Carnegie Ramble

Edward Leffingwell

In which the author, map in hand, threads the labyrinthine passages of the Carnegie International to find, among other things, aquarium reflections, shacks, furniture mazes, steam vents and visual echoes of MTV.

With the referential apparatus of a hall of mirrors and the intellectual ambitions of a vanguard film festival, the Carnegie International 1999/2000 places special emphasis on the art of the new as celebrated by the moving image. The lively and rambling host to this 53rd installment of the Western Hemisphere's oldest ongoing project of its kind, the Carnegie Institute consists of the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, along with a library and music hall, in an architectural embrace of old and new, a vast pastiche structure. They are a gift of Andrew Carnegie to the citizens of Pittsburgh, and are joined by mission and administration as well as by the curatorial fiat of this project.

On an architecturally dignified campus also occupied by Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the natural history museum is guarded at its Neo-Classical extremity by Diplodocus Carnegie (dedicated 1999), a full-scale bronze replica of a dinosaur discovered by museum anthropologists early in the century and subsequently named for the founder. At the other end of a long, mixed facade, a Richard Serra sculpture stands sentinel to the Institute's modern wing. It is a match for the dinosaur in its mass, volume and significance. A purchase from the International of 1985, the Serra identifies one of the principal entrances to the Museum of Art, the primary venue of the International. It also celebrates the objects of art the International has made available through purchase to the collections of the Carnegie and other important museums west of the Alleghenies since its beginning in 1896. This installment was organized by curator Madeleine Grynsztejn with the counsel of an advisory committee composed of Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of Documenta XI; Susanne Ghez, director of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and Lars Nittve, director of the new Tate Modern at Bankside, London.

Outfitted with a map and a spirit of adventure, the visitor chooses--or happens upon--one of several entrances to the scattered exhibits of the International. In keeping with the vocabulary of the museum as temple on the hill, they lead to variously dramatic flights of stairs. One treks through labyrinthine passages to discrete galleries and courts, even to the stacks and aisles of the Carnegie Library within the complex.

An expanse of glass along the fountain facade faces the Serra and an avenue beyond. For much of their length, the high glass panes are covered by red, green and blue panels of gel, the colors of video projections and a hint to the nature of the work within. A 10-by-20-foot Alex Katz painting, Autumn (1999), is immediately visible from the entrance to the main hallway that connects the original great halls and galleries of the art museum to the modern ones. A signature Katz landscape and a key element of the artist's contribution to the International, its overall patterning of yellow leaves and tree limbs reflects the day outside. It also appears to be saturated with an eerily intense hue, the modulated effect of daylight through the red gel along the inclined hallway. Leading to the museum's cafe beyond, the tricolor panels focus attention on two large projection screens looming above a scattering of tables and chairs at the terminus of the hallway. The underwater passages of Delphine (1999), Diana Thater's installation integrating video and museum architecture, transforms the hallway cafe into the food court of a public aquarium, with what appears to be a living tableau of divers and dolphins beyond glass walls. As a source of visceral and retinal stimulation, it also serves as an introduction to the companion video installation Thater designed for a gallery of the Museum of Natural History, one of many engaging infiltrations that characterize this International.

Further along the hallway, almost hidden by the anonymity of its simple entrance, lurks Gregor Schneider's Haus ur, a removal and reconstruction of a suite of interconnected rooms from an ongoing project begun by the artist in 1985. The rooms provided for the International are slightly scaled-down replicas of the rooms of his house in Rheydt, Germany. They were constructed within the house like a box within a box, and then removed for reassembly, a process recalling the creation of a David Belasco theater set or Beuys's removal of plaster from the walls of Rene Block's gallery in Aus Berlin (1975). A few visitors at a time are admitted to explore the monastic, barely furnished and somewhat claustrophobic suite of chambers, with the two-by-four armature that supports the walls visible at various passages along the way. A simple video monitor recalls Schneider's rooms in their furnished state, perhaps reflecting the Carnegie's history of archeological digs, while reasserting Beuys's pronouncement that culture is happening here and now and not in the museums.

Adjacent to the entrance of Schneider's installation is a second Katz landscape, My Mother's Dream (1998), an even larger four-panel nocturnal view of a woods. The painting faces another expanse of glass that looks out toward a large reflecting pool in the sculpture court, which is Olafur Eliasson's Your natural denudation inverted (1999). The pool's dark surface is patterned with the reflection of a few bare trees that appear to be rooted within and just beyond the pool itself. Looking for all the world like a permanent feature of the museum's architectural program, Eliasson's handsome project is centered by a geyser of steam piped from the Institute's heating plant. This serendipitous marriage of landscape and mechanical apparatus recalls the natural geysers of the Danish artist's ancestral home, Iceland, while acknowledging the machinery in the bowels of the museum, and brings to mind his project for the 24th Sao Paulo Bienal of 1998, a reductive, framed slab of ice [see A.i.A, May '99]. Not far away, several existing steam vents erupt from the Carnegie Mellon physical plant along the ravine that separates museum and school.

A second principal entrance is located nearby at the rear of the modern wing, where glass walls stories high reveal the grand stone staircase that overlooks the sculpture court. Another good place to begin a tour, it is identified on the interior by a generic reception desk and by a mammoth Christopher Wool painting, part of the museum's permanent collection, dedicated to the memory of a former International curator, the late John Caldwell. The staircase ascends several broad flights, and for the exhibition supported a series of installations by Suchan Kinoshita, 17 raw shacks of plywood deployed on alternating sides of the steps and together titled who the hell is Hannah (1999). Some of the shacks butt up against the glass wall flanking the sculpture court, so that their interiors can be seen from the courtyard, while others embrace the interior walls as the ritual procession of shanties climbs the steps. They can be glimpsed from above as well, their roofs littered with carpet scraps, a sewing machine, a worktable, vacuum cleaner, clockworks, flour, debris. Rudimentary plywood doors are equipped with sash cords and weights that rise as the doors close, and with crude latches operable by the visitor inside, who is free to rest on various sorts of chairs and examine clockworks, lamps and presentations on video monitors, among many other things. There is an abundance of lurid artificial grass and mirrors, electric fans, a surveillance periscope and telescope. Not incidentally, an entire wall along the second flight of stairs is covered with a somewhat battered Sol LeWitt wall piece, another acquisition from a previous International.

While this ascending village of shacks plays fast and easy with the building's architecture, Johannesburg-based Kendell Geers has sited his project where double flights of marble steps meet overlooking a Beaux-Arts lobby in an older section of the museum. Here the walls are covered with John White Alexander's allegorical mural The Crowning of Labor, a smoky period pageant of steel mills, laborers, laurel-bearing nymphs and Goyaesque wraiths. Against this backdrop, Geers deploys a formidable armature of scaffolding for Poetic Justice (1999), a video projection and sound installation condemning the use of torture. One large screen, which overlooks the stairs like an orator on a balcony addressing an assembly, relentlessly repeats the image of a hooded prisoner recoiling from unseen shocks or blows. The hall echoes with moaning and cries. By necessity and design, the visitor walks up to and underneath the projection to a warren of repeated images displayed on the dozen or more monitors and screens fixed to the scaffolding. Here the hooded prisoner appears again, and then a screaming man, his eyelids taped open in an incessant stroboscopic light. Another, tortured by forced immersion in water, straggles to free himself from an unseen captor's hands.

The visitor is again offered several choices of where to turn next. One choice leads to the decorative-arts galleries and another more directly to the museum's Hall of Sculpture balcony, where one finds an expansive site-specific cut-paper panorama by Kara Walker. The Emancipation Approximation (1999) overlooks an atrium filled with an installation by the late Martin Kippenberger, also part of the exhibition. Above is Lothar Baumgarten's The Tongue of the Cherokee (1985-88), acquired by the museum from a previous International, its linguistic symbols painted, laminated and sandblasted on the checkerboard glass coffers of the ceiling. Walker's procession of signature silhouettes offers a barbed storybook gloss on race relations in the rural 19th-century United States, identifying black and white figures through the caricature of their social and racial characteristics. There are cameo appearances by Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Fox of the Uncle Remus tales and, somehow, Leda and the Swan, and then a moment of oral sex performed on master. The mistress beheads girls with an ax at a tree stump, while a boy kisses a chicken's ass and drops eggs in a frying pan at his backside. There are vignettes placing the girls' heads where the swans' should be, and a swan expelling a load of guano that whitewashes a black figure below. Walker plays her characters off the dozen or so classic marble statues that surround the balcony, conscripting them as witness to her silent narrative.

Close at hand, Kerry James Marshall commandeered the museum's Treasure Room, a wood-paneled studio of display cases accessed from one side of the sculpture hall's balcony. RYTHM MASTR (1999) consists of two-sided newspaper comics, drawn and lettered by Marshall, taped to the glass of the cases as though they were makeshift privacy screens. Because of the light washing through the thin newsprint from within the cases, the serial cartoon, involving the streetwise and foolish, superheroes and villains, proves difficult to follow on-site, but was made available to readers of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the city's morning newspaper, in eight weekly installments.

As one returns to what at first appears to be a traditional gallery of the decorative arts, it becomes clear that the inmates have well and truly taken over the asylum. Mark Dion, a magnet for archival abundance, dresses the first of these galleries in its own costume with a two-part installation. For Ornithological Selections from the Collections of Carnegie Museum of Art (1999), he decorated the gallery walls and populated vitrines with avian paintings, porcelains, books and prints. In the second part, he centers the ensemble with Alexander Wilson--Studio (1999), an imaginative reconstruction of the wilderness cabin of the largely forgotten wildlife artist named in the title. Preceding John James Audubon's more famous undertakings by 50 years or so, Wilson's works demonstrate his struggle to acquire a passable skill in drawing from specimens. Dion understands this as part and parcel of the construction of history: how events and discoveries are recorded, interpreted, disseminated and then cast aside. He focuses on Wilson's frustration with the portrayal of an owl, scattering rejected sketches on a table and floor of a room crowded with specimens, ground pigments, clay pipes, a mortar, weaver's tools (Wilson was also a weaver), tackle, boots, pelts, decoys, skulls, a stuffed white owl, a bluejay, a robin and cardinal also from the collections.

The Hall of Sculpture itself is similarly chockablock with the elements of the Kippenberger installation, The Happy End of Franz Kafka's "Amerika" (1994/99). This work sufficiently resembles a nearby educational entertainment attraction, Planet Golf, to cause some confusion about its status as art, rather than link it to its intended target, Kafka's nightmarish fable. The Salvation Army store of a collector's dreams, Kippenberger's installation of hundreds of tables and chairs, many of them numbered, some of them valuable in themselves, includes the odd Le Corbusier chair, a nest of Thonet tables, a bit of Gehry bentwood, a collection of hotel ashtrays, and a carnival ride with two chairs under umbrellas endlessly revolving on a track around an axis of a gigantic, Paul Bunyan-sized, sunnyside-up plastic egg. There are accumulations of tables, a silver-painted desk with drawers for art storage, a lifeguard's chair, and a pair of high, rectilinear wooden towers, like tree houses or forts from a children's game of battle. Video images and sound are projected onto jars of organ specimens, giving a pickled heart the mouth with which to ask the rhetorical question, "What's the difference between a cartoon and the real thing?"

There are two more stops on the way to the more formal International galleries worth the diversionary route, both of them signaled by the yellow, black and white exhibition logo. Diana Thater's Delphine reprise necessitates a trek through the Kippenberger court, on to the Museum of Natural History, past dinosaurs and banks of interactive computer stations, educational theme-park digressions and a fast-food cafe appropriately named Fossil Fuels, up by elevator or flight of stairs to the rather funky dioramas of Botany Hall. Here, the videos that simulate the effects of an aquarium take on a more baroque appeal, projected on the vaulted ceiling above the coves surrounding a gallery featuring such attractions as a Lake Erie Beach, a Kitchen Garden of Herbs with a picket fence, and displays of simulated fruits and nuts native to the region. The projections overlap in kaleidoscopic fashion in the darkened room. On the floor at the hall's center, Thater installed a group of large video monitors, facing up at the projections, each monitor displaying a generous fraction of what appears to be an incomplete filtered image of the sun.

To finish this section of the tour, the plucky visitor moves on to the Carnegie Library far away, in search of Janet Cardiff's In Real Time (1999), something truly Kafkaesque, a new wrinkle in the development of the interactive acoustic guided tour and a step away from virtual reality. Leaving behind the ransom of a credit card and picture identification in exchange for a handheld video monitor and headphones, the visitor sets out on the trail, led by the image on the tiny screen and Cardiff's guiding voice. Follow along the stacks. Stop here. Turn right, cross this room, rest on this window seat, watch some non-sequitur boudoir scene in a jump-cut personal aside, move down a narrow aisle, look out into this inner courtyard, go down these stairs, a dizzying sequence. In fact, the experience is near to breathtaking, if not actually conducive of a panic attack, as the video connecting each location is bracketed by the location itself in real time, engaging the physical plant of the Carnegie in a direct and commanding way.

In some respects, Cardiff's tour produces a disjointed feeling of being at more or less the right place but in the wrong time. Back in the main galleries, the video installations of Jane and Louise Wilson and Willie Doherty reinforce that sensation of dislocation. The Wilsons' Gamma (1999), a six-minute, four-part video installation with sound, is made up of two split-screen images projected on opposite corners of a gallery accessed by one or the other of two entrances. On the grounds of a decommissioned American missile base in England, the Wilsons' cameras tour a sequence of hallways, reeling around the perimeters of abandoned rooms, through doors assigned useless levels of security. There is one lone figure in protective shrouding on the silo grounds, and a solitary uniformed woman within--scouts from a place of forgotten guardians, reminders of useless weapons in a colder war.

Doherty's 30-minute, four-part video installation with sound recalls uneasy times in Northern Ireland with the voice and eye of personal experience. Somewhere Else (1998) is made up of wall-size projection screens intersecting at right angles in a cruciform. Each of the quarters contains two screens, like an open book, and only one "chapter" can be viewed at a time. A barely audible, beautifully modulated voice recounts some mundane or tragic moment, as it relays from one audio station to another. Occasionally image and sound seem synchronous in meaning, and thus portentous. The camera tracks the white line of a two-lane highway, movement in a field, the interior of a warehouse--places where no good has happened--as they are returned to everyday, post-Troubles, life. It's like the scene of a crime after the criminals and the victims are gone.

Not far away, Pierre Huyghe presents L'Ellipse (1998), a three-part, 13-minute film-noir video projection consisting of clips from Wim Wenders's film The American Friend (1977), featuring the actor Bruno Ganz. Huyghe cast the still ruggedly handsome but older, battered Ganz in an episode obviously not included in the original film, but intimately related to it by action and location (Paris). The two original clips are projected on the left and right sections of a panoramic screen. The recent segment is inserted between them as though it were part of Wenders's original script, completed at last. The younger Ganz enters a room, looks out on the city, speaks on a phone. The projection shifts, and eventually it is the older Ganz who moves through the city. The camera seems to rotate full circle, and then Ganz enters an apartment, opens a book, the left screen activates, there is an elevator, the doors open. Huyghe's ellipsis imparts what seems to be an inevitable element in a not-quite-linear equation that is primarily formal and visual and depends on its own internal logic.

Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez produced a video projection that in its carefully shifting focus formally recalls Huyghe's more cinematic exercise. In El Ceibo (The Sideboard, 1998), the video element is concealed in a low credenza with sliding glass doors. The partially open door on the right reveals a small pile of dinner plates. In the video, the artist appears to be seated on the other side of the cabinet. He begins to remove stacks of objects from within, casually examining them and setting them aside. He appears to slide the glass panel on the left side closed, and then the action is almost ritually repeated in reverse order. The congruence of the furniture in the gallery and the sideboard portrayed in the video confuses the real with its representation, a sleight of hand. Hernandez-Diez is also represented by an untitled work of 1999, a giant-size wooden dish drainer with colorless acrylic fingernails the height of the artist resting on its shelf. In her notes about the two pieces, Grynsztejn relates the video to a display of dispossession and exile, and explains the sculpture as a meditation on vanity and absolution, a manifestation of the Catholic and patriarchal values of the artist's native Venezuela.

South African William Kentridge was awarded the Carnegie Prize for Stereoscope (1999), a 35mm animated film, transferred to video and laserdisc, of roughly eight minutes duration. The labor-intensive making of the Kentridge film involved the production of thousands of drawings which are photographed, modified by the addition or elimination of elements, and photographed again. The images appear in sequences, including what appear to be identical images placed side by side in stereoscopic fashion. Black with charcoal, electrified by bolts of intense blue flashing through the frames like laser beams, the film depicts the tedium of the workplace, the alienation of men and women at home, the factory and office as power base for the bosses, the switchboard apparatus that feeds communication and the electricity that springs from it. There is an intentionally dated quality to Kentridge's drawings. In narrative and expression he is heir to the political satirists Hogarth and Cruikshank, as well as his contemporary Sue Coe.

Shirin Neshat's powerful Soliloquy (1999), a 15-minute 35mm color film transferred to video, premiered at the International. It is another of Neshat's thoughtful portrayals of the dichotomies facing Muslim women, the disparities between the East and the West, the old and the new. As in her justifiably well received Rapture, Neshat uses opposing screens and story lines to strong advantage. The film begins with the black-robed Neshat, as though in two roles, gazing out from similarly structured windows, one giving onto a view of the Muslim world as it has existed for centuries, the other to a view of the modern city in a moment of change. More or less at the same time, she exits these rooms and performs relatively parallel actions. On one screen, Neshat proceeds down ancient stairways and alleyways, passes through gated entrances to courtyards where children play and women gather. On the other, she moves down expansive flights of stairs and along the corridors of a new, seemingly less-cloistered world, down an array of escalators in a vast public space, where she stops and appears to look at her own image on the opposite screen. It is the Neshat of two worlds.

Two additional films--Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 and Ann-Sofi Siden's QM, I think I call her QM--were made available at a set hour each day in the CMA Theater, their relative length and timing putting pressure on visitors with tight schedules. This visitor previewed the Barney film in New York but failed to catch Siden's, which curatorial notes describe as an examination of power and paranoia, a marriage of reality and fiction. Siden herself plays the title character, "a mud-covered being who refuses to be either identified or dominated." Barney, starring as the fictional counterpart of real-life murderer Gary Gilmore in this newest episode of the Cremaster cycle, moves in and out of visually dazzling interiors and landscape sequences set in Utah and Canada. An establishing shot seems to identify Gilmore as the Faustian child of a couple bound in a pact with a dominatrix from hell. She is the personification of a tightly corseted queen bee who in the end demands the subservience of a nattily attired Norman Mailer, author of The Executioner's Song, a novelization of the Gilmore saga. Mailer, himself once an aspiring filmmaker and actor, appears as Harry Houdini, putative grandfather of the murderer. Music swells throughout a scene set in a maquette of the Mormon Tabernacle. There are pop-country laments. Footsteps fall on pooling waters in the vast chambers of a 19th-century iron-and-glass palace. Barney as Gilmore rides a wild bull to the ground. There are parades of horses in formation and then of buffalo, small masterpieces of wrangling and choreography. Notices outside the galleries warn parents that neither of these films is suitable for children.

Sam Taylor-Wood is represented by three photographic tableaux that recall her work in video projection. Five Revolutionary Seconds XIII (1998) is the 25-foot-long result of a five-second exposure of an Arts and Crafts-style interior, moving through a pan of 360 degrees. The cast of characters, scattered through the space, includes a hefty tattooed man in jockey shorts on a stairway, a vaguely sinister younger man glimpsed through French doors, a black man reading a book, another man sprawled on a sofa, a suited man watching him, a girl with an empty glass, a pantry beyond. A barely audible soundtrack, taped during the shoot, features the voices of the participants. Soliloquy I and Soliloquy V (both 1998) each consist of a single large C-type print with a panoramic border along the lower edge that functions as a separately framed predella, reflecting on or vivifying the main image. In Soliloquy V, a stylish young man walks toward the camera, a red car far behind, a red brick wall to his left. The panel below is a panoramic shot of a deserted underground parking structure. In Soliloquy I, an androgynous young man sprawls on a sofa in an late-Victorian orientalist interior, his hand extending through the frame and into the predella, as though reaching into a rogue's gallery of the aristocratically decadent, a benediction to the stylish models posed in naughty abandon.

In a coda to Taylor-Wood's complexity, perhaps as punishment for mocking the posturing and pretense of contemporary art, Swiss artist Roman Signer seems exiled to a small bay most likely to be found only by those in search of the rest rooms. Signer presents moments-long video works documenting three of his "action sculptures." In Stiefel mit Rakete (1995) he attaches a rocket to a boot pinned to a tree. The rocket ignites, the boot pinwheels, the flare sputters and then quickly dies. The radio-controlled toy helicopter in Bert (1997) buzzes annoyingly, like a huge mosquito, around a figure attempting to sleep on a white-sheeted bed. In Signer's Chaplinesque, sweetly absurd Eskmorolle (1995), a solitary figure walks into a rural distance as an attached line plays out from a reel formed by a kayak supported like a tabletop on two thin metal A-frames. The figure recedes, the kayak spins, until the line reaches its limit.

With the exception of Signer's, the cinematic productions included in this International feature alienated or wounded people moving through landscapes. The presentations seem uncannily familiar, beyond their function as metaphor for the viewing experience. They share a resemblance born of the length and production values of MTV videos and novella-length modeling shoots. As filmed experiences, they seem essentially independent of language, and rely on the sensual quality of sound rather than on meaningful articulation. In some cases they could just as easily be in black and white for all the viewer may recall, and they are almost without exception inflected with memorable, sometimes exaggerated effects. Finally, they seem handsomely realized and are often moving.

There are other practitioners at work in this ample gathering, and much of the remaining International checklist may also seem familiar to the attentive gallery visitor or magazine reader. In Leben, leben/Life, living (1997-98), Hanne Darboven covers the exterior and interior walls of a gallery with 2,782 drawings, a mathematically annotated and systematic account of various days of the 20th century, interspersed with several bars of black-and-white photographs depicting dollhouse rooms, surrounding two actual dollhouses from Darboven's personal collection, one in the style of the previous century, one in the style of the 1950s. Gabriel Orozco's quatrefoil-shaped Ping Pond Table (1998) is hugely popular with the museum audience, as visitors whack table tennis-balls across a small pond stocked with water hyacinths.

Hot John Currin is represented by eight of his newest signature paintings of mannerist, Northern Renaissance nudes. Thomas Demand presents large chromogenic photographs portraying paper reconstructions of sites depicted in popular media. In Jeff Wall's vast transparency, Morning Cleaning, Mies van der Rohe Foundation, Barcelona (1999), water streams down a glass wall in the famous pavilion. His back turned, a custodian bends over his equipment, oblivious to a nude sculpture, in the patio beyond the wall, seemingly showering in the rinse water to her heart's content.

Ann Hamilton installed welle (1998), an immense bone-white weeping wall, its surface active with drops of water sprung from an unseen network of tubing and ducts. With a bench nearby, the work offers a welcome place of rest and contemplation for an audience in need of pause. Toward the end of another sequence of galleries, the visitor moves through the familiar waterfall-like beaded curtain of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's Untitled (Water), 1995, into a room ornamented with a silver-painted frieze bearing his untitled 1989/1999 memory text. Approaching the year of the artist's death, 1996, and then continuing, it reads, in part: "Mother, 1986; Interferon, 1989; A View to Remember, 1995; On the Edge, 1997." Gonzalez-Torres allowed additions and deletions to such "portrait" works by their owners; this one was altered with the agreement of the curator and the estate.

Ernesto Neto's Nude Plasmic (1999), a huge, biomorphic womb of translucent nylon fabric, intended to be accessible to the public, was closed for the weekend. Takashi Murakami's fiberglass cyborg mannequins, S.M.[Pko.sup.2] (Parts I and II, both 1999) hover, upbeat, the computer marriage of vintage Bickerton hardware and R-rated Spice Girls attitude. Chris Ofili's paintings had escaped attack as of the time of this writing. Sarah Sze has covered a gallery, floor and ceiling and everywhere in between, with an orchestrated scatter and assembly of domestic rubbish, Second Means of Egress (1998). Two of Edward Ruscha's paintings of snow-capped mountains inscribed with the names of very specific streets and places, Artesia (1998) and Hope, Olive, Spring (1999), appear to distinguish the physical and cultural differences that constitute Los Angeles today from the awesome landscape the city only thinks it occupies.

And so it goes, each entry like a Signer kayak, connected to a curatorial thread which is expressed in a free brochure. The visitor is invited to understand that the International experience centers on an examination of the real--on what constitutes reality in this day and age when the virtual and the physical, the local and the global, and the real and the fictive coexist. Among the approaches to the real in the exhibition are works that immerse us in a more explicitly physical realm than is offered by visual engagement alone. Art that uses time, sound, smell, and movement and that welcomes interaction as primary media is evidence of a commitment to the real.

The brochure goes on to characterize this vast project as an investigation of "a new internationalism in works of art that graft local and global visual vocabularies." From this generous perspective, every work gets to tell its story, and for the Carnegie International 1999/2000, it was a pretty good year.

Carnegie International 1999/2000, curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, is on view at the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh [Nov. 6, 1999-Mar. 26, 2000]. It is accompanied by a two-volume catalogue.

Author: An independent curator and critic based in New York City, Edward Leffingwell is also a corresponding editor for Art in America.

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