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

Last summer's Venice Biennale was famously hot and humid. Simply visiting the show felt like a test of one's endurance. But when you entered Assael's untitled installation in "The Zone" (Massimiliano Gioni's show of young Italian artists), you felt thrilled by how utterly unbearable an environment could be. The artist built a thirteen-by-thirteen-foot room out of massive sheets of iron. The only openings were the entrance and exit. Assael then furnished the room sparely, with a bed, a cabinet, a table; if such items normally evoke a domestic setting, here they were found objects made of iron (the kinds of things you'd more likely find in a factory). Ten electrical transformers sat on the table under a glass box, each boosting its 220 volts up to 9,000 volts and sending power surging through a maze of wires to glass bulbs underneath the furniture, making them spark. Gale-force fans blew the stultifying air around in the space--under the bed, below the table, and into the closet--which somehow had the effect of making the room even hotter. Interestingly, on a cool day at the end of the show, the fans created a cold wind that made the place feel icy.

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Assael's installations heighten our senses while suggesting risk and resistance as interesting mental and physical loci to explore. Although her works are also truly dangerous at times, she does not really focus on danger. Rather, she explores what risk taking means, especially as it opens up insights into the psychological and philosophical area where agency--intentionality and the responsibility and awareness of acting (or of choosing)--meets other mental realities, such as memories and dreams, that interfere with our intentions. This sort of interference occurs, for example, when a physical stimulus causes a psychological reaction such as fear, which then modifies our bodily experience, often resulting in a loss of self-control. Assael's world is certainly a visual one, but it is first of all tactile, atmospheric, and acoustic. In Naidalur, 2000, an early work that was still metaphoric, she placed transparent glass semispheres over holes in an outdoor wall to encapsulate air--in part alluding to a shelter called Naidalur in a deserted area of Iceland she had just visited. In The Theory of Homogeneous Turbulence, 2002, metaphor came true in a nighttime winter installation in the woods at the Villa di Medici in Rome (at Chiara Parisi's invitation): Assael hid three powerful fans behind bushes; a white light rotated and flashed high in the trees while its electrical frequency was miked and amplified. With this oblique reference to Heidegger's Holzwege (Off the Beaten Path; 1950) and perhaps even to Shakespeare's King Lear, Assael wanted her audience to experience being lost in the elements, nearly out of control, in a storm.

IN A SENSE THIS IS A SECOND TAKE. ELEVEN YEARS ago, Scott Grodesky was the subject of an Openings column in these pages by the artist Peter Halley. Halley was interested in a group of younger painters working in the interstices between popular image sources, Conceptual strategies, and a detached relationship to the physicality of painting. He saw the twenty-four-year-old Grodesky's work as evidence of the beleaguered medium's viability in a climate skeptical of painting's relevance. But times have changed (millennia have changed), and from our early-twenty-first-century viewpoint it seems a bit defensive even to address that endgame model of painting's plight. The whole issue feels like a phantom limb of modernism, still consuming our attention but functionally departed. Aspects of what interested Halley in Grodesky's approach remain, but there has been an enormous evolution in his work--and in our reasons for engaging it.