Take First - discussing up and coming artists in 2001

ArtForum, Jan, 2001

A feature on new artists? It's the oldest trick in the art-magazine book: Ring in the new with a preview of "fresh faces" and "raw talent" to watch in the year to come. If the conceit seems, well, a bit '90s, we nonetheless gave in to time-honored tradition-and our own curiosity-and asked fourteen critics and curators who always seem to know what's next to tell us whom they're looking to for new ideas and new art in 2001.

Daniel Birnbaum ANNEE OLOFSSON

Bob Nickas AMY O'NEILL

Clarissa Dalrymple RICHARD WRIGHT

Dennis Cooper JOHN WILLIAMS

Douglas Fogle HALUK AKAKCE

Katy Siegel ANDREA BOWERS

Ralph Rugoff SHIRLEY TSE

David Frankel DELIA BROWN

Susan Kandel LOS SUPER ELEGANTES

Matthew Higgs OLIVER PAYNE AND NICK RELPH

Vince Aletti HIROSHI SUNAIRI

David Rimanelli DARIA MARTIN

Hans-Ulrich Obrist ANRI SALA

Herbert Muschamp WINKA DUBBELDAM

Daniel Birnbaum on ANNEE OLOFSSON

THE FIRST PICTURE BY ANNEE OLOFSSON THAT REALLY made an impression on me, The Mourners--My Last Family Photo, 1996, depicts the Swedish artist surrounded by her family. The image conveys sorrow and loneliness: six elderly people dressed in black, a young woman in the center all in white. It took a while before I realized she was wearing a polar bear costume, holding the animal's head in her lap. Silly as it sounds, the image radiates dignity. The young woman is an outsider in many ways, a creature who no longer belongs to the group and must be sacrificed--or is it she who wants to distance herself from the crowd?

After almost a decade of exhibiting in Europe, Olofsson now seems to be getting the attention she deserves. In her most recent series of photographs, "God Bless the Absentees," 2000--which debuted at Schaper Sundberg Galleri in Stockholm and is currently on view in the artist's solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York--the sitters seem to meld into their immediate surroundings. In one photo, a bath mat's shag pile seems to have crept up and covered a young woman's pajamas; in another picture, a woman wearing a horse-patterned outfit is almost indistinguishable from the horse-patterned bedclothes on which she lies. These are witty images, and they return to a recurrent theme in the artist's work: the strangeness of that which is very close. Olofsson has worked intensely with her own family ties. In a recent video, for example, the artist's mother watches over her sleeping daughter while reading aloud the most private of documents: love letters meant for the daughter's eyes only. In a series of photograp hs from 1997, Olofsson appears in strangely intimate, even incestuous poses with her father, creating an ambiguous feeling of closeness and icy distance at once. Wherever there is natural belonging together, there is also an implied rift, an underlying sense of isolation. Most often, Olofsson's works are about herself and about solitude. Hers is a vulnerable ego, alone, haunted by demons.

In the series "Demons," 1999, a bodyguard follows a young blond woman--the artist herself--wherever she goes. Shot in Gdansk, these photographs capture the blonde in various semilegible situations, outdoors in the dark of night or in a cheap hotel room. Like a menacing shadow, the man is omnipresent--but is he her guardian or her tormentor, a shield against the demons or a projection of the woman's agitated mind?

There is a core of strange silence in Annee Olofsson's work. The situations presented in her images may be comprehensible on a superficial level: Power relations, family connections, bonds of affection, and intense emotion present themselves in a straightforward way. But something else makes itself felt only after extended viewing, an inexplicable echo that, worrisomely, eludes translation into words. The woman haunted by demons is protected by a bodyguard, so nothing will happen to her. Why, then, do we have the feeling that it's already too late?

Bob Nickas on AMY O'NEILL

IF THE PROM SCENE FROM CARRIE HAD BEEN STAGED by jack Smith as an episode of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, it might have looked something like Amy O'Neill's Post-Prom, an installation for a group show in Dijon in 1999. Instead of blood pouring down, there was a confetti rain machine. A rainbow of balloons hung limply overhead, and beer bottles rolled underfoot. The decorations had a homemade, happy-sad authenticity. Every so often during the opening, an unseen force shook the refreshment table. When people dropped a vote for prom king and queen into the ballot box, a hand would reach up (like Thing from The Addams Family) to shake theirs. When the hand poured drinks, glasses would inevitably overflow. At the end of the evening, O'Neill innocently emerged from beneath the table, perhaps unaware that she was still wearing a bat mask. The piece was a creepy tour de force and might have established the artist as our own Flaming Creature. But Post-Prom, like so much of O'Neill's best work, was realized in Europe and seen b y few of her fellow Americans.

Glacier and Murdered Snowball (both 1997) were made, appropriately, for shows in Switzerland, where O'Neill is currently living. In Glacier, she brought together Caspar David Friedrich's icebergs, Superman's Fortress of Solitude, and Mark Twain's travelogue A Tramp Abroad. As compacted as snow in a glacier, O'Neill's sources were given sculptural form--around a working hot tub--and overlapped in unexpected ways: the soaring, majestic ice caves from the Superman movie as sublime as any painted scene; its characters and story as fictive as Twain's "firsthand" account of a trip made mostly in his imagination. The headier side of her pop-comic sensibility is nowhere more apparent than in Murdered Snowball, a Styrofoam-and-resin replica continuously "melting" to the slow flicker of strobe lights beneath the floorboards on which it rests: a little movie reduced to a kinetic freeze-frame.