Who are the artists to watch during the year ahead? For the fourth year running, artforum asked a dozen critics, curators, and cognoscenti—including, for the first time, several artists—to introduce the work of an up-and-comer they feel shows special promise for the future - First Take

ArtForum, Jan, 2004 by Matthew Higgs, Martin Herbert, Jeffrey Kastner, Dennis Cooper, Debra Singer, David Rimanelli, Katy Siegel, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Carroll Dunham, Daniel Birnbaum, Wolfgang Tillmans, Hamza Walker

But Bar-Amotz's interest in coaxing unconventional performances from gallery visitors does not rest simply on some formal idea of turning artworks into audience-led matrices of possibility: He sees karaoke in particular, in its ideal state, as an extension of the Barthesian concept (see "Musica Practica" in Image-Music-Text [1977]) of "growling," an affirmation of human corporeality in an increasingly virtual and homogenized world. And he describes his use of homemade loudspeakers, inspired by hanging around the hyperspecific sound systems created by dub DJs, as a "stand against the approach of hi-fi's Brave New World, which is a universal sound system that can play all music and any sound but will ultimately average their qualities." Bar-Amotz and fellow artist Fabienne Audeoud spelled this out, wordlessly, in a performance in 2000 at W139 Gallery in Amsterdam. For fifteen minutes nonstop he groaned and she ululated, the sound emerging from white speakers that resembled cartoon star shapes, their woofers made out of black plastic buckets.

The acme of his production so far, however, shown in 2003 both in a one-off performance at Tate Britain and subsequently at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, is Dance Machine. Easier to operate than to describe, this is a sound-producing system activated by bodily movement; as they register in the eye of the camera, different motions and different colors trigger specific samples, ranging from a slammed car door to gunfire and from rich orchestral pads to sexual noises. At Tate Britain, dancer and choreographer Jasmin Vardimon demonstrated the machine, playing it like a multitimbre harp and recalling Clara Rockmore's extraordinarily melodic performances on the theremin, an electronic device better known for producing a tuneless whoop. That, however, was an expression of Vardimon's innate litheness. If you get in front of the Dance Machine (it's appearing in Bar-Amotz's solo show at Project, Dublin, in May) and fear you'll produce a musique concrete cacophony, don't sweat. The important thing is to remember the ontological necessity of making a spectacle of yourself and, as James Brown would say, get up, get into it, and get involved.

IN AN INTERVIEW IN THESE PAGES LAST SUMMER, French theorist Jean-Claude Lebensztejn invoked Duchamp's elusive, lyrical notion of the "infra-thin" as one way to think about the complex relationships between Photorealist paintings and their source materials. The evocative neologism expressed Duchamp's fascination with finely pitched distinctions between apparently identical objects or conditions; with the way closely related things tend to seep together across their shared edges yet somehow remain distinct and integral (among his poetic examples: the warmth that lingers on a seat after someone has risen from it). More than simple adjacency, infra-thin association proposes patterns of causality, of transition and exchange, between extremely similar but nevertheless discrete things or situations--like a Photorealist canvas and the photo on which it is based. In fact, the concept suggests, it's precisely in the subtlest slippages between seemingly analogous formal, psychological, or temporal states that the richest creative possibilities are generated.