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

October 17-January 31, 2005

Curated by Alanna Heiss, Daniel Marzona, and Amy Smith-Stewart

While inundated with photography by students of the Bechers, we are less familiar with those, like Katharina Sieverding, who studied with Joseph Beuys. Sieverding, born in Prague in 1944, worked in Dusseldorf from 1967 until 1972. Known chiefly for large-scale photography that pushes its subjectivist dimensions, she often focuses on her own body, submitting her visage to various forms of photographic dissolution. This survey of roughly a dozen works--multimedia installations, photographic series, and film and slide projections--is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by, among others, Brian O'Doherty and Norman Bryson and provides American audiences with their first museum show of Sieverding's work. Travels to Kunst-Werke Berlin, dates TBA.--T.J. Demos

Design [not equal to] Art

Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

September 10-February 20, 2005

Curated by Barbara Bloemink and Joseph Cunningham

It has become almost rote to pronounce a blurring of the line between art and design. Artists who have dabbled in both disciplines have, however, felt the need to delineate boundaries. "The intent of art is different from that of [design], which must be functional," Donald Judd said. "A work of art exists as itself, a chair exists as a chair itself." The washroom sink that Judd designed for his home is on view here among sixty-nine functional objects by eighteen other luminaries of minimalist aesthetics, from John Chamberlain's table made of car parts to Rachel Whiteread's daybed formed from the casts of negative space around a bed. It's form following function, albeit not without a detour or two.--Tom Vanderbilt

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

BOSTON

Lucy McKenzie

Institute of Contemporary Art

September 22-January 2, 2005

Curated by Nicholas Baume

Many of Lucy McKenzie's activities--like Flourish Nights, informal events organized at her collective studio in Glasgow--center on collaborative practices. But the Scottish artist also teams up to work on her own installations, curatorial probings, and site-specific projects (in locations as diverse as the Sunday Herald Magazine or the shipyard in Gdansk). Referencing such sources as the 1980 Moscow Olympics, handmade East German Depeche Mode concert flyers, and fascist and socialist mural paintings, McKenzie's paintings, drawings, and installations always engage visual manifestations of political culture, intertwining the personal and the social. This show, McKenzie's first in a US museum, consists of new works specifically produced for the ICA.--Christian Rattemeyer

Cerith Wyn Evans

Museum of Fine Arts

October 6-January 30, 2005

Curated by William Stover

"I'm interested in evoking polyphony, superimposition, layers, levels, the occluded and the visibility of the mask," remarks Cerith Wyn Evans on his commitment to an uncommonly erudite artistic practice. A former assistant to director Derek Jarman, Wyn Evans completed several experimental films before returning to sculpture in the '90s. Employing fireworks, mirrors, and neon--and notably commissioning a remake of Brion Gysin's "Dreamachine"--he investigates the phenomenology of language and perception with a romantic touch. Wyn Evans has achieved recognition in Europe and Japan but is rarely seen in the US. This first American museum survey features about fifteen objects and installations and a new project to be shown concurrently at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.--Michael Wilson