Fall 2004 preview: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between September and December

ArtForum, Sept, 2004

Robert Smithson

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

September 12-December 13

Curated by Eugenie Tsai with Connie Butler

One of postwar art's canniest theoretical provocateurs, Robert Smithson was famously ambivalent about conventional museums. His writings and public statements are replete with sardonic jeremiads likening museums to "asylums," "jails," and cultural "tombs" that force art into "esthetic convalescence" and "stupendous inertia." Yet at the same time, few artists have thought as strategically as Smithson about the relationship between extra-institutional gestures and the gallery environment--about how best to manipulate established modes of display to excite the network of references he conjured among the various artifacts, activities, and locations involved in his work.

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In the thirty-odd years since his death, Smithson has become an indispensable component of the contemporary canon. And despite a practice that interrogates the very idea of the museum, his diverse work--a complex gallery-based practice, seminal site-specific environmental projects, and eclectic and erudite writings--demands the kind of large-scale scholarly appraisal that only major institutions are equipped to present fully. This fall sees the arrival of such an exhibition as independent curator Eugenie Tsai debuts her eagerly awaited "Robert Smithson," the first American retrospective of the artist in a quarter century and the most comprehensive ever, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Tsai, a former senior curator at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art who organized the highly regarded exhibition "Robert Smithson Unearthed" at Columbia University in 1991, says that Smithson's "aesthetic of the 'entropic landscape,'" with its "allusions to a prehistoric past and science-fiction future," remains as relevant today as ever. And she notes that the artist's complicated relationship with the institutional context is integral to this continuing appeal. "It may not necessarily be in the form of Earthworks per se, but rather in the idea of working beyond the walls of the museum or the gallery, of investing your art in social systems," she says of his ongoing influence, "and questioning the whole power structure of the art world and its institutions."

"Robert Smithson" will feature some 180 objects--little-known paintings, drawings, and collages from the late '50s and early '60s among them, as well as extensive documentation of major Earthworks in the American West and elsewhere--and a substantial catalogue with essays by scholars including Thomas Crow, Suzaan Boettger, Ann Reynolds, Richard Sieburth, and MOCA curator Connie Butler. More than just "a heap of language," Tsai's catalogue, and the ambitious show it accompanies, promises a new perspective on this most eloquent, and contentious, of artists--an institutional appraisal of an often aggressively anti-institutional figure that hopefully won't be afraid to let a bit of its subject's high-desert spirit invade the clean white corners of the museum.--Jeffrey Kastner

Travels to the Dallas Museum of Art, Jan. 14-Apr. 3, 2005; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, June 23-Oct. 16, 2005.

NEW YORK

East Village USA

New Museum of Contemporary Art

December 2-March 19, 2005

Curated by Dan Cameron

The East Village scene of the early '80s--a roiling stew pot of artistic endeavors and a cesspool of degradation, intentional or otherwise--still exerts a powerful hold on the imagination of those who lived through its glories and excesses and those born circa 1985, the year Carlo McCormick declared the whole shebang dead in the East Village Eye. Opening at the New Museum's temporary Chelsea location, this survey outlines counterculture antecedents and attempts to encompass the full spectrum of Alphabet City with more than eighty artists, from avatars of graffiti art and punk expressionism to pencilsharpening practitioners of the neogeo and "Pictures" typology. Will Fun Gallery proprietor and underground-film star Patti Astor attend the opening? I sure hope so.--David Rimanelli

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Isamu Noguchi

Whitney Museum of American Art

October 28--January 16, 2005

Curated by Valerie Fletcher

Focusing on Isamu Noguchi's series of wood and stone totems that evoke the nearly sentient quality particular to his work, this retrospective covering mainly the early '30s to the early '60s celebrates the centenary of the Japanese artist's birth. Also featured are sixty-five sculptures and twenty drawings, all highlighting Noguchi's mix of European modernism with Japanese tradition and his extraordinary sense of material and form. Organized jointly by the Whitney and the Hirshhorn and curated by the latter's Valerie Fletcher, the show is accompanied by a catalogue that features essays by Fletcher, Bonnie Rychlak, and Dana Miller. Travels to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Feb. 10, 2005-May 8, 2005.--Dike Blair