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Let's get metaphysical: for the latest Carnegie International, curator Laura Hoptman has sought a philosophical or spiritual dimension in the works selected
Art in America, March, 2005 by Gregory Volk
British artist Jeremy Deller's shopping bags and T-shirts imprinted with bible passages, which are sold in the museum's store, want to be provocative, with their conflation of consumerism and spirituality, but instead they merit a "who cares" shrug. Far better, though hardly earth-shattering, is Deller's Breaking News (Dedicated to Peter Watkins), an installation--really more like an intervention-commissioned for the exhibition. Deller placed tiny video monitors playing reenacted battles within three miniature historical dioramas, part of the museum's permanent collection. In an exquisitely made 18th-century French room, for instance, the monitor displays fake scenes from the French and Indian War. While these works have a spectacular, how'd-he-do-it quality, their operative ideas--mixing past and present, historical verities and contemporary simulacra--seem like Postmodernism 101, ultimately more clever than profound.
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That is a complaint I have with several other, younger participants in the show. The Japanese artist Chiho Aoshima used an exacting process to transform a large wall in a main corridor into a digital-era mural that includes a giant churning wave, a young girl's open-mouthed face that seems at once aghast and vaguely erotic, toppling skyscrapers, fiery colors and smoke. Aoshima designed the images on a computer' and had the high-resolution data made into what is in effect a gigantic photograph, which was then cut into lengths and applied like wallpaper. It is a mix of pop and youth culture, comics and anime, with a post-feminist apocalyptic twist. But here the combination looks decorative and fashionable, like the decor in a cool Tokyo club.
Irish artist Eva Rothschild's freestanding, abstract sculptures made out of lacquered wood, vinyl or, in one work, incense sticks protruding from the wall; Los Angeles painter Mark Grotjahn's near-monochromatic abstractions featuring rudimentary, radiating geometric forms and two vanishing points; and Glasgow sculptor Jim Lambie's installation that incorporates chair backs, pocketbooks, a mattress and bright paint all have their moments. While revisiting and updating a vaulting Modernist abstract vocabulary, however, they all operate in rather safe niches. More convincing, and more immediately idiosyncratic, are British photographer Saul Fletcher's small self-portraits featuring unusual costumes and quirky poses, and German Tomma Abts's small acrylic-and-oil abstract paintings in muted colors, featuring skewed lines, triangles and parallelograms. At once fractious and oddly meditative, Abts's meticulously composed works have Constructivist roots but lean toward a digital present and future.
On the other hand, one of Hoptman's more unorthodox moves was to include three mini-retrospectives of older artists, and her choices add a great deal to the show. One features works by the American Robert Crumb, many of which are based on the turbulent East Village subculture of the late 1960s and '70s. Crumb's sexually explicit, politically charged and morally ambiguous drawings with text, far from remaining underground comics, now seem like national treasures, and chronicle an America riven by faith and lust, utopian yearnings and debilitating social conflicts.
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