First take first take first

ArtForum, Jan, 2002 by Daniel Birnbaum

The artist's reconstruction doesn't end with this reflection on the representation of techno-social power by a certain iconography of cuteness. Looking closely at the balloon's basket, one finds the features of the world's first commercial communications satellite, called "Early Bird"-another telling euphemism.

Davar is interested in the narratives of progress and their attendant packaging. She travels the paths of forgotten or failed projects once set up to invent the future while remaining wary of the twined fascinations of nostalgia and futurism. In her own idiosyncratic way, she is embracing the "skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life," as Donna Haraway once put it--with the slight difference that Davar's version of the "interrelation" between technology and the body balks at promising any liberatory effects. Her work, which ranges from elaborate embroidery "paintings" of 3-D wire-frame computer drawings to sci-fi- and fantasy-inspired illustrations of impossible creatures stuck in repetitive, robotic actions, promises other stuff-not least the criticism of an aesthetics of promise and seduction.

TOM HOLERT, who elsewhere in this issue interviews curator Robert Storr on the occasion of MOMA'S Gerhard Richter retrospective, is a Cologne-based writer and former editor of the pop-culture magazine Spex and the journal Texte zur Kunst. He coedited Mainstream der Minderheiten: Pop in der Kontrollgesellschaft (Mainstream of minorities: Pop in the control society, 1996) with Mark Terkessidis, with whom he cofounded the Institute for Studies in Visual Culture. Currently he is collaborating on another title with Terkessidis on "war as mass culture," scheduled for publication in fall 2002 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne.

Katy Siegel on JAMES SHEEHAN

JAMES SHEEHAN MAKES TEENY TINY PAINTINGS, some less than one inch square. While his novel skill wows, the artist, of course, would prefer not to be associated with the distinguished grain-of-rice school of image-making. Sheehan paints small for some of the same reasons others paint big--to put the viewer into another space. If, say, Barnett Newman wants to surround you physically, Sheehan wants to pull you close, drawing you visually and imaginatively into a universe both bounded and replete. Two paintings from 1999, [sic] and STET, take us into such a closed world: They show the artist and his computer-programmer buddy smoking pot in the friend's Silicon Valley garage workshop--for Sheehan, the creative soul of the now soulless computer boom.

Other paintings explore how distance relates to scale. Manifest Disappointment, 2000, the size of a postage stamp, zooms in on the artist's face, fore-grounded against a remote landscape. Jim, 2000, about six by seven inches, depicts the same scene, but the image blurs, as if Sheehan had blown up the earlier painting. Brushstrokes clump and swirl, the paint rising off the surface as if the image were losing resolution and revealing its materiality. The abstract Prongs Outside Prongs, 2000, furthers the idea that, like digital imagery or halftone prints, painting has an atomic structure: Its craggy peaks of multicolored paint resemble a fantastic magnified detail of a monochrome painting.