NEWSgrist: *The Hudson River School Revisited* Vol.4, no.18

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Vol.4, no.18 (Nov 24, 2003)

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*Underbelly*

Bulletin board: post your own news, press releases, urls:

http://pub11.bravenet.com/forum/show.php?usernum=870870569

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CONTENTS:

- *Splash* THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL REVISITED

- *Url/s* genomixer, by Stanza

- *Pop Pipeline* Jason Middlebrook’s narrative thread (ArtForum)

- *A River Runs Through It* Hudson River related exhibs (Journal News)

- *Benthic* Princenthal: Sugar Mud + Frogs as Sculpture (Wave Hill)

- *Mushroom Clouds* Nancy Spero: Disasters of War (NYTimes)

- *Globe Trotting* Tim Griffin on suprastructure (ArtForum)

- *Flow Charts from Hell* Mark Lombardi’s global networks (NYTimes)

- *Book Grist* James Croak on Suzaan Boettger (Artnet)

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*Splash* http://newsgrist.net

The Hudson River School Revisited

splash archived at: http://www.newsgrist.net/Splash_HudsonRiverSchool.html

Article:

“Time + the River” (The Journal News)

http://www.newsgrist.net/imagingtheriver.html

Catalogue essays/texts:

see *A River Runs Through It* + *Benthic* (below).

Exhibitions:

The Hudson River Museum

“Imaging the River”

Oct 16 2003 - May 24 2004

http://www.newsgrist.net/imaging1.html

Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford”

Oct 8 2003 - Feb 8 2004

http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={5BC229A1-FC6B-11D6-94C7-00902786BF44}

National Academy of Design

“George Inness + the Visionary Landscape”

Sept 17 - Dec 28 2003

http://www.nationalacademy.org/museum/inness.html

Wave Hill

“Hudson River Projects: Eve Andree Laramee + Brandon Ballengee”

Sept 6 - Nov 30 2003

http://www.wavehill.org/Arts/glyndor_gallery.html

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*Url/s*

http://www.genomixer.com

Online artworks inspired by the human genome sequence

by Stanza

Imagine interactive online artworks made from human dna for a global

internet gallery and using genetic code. Artist stanza, well known for

experimentation online has done just this by sampling his blood and

making audio visual genetic mutants online. Genomixer is a complete

audio visual online generative system.

Code representing code generated by code made from blood.

genomixer presents a series of online artworks inspired by the human

genome sequence and developed from dna profiles which are sequenced

from blood samples. The online artworks are investigations into genetic

codes mapped and re assembled online. The series enables a cross

reference of all the code on the genome sequence allowing the public to

intermix or breed their own variable; users can look at the new mix of

chromosomes in real time; on line. They can also keep and print their

pattern from the website.

Stanza is a UK based artist who works with net art, multimedia, and

electronic music. Most of his work can be viewed from http://www.stanza.co.uk

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*Pop Pipeline*

Jason Middlebrook

SARA MELTZER GALLERY

516 West 20th Street

October 18--November 15

ArtForum Online - picks [Oct/Nov]

by Bethany Anne Pappalardo

http://www.artforum.com/picks/place=New%20York?sid=9b9dee63bc517cdd1b21085308cb7db8#picks5757

Jason Middlebrook has reproduced the eight-hundred-mile Alaskan Pipeline

(at a scale of 2.5 miles to 1 foot) as a formal and narrative thread that

winds in silver paint around Sara Meltzer Gallery. Along the way, it

connects thirty or so drawings, beginning with a depiction of Prudhoe Bay,

where the APL originates, and ending with the Port of Valdez, where the

oil departs for the States. The multitude of graphic languages that

Middlebrook brings to his work--in particular, the merging of artistic and

scientific codes--has always been a major strength; here he draws on the

vocabularies of ecology, art history, and politics to evoke the pipeline's

status as an international commercial venture, an environmental threat,

and a phenomenological and visual creation--a sort of inadvertent work of

Land art. A number of images reference Earthworks created

contemporaneously with the APL (which was initiated in 1970 and

completed in 1977); one shows the pipeline running through Walter De

Maria's Lightning Field, 1977, and contains a striking contrast between

perpendicular silver lines and deep purple background. The drawings

participate in the current trend toward collage, obsessive detail, and

pop-culture saturation, but Middlebrook's engagement with the social

raises this project above and beyond most other work in this category.

Everything about this project--starting with the choice of subject

itself--suggests a commitment to something beyond the usual repertoire

of graphic and pop references.

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*A River Runs Through It*

The Journal News

Time and the river

By GEORGETTE GOUVEIA
THE JOURNAL NEWS (Original publication: October 19, 2003)

http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/101903/e0119hudsonriver.html

A river runs through three luminous new exhibits in our area. It is the

Hudson of history and geography. But it is also the river of memory and

imagination that traces the cycle of life and winds through time.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Sanford Gifford show (through Feb. 8)

and the National Academy of Design's George Inness exhibit (through

Dec. 28) celebrate two of the later and more unusual members of the

Hudson River School, a movement in 19th-century landscape painting

that set America on the course of artistic greatness while establishing its

image as a pastoral paradise. Gifford's canvases — of places as familiar

as Nyack and as tantalizingly exotic as the Near East — shimmer like

mirages. Inness' intimate nature scenes envelop you with an amber glow

and misty lushness. That these are two of the most ravishing shows

mounted in New York in recent years will come as no surprise.

Following the Hudson north from these Manhattan exhibits to Yonkers, the

Hudson River School's aesthetic heirs are on display in "Imaging the

River," at the Hudson River Museum through May 23. This illuminating

show juxtaposes paintings by such Hudson River School members as

Samuel Colman and Jasper F. Cropsey with edgy works by 23

contemporary artists, who often share their forefathers' autumnal

palette and environmental concerns.

It was the ecology movement of the 1960s and '70s that helped spur a

revival of interest not only in the Hudson River but in the style of art that

bears its name. More recently, PBS celebrated both in the 2002

documentary "America's First River: Bill Moyers on the Hudson."

"The Hudson River, it seems, is on everybody's mind," says Jean-Paul

Maitinsky, the Hudson River Museum's assistant director of exhibitions

and programs. Guest curator Amy Lipton attributes this in part to what she

sees as the Hudson's new post-9/11 role as a haven from urban anxiety.

But the trio of exhibits also arrives at a moment when America's rivers in

general are gaining new artistic prominence, thanks to a national juried

show of 40 works at the Florence Griswold Museum's Krieble Gallery in

Old Lyme, Conn. (See accompanying box.) Among the works in "The

American River" is New Yorker Stephen Hannock's panoramic painting

"The Oxbow, After Church, After Cole, Flooded" (1979-1994), which

pays hommage to Hudson River School founder Thomas Cole. He

spurred engraver Asher B. Durand to take up landscape painting. They

in turn inspired a new generation that besides Gifford (1823-1880) and

Inness (1825-94) included Frederic Edwin Church, John Frederick

Kensett, Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge. "Hudson River

School" was a misnomer. It was not a school, though many of the

artists gathered at the now-defunct Tenth Street Studio Building in

Manhattan. Nor were its subjects limited to the Hudson, though the

artists sketched and often lived along its banks. Some of the most

gorgeous images in the Gifford show are of Greece and Italy. And

Inness, whose later canvases transcended the Hudson River School,

painted sites that are not necessarily recognizable.

As with "Impressionism," the term "Hudson River School" was coined in a

derogatory review — as a way to scoff at something deemed provincial

and old-fashioned. The Hudson River School painters were anything but.

From about 1825 to 1875, they were the artists of the Americas,

subscribing to the philosophy that man could best experience God through

nature and that America was God's country.

Gifford's "An Indian Summer's Day on the Hudson — Tappan Zee" (1868),

part of the Met show, finds the otherworldly in the American landscape. A

lone boater drifts by Tarrytown's burnished banks. Across the river, a

flotilla of white sails draws the eye to a barely visible Nyack and Hook

Mountain, all but lost in a mauve haze. But it is not just Westchester and

Rockland counties Gifford is depicting here. It is this life and the next, the

concrete and the incorporeal. And the river, as of old, is the passage

between two worlds.

"Of all the Hudson River School painters, Gifford has the most inflected

poetic instincts," says Kevin J. Avery, associate curator in the Met's

Department of American Paintings and Sculpture and co-organizer of the

Gifford show. "There's a dreamy quality to his works. His wide panoramas

are seen through the scrim of an atmospheric veil."

This painterly veil did much in the 19th century to suggest that nature was

something to be saved as well as savored. (Thomas Cole and Frederic

Church were among those artists particularly concerned about the effects

the Industrial Revolution would have on nature.)

You can see this concern reflected at the Hudson River Museum in Dan

Ford's humorously pointed "Morning in America" (2003). Borrowing a

phrase from Ronald Reagan, "Morning" portrays a picturesque group of

19th-century travelers, arriving on the riverbank as cows graze nearby.

Those cows better not get too comfy: McDonald's looms on the left side

of the painting.

Just as the natural meets the supernatural in "An Indian Summer's Day,"

blatant commerce confronts bucolic beauty in "Morning in America,"

which leaves little doubt as to which will win. The painting's polarity

underscores the Hudson's own duality as a waterway with both salt and

freshwater currents.

But as the Hudson River Museum show demonstrates, the relationship

among art, commerce and nature, then and now, is a tangled one. The

tiny trains that slither through Hudson River School landscapes, like so

many serpents in the Garden of Eden, are what conveyed the artists to

the scenes they painted, says guest curator Amy Lipton. By portraying

the land so invitingly, the artists may have inadvertently hastened its

development and decline. That's the subtext of Alison Moritsugu's

"Mountain Landscape With Waterfalls" (2002), a pastoral scene painted

onto a wooden tree stump.

Still, it has not been the intent of the Hudson River School artists and

their heirs to do anything but extol nature's wonder even as they have

benefited from the technology that has often diminished it. For them,

nature has been both a spiritual as well as a physical retreat.

This is particularly true of George Inness' paintings at the National

Academy of Design. Perhaps alone among the Hudson River School

painters, he was drawn to the intimacy of France's Barbizon School of

landscape painting as well as to the light-infused Christianity of

18th-century Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. In "The Trout

Brook" (1891), the bright greenery of a clearing is suffused with a

light that both conceals and reveals a solitary figure by a stream and

another in the distance. We could be in the Hudson River Valley or the

Elysian Fields.

"It is ... his understanding that the river/stream as a place is less

important than the river/stream as a way of thinking and a way of

creating that allows (Inness) to serve as that bridge to modernism,"

says Adrienne Baxter Bell, guest curator of the National Academy show.

As with Inness, many artists in the Hudson River Museum show chart the

landscape of the mind. Rosalind Schneider's "River Meditations" uses

images recorded from the banks of the Hudson during the winters of 1999

and 2003 to create a 14-foot-long video projection in abstract pastels that

flow like the river itself.

Such ceaseless transformation is the undertow in "Imaging the River."

On a 1,000-square-foot deck in the museum's courtyard, Roy F. Staab

has fashioned "River Surface" out of saltmeadow cordgrass from the

Hudson and saplings from its banks. The bound reeds waft over the

sapling supports in an undulating work that will evolve with the

deepening seasons.

"I make ephemeral art, and the river has given me that opportunity,"

he says. His piece, like so many others in these exhibits, reminds us

that time is the river of life.

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*Benthic*

An Unsettled River:

Hudson River Projects by Eve Andrée Laramée and Brandon Ballengée

by Nancy Princenthal

Wave Hill

http://www.wavehill.org/Arts/catalogue_essay.html

Settling, as a term for colonization, is a word that cuts two ways. When

Europeans first arrived in substantial numbers at what would become

New York, it was not with the idea of establishing a stable agricultural

community. At first they sought, unsuccessfully, a trade route to Asia,

but soon found natural resources in sufficient abundance to redirect their

hopes for commercial success. Those who settled here—who stabilized

the land, or tamed it, or compromised it, or who compromised their own

expectations—lived along the Hudson River because, as a trade highway,

it was the fluid reason for their residence.

An exceptionally broad, long and beautiful river, the Hudson has remained

one of the country's premier waterways, but it is still, in many important

ways, unsettled. It bears testimony to shifting commercial imperatives,

from exploration and transport to tourism. Its landscape served as

paradigm for the ideologically fundamental concept of the American

frontier and—in the form of the Hudson River School of landscape

painting—for a national esthetic, both long since rendered kitsch, and

celebrated as such. And the Hudson has suffered massive environmental

degradation resulting from the culture that grew around it, as well as

showing signs—again, culturally driven—of some reversal of that damage.

This mutability, and the forces that determine change, are central subjects

in the installations that Brandon Ballengée and Eve Andrée Laramée have

conceived for Hudson River Projects. Both artists have well-established

interests in the relationship between science (including ecology, biology,

geology, and chemistry) and art. And both take particular pleasure in

slipping between professional identities, ranging from artist to scientist,

historian, fiction writer, social activist, and back.

Sugar, a crop associated with the antebellum South but, especially after

the Civil War, processed mainly in the industrialized North, is the staple

around which Laramée has organized her installation at Wave Hill. Called

Sugar Mud, the installation’s most prominent feature is a room-filling

mound surfaced with crystallized sugar tinted an opulent shade of gold.

In near delirious excess, the jewel-bright sugar dune slopes halfway to

the ceiling, sweeping over two windowsills and into the fireplace in an

elegant, river-facing room of Wave Hill’s Georgian revival Glyndor House.

The effect is enhanced by an unearthly golden light (a result of gels

covering the windows) that also furthers the room’s evocation of New

York's Gilded Age. But there is something brutal about the incursion of

this implacable mass of sugar, which appears to have surged into Glyndor

House with the force of a mountain-moving glacier. The spectacular,

mutually subversive collision of architectural and (seemingly) geological

form is a figure for the relationship between culture and nature that is

Laramée’s theme.

In addition to this dazzling sugar dune, Laramée is presenting five more

sober documentary images, one of which is a photograph of the 150-year-

old American Sugar Refining Company's factory on the Hudson at Yonkers,

just north of Wave Hill. A caption explains that 80,000 tons of sediment

from the river bottom there—sludge called sugar mud—have been dredged

by the Army Corps of Engineers and dumped downstream at the “Historic

Area Remediation Site” near Sandy Hook, New Jersey, an area also known

as Mud Dump Site. At once primitive and meta-industrial, this massive

effort to dig up and reposition a small mountain of mud—or, to resettle

it—is an undersea ghost of Laramée’s sugar dune. It also echoes, as she

points out, Robert Smithson's various reworkings of the landscape and the

"inverse monuments" of his early Earthworks peer Michael Heizer. Making

monumental sculpture from unseen and interstitial space is of compelling

interest to Laramée. But she is no less struck by the rich irony of calling

the government’s reburial of sugar mud “remediation,” since the sludge,

however sweet, is deadly (it has been shown to contain an extensive array

of toxins, including PCBs).

Others of Laramée's images include two Benthic (from benthos, Latin for

river bottom) images of the Hudson's floor, prepared by Roger Flood,

Associate Professor of Marine Geology at SUNY Stony Brook, and Vicki

Lynn Ferrini, a doctoral student there. Made from sonar and ground-

penetrating radar readings and digital analysis, these preternaturally vivid

topographic maps show the river from underneath, re-envisioned not only

spatially but also in terms of color, which ranges among acid greens,

yellows, and reds, the colors representing both the floor’s depth and its

density. The maps reveal a lunar-like landscape of sharply ridged

escarpments, deep clefts, inky depressions, and sandy plains of

indeterminate scale. “I became fascinated with looking at the river

sideways and upside-down” Laramée says, referring to the Hudson’s

watershed (sideways) as well as the river’s floor.

Laramée was on board the research vessel (it is called, memorably, The

Sea Wolf) with Flood and Ferrini when the mapping was done, an

experience that made clear just how vast a quantity of data they collected.

But she is also alert to the subjective decisions that mapmaking—like all

forms of science—always entails. “Maps go under the heading of hard

text,” she has said, “but there are all kinds of map deceptions that occur.

Maps are fluid and changing.” In the installation at Wave Hill, she

continues, “I look at the subjectivity in maps.” Further, she has an abiding

interest in the drifts and detours, the emotional and perceptual

temptations—“what the Situationists termed 'psycho-geography'” —that

correspond to cartography's inherent vagaries.

Completing Laramée's portrait-in-fragments of the Hudson are

reproductions of a pair of paintings depicting the river at points physically

proximate but separated historically by roughly 65 years. One, which

dates to around 1850, is an idyllic Hudson River School landscape by the

little known (but euphonically named) John Bunyon Bristol. A burst of

butter-yellow sunlight emerges beatifically from misty clouds, playing over

the river and a handful of sailboats on the water; it was this admittedly

saccharine feature that most appealed to Laramée, along with the

dune-like palisade on the Jersey shore. The second painting, made in 1915

by the equally obscure Modernist painter Daniel Putnam Brinley, is of the

sugar factory at Yonkers. Brinley's jaunty rendering features a bustling

train depot and, where sailboats once glided, a vigorously smoking

steamship; the bracing atmosphere is marked by the painting’s palette,

dominated by a Cezanne-ian cobalt blue. A celebratory image of active

industry, Brinley’s anomalous Hudson River painting again suggests how

picture-making supports ideology, which in turn changes the very nature

of the landscape it depicts.

Brandon Ballengée’s artistic practice is even closer to scientific research

than Laramée’s, and has involved him in close studies of aquatic life as it

is affected by pollutants in New York (and around the world). For Hudson

River Projects, he has brought together maps, images, live specimens of

marine fauna, and a computer station to assemble a composite portrait of

the river’s fragile wildlife. Citing a different range of artistic predecessors

than Laramée—he mentions Hans Haacke’s installation featuring live

chicks, Helen and Newton Harrison’s literally groundbreaking projects

focusing on river basins, and Joseph Beuys’ introduction of the concept

“social sculpture”—Ballengée intends his work as a provocation to active

engagement in repairing environmental damage.

Alongside several biologists (his collaborators for the Hudson River project

include Stanley K. Sessions, and Peter R. Warny and tank specialist Hong

Suk Michael Oh), Ballengée has been studying fish and amphibians native

to the Hudson that are now uncommon or certifiably threatened. Producing

the digital images shown at Wave Hill involved, in some cases, a

painstaking procedure (it took up to eight months per specimen) that

includes clearing the animals of body fluids, preserving them in formalin,

and injecting them with dyes that stain various internal tissues

differentially. Whether preserved or intact, animals were placed directly on

a high-resolution scanner bed, from which were generated Lamda prints—

some of them vast enlargements—of breathtaking detail and luminosity.

Thus a modest sturgeon, cleared and stained, became an aqueous blue

wraith, its filigreed skeletal structure, including the ridges of its exterior

plating, articulated with the delicacy of a Fabergé egg. A humble inch-long

horsehair worm, left intact, was transformed by enlargement into a long,

sinuous line fluent as any signature’s final flourish. Most arresting of all is

a mammoth enlargement (the overall image size is 60”x48”) of a skate

native to New York Harbor but now rare. Cleared and stained, it is an icon

of stunning grace and menace, its minutely lined wings incipiently angelic,

its mouth, ringed with rows of blood-red teeth, distinctly sinister.

A major component of Ballengée’s Wave Hill installation, the full title of

which is Breathing Space for the Hudson: Charting the Biodiversity and

Pollutants of the Hudson River, is a trio of custom-made fish tanks stocked

with aquatic life representing three different levels of salinity (that is, three

different points along the river, at varying distances from the harbor). The

tanks’ various support tubes and cables are concealed below, so visitors

can walk around them unobstructed; Ballengée intends their contents to

seem “shoveled right out of the river” and up into the gallery above.

Suspended between the tanks are sectional maps, printed on mylar, of

the Hudson from Troy south. Visitors can use the computer station

provided in the gallery to access a site with information on industrial

polluters and identify them with positions indicated on these maps. It is

Ballengée’s hope that further action, in the form of research, education,

and protest, will follow.

The emphasis on activism is greater in Ballengée’s work than in

Laramée’s; her interest in the intersection of science and fiction is deeper

than his. But both like to linger where evolution, culture, and artistic

expression cross paths. This inclination is reflected in Ballengée’s

participation in studies of frogs whose deformations, including

supernumerary rear legs, can be traced to parasites that (arguably)

burgeon with pollution, thence to the pressure of humankind (however

blindly applied) on the physical shape of other animals. “Many of the

malformations found in the wild can be induced through injuries caused by

mechanical disruption from parasitic infestation,” Ballengée concluded,

exhibiting the disturbing animals he studied in an effort “to inform viewers

about the complex growth processes of other living organisms.” In

another experiment, he has been breeding frogs back six generations,

toward their ‘wild’ form. “You can call the frogs sculpture,” he says. “I’m

shaping them.”

Looking at similar intersections from a slanted perspective, Laramée has

also previously explored the squishy boundaries between nature and

industry. Most closely related to her Wave Hill installation are recent and

current projects involving waterways, including one centering on the

Salton Sea, and another on radioactive water in New Mexico. She has a

longstanding fascination with the rich and tangled history of automata,

and, generally, with the susceptibility of seemingly irreducible technology

to speculative analysis. In an unpublished 1995 interview with the artist

Jordan Crandall, Laramée said, "We think of electricity as being a

technological force, and it's a natural force, in the same way that acts of

human beings are a natural force." In other words, Laramée and

Ballengée both like to twist the disciplines of science and art so their

boundaries warp. And each responded to the invitation to conceive a

project about the Hudson by unsettling the river, with great vigor, wit,

and sympathy.

============================

*Mushroom Clouds**

NYTimes, Nov 21, 2003, Art Review, HOLLAND COTTER

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/arts/design/21GALL.html?pagewanted=2

Nancy Spero

Galerie Lelong

http://www.galerie-lelong.com/newyork/fr_newyork.htm

528 West 26th Street, Chelsea

Through Dec. 6

more info:

http://www.firstpulseprojects.net/bombproject/spero2.html

Without a signature image or outsize scale, Nancy Spero has ended up

being one of the distinctive artists of American postwar years. Her secret

weapon is matching a kind of reverse-bravura style embodied in a blend

of painting, drawing and printmaking with an acutely focused political and

psychological content.

That concentration was never fiercer than in the dozens of gouache and

ink works on paper she made from 1966 to 1970 in response to the

Vietnam War. The entire "War Series" is being shown at Lelong in New

York (it was exhibited at Documenta X in Germany in 1997), and it is as

powerful and pertinent today as it was nearly 40 years ago.

Ms. Spero's art is emblematic rather than illustrative. Military helicopters

are predatory insects vomiting poison. Mushroom-shaped clouds become

crucifixes, swastikas, defecating phalluses. Flagpoles with victory

banners pin minute figures to the ground. Each image is spare, even

delicate, but looks scratchily propulsive, as if done in a white heat.

Like Goya's "Disasters of War," this is a passionate, mordant,

self-consciously moral art, and it has traveled the waves of fashion

remarkably well. Its political ardor made perfect sense in the 60's and

again in the 90's; its fantastic narratives would not look out of place

beside work by many young artists now.

Ms. Spero has never, in fact, been fashion-conscious. At some early point

she seems to have figured out that the old form-vs.-content debate was

academic wheel-spinning. She wanted to say what she needed to say in

the most direct way she could. This approach gives the "War Series" a

diaristic look, physically modest, emotionally large. It also gives Ms.

Spero a place in the big picture of 20th-century art, the one that will

emerge after big-gun institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the

Whitney have cleaned all the bulky canonical junk out of their overstuffed

closets, and told the story a new way.

============================

*Globe Trotting*

Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition

Introduction by Tim Griffin

ArtForum In Print (Nov Issue)

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5682

When Francesco Bonami, director of last summer's Venice Biennale,

famously wrote in his exhibition catalogue that "The Grand Show' of the

21st century must allow multiplicity, diversity and contradiction to exist

inside the structure of an exhibition . . . a world where the conflicts of

globalization are met by the romantic dreams of a new modernity," it was

reasonable to imagine that he was responding to structural and thematic

questions posed by Okwui Enwezor in his Documenta 11 of the preceding

year. After all, the Nigerian-born curator, focusing on the issue of

globalization, had in a sense defocused his event, dividing it into

"platforms"--conferences and lecture series engaging figures from a wide

range of disciplines--that took place at different locales around the world

over the course of the year leading up to the installation in Kassel. Of

course, this very commonality sets up a significant contrast. Enwezor's

globalism resonated differently from Bonami's: The same word typically

used--as at Veniceto describe an ever-expanding circulation of

communications and commerce (with all the attendant conflicts that such

connection entails) was in Kassel linked to the acute value of regionality

and difference, where the emergence of the local and particular precluded

the possibility of any unifying system or thematic but nevertheless

comprised a field of what could be called "minor knowledges."

Indeed, few terms are so frequently bandied about in artistic dialogue

today as "globalism," and yet few terms are so multifarious in their

current usage, or unfold in so many dimensions. For example, the rhetoric

of globalization allows for discussion of neocolonialism in an expanded

art marketplace while at the same time entertaining the notion that New

York has ceded its historical position as the city that "stole the idea of

modern art" (perhaps becoming instead the capital of capital), and

coinciding with these insights is a still-developing sense that tiers of

access to information exist within the worldwide artistic community,

dividing those who can from those who cannot afford to crisscross the

globe and so speak knowledgeably of a contemporary art-world

suprastructure.

Nothing in contemporary art speaks so directly to all of these issues as

the large-scale exhibition--from Documenta to the Venice Biennale, as well

as any number of other biennials that cropped up around the world during

the past decade. This type of exhibition, endowed with a transnational

circuitry, assumed the unique position of both reflecting globalism--since

these shows happen in locations throughout the world, however remote—

and taking up globalism itself as an idea. Establishing a new curatorial

class able to bring artists together from wide-ranging geographic and

cultural points, the large-scale exhibition altered the kinds of visibility

afforded artists and so fundamentally changed the conditions of artistic

discussion, ultimately forwarding the position that no show could, or

should, presume an all-encompassing thesis--at least not in conventional

terms and form. Rather, the exhibition extends through time and across

geography to include panels, lectures, publications, performances, and

public works that fall well beyond the parameters of the traditional show,

and lies well beyond the grasp of any single viewer. In turn, these

exhibitions have come to marshal the forces of any number of disciplines,

including art history and theory, which leads one to the question of

whether the critical function is in some sense migrating from critic to

curator, or indeed whether such nominal distinctions are useful at all.

(As Catherine David, curator of Documenta 10, says in these pages

regarding related shifts in terminology, "The question for me is not about

. . . who is the artist but about how to produce, discuss, debate, and

circulate to various audiences a certain number of ideas and formal

articulations proposed by author(s). At this level, I think that many

people . . . with whom I am working no longer correspond to the

economic, social, and cultural figure of the artist' as it has been

constituted in the modern age.")

It is precisely in order to trace the contours of such shifts in thinking,

and to offer a "postmortem" on the global exhibitions that have sought to

articulate them, that Artforum invited a select group of curators and

artists to participate in the roundtable that follows. These curators

possess unsurpassed familiarity with the evolution of the large-scale,

transnational exhibition, and they have already been, to an extent, in

dialogue with one another through their work: Bonami; David, who

organized "Contemporary Arab Representations" in Venice this past

summer as well as Documenta 10; Enwezor, who, before directing

Documenta 11, was curator of the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale; and

Hans-Ulrich Obrist, who cocurated "Utopia Station" in Venice and whose

other projects include this year's Tirana Biennale. Martha Rosler and

Yinka Shonibare contribute here as two artists who have contemplated

globalism in their work for some time and who appeared in Bonami's

Biennale and Enwezor's Documenta, respectively. Finally, Artforum

invited scholar and critic James Meyer to moderate.

Meyer has written in these pages on Documenta 11 and composed

key texts on nomadism in contemporary art and on the changing status of

site-specificity.

The results of their dialogue--which was conducted online and assembled

for the printed page--are hardly conclusive. But then, conclusiveness is

not the intent here. Rather, this roundtable (followed by an essay penned

by scholar and critic Pamela M. Lee on the construction of the art world in

light of globalization) punctuates one moment in an ongoing discussion,

providing an occasion for reflection before we encounter the generations

of large-scale exhibitions that undoubtedly lie ahead. TIM GRIFFIN

cont’d here: http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=5682&pagenum=1

============================

*Flow Charts from Hell*

NYTimes, ART REVIEW | 'GLOBAL NETWORKS'

Webs Connecting the Power Brokers, the Money and the World

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: November 14, 2003

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/14/arts/design/14KIMM.html