First take first take first

ArtForum, Jan, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

Olde Wolbers's characters become victims of their excessive imaginations and end up unable to distinguish their dreams from reality. Funny and fresh, these stories of individual calamity are contemporary parables that warn of the dangers of confusing the virtual with the real--and of the hubris of creative enterprise in an ever more technologically determined world.

Critic and curator KATE BUSH has been senior programmer at the Photographers' Gallery, London, since 1998, where she has mounted shows of the work of Amy Adler, Corinne Day, Erwin Wurm, and Malerie Marder, among others. In 2001. she curated for Madrid's water tower-cumartist's space, Canal do Isabel II, "The Fantastic Recurrence of Certain Situations," a group exhibition that introduced London-based artists Shizuka Yokomizo, Sophy Rickett, Dryden Goodwin, and Julie Henry. Bush Is currently working on a large survey of recent developments in British photography and video. Her writing on artists such as Darren Almond, Juergen Teller, Joseph Grigely, and Jaki Irving has appeared in Frieze, European Photography, The Guardian, Parkett, Artforum, and other publications.

Bob Nickas on KELLY WALKER

MOST OF A SWIMMING POOL AND PART OF A HOUSE dangle off a cliff, while the owner, Buster Keaton-like, stares stonily into the wreckage wondering where all the water went. Another perfect day in paradise (somewhere in '70s California) interrupted by a 6.5 jolt on the scale, aftershocks courtesy of Kelley Walker. At the bottom of the picture/cliff, computer-generated forms, all sunny yellow-gold, appear to have tumbled into a pile as so much psychedelic rubble. Up in the trees, a slogan has been laid in: FIGHT CAPITALISM, set over a slightly larger REAPPROPRIATE. Walker amplifies the absurdity by way of the title, probably spoken by the homeowner himself: Then we joked about how we had always wanted a sunken living room, 2001. As if that weren't enough, it turns out that the picture we're looking at isn't exactly the artwork.

Walker refers to this object simply as a poster and directs our attention to the CD on which the image is stored. In a text accompanying the disc, we're told: "The disc and the image it contains can be reproduced and disseminated as often as the holder desires. Whoever receives a copy of the disc or image can likewise reproduce/disseminate either as desired and so on. Furthermore, anyone with a disc or reproduction can manipulate the image and reproduce/disseminate it in its altered state. All forms of reproduction/deviation derived from the image on the disc signed Kelley Walker perpetuate a continuum correlating to the artwork..."

Talk about revising copyright laws--not to mention the auteur theory. Those must be down at the bottom of the cliff with all that pretty rubble. Despite the fact that Walker's interventions occur in what is for some rather old-fashioned media--collage, handmade sculpture, cameraless photography (he makes no attempt to conceal this image's once seamless life in a book)--his work couldn't be more here and now. The sense of fair use, portability, and mutation he embraces is wholly within the current of artists who, thanks to home-computer editing systems, look on a car commercial or the latest Star Wars extravaganza as raw material. Walker's art partakes of both conceptual and populist strategies, sober and comic reflection, and is often propelled by his belief in the complexity of something as everyday as a walk in the street--well aware of what Jeff Wall refers to-as "the anonymous poetry of the world."