"Beau Monde: Toward A Redeemed Cosmopollitanism" - art critic Dave Hickey curator of exhibit; various artists

ArtForum, Oct, 2001 by Michael Duncan

SITE SANTA FE

For those desperate to jump from Venice Biennale curator Harald Szeemann's "Plateau of Humankind," SITE Santa Fe provides the perfect place to land. Devoid of slo-mo videos and feel-good/feel-bad Cibachromes, "Beau Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism," curated by Las Vegas-based critic Dave Hickey, turns the tired notion of an international biennial on its ear and spins it, discovering in its trajectory all sorts of patterns and ideas. Sophisticated and subtly elegant, the show represents the antithesis of the yahoo perversity that Hickey's detractors mistakenly attribute to him.

Shifting the rhetorical emphasis of a biennial from the "international" to the "cosmopolitan" is Hickey's brilliant stroke, allowing him to trump art's "One World/One A-List" hand with a show full of wild cards. Globalism here is manifested by artists who fuse several cultural and formal styles in their work. Gajin Fujita's painting and facade mural, for example, mix the stylization of Japanese Edo woodcuts with LA Latino graffiti graphics. Jesus Rafael Soto's large wire relief, whose vibrating, bifurcated circles resemble hungry Pac Men, blends austere constructivism with Op effects and Venezuelan oomph.

The impurity nurtured by this collection of maverick artists demonstrates the aggregative flux of contemporary culture without PC sermonizing or it's-a-small-world sociology. Melding the local with the global, the formal with the sensual, the old with the new, these artists make work that inhabits rather than announces identity politics. Mixing references to Egyptian, Aztec, Native American, French, Caribbean, mummer, showgirl, and dragqueen cultures, the looming eight-foot Mardi Gras parade costumes of Darryl Montana illustrate how New Orleans's Creole gang rivalries have been sublimated into a fabulous one-upmanship of furious ostrich plumes, megacount sequins, and marabou madness.

Heartening too is Hickey's decision to add a cross-generational influx to the sanctioned biennial ethnic and gender mix. In fact, oldsters steal the show, with solid and decidedly hip works by Kenneth Anger, Bridget Riley, Ken Price, Ed Ruscha, Frederick Hammersley, and Ellsworth Kelly. Although Hickey includes his share of emerging artists, "Beau Monde" demonstrates that art-historical digging is a lot more exciting than trolling the art schools. Why net guppies when you can go deep sea fishing and catch Jo Baer's sharp '70s reliefs? Baer's work fits effortlessly into the current revival of Op and Color Field painting. In muted desert stripes, her low-riding horizontal painting H. Arcuata, 1971, presents a morphed vector that hugs the work's top edge before slashing across the right corner of a wide-open expanse.

Hickey manages to avoid the programmatic and rather random-feeling historiography of Catherine David's Documenta X and Jean Clair's 1995 Venice Biennale by including work by older artists that appears totally of the moment. Looking completely fresh, James Lee Byars's Eros, 1992 (the sole inclusion by a deceased artist), transforms a Minimalist trope into a kind of sensual essence. Neatly placed on top of each other, two rectangular hunks of glistening Thassos marble suggest a streamlined couple flagrante delicto. Horizontality never felt so right. And in Love Me, Love My Dog, 1972, Frederick Hammersley tweaks austere hard-edge painting in a way that seems very twenty-first century, slyly opposing an off-white square with one in a hue that should be dubbed "Old Yeller." Both Hammersley's works and Riley's new hip-toned mind-teaser of a pattern painting seem perfect strokes of breezy classicism, ideal for today's Gucci/Neutra mind-set.

The eclecticism of the modestly sized show is orchestrated in an extraordinarily tight design scheme organized around formal contrasts of geometric hard-edge and organic blob. This yin-yang dominates the exhibition's central gallery, with Pia Fries's accumulation of luscious frosting-like smears, thick clawmarks, and caked-on trails of paint successfully holding its own next to Riley's crisply executed array of pulsing leaf shapes. The building's exterior also presents the dialectic: Fujita's swirling graffiti unfolds on a side wall, and the front facade glimmers with Jim Isermann's pristine, Factory-silver relief of diamantepatterned, vacu-formed plastic.

To accommodate this stripped-down aesthetic push-pull, Hickey, assisted by German architecture firm Graft Design, has transformed the former beer warehouse into a House of Style. Graft Design is credited with the fake sunflowers lining the ramp outside that leads visitors to a vision of the Emerald City of Oz-an astonishing open vista of the galleries within, appearing vast thanks to mirrored panels in the furthest space. In the formal entry area, accompanied by quietly pulsing electronic music, Jennifer Steinkamp & Jimmy Johnson's Op-baroque video is projected onto a curved ceiling. Below its throbbing patterns, the keyed-up, serape-striped rug of Alexis Smith's adjoining installation spreads out on a slightly raised platform that intimates a kind of petit salon--complete with sconce and painted mural. Smith's wall text reads "Heaven for weather. Hell for company," an assessment of the ideal afterlife for which the artist has rolled out the red carpet, leading viewers into her mural's fiery desert sunset. Co mpelling and awesome, Smith's heady installation is a rightly ambiguous welcome to the apocalyptic west.