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

Art in America, Feb, 1996 by Brooks Adams

A powerful impression emerges from the 1995 International of the Carnegie Museum as a shining, modernist mausoleum. At least one of Artschwager's packing-crate sculptures is in the shape of a coffin, and Salcedo's works are referred to by Armstrong in the catalogue as "weighty, handmade tombs."(4) The museum's addition, the Sarah Scaife Galleries designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes in 1974, was newly refurbished by Richard Gluckman, architect of the Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side of Pittsburgh [see A.i.A., Sept. '94]. The renovated galleries, with their original white terrazzo floors and skylit ceilings, look better than I had ever imagined they could. Armstrong's sober and grandiose show emphasizes the two imposing enfilades of the Heinz and Scaife Galleries: I have to admit that Barnes's '70s late-modernist style of museum building has finally come into its own.

A memorial impulse must have prompted Armstrong to include work of two recently deceased masters, Donald Judd and Joan Mitchell. Groupings of their work are accorded quite a lot of space. Judd's stainless-steel sculptures in a row have their own Neo-Classical gleam in the colonnaded Hall of Sculpture below the casts of classical figures, and Mitchell's abstractions feel particularly tied to Northern landscape in the light-fired and broadly fenestrated '70s galleries around the outdoor sculpture court where Per Kirkeby's large-scale, tomblike brick sculpture loosely inspired by early modern Danish brick churches hold sway. (Somewhat incomprehensibly, a series of gestural bronze sculptures by Kirkeby from 1983 are exhibited inside, opposite the Mitchells.) Perhaps the reductio ad absurdum of the show's recurrent funerary impulse was the decision to exhibit Canadian photographer Angela Grauerholz's work in Plexiglas-encased black drawers that can't be opened, except by a white-gloved attendant who never seems to be there.

At the 1995 International, there is a notable absence of humor or subversive irony; possible exceptions are Tony Oursler's talking-head video sculptures and Franz West's sculptural re-creation of his Viennese studio. The latter comes complete with working telephones, an old couch where you can sit and make local calls, a scrappy wallpaper treatment of telephone book pages, a freestanding commodelike structure whose rough papier-mache surfaces are brushed yellow on one side and black on the other, and even the actual linoleum of his studio floor imported for the occasion--all installed in the Carnegie's baroque decorative-arts gallery. The august tapestries and inlaid Dutch cabinets of the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Galleries are suddenly enlisted in a new, self-conscious evocation (and perhaps a parody) of overstuffed imperial Viennese taste.

Despite the centennial occasion, the 1995 International is largely devoid of historical displays, preferring instead to float in a kind of timeless, high-modernist ether. (A historical show to be called "International Encounters" will take place at the museum in November '96, tracing the evolution of the Carnegie prize winners from 1896 to the present.) A key element of the centennial preparations was the restoration of the museum's Beaux-Arts murals in the Grand Staircase. The Apotheosis of Pittsburgh (190607), an allegorical vision of the steel industry by the American Symbolist John White Alexander, almost stole the show for me. The murals are enlivened by Stephan Balkenhol's monumental wood sculpture of an anonymous worker, placed on the balustrade at the top of the stairs, which seems to bring Pittsburgh's proletarian spirit right up to date and even to propose a new kind of civic model of the international, postindustrial worker.