黑料不打烊

At the beginning of each year, Artforum asks a seasoned group of critics, curators, and artists to introduce the work of up-and-comers they feel show special promise for the future. The following pages feature their picks for 2005.

DEBRA SINGER ON KRISTIN BAKER

Accident and control, anxiety and euphoria orbit one another in Kristin Baker`s current series of paintings, which is inspired by the seductive theatricality of auto racing and fuses the sport`s electric colors, industrial materials, and iconic imagery with passages of modernist abstraction. The resulting "dysfunctional panoramas," as the New York-based artist calls them, posit racing-with its combination of mastery, failure, calculation, and chance-as analogous to painting itself, offering an ambivalent reflection on modernity, spectacle, and global consumerist culture in the process. Interpreting the racetrack as a kind of contemporary coliseum, Baker`s works conjure both complicit enthusiasm and tenuous concern toward the popular fascination with sensationalist mass entertainment.

Baker`s landscapes are steeped in a lifetime of frequenting the track with her father, an amateur race-car driver. But while she has long been shooting photographs and videos of the sport on location, it was only during her final months in Yale`s MFA program that the 29-year-old artist began to engage conceptually with the activity of racing, and the imagery found its way into her painting. Baker explains that she started to understand racing as a microcosm of American capitalism, given the sport`s inherent ties to technological innovation and corporate sponsorship, the latter evidenced by those omnipresent logos plastered onto car bodies, stadium walls, and drivers` suits. Despite such culturally specific associations, many paintings transform representational details into predominantly formal elements, as in Ride to Live, Live to Ride, 2004. The up-close vantage of a moment immediately following an explosive crash, when smoke clouds the view of drivers and spectators alike, is dominated by vibrant, propulsive shards that radiate outward, interlacing with billowing flows of sooty haze. The flurry of edges and forms, reminiscent of the ornamental impulse of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, imbues the scene of destruction with a paradoxical, almost floral delicacy, as translucent and opaque layers of paint overlap like scraps of torn tissue, beautiful despite circumstance.

Baker talks about "building" paintings, an apt term given the works` distinct collage sensibility and almost trompe l`oeil relief. She creates such effects through an elaborate process of first intuitively "drawing" with tape and then, as she begins to paint, ripping up the strips gradually to generate strata of impasto areas beside passages of scraped-down sheerness. Her striking use of high-gloss, metallic, and cementlike pigments suggests a "constructed" industrial aesthetic, which is reinforced by her choice of materials: She applies acrylic paint with spatulas and knives onto outsize PVC panels, the kind commonly used for public signage and racetrack walls. Recently, Baker has also erected freestanding paintings; for example, Kurotoplac Kurve, 2004, a large, arced contour of panels supported by an aluminum lattice, evokes both stadium bleachers and winding track.

In this latter work, scattered car fragments blast across the surface in yellows, blues, greens, and blacks, possessing a strangely effervescent lightness. Blurred forms provide a tactile sense of speed, a pulchritude of velocity whose depiction recalls the early-twentieth-century Futurists, while gestural, undulating sweeps of red-and-white stripes lining the track walls around the gray, muscular whorl of a paved hairpin turn summon Abstract Expressionism. This coy insinuation of a range of stylistic references further indicates how Baker, throughout her work, reflexively addresses its status as painting, focusing in particular on questions of abstraction versus representation in her chosen medium.

The next year will be a big one for Baker. A solo show at ACME in Los Angeles (March 19-April 16) will be followed by an unusual opportunity: beginning in early May, she will exhibit six billboard-size works along the citywide raceway of the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix. The stunning combination of artifice and reality, with Baker`s paintings placed in a setting appropriate for what she anticipates will be her last on this theme, promises to lend a new dimension to the term "action painting."

Debra Singer is director of The Kitchen in New York.

JESSICA MORGAN ON ROMAN OND脕K

You may have seen Roman Ond谩k`s work and not realized it. Among the Slovak artist`s projects that easily disappear into the fabric of quotidian life are Good Feelings in Good Times, 2003, a queue of ten to twenty people that formed daily outside the K枚lnischer Kunstverein main entrance for half an hour; Teaching to Walk, 2002, for which the artist invited a young mother to bring her one-year-old boy into an otherwise empty gallery space for his first steps; and Silence, Please, 1999, in which attendants at Amsterdam`s Stedelijk Museum dressed in the original guard uniforms from the periods in which they were born (the 1940s to 1960s). Ond谩k`s work questions the "real" or tangible quality of lived experience-and the always provisional nature of representation-through the doubling of event and nonevent, staging and reality.

His work is distinct from Peter Fischli and David Weiss`s replication of the banal disarray of the workaday world, or Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset`s investigation of the exhibition as a site of both concrete and symbolic production. Though also informed by the legacy of Conceptual art and institutional critique, the idea of "disappearance" in Ond谩k`s work most closely resembles the tactically subversive strategies of fellow Slovak artist J煤lius Koller. Koller`s public interventions-such as his "Anti-Happenings" of 1965, in which he left "invitationcards to an Idea" around Bratislava and elsewhere-reflected a desire to remain independent from the Communist government and institutionally sanctioned art forms. With such works, Koller aimed to generate a commonality and reveal connections between past and present, lived and imagined experience. Ond谩k, though less institutionally constrained than Koller, deploys a similar subterfuge to effect empathy and intimacy among his performers and viewer participants.

Like Koller, Ond谩k has used children in various projects, not for any association they might have with nonart-world innocence or sincerity but to suggest instability and flux, the potential repetition of past and present in the future, and the effect of time and memory on our understanding of space. Teaching to Walk, for example, mobilizes various, often contradictory meanings: The traditional stillness of the gallery is transformed into a performative space; a movementbased activity becomes an object; and the child`s achievement is simultaneously undermined and monumentalized by his (overlooked) presence in the gallery. While Ond谩k appears to present an unmediated "reality" within the gallery space, he also questions the construction of the reality-versus-art relationship. Teaching to Walk asks when this transformation takes place: At what point does reality become art, or vice versa, and how does this happen?

Ond谩k`s most fluid and translatable work is Good Feelings in Good Times. Initially realized outside of the relatively quiet K枚lnischer Kunstverein, the line implies the presence of a popular attraction rarely associated with contemporary art and also alludes to the construction of value through the visual evidence of supply and demand. A clearly coded form of social gathering, the line has vastly different connotations according to location, and Ond谩k`s work subtly plays with cultural specificity, historical memory, and behavioral difference. His own sense of the work was informed by his memory of lines in front of Slovak shops during the Communist era, when passersby, lured by the promise of scarce goods, would eagerly wait, mindless of the reward. A repeat performance of the piece in London this year at the Frieze Art Fair also drew attention to the uniquely British custom of patient waiting, which leaves the hierarchy of the queue-like the country`s class structure-largely unchallenged.

Just as those who unwittingly joined in the performance Good Feelings in Good Times on the off chance that something of "value" could be had at the end of the line (whether entrance to the museum or otherwise), visitors likely remained altogether unaware of their complicity in the work Announcement, 2002. Here Ond谩k placed a radio in the gallery space, tuned to an international Slovak radio station broadcasting a prerecorded imperative statement by the artist: "Your attention please for the following announcement: As a sign of solidarity with recent world events, for the next minute do not interrupt the activity you are doing at this moment." Asked to perform the action of not performing, the visitor takes part in Ond谩k`s complex structural analysis of producer and produced, implication and imagination.

Jessica Morgan is a curator at Tate Modern, London. (See Contriburors.)

JOE SCANLON ON WALEAD BESHTY

In 1969, a nightly TV-news anchor named Fred Van Amburg was troubled by his declining ratings, which he believed were due to the unbearable daily reports of protests and body counts. Having limited control over world events but much control over their packaging, Amburg decided that the news wasn`t the problem, its presentation was. A somber, solitary journalist delivering the news directly into the camera-and, by extension, into people`s living rooms-made viewers feel responsible for it, and the only way to avoid that feeling was not to watch. Amburg`s innovation, dubbed "Happy Talk," forever changed television news. The format allowed two coanchors to banter between segments, thereby taking pressure off viewers at home. Rather than having to react to the news, viewers could react to the coanchors` reactions, which were invariably jovial.

As Amburg put it, "There`s more to life than news, weather and sports." There certainly is! For one thing, there`s shopping! The great side effect of Happy Talk was that advertising revenues soared. The more viewers learned how to shrug off Kent State or the My Lai Massacre as mere news (and therefore of no concern to them), the more they could transfer their newfound, carefree attitudes onto yet another trip to the mall.

Walead Beshty`s forays into shopping are every bit as perverse as Happy Talk viewers turning decapitations into matching drapes. His photographs of merchandise and shopping malls have an air of misapprehension to them, as if he has stumbled onto a curious phenomenon but doesn`t think it has anything to do with him. Stumbled is the operative word here, since Beshty`s serial photos are cumulative chains of events acted out in an engorged stupor: He consistently pays attention to the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way, or the right places at the wrong time-as in his photographs of outmoded shopping malls, visited thirty years too late. Little by little, step by step, potted plant by potted plant, Beshty`s images zero in on the revelation of being confused.

The confusion in question is "late capitalism," as Fredric Jameson so optimistically put it. In this sense, Beshty`s Dead Mall, 2002-2004, seems a little too mindful of the party line. Whatever Marxist schadenfreude might be gleaned from black-and-white images of corny decor, broken signage, and mismatched displays, this pleasure is more than offset by the will to power it reveals. However much Beshty would like to pass judgment on these nonsites by relegating them to the past, this is an exclusive privilege of the discriminating masses, one we artists can only dream about. And he probably shouldn`t be any more judgmental of consumer society than we should be of him when an eighteen-by-twenty-two-inch photograph he displayed at P.S. 1 over the summer turns up in a Chelsea gallery face-mounted on Plexi at eight times that size.

Beshty`s capitalism carries much more punch when he gets involved. Shot in stores all across the United States, "The Phenomenology of Shopping," 2001-2003, shows a pliant consumer inserting his head into banks of fake floral leis, racks of stuffed animals, and rows of washer/dryers like someone who`s really, really into the whole shopping thing. The gesture is as effective as it is stupid, suggesting that when it comes to twenty-first-century capitalism, "hypertrophic" is a more apt adjective than "late." It`s startling to see how many products the human head will fit into. I like the pun of "losing your head" while shopping, and I like seeing the body go limp as a consequence, not as a sign of death but of rank conformity-in the same way that a frog "conforms" to a great blue heron`s throat. It`s cathartic to see an artist dealing with his relative powerlessness by making an ass of himself, all in the guise of being a carefree consumer.

Joe Scanlan is an artist and assistant professor at Yale University. (See Contributors.)

CAROLYN CHRISTOV-BAKARGIEV ON MICHAEL RAKOWITZ

I like the poetics of Michael Rakowitz-the pragmatics of his aesthetics and the "making" (poiein) of his projects. Toying with the various boundaries between architecture, engineering, industrial design, and art, Rakowitz devises his works in a concise but richly metaphoric language that almost belies the practical and political issues he addresses in his highly charged installations and public projects.

Born in New York in 1973 of Iraqi Jewish descent, Rakowitz is a nomad, always translating, transforming, shifting, renovating, and experimenting, continually asking what might happen if you put something belonging to one place, or one culture, into another. The effect resembles that of the poet who creates a surprising and unexpectedly vivid image through substitution, connection, or juxtaposition. After completing a masters of science in visual studies at MIT in 1998, he launched paraSITE that same year, first in the Boston area and later in New York: an ongoing project involving the production and distribution of inexpensive, portable dwellings in the form of inflatable, lightweight, double-layered plastic tents using trash bags and clear weatherproof packing tape. Created for use by the homeless during winter, the tents are designed to be attached to the exterior vents on buildings in major cities, temporarily exploiting, like parasites, the energy of their hosts. While every tent obtains and conserves precious heat, each one is also unique, custom-made for a specific individual`s desires and needs, which the artist determines over the course of several conversations with prospective users. One of Rakowitz`s "clients" asked for an elongated design while another preferred a bulbous, Jabba the Hutt-like look; one specified transparent walls, so that personal items would be visible from the outside, while others asked for opaque walls for privacy or for pocket windows to display "cardboard poetry."

I first came across paraSITE while reading the city section of a New York newspaper, discovering only later that Rakowitz was an artist. This introduction is, I think, appropriate, given that Rakowitz-in contrast with most younger artists-does not engage the exhibition scenario as merely a site, cut off from ordinary life, for his cultural legitimization. For example, Rakowitz took over a run-down gallery space at New York`s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center with his installation Climate Control, 2000-2001, creating a low-budget system of humidifiers and galvanized steel ductwork (the latter ran in and out of the windows, like veins carrying immaterial blood) that effectively "climatized" the room: a metaphorical shelter for homeless art? A short time later, rather than exhibiting anything of his own making in a gallery in downtown Manhattan, Rakowitz constructed a vent running from the ninth floor to a Chinese bakery at ground level, filling the room with the smell of baking buns. He gave the 2001 project the multivalent title Rise, bringing to mind both the buildings rising above and the breads rising below. In each of these projects, Rakowitz makes audiences conscious of how a building breathes, of how spaces and people are ultimately connected, of how air (that invisible connector of all things) circulates, and of how that circulation might be diverted toward liberatory purposes.

An exhibition in a former air-raid bunker in Berlin provided another location for an art project poetically related to the theme of air and connectivity: By Air, By Sea, 2002, was made by placing an electronic wildlife caller atop the tower at the bunker`s entrance. This broadcast the cries of indigenous birds of prey as well as other songbirds, causing multitudes of sparrows, robins, finches, and blackbirds to ally and mob the scene in an attempt to drive away the fictional predators, and then to disperse just as quickly. The event as a whole served as a metaphor for all the invisible, yet no less real, exchanges that occur in everyday life, for how we aggregate and disaggregate as multitudes, for how our breathing creates endless patterns of movement in and through social space.

Rakowitz`s latest work to involve a sense both of dislocation and connectivity is Test Ballot: Examining the Faulty Machinery of Democracy, 2004, an event executed on November 2 to coincide with the US presidential election. Instead of summoning birds, he brought fifteen voting machines, the Votomatic brand used in Florida during the contested 2000 ballot, to locations in Europe-including Milan, Ljubljana, Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Athens, and Innsbruck-and invited the global community to vote. This parallel election underscored what the artist felt was an odd paradox implied by the historic occasion: The outcome, on which so much depended globally, was derived only from the mandate of an American electorate. Again, Rakowitz proposed a connection between inside and outside (here, of the United States), asking for the admission of and interaction with different lands of air.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli in Turin. (See Contributors.)

DAVID RIMANELLI IN ADAM McEWEN

A furtive quality of the almost-there or phantom presence haunts Adam McEwen`s practice throughout, as he plays on inversions of context, reversals of fortune, and gallows humor. The first works that caught my eye were little signs such as one might see in store windows or on shop doors alerting visitors that the place was closed for business, but instead of "Sorry We`re Closed" they said things like "Sorry We`re Sorry," "Fuck Off We`re Closed," or "Sorry We`re Dead." All of which suggest that whoever made these particular signs (or decided to use them) isn`t feeling terribly sorry for much. These signboards (realized in 2001 and 2002) are in fact little paintings, executed by McEwen in flashe on paper without the slightest hint of a brushstroke. Hung last year (and in the summer of 2003) inside the always-locked glass door of Chelsea`s Wrong Gallery, an exhibition space maybe a foot deep, "Fuck Off We`re Closed" did rather accord with the genius loci, where the attitude might be summarized as "Fuck Off We`re Cool." It became site specific.

McEwen subsequently glamorized such "protosignature" post-Pop/post-Conceptual text pieces by rendering a "Sorry We`re Dead" on a large silver canvas (Untitled [Dead], 2002). The invocation of Warhol`s death-and-disaster paintings, not to mention the Superstar fog of the silvered Factory decor, skirts cynicism in the brazenness of its references; transferred to metallic canvas, the cheap-looking shop sign becomes visibly pricey, a gallery-ready chattel. Didn`t Warhol claim that he used the diptych format in his large death-and-disaster paintings because the monochrome half made it twice the painting, so to speak? He could charge more for it. Sorry We`re Expensive. Maybe this is related to another of McEwen`s store-sign paintings, "Come In We`re Cunts." The artist remarks in an interview (in Wrong Times, a publication of the aforementioned gallery): "`Come in we`re cunts` is just `Come in. Fuck you.` There are shops that have cunty people working behind the counter in cunty shops, but that`s more English. I like those shops where the customer is always wrong."

McEwen did a four-year stint writing obituaries for London`s Daily Telegraph. "I actually wrote the obit for John F. Kennedy Jr.," McEwen remarks. That`s the background for his series of obits for still-living celebrities-among others, Malcolm McLaren, Jeff Koons, Marilyn Chambers, Macaulay Culkin, and Nicole Kidman. In all respects adhering to the obituary format, these pieces relate the life stories and accomplishments of their subjects. Only one item is missing: cause of death. McEwen suggests that these artworks-black-and-white C-prints, or colorless color photography-have their own shelf life, as it were: "The one thing I know for sure about these people is that some day they will die, at which point maybe the artwork doesn`t mean anything." In these faux obits, McEwen makes hay out of the etiolation of meaning around the otherwise seemingly replete figure of the famous person. I`m reminded of Thomas Crow`s comments about Warhol`s dead-celebrity art: "How does one handle the fact of celebrity death? Where does one put the curiously intimate knowledge one possesses of an unknown figure, come to terms with the sense of loss, the absence of a richly imagined presence that was never really there[?]"

Entering the artist`s recent exhibition at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York, one was confronted by a wall with a small doorway roughly cut out of it, leading into the gallery`s project room, which housed Shoegazer (Bonus Version), 2002-2004, a multipart installation. The "shoegazer" itself is a long, narrow strip of mirror leaning against the wall, like those one finds in certain shoe stores. But the look isn`t too flattering, as McEwen`s mirror has an icky brown tint. Above the mirror, McEwen hung a closeup of Michael Jackson`s feet, clad in superspecial dancing shoes and incandescent socks; a small drawing of a shoe-gazing guitarist from a very noisy band like My Bloody Valentine (a certain kind of low-frequency noise that can, apparently, trigger involuntary bowel movements is known as "brown sound"); and a purple-tinted version of an earlier piece, Unfitted (A-line), 2002, where McEwen took the famous photograph of Mussolini and his mistress strung up by their feet and inverted it, so that they seem to be throwing their arms up as they ascend ecstatically. McEwen refers to "an unpleasant sense of exaggerated self-consciousness" at work in this piece, and the extremities of self-fashioning that went into the fairly ludicrous Italian dictator and our number one, off-the-hook pop star speak volumes of unpleasantness and exaggeration. The murky strip of mirror below might as well be the gate of Hell. Facilis descensus Averni, to borrow the words of the Poet. But why is the road to Hell easy? Because you`re walking down.

Sorry I`m Finished.

David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Artforum.

TOM HOLERT ON JULIAN G脰THE

Julian G枚the likes to cut. A recurring theme when he muses about his work is the tender yet aggressive restiveness of the drawings, collages, and sculptures he produces. Perhaps owing to his enthusiasm for the bleeding edge, his works take on a certain air of danger, giving rise to almost visceral sensations. At the same time-and this is not to be considered contradictory at all-G枚the`s hybrid creations are utterly sexual and seductive, at least for an observer capable of taking pleasure in the sight of such uncannily edgy, masculine shapes.

The pleasurable dissonance becomes even deeper when one learns about the peculiar references and predilections G枚the brings to the game. "Living with Design," the artist`s autumn 2004 solo show at Cabinet in London, took its name from a popular book by `60s interior designer David Hicks. Notwithstanding the nature of this vintage manual for combining antique-store finds and fashionable items of contemporary design-what could it possibly mean to "live" with design? And when does design-enhanced dwelling turn into a "design for living"?

G枚the`s installation seems to point toward a strategy for survival by means of a perverse kind of "as if" furniture that radiates both jouissance and threat. Dominating the gallery space was Darkness Has Reached Its End, 2004, a monstrous, insectlike scaffold made of metal and topped by a metal structure that resembles a crossing of throne and obelisk. Shrouded in black chiffon, the sculpture automatically evokes death and ritual (the black widow), while the "legs" of the work seem to have been derived from `50S horror films. Diversifying matters even more, the ensemble bears features of the cast-iron sculpture-furniture of Gilbert Poillerat, the ma卯tre ferronnier whose pseudoarchaic pomp was rediscovered by Karl Lagerfeld, formerly a fervent collector of these eccentricities.

G枚the also takes inspiration from an interior designer from the 19405 and `50s, Jean Royer, and his oddly curved metal tables and seats, similar to the bizarre stil novo of the `50s represented most prominently by the idiosyncratic, postfunctional designs of Renzo Zavanella. The artist, who also works as an illustrator on animated films, explores the margins of design history, where bourgeois interiors can no longer be distinguished from movie sets and where furniture loses almost any use value and becomes instead an instrument of sublime torture, taking on a fantastic, surrealistic life of its own.

Accordingly, the monumental folded-paper and metal sculpture Painted White in a Spirit of Rebellion, 2003, originally installed in the window of Daniel Buchholz`s antiquarian bookstore in Cologne, has been rightly described as an homage to the "Big White Sets" of leading Art Deco-inspired Hollywood designers like Cedric Gibbons, Van Nest Polglase, Hobe Erwin, and Frederic Hope. Here, with this carefully illuminated stand-up relief landscape, the glamorizing functions of display and set design have been displaced in favor of a special brand of meta- or ultraglamour.

While activating a wide range of historical references and drawing on a long-standing interest in the intersection of bodybuilding and design as a means to plumb the social and aesthetic correspondences between ultramodernist stylistics and homosexual lifestyles, G枚the also cherishes the inherent anthropomorphic or zoomorphic qualities of his sculptures. The various elements of his shows seem to interact with each other, like creatures watching other creatures as they revel in the limelight of the white cube. The sculpture-creature in "Living with Design" seemed to look at the two objects on the wall: the friezelike Soft Furnishing Crisis, 2004, where abstract drawings rendered in purple ink merge with the photo silk screens of a bodybuilder`s abs and pecs; and the fleece-like, fabric-on-painted-board collage Oochy Koochy, 2004. The latent, rapturous joy of the latter all-but-innocent still life is hinted at by the title, linking the shrieking sounds of a 1988 Baby Ford acid-house track with G枚the`s sharpened shapes-and in the process, fostering an idea of relentless celebration while everything is frozen in pleasure.

Tom Holert is a writer based in Berlin. Recently he cocurated (with Heike Munder) "The Future Has a Silver Lining: Genealogies of Glamour" at the Migros Museum f眉r Gegenwartskunst, Z眉rich.

JORDAN KANTOR ON JAN DE COCK

While there have been several opportunities to see Jan de Cock`s sculptures and photographs over the past few years, the twenty-eight-year-old Belgian`s particular brand of site-specific art first made an international splash last summer at Manifesta 5 in Donostia-San Sebasti谩n, Spain. For that remarkable installation, de Cock took over an abandoned shipbuilding warehouse, erecting a large structure that, as is typical for his work, mined the fecund territory between art and architecture. Part sculpture, part building, de Cock`s supersized piece filled the interior of the warehouse space and spilled out onto the roof, literally blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. As one walked around-and through-the soaring structure, its walls and exposed beams snapped in and out of visual alignment, creating compelling vistas and strange spaces, which had a strong perceptual, even bodily, effect. Constructed with quotidian, commercial building materials over a nine-week period-during which it looked like it may have doubled as the artist`s crash pad-the work was memorable and surprisingly ravishing. I, for one, had no idea green fiberboard could look so good.

Following shows at galleries in Amsterdam, Cologne, and Vienna, as well as at SMAK Ghent and De Appel in Amsterdam, de Cock`s Manifesta project was the latest in an ongoing series of architectural interventions begun in 2003, which he calls "Denkmal." As others have noted, the artist`s use of the term-a German word meaning both "monument" and "memorial"-knowingly alludes to Adolf Loos`s famous quip in 1909 that the tomb (Grabmal) and the monument (Denkmal) were the only architectural forms that could rightfully be considered art. While de Cock`s work certainly challenges the rigid taxonomy that has until recently allowed only slivers of overlap between the fields of art and architecture, its engagement with acts of memory extends beyond smart art-historical quotation. Indeed, with his "Denkmal" structures de Cock evokes the particularly nostalgic side of remembrance, yearning for a time-for Loos`s time-when art and architecture seriously and self-consciously positioned themselves as vehicles for social change. His rigid geometric structures dance between the gestalt of monolithic sculpture and the inhabitability of architecture, and they strongly recall both the paintings and environments of de Stijl, that multidisciplinary movement that so taimpteted its potential to change our perceptual world. Caught in a seemingly irresolvable bind, de Cock`s "memorials" seem to court social engagement while mourning its apparent futility. This two-pronged dialectic-which simultaneously pulls de Cock back to earlier moments of avant-garde radically and propels him toward his own era-is common in much new art today and is one characteristic that makes his work utterly contemporary.

De Cock`s architectural/sculptural project extends to light-box photographs, which document his structures in use. Made with three-second exposures, they capture the movement of people interacting with his installations during their short lifespans. After the constructions are disassembled, de Cock typically installs his photographs in the spaces they depict, creating a frisson between a visitor`s memory of the installation and the artist`s record of it. Sometimes, however, he shows the light boxes elsewhere, exploiting the particularly historicizing (and memoralizing) function of photography. (This month, for example, Fons Welters will mount an exhibition of de Cock`s photographic record of his Manifesta project in Amsterdam.)

One of the primary objectives of de Cock`s interactive and self-reflexive art is to pierce the doldrums of the viewer`s everyday consciousness through active involvement. This strategy of engagement was, of course, crucial for modernism`s pioneers, and de Cock`s consistent use of the title "Denkmal" underscores both his appreciation for their aims and his desire to move beyond the sense of belatedness that inevitably haunts his project-and our historical moment more generally. Apart from meaning "monument" and "memorial," "Denkmal" can also be phonetically understood as the German slang imperative denk `mal, meaning "think about it." By imploring his viewers to "denk `mal," de Cock brings monuments and memorials back to life, pulling them from dusty history into our living world. With two more "Denkmal" projects on the horizon-in May at Frankfurt`s Schirn Kunsthalle and in September at Tate Modern-we will, indeed, have plenty more chances to "think about" de Cock`s monumental, melancholic, and memorializing work.

Jordan Kantor is assistant curator in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art and an artist.

PHILIPPE VERGNE ON ZON ITO AND RYOKI AOKI

When I first saw artworks by the Kyoto-based couple Zon Ito and Ryoko Aoki at the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, I couldn`t tell which was which or who did what. Both in their early thirties, they have located themselves somewhere to the left of the cultural sphere dominated by economic, if not industrial, models of efficiency, investing instead in labor-intensive practices such as embroidery, beading, and handcrafted books, as well as notions of modesty, frailty, and the quotidian. The combination is not unlike the cinema of Hiroyuki Oki or Apichatpong Weerasethakul, or the music of Daniel Johnston, Andrew Bird, and Momus. All are energized by a desire to slow things down in order to revitalize an aesthetic maquis, a kind of "rear-garde." This nonmonumental, nonheroic attitude may be one of the most difficult positions for an artist to adopt today.

It was not until I saw Ito and Aoki side by side installing Ito`s work in the Walker Art Center`s "How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age," 2003, that I understood that they are the feminine and masculine counterparts of one artistic practice. The two are actually one but remain distinct, their work never revealing the line between feminine and masculine sensibilities. For his part, Ito works primarily with embroidery on fabric, clay sculptures, and handmade books, but also makes strange animated films with hallucinatory landscapes whose morphing human figures and twisted wildlife scenes are so precious, awkwardly narrative, and obsessively craftsy that one might wonder what they could possibly have to do with any contemporary artistic discourse. In fact, his aesthetic is informed by Japanese tradition, 1980s video games, underground illustration, and youth culture, and his program seems to be charged with a deliberate and juvenile withdrawal from the modernist dogma of Cartesian rationality and efficiency. Rather, his visions, often dark and pessimistic, seem fished from the stream of consciousness. In Dried Persimmons, 2002, an embroidered diptych on fabric, realism, hypersubjectivity, memory, and dreams seem to drift freely together in a chaotic liquid world, intermingling forms resembling those of a Surrealist cadavre exquis.

Aoki`s drawings, installations, collages, animated films, and books-recently seen in Los Angeles at Marc Foxx Gallery-share a similar sense of a rotten Eden. With comparable grace, she depicts microscopic, decrepit floral worlds that suggest the irreversible erosion of being and put a poetic face on the normally imperceptible, as in Radiowave Observation, 2004. Occasionally her world is also one of interrupted fairy tales with a meditative, melancholy take on "girly" vanities. In works such as Pelvis Contortion, Back Bone Contortion 1, and Back Bone Contortion 2, all 2004, her iconography seems borrowed from both D眉rer`s intricate and codified woodcuts and children`s books like Where the Wild Things Are, the latter targeting an audience emancipated from innocence but not yet stifled by intellectual immobility.

In their collaborative animated films, Ito and Aoki`s aesthetics merge to create a third sensibility. Overall they share a detached, dreamy attitude toward the surrounding turmoil, a sensibility that allows for indeterminancy-what philosopher Fran莽ois Jullien has called "the propensity of things"-to guide their acts. In Children of Veins, 2004, the fluidity suggested by their respective works coalesces in movements of concentration, dispersion, and dilution, with forms reminiscent of water changing state from liquid to solid to steam. In Psychic Scope, 2001, a salamander becomes a girl who becomes a river, and in Breeding Wall, 2001, the head of a young boy becomes a tiger before disappearing into bushes-giving birth to a microcosm as vast as the greatest macrocosm, as if a single speck of dust contained the whole world. Such morphing imagery suggests an absence of permanence, a series of metaphorical visions, a book of changes, a world where nothing is actually achieved or stable yet is constantly and complexly shifting between becoming, being, and withering.

Philippe Vergne is senior curator at the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis.

BOB NICKAS ON MATTHEW DAY JACKSON

What could a Viking burial ship, Piet Mondrian, and the punk bands Black Flag and Bad Brains possibly have in common? For Matthew Day Jackson they serve as points in a constellation, multiple references that can be overlaid to draw, in his words, "a cosmological chart." The Viking ship in question is Jackson`s sculpture Sepulcher, 2003-2004, which the artist constructed from unused material in his studio, as well as from bits and pieces scavenged from previous work. This conscious process of recycling extends to the sail, which references a Mondrian abstraction but is entirely composed of Jackson`s old T-shirts. According to legend, a burial vessel should be sailed out to sea, set afire, and sunk. But here the course charted is decidedly forward. In effect, Sepulcher suggests that the preoccupations of Jackson`s youth-modern art, various bands and products-were cast aside to preserve his creative future. He explains, "Sepulcher is a monument to my own death at the age of thirty and is meant to act as a farewell to beleaguered ways of making art, tired thinking, and antiquated strategies for expressing myself."

Jackson`s Burial Costume (Second Skin), 2004, was laid inside Sepulcher when it appeared in "Relentless Proselytizers," a group show at Feigen Contemporary in New York last summer. Assembled from the artist`s discarded wardrobe, the piece comprises a jacket with studded epaulets and serpentine camouflage-pattern inserts, military cape, fencing chest guard, dashiki, and various patches-POW, Slayer, Deicide-stitched together to form clothing at once stunning, funky, and dandified. The work resembles a uniform sewn by some urban tribe, appearing as much a relic as an omen of a postapocalyptic near-future-equal parts American Revolution, black power, Road Warrior, and hippie/headbanger. Although conceptual and material elements have always been reciprocal for Jackson, and his subject matter has consistently been politically minded, his earlier work was more traditionally painting based. The artist had never previously incorporated personal items, let alone cannibalized his own work. As Sepulcher and Burial Costume remind us, the past is called the past for good reason.

Jackson`s recent work may be seen as part of a return by younger artists to the handmade, and his fine carving betrays his Pacific Northwest roots. But his craftsmanship and invention always serve a critical purpose. Influenced equally by current events and American history, his projects often address the country`s increasing militarism and idealization of its past, as well as an endangered global environment. Tomb of the Unknown, 2004-, takes its cue from an unlikely source in Eleanor Roosevelt: "What is to give light must endure the burning." The sculpture, still in progress, resembles a World War II tank barrier and serves as a perch for a wood-burned raven and two carved vultures-birds venerated in Native American culture but otherwise generally despised. One vulture triumphantly spreads its wings as if it were our most idealized bird of prey, the bald eagle. Jackson plans to char the entire main structure, making it appear to have endured a forest fire or warfare, a natural or man-made disaster.

In Jackson`s Brooklyn studio, a number of new pieces are underway. One drawing is a study for a ceramic and stained-glass chandelier that will combine the facade of the Alamo and the form of the Pentagon-symbols, respectively, of America`s "heroic" sacrifice in its conquest of the Wild West and of contemporary Western power. The artist is also poised to transform another icon of the pioneer spirit, the covered wagon. He will build its body with the remnants of some of his old paintings, making its wheels, yoke, and other moving parts with carved and glued scrap wood: Material usually considered worthless will propel the wagon ho! Given the art world`s renewed interest in Americana, it might be easy to mistake Jackson`s project as somehow nostalgic. But he sees no particular valor in the na茂vet茅 and violence surrounding myths of the American frontier. Jackson`s image for the wagon`s canvas cover? Intertwined snakes abstracted from Benjamin Franklin`s "Join or Die" cartoon and the slogan/challenge of the Revolutionary War flag: "Don`t Tread on Me." Could Jackson`s reappropriation be any more timely?

Bob Nickas has curated more than fifty shows of contemporary art in the United States and Europe over the past twenty years. He is curatorial advisor at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.

ALISON M. GINGERAS ON RICHARD HUGHES

Clich茅s make good art. "One man`s trash is another man`s treasure" is a perfect case in point. As any MFA student knows, sifting through the forgotten byproducts of urban life can provide a gold mine of unusual materials-but Dumpster diving alone does not an art practice make. From early Dada assemblage to David Hammons`s masterfully simple recuperation of things found on the street, very few artists have successfully (and selectively) incorporated "garbage" into their work.

Richard Hughes is one such artist. Born in Birmingham, England, in 1974 and recently graduated from Goldsmiths College in London, Hughes has already produced a constellation of sculptural works that convincingly appropriate cast-off goods such as bicycle tires, dirty mattresses, torn posters, and plastic bottles (he either deploys found objects or skillfully recasts simulacra of the originals).

Hughes grew up in Britain at a moment when municipal planning was transforming many cities into sprawling urban wastelands, and his material preoccupations directly reference the youth subcultures that were nurtured in those environments. Take for example a work entitled Stuntnutter, 2003-an ephemeral public sculpture composed of three BMX bicycle tires, recast and poetically interlaced, initially exhibited on a desolate, roadside stretch of grass. Hughes not only makes a clear if melancholic nod to the BMX bike and skateboard gangs of his youth, but also underscores the class conditions and spatial context that gave rise to such collective experiences. Echoing the way in which teenagers appropriate the "nonspaces" of cities (roadsides, empty malls, housing-project stairwells), Hughes`s display strategies reinforce his interest in uncovering the highly charged meanings of discarded objects and marginalized places.

Even within the sterile confines of the white cube, Hughes is able to convey his blackly humorous engagement with uninviting ambiences and scavenged materials. What initially appeared to be a pile of plastic trash bags full of clothes (awaiting donation to the Salvation Army) propped unassumingly against a wall at Roma Roma Roma (during his Italian solo debut in 2003) was, in fact, a playful, trompe l`oeil sculpture entitled Dad`s Bag of Rags, 2003. Hughes carefully arranged several brightly colored T-shirts inside the one clear plastic bag to create an iconic image of a face-the source for the image is taken from the cover of the psychedelic rock group Love`s 1967 album, Forever Changes. Using a similar trompe l`oeil technique for an installation entitled Crash My Party You Bastards, 2004, Hughes created out of everyday scraps a three-dimensional version of Salvador Dal铆`s 1935 painting Face of Mae West. In both of these works, Hughes merges low-budget illusion with pop-y/cult-y allusion. This powerful, somewhat startling combination conjures an entire constellation of interests, behaviors, postures, and attributes-the devotion to pop heroes and cult bands, the rebellious aura of subcultures-typically abandoned at the end of adolescence.

In what is, perhaps, his most spectacular work to date, Hughes shifts gears away from youth culture to a seemingly more generic subject. Slouching Back, 2004, is a sculptural depiction of a sunset, which Hughes exhibited this past autumn at The Showroom in London. Each distinct element of this landscape is rendered from found objects and then carefully placed in the gallery. What at first appears to be nothing more than a dissonant collection of junky material ultimately coalesces into an image on the viewer`s retina. A misty "mountain top" landscape was suggested by a heap of down comforters in one corner; a stunning backdrop made from torn posters pasted to the wall mimics the gradation of colors in a late evening sky; the "sun" is nothing more than a light bulb hidden behind two hexagonal pieces of Plexiglas-aping the lens-flare effect that occurs in most photographs of sunsets. More than just a cheeky simulation of nature, Slouching Back balances Hughes`s formal originality with deliberate art-historical allusions (e.g., Claes Oldenburg`s soft sculptures; the affiches lacer茅es of Raymond Hains, Jacques de la Villegl茅, and Mimmo Rotella). As with his more specifically subculture-inspired works, Hughes is able to recuperate even the most hackneyed of subjects (and materials)-like a beautiful sunset-and infuse them with new life. Hughes (and the web of concerns he evokes) commands more than just a casual glance.

Alison M. Gingeras is an independent curator living in Paris and New York.

SOUND THINKING

BRUCE NAUMAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN an artist who does the opposite of what you think he should, then somehow makes you think it was exactly the right thing to do. When he agreed to create a work for Tate Modern`s Turbine Hall, I thought he had clearly accepted an invitation to fail. The Turbine Hall is the Jaws of museum architecture. With few exceptions, it opens its massive mouth and swallows what it is fed, even when artists super-size their work to the point that it seems like a caricature of itself. At 500 feet long, 115 feet high, and 75 feet wide, this public mall seems particularly wrong for Nauman, whose work is intensely psychological and private. For me, all of his sculptures, including the room-size installations, operate on a human scale. To make matters worse, Nauman`s project follows what was arguably the Hall`s most popular installation-Olafur Eliasson`s dramatic (some would say overly theatrical) Weather Project. How could Nauman possibly pull this off without seeming like a BB in a boxcar?

You might say he talked his way out of it, turning the problems into solutions. Nauman has left the vast space of the Turbine Hall empty of any extra visual effect. What he has added, however, is perhaps the most spatially invasive of all materials-sound in the form of the human voice. Making full use of the long, narrow space, Nauman has placed pairs of directional, wall-mounted speakers across from each other down the Hall`s full length. As you walk the space, you pass through walls of language, spoken by Nauman and others. Some are his original vocal recordings, and others are rerecorded or newly recorded pieces using text from works made in numerous media over almost forty years. It`s a brilliant solution, establishing a vast psychological landscape that, rather than dwarfing the visitor, makes us the object of a less-than-serene experience. Nauman is the dark side of Eliasson`s sun. No sunbathing here, just walking through shadows.

Raw Materials digs deep into the archaeology of Nauman`s involvement with language. Beginning with rare early works such as First Poem Piece, 1968, Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room, 1968, and False Silence, 1975, and stretching to such recent ones as World Peace, 1996, it is a kind of lexical retrospective. The title Raw Materials suggests the fundamental role Nauman sees language playing in his work, as well as the fact that he has left the Turbine Hall in a raw state. In a 1970 neon work, the artist presented the palindrome Raw War. In Raw Materials, he presents a war of words.

This is not a books-on-tape experience. Rather, it is what Conceptual art always said Conceptual imagery should be: a powerful form of mental sculpture. Like so many of Nauman`s best installations, it explores that strange boundary between an individual experience and a collective one. The result is an edgy confusion between "your" space, "my" space, and "his" space. Some of Nauman`s earliest works reflect his interest in blurring these boundaries. Video Surveillance Piece (Public Room, Private Room), 1969-70, consists of two spaces, each monitored with a video camera: a "private room" with no entrance and a "public room" of the same size. What the camera sees in the private room appears on the monitor in the public room and vice versa, offering a concise example of Nauman`s interest in confusing the distinctions between the personal and the communal. At the Tate, public and private are blurred on a grand scale.

The Turbine Hall is essentially an indoor city square, a place where large groups can congregate but also where an individual can walk around with his or her thoughts. Because Nauman has given us nothing to look at, we are left to navigate-physically, visually, and psychologically-between ourselves, the sea of other visitors, and, the trump card here, Nauman`s voice. The resulting experience can be a disorienting, even surreal, synesthesia. The artist`s projected voices blend with the ambient voices and gestures of other visitors to create a forest of signs and sounds. On top of it all, so to speak, the artist has mounted speakers near the ceiling that emit a constant mmmmmmmmmmm. It`s a little like being in a restaurant with poor acoustics, where fragments of conversation and background noise combine to make you feel you`re in an aural whirlpool.

One way of focusing is to center yourself in one of Nauman`s audio streams, although they offer a slippery foundation. Using a wide range of voices, Nauman has given each text a different personality, creating a small crowd within a crowd. The first voice you hear on entering the hall is like a drumbeat: Nauman loudly repeating the title of a 1992 piece Thank You in a cadence that is quick and at times strained. These two simple words, which everyone is taught are integral to good manners, have never seemed quite so incomprehensible, or at least variable in their intonation and meaning. As Nauman races through repetitions, his voice oscillates between sincerity and mockery. More than one person has noticed that somewhere in the loop of repetition "thank you" begins to sound like "fuck you." Welcome to Nauman`s disjunctive world.

As you walk down the hall, the next voice you encounter is that of a young boy reciting different variations on the phrase "You may not want to be here." In this case, Nauman distorts the message through the variable subtraction of words: "You may not want to be here. You may want to be here. You want to be here. You want to be. You may want to be. You may not want to be." Eventually we are told, "You may not want to hear." Indeed, the harder the child tries to adapt to Nauman`s variations, the more frustrated he becomes and the meaner he sounds. I take this to be a kind of child`s version of Nauman`s 1987 video work Clown Torture, in which the artist runs a smiling and brightly painted clown through a gamut of situations that turn him into something far too human to be funny.

Like his sculptures, Nauman`s use of language subverts expectations, flipping and coloring information so that it doesn`t register in normal ways. His use of acrid colored light to destabilize our perception of a room, or candy-colored neon to light up a dark word, say, "malice" in pink and yellow, finds its counterpart here, where pleasant and benign voices deliver dark messages. In False Silence, what sounds like the congenially disengaged voice of a flight attendant giving instructions for takeoff repeats the haunting monologue: "You can`t reach me, you can`t hurt me. I can suck you dry. You can`t hurt me. You can`t help me. Shuffle the pages. Find me a line. Arapahoe, Arapahoe. Where did you go? I blink my eyes to keep the time." Like a dream in which you run but go nowhere, you are drawn in and then held at an uncomfortable distance. In this case, it seems as though the voice emanates from the unreachable end of a tunnel, underscoring the sense of presence and absence that haunts much of Nauman`s work.

Throughout his career, Nauman has grappled with the tension between private thought and public exposure-one of the great dilemmas facing the modern artist who is challenged to be intensely personal in a very public way. In other words, how do you withdraw into yourself to make art if you are expected to assert yourself at the same time? Nauman`s answer has been to assert his withdrawal. In a 1970 project for Artforum, he wrote down a number of ideas that would help guide his art over the next three decades. One of the most interesting statements, printed in boldface, reads: "Withdrawal as an Art Form." One 1968 installation had already materialized this idea in a powerfully dematerialized manner. Speakers hidden in the walls of an empty room instructed viewers-who had no idea where the sound was coming from-to "get out of my mind, get out of this room."

As he did in that installation, Nauman has transformed the Turbine Hall into a kind of analogue of his mind, placing us at his verbal/thought control center. The result is a strangely intimate melding of mind, language, and sculpture. As we cross the halfway point of the vast space, Nauman yells at us to "get out," but we`re in too far to retreat. We hear the original 1968 recording of the artist`s voice, which is young and guttural. We are in the belly of the beast and in the heart of his Raw Materials.

Nauman once told me, "Misunderstanding is the basis for how a lot of us relate to each other-trying to figure out what the misunderstandings mean. Linguists and therapists use misunderstanding as material to work with." Misunderstanding, especially as it relates to human relationships, is also a key element of Nauman`s Raw Materials. The text for his sculptural installation Consummate Mask of Rock, 1975, was initially titled The Mask to Cover the Need for Human Companionship. The installation, which according to a recent interview was conceived around the time of his divorce, consists of limestone blocks of various shapes and arrangements that suggest shifting perspectives and skewed relationships: Some appear to be coming together, others seem to be falling away from each other. Accompanying the blocks is a numbered list based on different combinations of seventeen words, among them "mask," "fidelity," "truth," "cover," "pain," "desire," and "need." Here, Nauman seems more confessional than confrontational:

14. This is the need for pain that contorts my mask conveying the message of truth and fidelity to life.

15. This is the truth that distorts my need for human companionship.

16. This is the distortion of truth masked by my painful need.

17. This is the mask of my painful need distressed by truth and human companionship.

The text is even more powerful when spoken, as it is in the Turbine Hall. The words come at us like the unconscious being released. They are dark thoughts with double edges: The statement "The consuming task of human companionship is false" seems particularly poignant in the Turbine Hall, where couples and friends walk together through Nauman`s piece. Is it the task or the companionship itself that is false? While Warhol declared that everyone would have fifteen minutes of fame, Nauman seems to suggest that everyone will have fifteen minutes of pain. His riposte to Warhol is yet another act of implosion: "People die of exposure." In Raw Materials, we are completely exposed. There is no sculpture or object to hide behind.

At the end of the hall, we encounter World Peace, which seems to summarize the frequent subject of Nauman`s work with language: the assumptions, blind alleys, and misdirections involved in human communication, whether between lovers, friends, enemies, or artist and audience. A female voice and a male voice, projected from opposite speakers, recite the same set of phrases based on different combinations of the verbs "talk" and "listen" and the pronouns "I," "you," "me," and "them": "You`ll talk to me. I`ll listen to you. I`ll talk to you. You`ll listen to me. . . . I`ll talk to them. They`ll talk to you. You`ll listen to them," and so on. The systematic back and forth of the "conversation" initially sounds like two reasonable people working out the parameters of a dialogue, but soon morphs into a humorous battle for control, going nowhere fast. The title World Peace, with its implication of possible global understanding, amplifies the pathos of the vocal performance.

Although many artists of Nauman`s generation have employed language in their art-Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Douglas Huebler, Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Robert Barry, et al.-Nauman`s approach invites few comparisons. Like many of his colleagues, Nauman naturally gravitated to Wittgenstein`s writings about the nature of language and its relation to the world. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the philosopher wrote, "The boundaries of my language mean the boundaries of my world." To my mind, few artists have explored these boundaries as intensely as Nauman. When he speaks in his art, he reduces language to a fundamental, almost primitive level.

In fact, there are moments in Raw Materials when we don`t seem to be experiencing language at all, but some hybrid form of melodic linguistics-sound with attitude. I can`t help but think about Nauman`s background and interest in music. As an undergraduate, the artist studied music, among other subjects, at the University of Wisconsin-he has spoken specifically of his interest in Webern and Sch枚nberg-and for a time worked as a jazz bassist. As he has said, "Music plays a role in a lot of my work, even when there is no music." Music, or something like it, is indeed a reference in quite a few of Nauman`s works over the past forty years: the weighty aluminum slab with a mirror-finish bottom, John Coltrane Piece, 1968, which refers to the musician`s penchant for turning away from the audience; the Buster Keaton-like Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio, 1967-68; the disconcerting Six Sound Problems for Konrad Fischer, 1968, in which the artist mixed recorded sounds with natural noises in a gallery; the audio assault of a rock `n` roll drummer in Learned Helplessness in Rats (Rock and Roll Drummer), 1988; the eerie and mournful steel guitar in End of the World-Lloyd Maines`s, 1996; the wailing coyotes and whining horses in his recent Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), 2001.

Perhaps I`m confusing the biographical with the phenomenological, but to walk through the Turbine Hall quickly, letting each band of language register brief intonations, is also a musical experience. I`m not suggesting that these voices come at us like a symphony or choir. It is more like a lexical equivalent of jazz, in which a musician takes us to the very edge of melody, then brings us back to a refrain. Imagine the twenty-one bands of sound/language crossing the width of the space as a set of strings activated as the viewer walks through them. There are high points of melodic manipulation: the alternating male and female voices speaking in Portuguese the title The True Artist Is an Amazing Luminous Fountain, 1966; the chorus of voices in One Hundred Live and Die, 1985; the almost operatic voice of Rinde Eckert in Anthro/Socio, 1991; and the staccato refrains of "thank you thank you thank you . . . work work work work work . . ." then "think think think think." Sometimes these sounds have distinct boundaries; sometimes they bleed together. Using different voices like differently tuned strings, Nauman plays with the space as if it were an instrument. Some of the artist`s drawings for Raw Materials vaguely resemble musical scores; their annotations could be a cross between John Cage and Miles Davis.

Stevie Wonder once said, "A lot of seeing is hearing and feeling. . . . You listen to the voice and get the image." When you leave the Turbine Hall, Nauman`s voices have an insidious way of resonating, staying with you like an image flickering at the front of the brain. Someone said to me after experiencing Raw Materials, "Nauman is always in your face." In the Turbine Hall, he may not be in your face, but he`s definitely inside your head.

Michael Auping is chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

SIDEBAR

Beshty consistently pays attention to the wrong things, or the right things in the wrong way, or the right places at the wrong time. Little by little, step by step, potted plant by potted plant, his photographs zero in on the revelation of being confused.

Rakowitz`s By Air, By Sea represented a metaphor for how we aggregate and disaggregate in multitudes, for how our breathing causes endless patterns of movement in and through social space.

Given the art world`s renewed interest in Americana, it might be easy to mistake Jackson`s project as somehow nostalgic. But he sees no particular valor in the na茂vet茅 and violence surrounding myths of the American frontier.

MICHAEL AUPING ON BRUCE NAUMAN AT THE TURBINE HALL

BECAUSE NAUMAN HAS GIVEN US NOTHING TO LOOK AT, WE ARE LEFT TO NAVIGATE-PHYSICALLY, VISUALLY, AND PSYCHOLOGICALLY-BETWEEN OURSELVES, THE SEA OF OTHER VISITORS, AND, THE TRUMP CARD HERE, NAUMAN`S VOICE.

COPYRIGHT: Copyright Artforum Inc. Jan 2005. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.

PROQUEST-CSA, LLC- MAKES NO WARRANTY REGARDING THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, OR TIMELINESS OF THE LICENSED MATERIALS OR ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED.