know everything about it.” Prompted by an interlocutor we cannot hear, she presses onward, discussing the clip’s relationship to music videos and driving video games; analyzing its real-world verisimilitude; offering psychological speculations about the kind of person who could have ended up in a situation like the one onscreen; prognosticating about what could happen next; guessing what kinds of feelings it might arouse in the viewer; selecting a suitable sound track for it. Perhaps most importantly and humorously, she explains where it is to be exhibited—“An art fair, in Basel”—and spells out what art fairs are: “[They are] the art world. Lots of galleries are there, like streets. And it’s full of people walking around.” Encountering this video installation at Art Basel must have been uncanny. How often do artworks speak back to you? And of those, how many speak of the encounter you’re in the midst having? If the tradition of self-conscious artworks stretches back well beyond twentieth-century modernism (think of Velazquez’s Las Meninas), it remains rare even today that an artwork is endowed with something more akin to artificial intelligence.

To encounter it at a nonprofit venue, as I did at Artists Space in New York in late 2005, is to understand how the video, already complete and therefore somewhat out of the artist’s hands, continues to subtly chart its movement through the world. An attendant, slightly dissonant frisson inheres in the experience, forcing one to think not only about the conditions of the particular exhibition you are attending, but also about its previous incarnation as an artwork made for an entirely different venue. To imagine its resonance in an art-fair setting encourages one to think more critically about the contingent, ever-evolving relationship between an artwork and its public. It brings to mind a striking question: Just what causes the guilt referred to in the title? With everything but an answer coming from the artwork itself, one’s response, as with all of Gander’s works, must be an individual act of negotiation. To traffic in such thought-provocation without retreating into abstraction or mystical ambiguity is rare. The study of a car in a field is a video koan, the value of which does not reside solely in the stress of meditation upon the considerable questions it generates, but also in the image itself, which is, despite its utter anonymity, prepossessing.

Is this guilt in you too (Cinema verso) (2006) charts the story of two characters, one living in New York City, the other in upstate New York. Both are experiencing sensory lapses: In the city, the man is slowly going blind, and is trying to find the best route to his daughter’s school given his deteriorating sight. Upstate, the unnamed character is experiencing what might be described as a kind of snow blindness, a whiteout not unlike that which was depicted in The study of a car in a field. With numerous such links between them, Gander has suggested that study may be seen as a kind of trailer for cinema verso. But whereas the earlier installation disentangled its audio and video tracks, but let gallery-goers experience them simultaneously, Cinema verso goes one step further. Viewers enter into a situation analogous to those experienced by the two protagonists, as it quickly becomes apparent that one is viewing the reverse side—verso—of a semi-opaque projection screen, through which distinct images become bleary washes of moving color. (This fact is confirmed by peeking around the edge of the screen at an empty auditorium.) The audio track is likewise faint, as it emanates from a directional speaker placed in a corner near to the screen. If you wish to hear the sound track, you must stand beneath the speaker and therefore cannot see the screen clearly; conversely, if you can see the video, its sound is unavailable. The installation anatomizes sensory experience, causing an empathic connection with the video’s hampered protagonists and forcing an imaginative reconstruction of its constituent parts, which will necessarily be different for each viewer.

Ghostwriter Subtext – (Notes on Speaking and Learning) (2006) furthers this theme, adding an intriguing subtext: the installation itself admits a divisive, revealing ambivalence. It is a two-channel work, the main screen depicting an interview with the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and the architect Rem Koolhaas conducted by a ghostwriter that Gander has hired. Obrist and Koolhaas are sitting inside the Serpentine Gallery’s temporary pavilion in London, which had, shortly before the shooting of Gander’s video, been the site of a twenty-four-hour “interview marathon” conducted by the duo. The unnamed ghostwriter, for whom extracting information is key to his trade, turns the tables on these prolific interrogators. In a manner similar to Cinema verso Gander has severed image and sound: Though the audio plays sequentially and is audible throughout the installation, Obrist and Koolhaas are only depicted at moments only when they are not speaking; as soon as their lips part to emit speech, the image cuts away to one of the other two listeners. (Interestingly, this decision gives the images the rhythm of conversation, alternately dawdling and accelerated.) A second, blank screen presents the transcript of a conversation between Gander and a friend as subtitles. Whereas Cinema verso allowed one behind the screen, this conversation, in which Gander wonders about the effectiveness of the installation as a whole, prods at the seamless surface one expects an artwork exhibited in public to possess. (In this manner it returns to probing of The story of a car in a field.) Given the deft play with truth that Gander has exhibited throughout his career, it’s perhaps too simple to assume that the dialogue flashing across the bottom of the screen is in any way confessional. But it doesn’t appear to be a conceit, and the possibility—of an anxious artwork, infallible as humans are—is appealing.

* * *

Gander is a latter-day modernist operating in the expanded field—high culture and low—brought into the realm of fine-art discourse by postmodernism. As he says himself: “I don’t see the difference between [the artist] Jonathan Monk’s work, the colour red, Star Wars the movie, or a piece of cardboard.” As the combination of technological development and increasingly available specialized labor has allowed artists to slalom across disciplines heretofore barricaded by the need for training, one comes to identify a certain class of practitioners less by style than by outlook. Other artists, such as the collaborative duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, for whom Gander has expressed admiration, or Maurizio Cattelan, deploy a similar (and potent) combination of self-reflexiveness and humor. What makes Gander’s practice unique is the frequency with which he turns this playful deliberation—it is calculation without cynicism—on himself, offering up to viewers an opportunity to inhabit his world rather than a position paper to ingest. That such an impressive variety of stories has been for several years the result of this curious process is all the more laudable. The last words should go to Gander himself: “I make better work when I’m just entwined with all the amazing stuff we’re all drenched in every day—just by happening to be alive—than when I am aware I’m ‘making art’. It’s that simple.”

You can draw a zigzag line across history and the arts, highlighting negation as a force of change by connecting, for example, Martin Luther to Bartleby the Scrivener to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing to Lee Lozano to the World Social Forum. Negation is normally considered the act of denial or the absence of something extant or positive. But another sentiment seems truer to me: Negation is a positive force. It is a tool, a resource to be exploited, and a way to strategically counterbalance the status quo. No can be a nuanced term: The refusal to work under given conditions implies the desire and need to change or replace them, a process that can take myriad forms. Matias Faldbakken has written, “If Eskimos have two hundred ways of saying ‘snow,’ I want a million ways to say ‘no.’” Negation is a quicksilver agent, difficult to identify, harder yet to pin down. Opposition is never stark. Here are thumbnail sketches of three ways to say “no,” as outlined or embodied by Maurice Blanchot, Joseph A. Schumpeter, and Henry David Thoreau, an admittedly idiosyncratic pantheon. Only 999,997 to go . . .

* * *

“Literature professes to be important while at the same time considering itself an object of doubt. It confirms itself as it disparages itself.” From this premise, outlined near the beginning of his essay “Literature and the Right to Death,” the French writer Maurice Blanchot swerved toward definitions of literature and of the writer—and hence of art and of the artist—that in their embodiment of paradox, they forward a radical affirmation: Everything is possible immediately. The writer must “destroy language in its present form and create it in another form, denying books as he forms a book out of what other books are not,” Blanchot stated. This negation is a license to freedom: The freedom to imagine worlds that do not exist and to make everything within them instantly available.

This opportunity is itself hounded by ambiguity; by allowing himself the freedom to depict the unrealizable, the writer limits his ability to create the conditions for his emancipation. He “ruins action, not because he deals with what is unreal but because he makes all of reality available to us.” Yet his writing is “the world, grasped and realized in its entirety by the global negation of all individual realities contained in it, therefore, at its highest level, it re-creates the lucidity-in-lack-of-control and the openness of total revolution. Every boundary dissolves. The French critic and novelist Julien Gracq touched on this in his Reading Writing, where he extolled the prose of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet and François-René de Chateaubriand for their “exquisitely negative values; in the various ways [their work] thwarts expectation at every moment, in the largely open register of its breakdowns.”

Unexpectedly, it is Damien Hirst, with his book title I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now, that gives voice to this freedom intrinsic to art. Extract Hirst’s monomaniacal ego from the statement—assume the art object is speaking for itself&8212;and one has a prescription for effective and affecting art. Operating everywhere and nowhere, relatable both to the masses and to the individual, with immediacy and foresight, an artwork has the power not only to negate but also to supersede current conditions. It hovers above us, suffused with all of our contradictory urges and desires.

* * *

Joseph Schumpeter, one of the twentieth century’s greatest theorists of capitalism, coined a term that remains with us today: creative destruction. It is “the essential fact about capitalism,” in the economist’s words. “It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.” In essence, this concept suggests that nothing is permanent: Everything—every business and business practice, in Schumpeter’s case—will be negated in time by insurrectionary forces. Fusing two essentially opposite terms, the term expresses capitalism’s dependence on “innovation, human drama, and sheer havoc,” as Schumpeter biographer Thomas K. McCraw phrased it. Today, as globalization seems to lock capitalism into place as the central, inalienable fact of contemporary life for an ever-growing number of peoples, the instability cited can be understood as a seam or loophole. It is a manner by which one—or, more likely, a group—may introduce broader, more structural changes to a highly regimented system.

I cling to the belief that art—indeed, art informed by modernist principles—can act as an agent for this kind of “massive change” (to use the designer Bruce Mau’s term). The commensurability of “creative destruction” and the modernist dictum “make it new” remains striking. Both terms create a temporal continuum and both prioritize that which is at that continuum’s leading edge. Whereas the innovation intrinsic to capitalism is ethically and morally neutral—if one imagines it solely as a process, and does not consider intention or its societal effects—modernism in the arts was (and remains) conditioned by teleological thinking: The movement has an endpoint, a goal. As the twentieth century taught us in so many ways, any guiding intelligence, when deployed at so large a scale, is likely to be, at best, benign in its coerciveness and, at worst, malevolent and ultimately catastrophic.

This is not to advocate for mindless transformation for its own sake, nor for passivity in the face of that which one hopes to change. But creative destruction gives a measure of hope in the face of despair. Now more than ever, art production is inextricably bound up with the machinations of capitalism, and urban wealth—ostensibly the primary endower of artists—is in fact displacing them. Given this, some comfort comes from the knowledge that resistance to the status quo will be abetted by impermanence, one of the status quo’s essential qualities.

* * *

“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.” So wrote Henry David Thoreau, who by all accounts—including his own, in his numerous journals—was a rather misunderstood social figure. Today he might be disdained as a loner, but as the late poet William Bronk related in his essay collection The Brother in Elysium: By following the dictates of his own conscience Thoreau was accepted by his neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts, if misunderstood “for the little differences and a certain strangeness that they felt between them and him.” Bronk, who spent most of his life in small-town, upstate New York, was sympathetic to the great Transcendentalist and was able to appreciate what Thoreau gave us—a searching, often lyrical account of himself and his immediate environment as both were affected by the rapidly changing society, all in exchange for his abandonment of most social conventions of the time.

Thoreau’s predilection for silence, his eschewal of idle chatter, and his avoidance of large gatherings of men stemmed from a peculiar (to contemporary sensibility) definition of friendship: It is not, as Bronk phrased it, a “mutual assistance league,” but rather an appeal to our best estimation of each other. One solicits neighbors for assistance and one turns to friends for sustenance that is deeper and that requires nothing more than insistence on the integrity of each partner’s individual nature, “specific for each other beyond any power of word or deed to change,” in Bronk’s words. Indeed, as Thoreau himself put it, “It is not words which I wish to hear or to utter but relations that I seek to stand in.”

These relations are a far cry from, for example, relational aesthetics, in which fleeting connections among culturally and economically homogenous groups are celebrated (often uncritically) as heralding a new social paradigm. Indeed, words (and certainly workshops) are not necessary to Thoreau’s conception of friendship—fellow feeling suffices. What would it mean to “opt out,” on his terms, today? While risking the disapprobation of colleagues—or worse yet, their indifference—there remains much to be gained by turning away from such thin relations. By turning inward, at a moment when so much artistic production is unavoidably linked with its social manipulation, one could stopper the slow diffusion of one’s creative faculties, thus making viable a kind of self-understanding that may otherwise never be achieved. Many artists, however, in choosing such self-reliance, will discover that the “new value” they acquire by doing so is of limited interest. But after time, some will be rewarded for their efforts and, more importantly, their creative output will enrich the lives of those that follow. (No one may know this better than Bronk, whose essay on Thoreau, written in the mid-1940s, was not deemed publishable until 1980.)

Let the last words come from Bronk: “In silence [man] prepares for speech; in solitude for society. And so in like manner, the truest society always approaches nearer to solitude, and the most excellent speech finally falls into silence.” Furthermore, “Silence is the world of potentialities and meanings beyond the actual and expressed, which the meanness of our actions and the interpretations put upon them threatens to conceal. Yet all actuality is to be referred to it and valued accordingly as it includes or suggests it. Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against.”

This Reader, a companion volume to the “Uncertain States of America” exhibition catalogue, began last year when the curators met with artists in their studios. What were the artists reading? What articles, books, reviews—and, we soon discovered, cartoons, cookbooks, memoirs and film scripts—were influencing their practices? A comprehensive survey of these curiosities was not included in the earlier exhibition catalogue. It remained, pace Obrist, an “Unrealized Project.”

Invited one year later by the curatorial team to construct such a list, we began by surveying the artists in the show and using their recommendations, many of which are included at the reading list at the back of this book, as a starting point for the selection of texts presented here. What follows is a synthesis of their nominations and our own research into significant recent writings both by American artists and about artistic practice and cultural politics in the United States today. Keeping with the theme of this exhibition, emphasis has been placed on identifying “young,” “emerging” writers, though salient pieces by a comparatively older generation and by those who reside outside of America are also included.

We hope that the following selections introduce some new writing and writers and shine a fresh light on more familiar passages. Equally we hope that this book’s reception reaches beyond those audiences who experience the exhibition first hand, and that it becomes a conduit of knowledge beyond the immediate exhibition-going public.

The present volume is not a “portrait of the exhibition’s artists in text” (an early, and mightily optimistic, vision). Nor is it a top-down survey of all that is novel and noteworthy in today’s art world. Cognizant of this exhibition’s ambitious modus operandi, to represent “a ‘new’ vision in American contemporary art,” we realize, of course, that some may view this publication as nothing but such a list, a currency-enhancing invocation of already-prevalent curatorial/critical interests. And we understand that such a publication indelibly sanctifies its content, that it operates as a value filter or, as Isabelle Graw observes in these pages, a “‘sound bite’ in order to underline claims for art historical importance or theoretical erudition.” Yet it is our underlying hope that this Reader belies such a roll-call of erudite endorsements, and that its contents engage audiences in unanticipated and fundamentally informative manners.

It is commonplace to note that contemporary art is swaddled in a haze of words, and it is futile to attempt a synoptic overview of art discourse, so we drew simple boundaries beyond which our inquiry would not trespass, several of them congruent with those set by the “Uncertain States of America” exhibition. The two most binding examples: each piece of writing included here has been published since 2000, and each discusses contemporary art, aesthetics, politics or the amorphous and expansive zone where these three concerns overlap. Selecting texts thus became a game, albeit one burdened by methodological complications. How to accommodate writings both by artists in “Uncertain States of America” and others critical of their programmes, or, for that matter, the very presuppositions of such a traveling group show? What, we contemplated, could be an appropriate framework to muster comprehensiveness in the face of mind-boggling pluralism and attendant information overload? How to play the game? One artist’s advice proved invaluable: “Don’t be an authority. And don’t apologize for not being an authority.” So we aimed for an eclectic sampling of material by writers—art historians, journalists, critics, artists, philosophers and a graphic designer/lawyer—whose contributions, we felt, gained from their placement alongside one another and from being set in relief against the project as a whole.

* * *

In recent years, many have noted the fashionableness of art that addresses its broader social context. The translation of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics into English in 2002 and the ongoing debate about this set of essays is one prominent example of this tendency. Others pertain to the intensification of discussion about the Internet’s (virtual) social power and the agency of extra-gallery/museum practices, the latter of which inspired “The Interventionists,” an exhibition curated by Nato Thompson and presented at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, in the summer of 2004. What has perhaps changed since the re-election later that autumn of George W. Bush is the zeroing in of (primarily European) interest in American art and artists. One could cite “Uncertain States of America,” “USA Today” at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, “This Is America: Visions of the American Dream” at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and even “Day for Night,” the 2006 Whitney Biennial (curated by Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, Europeans now ensconced in American institutions), as evidence of this trend.

This is undoubtedly a moment marked by a serious interest in the actions America is taking on the world stage—actions that have been described as cause for “grave concern.” We do not attempt to authoritatively engage these concerns here, but we do think that this sampling of discourse by and about a country’s visual artists leads to insights about its politics and society not gained elsewhere. Many of the artists in this exhibition, of course, would be quick to disavow explicitly political readings of their work, preferring, as Kori Newkirk recently stated during a panel discussion at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, to “seduce first.” He continued: “‘Political’ content can [simply] come in through the side door or window.” The art world’s definition of the term “political” remains fuzzy (as Pamela M. Lee rightly notes of its definition of “globalisation” as well), but, on occasion, this thinking-through-form counters the obfuscation that now stands for contemporary American political discourse. At the very least, it gives a sense of what it is like to live in the United States now, and it occasions some inspired debate. The present Reader, released on the occasion of the exhibition “Uncertain States of America” at the Serpentine Gallery, will be followed by an expanded selection of texts published by Sternberg Press this autumn. We hope that these books serve not only as valuable compendiums of recent writing about contemporary art, but also as inspiration to seek further understanding of these “Uncertain States.”

* * *

We would like to thank Julia Peyton-Jones, Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist for inviting us to undertake this project and for being instrumental in its realization; Caroline Schneider of Sternberg Press for ably seeing the book into print; the artists for their consistently trenchant criticisms of and honest responses to it; all of the authors and publications who granted reprint permission; and David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey of Dexter Sinister for their grace under pressure. Likewise we wish to thank Greg Allen, Eric C. Banks, Christopher Bedford, Tom Eccles, Bettina Funcke, Liam Gillick, Rachel Harrison, Michael Ned Holte, Gareth James, Miriam Katz, Elizabeth Linden, Molly Nesbit, Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Amie Robinson, Scott Rothkopf and David Velasco for their thoughtful contributions to the dialogue that produced this book.

“The most important thing about the work is that it is destroyed,” says Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright about his gouache wall paintings, improvised on site and covered over at the end of each exhibition. His mostly abstract works, which often occupy very little of the given wall space, are representational in an unexpected sense: Rather than depicting a scene or object found elsewhere or pulled from his imagination, Wright’s works “represent” the frequently idiosyncratic character of the site (a room’s proportions or its décor) and the contingencies of the work’s creation (the exhibition context or the artist’s mood). Wright achieves maximum effect through frequently minimal interventions by combining his intuitive sense of color, form, and placement with a deep knowledge of the histories of art, architecture, and ornamentation. He oscillates primarily between marks that allude to familiar Gothic, Rococo, and modernist forms, frequently fusing them with the graphic hallmarks of subcultures. Reading between the lines (sometimes literally), viewers discover motifs reminiscent of tattoo design or biker-jacket decoration, scientific symbols, religious iconography, and ornamental patterning. Wright deliberately chooses “available” forms—ones he feels are divested of cultural content by virtue of their familiarity—and, with precision and a concentration bordering on what he calls the “ecstatic,” imbues them with a new (and temporary) agency.

Wright maintains that architecture is subjective—an accumulation of encounters and observations rather than something that can be mapped out analytically with floor plans and elevations—and his paintings become a commemoration (in one critic’s words) of his pas de deux with the exhibition space. For a gallery visitor, the surprise encounter with an out-of-the-way work, the significant optical transformations a painting undergoes from different points of view, and the attendant awareness of one’s movement through space all foreground the negotiation inherent in viewing works of art. Context is inextricably linked to the artwork and the space between paintings becomes as important as the works themselves. (Perhaps an echo of some Minimalists’ preoccupation with phenomenology can be found here.) The viewer’s memory also performs a commemorative operation when considering the best of Wright’s works, as she remembers not just the graphic punch of each painting but also the details of her engagement with them.

Situating Wright’s practice can be difficult, as his art frequently takes contentious positions and registers numerous tensions. It attempts to slip free of the art market’s grasp by remaining resolutely impermanent, making its destruction a precondition of its creation. It sits uneasily outside any genealogies of wall painting, which one critic divided into “mural” (Sol LeWitt, Simon Patterson, etc.) and “wallpaper” (Robert Barry, Michael Craig-Martin, etc.) camps. It can be difficult to reconcile the laboriousness of Wright’s process with the ephemerality of the final product. Yet the work’s thought-provoking ambiguities do not mask the pleasure of beholding one of Wright’s paintings, both in discovering how it alters your relationship to a space and in knowing that the transformation is evanescent, a product of the very moment of the encounter.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Every Anvil (detail), 2001

From a billboard detergent advertisement to the weather forecast on the morning radio, from the menu at a favorite restaurant to snippets of conversation overheard in line at the DMV, we constantly process, sort, and decide how to store information. Archives are necessarily formed—all the weather forecasts in the past week, for example—and, in real time, we splice bits of them together to form private narratives that give shape to experience. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, collaborators since 1996 and based in Brooklyn, have for the past eight years often used digital technology as a proxy for this process, exploring concepts of narrative, repetition, archiving, the database, and the influence of media in our everyday lives. The technology they deploy—in obsessively edited videos, on websites, in live events, or in sculptural installations—with its underlying code of ones and zeros, is a metaphor for our mental systems of classification. Wisely the McCoys use it as a means rather than an end. Without becoming didactic or losing visual appeal, their art perceptively exposes the strict organization by which we cope with a glut of information.

Soft Rains (2003), exhibited at FACT, Liverpool, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, and at Postmasters Gallery in New York, treads on our mental library of cinematic images by using digital technology to stitch together hackneyed narratives lifted from countless genre flicks. Seven tabletop sculptures on pedestals of varying height, each a miniature film set made by hand and populated with figures ordered from a German model railroad manufacturer, become settings we have little trouble recognizing: there’s the David Lynch chilller and James Bond thriller, a Fellini classic, a noirish lounge scene, and an artsy indie film featuring a warehouse loft-slash-studio. Our omniscient eye peers down at these lifeless scenes through a phalanx of small video cameras and lights on flexible metal arms, each precisely pointed to a specific part of the (non-)action. An earlier exhibition of some of this work had a working title of “Robot Films,” and indeed the McCoys cede the directorial “Action!” and “Cut!” to a computer, which in real-time feeds the cameras’ motionless views through a program that composes an endlessly reorganizing “film” made of roughly minute-long fragments, each containing six to ten shots. The slivers of would-be narrative, aided by a score partly taken from actual films and partly composed for the work, lose none of their cinematic magic from this concession. Instead, despite presenting the mechanics of creation (the sculptural film sets and their attendant cameras) and the product (the resultant “film”) in the same place, Soft Rains encourages a double suspension of disbelief that leaves the viewer to focus on either the deft craftsmanship of the former or the emotional tug of the latter.

The McCoys’ use of live video can be seen as a nod to the pervasive use of the medium by artists in the late 1960s, when it often was accompanied by a performative element. In Soft Rains, it is the viewer that engages in a kind of performance, willingly bridging (in both directions) the distance between the temporal, two-dimensional presentation of the filmic image on screen and the static, three-dimensional presentation of the tabletop sculptures. Another way to put it is that viewers can enjoy trying to pair the on-screen scenes with the cameras from which they come.

The construction of quasi-narrative in Soft Rains is a clever foil to the deconstruction of the artists’ “Every” series (2001-2002). Working with images from the 1970s TV show Starsky and Hutch, episodes of the original Star Trek series,1940s- and 1950s-era Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons, movies set in Las Vegas, and 1970s East-meets-West style Kung Fu films, the McCoys create classification systems for narrative material. They reorganize the linear progression of already-produced narrative into the atemporal spread of databases. For example, Every Anvil (2001) creates a taxonomy of cartoon violence: the artists sorted through hours of early Looney Tunes footage and meticulously re-arranged it by type. The work takes the form of an open suitcase hanging on the wall with a small video monitor and a VideoCD player set inside. Nearby is a shelf loaded with CD’s containing the results of their effort, labeled “EVERY HAMMER AND HATCHET,” “EVERY MEAN DOG,” “EVERY POISONING,” and so on. The viewer is encouraged to play a CD at random, and each contains nothing more than a cascade of clips showing whatever the label describes.

Every Shot, Every Episode (2001), the first in the series and which takes the same physical form, slices the twenty episodes of Starsky and Hutch aired between 1975 and 1977 into over 10,000 individual shots spread across almost 300 CD’s. The categories are looser, ranging across visual cues, individual characters, or plot twists (“EVERY ZOOM IN,” “EVERY YELLOW VOLKSWAGEN,” “EVERY BLUE,” “EVERY MOAN OF PAIN”), but the result is the same: the predictable plot mechanisms (rising action, climax, denouement) are dismantled and the connections between events are made obscure. The process unveils the clichés and repetition inherent in their formulaic sources: Wile E. Coyote will never catch the Road Runner, Starsky and Hutch will always bust the bad guys. The artists write that the material they use “employ[s] formulas or archetypes of human behavior…and constitute many of our earliest experiences with narrative.” The heart of these works is their turning that narrative into list or database form.

What that reveals, in the case of Every Anvil, was succinctly outlined by the writer Jim Supanick: “The dogged persistence in facing falling safes, every stick of dynamite, every anvil…the slapstick quality that kids tap into shows itself as Sisyphean repetition to the adult viewers who make the mistake of looking too closely…[reminding] us of the masochism ingrained in our own everyday lives.” Every Shot, Every Episode may be a bit more benign, given our distanced, ironic appreciation of the source material, but the conceptual (and literal) shake-up is a potent way of reimagining the overly familiar. As Jennifer puts it: “It’s a strategy for looking at narrative in a different way. Maybe more from the point of view of the maker or the production process rather than the spectator.”

The McCoys’ extensive involvement with reorganizing available footage led naturally to a desire for more active re-creation. For The Kiss and Horror Chase (both 2002), the artists, instead of working with the original material, completely restaged scenes from Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2, respectively. The artists leave their place as editors to temporarily become both spectators—Body Heat and Evil Dead 2 are among their favorite films—and directors. Horror Chase, filmed on a Brooklyn soundstage inside a 1,000 square foot set constructed by the artists, is a one-shot horror picture. The camera stalks actor Adrian Latourelle (playing the Bruce Campbell role in the original film), who runs in fear down a hallway and into a bedroom, crashes through a door into a living room, runs past the kitchen into a bathroom and then a closet, dashes down a mist-filled hallway, and finally ends up back in the kitchen. The camera winds up exactly where it began, making for a forty-five second seamless loop that, in the final artwork, is manipulated to run fast, slow, and backwards according to a computer algorithm that randomizes its playback. Rather than working with the entire film, the McCoys show the chase scene—in this case the actor is trying to avoid an evil force that eventually possesses him—as the essence of the horror genre. The Kiss is an endless prolongation of the climactic moment in every romance film (though specifically taken from Body Heat), seen again through a computer program from random angles and at random speeds. Both films expand the issues raised by the “Every” works: as Timothy Druckrey writes, “In differentiating the original and its perverse double, the production takes the flash-back into the realm of the fetishistic…[it] is a kind of classic in limbo—part re-creation, part parody, part hijack, part homage.”

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from Horror Chase, 2002

The same descriptors can be applied to Soft Rains and especially Our Second Date (2004), which again adds a personal variation to the proceedings. The work is another tabletop sculpture attended to by robotic cameras, but this time it recreates on one platform both the set (taken from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend) and the screen (the Parisian movie theater the artists visited to watch that film on their second date.) Soft Rains collapses the space of film—its creation and reception—into one room; Our Second Date reduces it even further. Like the steel suitcases that contain Every Anvil or Every Shot, Every Episode, the interplay of creation, transmission, and reception in Our Second Date reveals a world every bit as rich and complex as our own.

Mark Handforth, installation view, 2004 Whitney Biennial

Mark Handforth possesses the increasingly rare ability to make sculptures that engage the eye, the body, and the mind. With an incisive wit and visual sophistication, the Miami-based artist pairs the handmade with appropriated everyday objects, making subtle alternations and juxtapositions to reference modernist design, Minimalist sculpture, street subcultures, and roadside Americana. To great effect, Handforth plays representation against abstraction, the rough against the refined, and art history against itself. He frequently exhibits multiple works at once, making installations of casual associativeness that, as 2004 Whitney Biennial curator Debra Singer notes, “suggest a constant state of flux—a process of being rearranged, constructed, and dismantled all at once.” This was literally true of earlier works, such as Not from where I’m standing, exhibited at the North Miami Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. That installation comprised a tower of industrial scaffolding that acted as a screen on which an ever-changing array of objects were installed or hung. More recently, that sense of flux occurs in the mind, as the viewer becomes progressively more cognizant of the multiple quotations implanted in each work. However, it is no small feat that, unlike Simon Starling, whose highly conceptual work inevitably requires careful explication, Handforth never loses sight of the value of aesthetic pleasure. He delights in a narrow range of materials—exotic woods, industrially fabricated metals, fluorescent lights covered by colored gels, multicolored candles—that are deployed to very specific effect. The result is an art that, as Singer writes, is “equal parts suburban alienation and modernist transcendence.”

Given Handforth’s consistent engagement with Minimalist sculpture—no matter that only some of his works resemble Minimalist objects—it can be rewarding to examine part of his oeuvre through the dominant lens by which that earlier generation was viewed: phenomenology. A recent Artforum article by art historian James Meyer posits that for many contemporary sculptors a relationship to the spectacularly sized gallery space has replaced a direct engagement with the viewer’s body. At the tail end of a half-century genealogy of this transition, Meyer cites Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses and the sculptors who have filled Tate Modern’s grand Turbine Hall as artists for whom “…an aesthetic of size…has subsumed a Minimalist concept of scale.” Yet Handforth’s art is an exception to this trend, with many of his works splitting the difference between the two poles while falling outside of Meyer’s chronological spectrum. As physical objects, Miami Kiosk (1998) and DiamondBrite (2004) can be placed somewhere between the somatic works of Sol LeWitt, Walter De Maria, and others in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in 1966 and the oversized sculptures by Tony Smith, Ronald Bladen, and Barnett Newman in Scale as Content at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1967: they’re big enough to seem awkwardly stuffed into the gallery space yet not so large as to fully alienate a viewing body. (In fact, the exact opposite of alienation occasionally happens: one widely circulated picture of Miami Kiosk features children playing on top of it.) It is conceivable that Handforth really performed a David-versus-Goliath showdown with the highway sign—just as fellow Biennial artist Wade Guyton wrestled with Marcel Breuer chairs—to make DiamondBrite, generating its torqued form by hand. Handforth’s objects privilege neither viewer nor gallery space, thereby completing the Minimalist task of making the viewer physically aware not only of the object, but the space in which it resides.

Yet Handforth slyly embeds too many quotations in his works for us to rely on formal analysis alone. He draws from high and low sources: the graceful curves of Freebird (2000) call to mind Alexander Calder’s mobiles, but the title comes from Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band from the artist’s adopted home of Florida. Likewise the sculpture is made from the streetlamps found all across the country, but the artist’s longstanding interest in modernist interior design connects this work to Achille Castiglioni’s canonic 1962 Arco Floor Lamp (itself a part of the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection). Even the simplest of Handforth’s objects, arrangements of fluorescent tubes distributed across a wall, open an arena of complicated interpretation. Perhaps more than any other modern artist, Dan Flavin laid singular and lasting claim to his chosen medium, and it takes bravura to rush into this hallowed territory. Even more so considering the decorative end to which Handforth has deployed the material: one work presented the Union Jack across a gallery wall and several others Jesus’ cross. Representation, however frought with its own meaning, is slipped into the work. (Another way to put it: he takes representation off the cross on which modernist abstraction had tried to nail it.) Handforth brings Flavin’s ephemeral transcendence (and his latent, secular spirituality) back to Earth: the enlightening glow of an expansive empire, represented by its flag, and Jesus’ beatific, radiant presence are invoked by humble, commercially available materials.

Lest we picture the artist solely as a postmodern ironist, Handforth also notes that fluorescent tubes provide a lovely, mood-setting light, and it’s worth noting a romantic thread that runs through his practice. Its most succinct embodiment came in the form of a public artwork in Basel, Switzerland, for which the artist found graffiti and duplicated it in blue neon beneath a bridge: Claudia I love you kind of; 11:25pm. A humble turn on Jenny Holzer’s gnomic pronouncements, the sculpture, perhaps as fragile as the original message was transitory, reflected frustrations of the heart in the churning waters. Another work, exhibited in the courtyard of Galleria Franco Noero in Turin, outfitted a Vespa scooter with nozzles that emitted a fine, cooling film of water. The scooter’s headlights, left on, created rainbows in the surrounding air. The artwork references the omnipresence of the scooters on Turin’s streets as well as the final scene in the Who’s Quadrophenia (1979), which features the teenage lead apparently driving toward suicide on the foggy seaside cliffs near Brighton. As the critic Tim Griffin notes, “Handforth’s sculpture is romantic but never quite leaves reality behind, laden as it is with sociological content.” Another Vespa is one of many objects—among them a parking meter, fire hydrant, and a length of pipe (dedicated to the artist Jack Smith)—that Handforth has covered in wax devotional candles. They drip a spectrum of color, making concrete the accretion of time and suggesting that Handforth prays at an altar dedicated to beauty found in the everyday.

Mark Handforth, Vespa, 2001

The site-specificity of the Turin Vespa was again evident in Lamppost (2003), a sculpture commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Doris C. Freedman Plaza at the southeast corner of Central Park. A forty-five foot long industrial streetlight, it is bent in two places and laid awkwardly on the ground, its yellow sodium bulbs replaced by red lamps. The work updates Claes Oldenburg’s public proposal sensibility without seeming as much of an intervention: Lamppost countered the muteness of other modernist public sculpture, retaining its functionality by lighting the plaza at night with an amber glow.

Handforth’s reappropriations betray an interest in the failures and creative reuses of other artists’ grand gestures. He delights in the public outcry over a Carl Andre sculpture made of 120 bricks and tells the story of a Richard Serra sculpture sited publicly in London that, comprising four massive slabs leaning one on another, has a center closed off to public eyes: its interior space has become an outhouse for the city’s transients. Coming from Handforth, the tale has an insouciance that adds frisson to his own art. To quote Griffin: “Handforth looks for ‘sculpture’ that already exists amid the cultural wreckage,” and he’s smart enough to know that his art may meet the same fate. (An acknowledgement through which the Romantic can once again slip in.) Handforth writes: “At the end of it, all you have is a work and what that work does, where it sits in the world, and what is ultimately … affected by it and through it…. [My objects] exist in the world on the world’s terms.”

Installation view, Hammer Museum, 2004

Milwaukee-based Argentinean artist Santiago Cucullu chooses historically marginalized figures and events (often from his homeland’s anarchist movement) as the subject of his works, which include large wall drawings made of contact paper, watercolors, and sculptures. Cucullu’s references to figures such as anarchist and pamphlet printer Severino di Giovanni, Giovanni’s compatriots Alejandro and Paulino Scarfo, their Spanish forefather Fermin Salvochea, and the historian Osvaldo Bayer inflect a typical chronology of revolutionary fervor and protest, usually traced in straight lines from France, Russia, and Italy to the United States and back to Europe. Similar to the southward glance of “Beyond Geometry”—the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition dedicated to reductive modernist art—which brought South American Concrete Art, Argentine Arte Madí, and Brazilian Neo-Concretism into dialogue with contemporaneous North American and European art movements, Cucullu performs a resuscitation. The artist marries biographical details from these largely forgotten lives with places and people recollected from his own, creating composite visual storyboards that mix references to high and low culture, range across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and freely jumble the contemporary with the historical.

Cucullu’s mural-scale drawing for the Hammer Museum is perhaps his most ambitious and freewheeling contact paper work to date. Its source imagery is almost comically disparate: some comes from the archives of the Federación Libertaria de Argentina (FLA), an anarchist library in Buenos Aires; other parts reference a drawing the artist made while in school (and subsequently lost) that depicted a pair of Doc Martens with the imagined name Dusty Springfield Rhoades written across the top; and other fragments allude to Dusty Rhoades, a real-life reporter from Springfield, Illinois, whose name the artist came across coincidentally while listening to a radio report about a police officer dismissed from her force. Cucullu presents everything as a tangle of images on a nearly flat picture plane, which can lead almost to the point of visual abstraction—making it hard to see the trees for the forest, so to speak—but also calls to mind pre-Renaissance religious paintings, which often set down multiple narratives in a single space on a single canvas. Continuing the analogy, Cucullu’s multiple works rendering scenes from the life of Severino di Giovanni, who died in a shootout with police in Buenos Aires on February 1, 1931, can be viewed as a secular rendering of the Stations of the Cross. Inasmuch as Cucullu’s mostly forgotten events and minor characters, in being rescued from the dustbin of history, are elevated to the point of being inscribed directly onto the walls of our institutions dedicated to preserving culture, we might even link his art to the tradition of history painting, substituting police shootouts for extravagant feasts and grand battles.

In a contemporary reading, a viewer can look at the nonhierarchical relationship among segments of Cucullu’s murals as analogous to the equality of anarchist utopian vision, or as representations of the disarmingly random way in which we come across pockets of information in everyday life. And while not quite random, Cucullu’s artistic process definitely incorporates an element of chance. Drawing on pictures from an archive organized by an idiosyncratic system of narrative association, he rarely knows how the finished artwork will look when he begins affixing the contact paper to the wall. (An act that itself mimics the protestor’s wheat-pasting of propaganda posters around the city.) His material—no different from what you’d find in a hardware store and use to line the kitchen cabinets or a set of shelves—comes in a limited range of colors. He arranges a random and roughly geometric pattern of swatches on the wall before outlining and coloring in the negative space of his image in white; the whitened segments are then excised with an X-acto knife, leaving an elegantly composed multicolored cutout ready to be glued to the gallery wall. This process splits the difference between Arturo Herrera, a New York-based artist whose poster cutouts have graceful curves and random colors derived from found material, and Richard Wright, a Glasgow-based artist who almost exclusively paints abstract patterns directly onto the wall. Cucullu nonetheless maintains an improvisational freedom that Herrera and Wright don’t allow themselves, sometimes capriciously combining more than a dozen individual images to create a single artwork. His compositional choices, often made on-site while installing, add a performative element to an art form that already engages in a sophisticated flirtation with traditions of drawing and painting.

Cucullu’s untitled wall work for the 2004 Whitney Biennial is a recent example. The “back story” for this mural includes references to Schlaraffenland (“Land of the Idle”), an imaginary country of leisure and gluttonous luxury concocted by Germans at the turn of the sixteenth century; Severini and the Scarfos, the Argentinean anarchists; and modernist architecture in Argentina and Japan. Utopia—whether imagined, protested for, or laid out in concrete and glass—is the linchpin linking these images. The connection may not belong entirely to Cucullu, however, as many Germans, some no doubt familiar with the Schlaraffenland ideal—it’s the subject of a 1566 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, now in the collection of the Alte Pinakothek in Munich—immigrated to Argentina during the first decades of the last century. The pull of utopias, whether entirely fanciful or potentially realizable, has brought people to South America since the first stories of El Dorado, the fabled “City of Gold,” circulated hundreds of years ago (coincidentally within two years of Hans Sachs’s popular satire of Schlaraffenland in Germany). Severini left Italy for Argentina in 1927 to escape the Fascists and start afresh. Cucullu’s artworks integrate this history without becoming didactic or losing their visual appeal, locating it within a matrix that also includes references to the rapper Eazy-E, the 1979 film The Warriors, and countless other cultural touchstones that have their own appeal in our day. It’s a natural human tendency to anthropomorphize abstraction, to look for representations of ourselves in that which doesn’t readily divulge its secrets. Cucullu’s art, made with a sleight-of-hand that turns ordinary materials into spectacular constructions filled to the brim with content waiting to be “unpacked,” consistently rewards this kind of extended looking.