Let's get metaphysical: for the latest Carnegie International, curator Laura Hoptman has sought a philosophical or spiritual dimension in the works selected

Art in America, March, 2005 by Gregory Volk

Dating to 1896, when Pittsburgh philanthropist Andrew Carnegie established a series of modern art shows at the Renaissance-style museum he built, the Carnegie International has long been one of the premier large-scale exhibitions of contemporary art in the United States. Installed in the elaborate, three-story Carnegie Museum of Art, the exhibition has gone through many incarnations over the years. It was a juried annual, a biennial and a triennial. It became a curated show, then briefly a two-artist show. For the past quarter century it has occurred every four years or so, with an in-house curator, buttressed by outside advisers, making the selections and formulating the themes. Winners of the exhibition's grand prize have included Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, Rebecca Horn, On Kawara, Richard Artschwager and Sigmar Polke, which is quite a roster, and hundreds of other significant figures have shown there through the years. Bringing cutting-edge art to Pittsburgh is what this show is all about, and in turn Pittsburgh, which is otherwise not known as such, temporarily becomes a major art destination.

Laura Hoptman, a curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum and formerly assistant curator in the department of drawings at New York's Museum of Modern Art, organized the 54th Carnegie International. Hoptman made a name for herself with several intelligent, forward-looking exhibitions at MOMA. Among these were a 1997 project room exhibition of figurative paintings by John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton and Luc Tuymans; a 1998 Yayoi Kusama show (co-curated with Lynn Zelevansky); and the highly acclaimed 2002-03 "Drawing Now: Eight Propositions," which somewhat unexpectedly riveted a large audience for months.

Leaving aside, for the moment, Hoptman's themes for this Carnegie International and the artists she chose, an excellent thing about the exhibition, as always, is its manageability, this time with 38 artists from five continents (although the distribution is heavily weighted toward the United States and Western Europe). Each artist has enough opportunity and space to present substantial work, oftentimes an entire roomful of it, and while the whole show has 400-plus pieces on two floors, it doesn't feel crowded. Hoptman effectively countered a prevailing curatorial tendency to cram in work after work, artist after artist, which makes everything a blur for the viewer and undermines the idiosyncrasies of individual participants (while, incidentally, deflecting attention toward the curator who has put the whole thing together, which is probably precisely the point). There is art on display in just about all mediums, including abstract and representational painting, large and small sculpture, performance and installation. A hefty (but not withering) selection of film and video is also included, shown both in museum galleries and an adjacent cinema. Moreover, many of the works were made specifically for this exhibition, guaranteeing that this famous survey of contemporary art is indeed contemporary.

Obviously, such an exhibition has many counterparts elsewhere within the ever-proliferating system of large-scale international exhibitions and biennials. One result of that system has been a radical extension of the role, scope and power of curators. No longer charged with finding the "best," whatever that is, curators are free to explore all kinds of material, ranging from visual art per se to cultural and political theory, philosophy, sociology, ethics, economics and probably many other disciplines as well, all framed as urgent and pressing.

At the Carnegie International, Hoptman continues this tendency to advance big, overarching themes, not only about art but about life and the world. Here are her ideas in a nutshell. For centuries, artists have trafficked in core issues concerning life and death, faith and doubt, immortality, ethics, free will, God and spirituality, along with questions ("Who am I?", "Who are we?" and "Where are we going?") that philosophers after Kant, according to Hoptman, have called "the Ultimates." In Hoptman's terms, a major failure of both cultural theory and artistic production since the late 1960s has been a reluctance to address these "Ultimates," with a preference instead for politics, everyday situations and materials, irony, identity issues and what have you. Her solution is to focus on profound matters again, choosing art that concerns itself with the problems and aspirations of human beings in these supremely conflicted times.

"Ultimates" or not, a goodly number of the well-known younger or midcareer artists featured here have been on the biennial circuit for years, for instance Ugo Rondinone, Carsten Holler, Maurizio Cattelan, John Bock, Pawel Althamer, Julie Mehretu, Francis Alys and Neo Rauch. Among other participants, Yang Fudong was recently nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize and Kutlug Ataman for the Turner Prize--which Jeremy Deller just won--although in all likelihood Hoptman selected these artists before they received these accolades. While she thankfully brought in other artists who are not biennial veterans, there was a lot of itinerant star power here. Further tying the exhibition into the international circuit was the presence, on the advisory board, of consummate insider Francesco Bonami, the curator of the last Venice Biennale [see A.i.A., May '03], with its laughable subtitle "The Dictatorship of the Viewer" (laughable because that vast show, especially the Aperto section, with its several sub-curators and multiple, predictably burning themes, actually had far more to do with the dictatorship of the curator than the viewer). Also on the advisory board was artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, the 2004 winner of the Hugo Boss Prize and one of three curators of the "Utopia Station" section of Bonami's Biennale.