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

Art in America, Feb, 1996 by Brooks Adams

I felt this new sense of globalized private space while looking at the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki's black-and-white documentation of the environments once occupied by his young wife. The photographs depict different rooms and different unmade beds, as weD as street scenes in Tokyo, at the time of their marriage, during her illness and death, and afterwards. The smallish works are shown unframed at the Carnegie, and above them hangs a second row of Araki's larger color photographs of flowers. These are so summarily pinned to the was that they literally curl and flutter in the breeze. Araki's images propose an ideal of perishability and transience. Most striking to me are the visual puns in the photos between the artist's cat darting about, like a spirit force of the wife, and the wooden cutout of a girl holding a cat in a Western-style sign in Tokyo.

The installation of the show stresses the similarities rather than the differences between artists. Thus British photographer Craigie Horsfield's large and brooding black-and-white photographs are hung in close proximity to Canadian filmmaker Stan Douglas's equally brooding black-and-white film Der Sandmann (previously seen at the 1995 Whitney Biennial). An in-between or leftover kind of territory seems to be charted in both artists' work, be it Horsfield's extensive documentation of '70s Krakow (where many of his best photos were shot) or Douglas's concentration, in an exhibited series of color photos, on funky little allotment gardens in and around Berlin.

Armstrong makes an explicit point, both in the show and in the catalogue, of the coincidence of floorplans in the works of Guillermo Kuitca and Balka. The Argentinian Kuitca's depictions of jailblocks and stadiums are painted and penciled in painstaking detail; every seat in that stadium bears a little handwritten number. The Polish Balka's steel floor sculpture, loosely based on the floorplan of an apartment that he grew up in outside Warsaw, is cordoned off down the middle so that one can't cross to the other side of the gallery and see the sculpture from another angle. Kuitca's paintings are hung in a small diamond-shaped gallery in the midst of the Artschwager sculptures, and Balka's low-lying sculptures are installed at the terminus of a long enfilade. From these two artists, who both grew up under politically repressive regimes, I got a definite sense of entropy and restriction, not to mention a haunting feeling of constrained public and private spaces.

Given the extensive redrawing of the world map since 1989, some intimations of melancholy and displacement are perhaps inevitable in all the depictions of furniture-on-the-move. In one large gallery, more than 20 of the Colombian Doris Salcedo's furniture sculptures are massed together at the far side of the room, as if they were literally heading for the exit. Made from clunky, old wood furniture found on the street in Bogota, Salcedo's sculptures carry with them the patina of antiquated apartments. According to the catalogue, the works are also conceived as monuments for people who have disappeared for political or drug-related reasons; they are furniture with cement shoes. (Salcedo's sculptures also suffered a bout of victimization: in a distinctly unpleasant instance of American governmental paranoia, four of the artist's sculptures en route to the International were systematically broken into and destroyed by U.S. Customs officials looking for drugs [see "Front Page," Jan.'96]).