Domestic globalism at the Carnegie - 1995 Carnegie International; various artists, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Art in America, Feb, 1996 by Brooks Adams

The 1995 International marks its centennial with a well-thought-out, somewhat conservative selection of imposing works, on view in newly refurbished galleries.

The posters touting the 1995 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh carry a photograph of the artist Robert Therrien dwarfed by his colossal sculpture of a table and chairs and the catchy slogan: "You'll never see an art exhibition this big again." Cheerfully hyperbolic, the ads establish a boosterish mood for this most venerable of the American contemporary-art salons. As orchestrated by Richard Armstrong, chief curator and curator of contemporary art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, this latest version of the International actually proves to be less about breadth or size than about consolidation.

The Carnegie International began in 1896 as an annual, and recently has been more usually a triennial show. (The last one was in 1991, and the one before that in 1988.) The International is somewhat different from other similar events in that it is designed to be a collection-builder for its host institution. In founding the Annual Exhibition, the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie believed, as we read in the catalogue, that the Museum of Art "should not purchase Old Masters, but confine itself to the acquisition of such modern pictures as are thought likely to become Old Masters over time." In this forward-looking project, Carnegie was about 30 years ahead of the trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.(1) (Indeed, Carnegie's enlightened approach to culture for the masses made possible the education of the Pittsburgh-born new old master Andy Warhol and his classmate Philip Pearlstein at what is now Carnegie-Mellon University.)

Like the Venice Biennale, which celebrated its centenary in the summer of '95, the Pittsburgh show was also postponed a year to be part of a larger centennial plan for the Carnegie Institute.(2) Sunday, Nov. 5, 1995, marked the opening of the International and the exact anniversary of the Institute's inauguration in 1895. To the sound of bagpipes, a distinctly noncontemporary art crowd resplendent in tweeds and plaids filed into the Music Hall in what seemed like a living diorama of Andrew Carnegie's Scottish heritage. In fact, the dioramas of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History were only a room away.

In the 1995 International, sculpture is emphasized, perhaps for the first time in the history of the exhibition, with painting, photography, film and video all playing strong yet subsidiary roles. Displays are kept very much on site in the museum, in contrast to the 1991 International, curated by Mark Francis and Lynne Cooke [see A.i.A., June '92] which featured installations at several locations around town. In the 1995 International, the affinities of sculpture and furniture form a thematic leitmotif Myriad sculptural chairs, tables, crates and commodes scattered about the galleries give the exhibition a kind of packing-it-up, moving-day mood.

The show is long on Minimal art and rather short on edgy '90s installations: Ritkrit Tiravanija's makeshift soup kitchen on the museum's entrance ramp stands alone. Yet there are plenty of Neo-Minimalist sculptural groupings with installational aplomb, such as Rachel Whiteread's ethereal room full of 100 resin casts of the spaces under nine different chairs deployed in a grid on the floor in translucent Life Saver shades. The overall effect is pickled-in-aspic modernism.

Armstrong, a former curator at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, is a veteran of biennials. He is known primarily as an Americanist who specializes in art of the 1960s and '70s. He did an excellent Richard Artschwager retrospective at the Whitney in 1988 and also collaborated with Suzanne Delehanty and Linda Cathcart on an earlier Artschwager show in 1979, when he was curator at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. It seems clear in this exhibition that Armstrong conceived of Artschwager's recent packing-crate sculptures, shown in copious variety, as presiding spirits. As he writes in the catalogue introduction: "Artschwager's stubbornly mute yet discursive furniture-derived sculptural pieces (some of them more than 30 years old) are crucial precursors of works by many of today's younger sculptors."(3)

Thus Therrien's gigantic sculpture of a table and chairs, Tiravanija's folding metal tables and stools, Whiteread's casts of negative spaces, Thomas Locher's aluminum chairs and tables hung as reliefs near the loading dock of the museum, Franz West's crude papier-mache and stucco mockups of cabinets, Doris Salcedo's distressed-wood chairs and her dressers with concrete infills, and Rob Birza's use of '70s molded chairs upholstered in a hideous herringbone fabric--all could be seen as the offspring of Artschwager's eccentric oeuvre.

Going through the exhibition, I sensed an overarching theme (nowhere exactly enunciated by the curator) that might be described as a muted globalism. I felt this most palpably while watching a mesmerizing cinematic installation on multiple monitors as well as a large screen of Chantal Akerman's film D'Est, with its slow, silent pans of Russians waiting in line in the snow. Here was a Paris-based Belgian portraying the daily routine of post-Soviet Moscow. This feeling of life lived in many different places was also conveyed by the ad hoc collapsibility of Tiravanija's soup kitchen, with its packing boxes stamped "Made in China" and a video monitor showing Asian people eating in a real soup kitchen [see article beginning on p. 82]. This suggests a new exoticism of the ordinary. The favored genre for it seems to be still life, with intimism writ large (to wit, Therrien's Under the Table).