Weird Science

Get hip to the wonders of science, Richard Dawkins's recent book Unweaving the Rainbow urges the art community. A range of upcoming shows seem to have answered the challenge, but they may not be quite the uplifting celebration of quantum graininess the physicist had in mind. At Magasin Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Mike Kelley will propose a dubious monument to the work of primate behavior specialist Harry Harlow in the form of a clinical, human-scale steel playroom that monkeys with the scientist's research methods as well as Isamu Noguchi's set designs for Martha Graham (Oct.

17, 1999-Jan. 16, 2000). Udo Wid, a "one-man institution" whose work combines neurophysiological research and free artistic experimentation, will be represented at the Secession in Vienna between October 8 and November 18. Flora Neuwirth, the up-and-coming inventor of "fnsystems" (a design concept that she applies rigorously to everything from bars to bras), will be showing brand-new work at the Salzburger Kunstverein (Sept. 16-Oct. 17). At the Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland (location: see below), from September 12 to November 7, Pavel Pepperstein will take a break from the poststructuralist-inspired practice of "Medical Hermeneutics" that he helped pioneer in Moscow in the later '80s. "Unbribable Inspector-Functionaries in the Epoch of Fading Flags" classified culture as a pathology and graded its outbreaks according to a five-point diagnostic; in Zug, Pepperstein will work with his father, artist Victor Pivovarov, on a dissection of the father-son relationship. And at the Witte de With in Rotterdam, the group show "Stimuli" (Nov. 20, 1999-Feb. 13, 2000), with artists ranging from Gerhard Richter and Barnett Newman to Dennis Adams and Francis Alys, will consider art's ambiguous relation to the concept of objectivity and test out the ways in which hallucination might offer a model for artistic production and consumption.

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