First take first take first

ArtForum, Jan, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

What's new in the new year? For the second season running we called on a dozen critics and curators we find dependably prescient when it comes to identifying new ideas and new art and asked them to introduce the work of a young artist they feel shows special promise for the year ahead.

Daniel Birnbaum on ANNIKA LARSSON

SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR, BUT WHEN IT'S guillotined in a slick video by a young Swedish artist who used to be one of Vanessa Beecroft's videographers, it's no longer simply a plug of tobacco nor a mere symbol of masculinity. It has already become a kind of metacliche. Annika Larsson, who is based in Stockholm and Berlin, will have her first major solo show outside of Scandinavia, at London's Institute for Contemporary Art, in February. What's fascinating about her videos isn't so much their exploration of male stereotypes, which may be what first strikes the eye: men in dark suits and ties, men with impeccable haircuts and cigars, men with black leather gloves and, perhaps, a huge dog on a leash; serious-looking men, like stockbrokers playing a children's game with utter absorption, as if it were a matter of life and death. All of that may be interesting as an investigation of the social construction of masculinity, but what's really fascinating is something else altogether--something to do with the repetitiveness and pulse of her video loops, usually highlighted by a monotonous sound track. What I experience is a strange sense of time coming to a halt.

This peculiar temporal effect must be the result, at least in part, of the strict set of rules according to which the slight alterations and modifications of the same basic elements take place. In Perfect Game, 1999, nothing much happens apart from the young men's concentrated staring at a game of pick-up sticks. In Dog, 2001, an old man, a young man, and man's best friend are implicated in some kind of ritualistic power play (involving metal and leather) that seems almost a parody of fascist aesthetics. The combinations of significant positions and gestures are limited and worked through systematically. My favorite video, though, 40-15, 1999, is even sparer, showing nothing but two men playing tennis, or rather warming up, in front of a mirror in a sparsely furnished apartment. Years ago I remember being mesmerized by the music video for Air's "Kelly Watch the Stars": It simply recorded a Ping-Pong match and the audience who so solemnly followed the ball's movement back and forth. The effect of 40-15 is eve n more unnerving. One gets lulled into a soporific state in which time is clearly flowing but also standing still. Repetition can be torture, as in some of Bruce Nauman's work. It can also produce a feeling of lightness and joy. Through iteration Annika Larsson produces a kind of psychological slow motion (maybe it has something to do with hypnotic techniques), and her work becomes less about process and more about a state of mind. It's been called duree. Let's call it absolute flow.

Director of the Stadelschule art academy In Frankfurt, DANIEL BIRNBAUM also heads the institution's renowned Portikus gallery, where, in his first year as director, he has mounted shows of the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jason Rhoades, Elmgreen + Dragset, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Archigram's Peter Cook, and Rivane Neuenschwander. The author of The Hospitality of Presence: Problems of Otherness in Husserl's Phenomenology (Almqvist & Wiksell, 1998), Birnbaum Is a contributing editor of Art forum and has written for these pages articles on a wide range of artists, including Gregor Schneider, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mark Dion, Thomas Ruff, Bruce Nauman, Darren Almond, Olafur Eilasson, Jason Rhoades, and Toblas Rehberger.

Dennis Cooper on AMY SARKISIAN

SOMETIMES ART CROSSES WIRES WITH THE WRONG politician--I'm sure I needn't name names--and winds up scandalizing the public. But art that offends the art world itself is so rare that it's hard to imagine what such a thing would entail. I don't mean the groans about this or that Yale grad's inflated reputation or the snickers that greet some YBA's cleverly executed "shocks." I'm talking about an artwork that could horrify or at least seriously flummox those in the know. As it happens, I may have witnessed just such an occurrence last February, when Los Angeles sculptor Amy Sarkisian all but wrecked an otherwise sedate group show at Roberts & Tilton gallery with a work so, well, wrong and weird that arguments continue to erupt around its memory.

The agent provocateur in question was Toy Skull Reconstructions: Dark Version, 2000-2001. Sarkisian had gathered together five fake human skulls and, using a technique employed by forensic artists to reconstruct the visages of long-dead John and Jane Does, molded the heads of five imaginary young men and women onto these noggin-shaped frameworks. The nauseatingly lifelike, psychologically challenged busts were given heavy metal/goth wigs and collars and placed on looming pedestals draped in Draculean black robes. Lined up firing squad style along one of the gallery's walls, they gazed with malevolent stupidity at passersby and at the gigantic, album cover-like portrait of themselves (White Queen, 2000) that hung on the opposite wall. The effect--a mixture of embarrassment, pity, disgust, laugh-out-loud amusement, and, finally, head-shaking respect--was so outrageous and unfamiliar that it turned even the world-weariest galleryhoppers into pre-apple Adams and Eves.