to the avant-garde poetry the artist was
immersed in at Greenwich Village's Judson
Church before his move to Los Angeles in
1963,The kind of "arbitrary directives in
the script and aleatory effects" Oldenburg
ascribed to the performers' bodies as well
as to the automobiles, suggesting a pun
on the "autobodys" ofthe tide, might also
have been inspired by the performances of
the Judson Dance Theater and the work
ofYvonne Rainer that Oldenburg would
also have seen before traveling vrest (176).
Whiting's primary aim here, however, is to
read Oldenburg's performance in a parking
lot as an opportunity for the audience to
reconceive ofthe car and the banal, empty
lot as a site of theater.
Throughout the book Whiting success-
fully demonstrates that this wide variety of
work can best be understood through its
relationship to the locations and spatial
contexts in which it was produced.Tliis is
especially evident in the way she takes into
account the building and the location in
which Judy Chicago and the participants
in ihe Cal Arts Feminist Art Program chose
to establish their creative headquarters.
Womanhouse.The group renovated a
seven teen-room, seventy-five-year-old,
abandoned house on North Mariposa
Avenue (not Mariposa Street as it appears
in the text) in Hollywood to provide meet-
ing and exhibition spaces, far from the
new suburban Cal Arts campus in Valencia.
California. Wbiting sees Womanhouse not
only as a much-needed venue for the exhibi-
tion of feminist art in this period, but as a
challenge to the kind of boosterist view of
die city promoted by the architectural histo-
rian Reyner Banham in his popular book
Los Anyeles.Thf Architecture of Four Ecologies and by
much ofthe cultural establishment at tlie
time. As Whiting articulates it, "by locating
themselves In a neglected and marginal cor-
ner ofthe city and granting visibility to a
dilapidated mansion, the group not only
questioned Banham's ceiebration of'a giant
city, which has grown almost simultaneously
all over,' but also claimed space for a femi-
nist art project far from the galleries on La
Cienega Boulevard, LACMA [Los Angeles
County Museum of Art], and Pasadena Art
Museum" (r92).TIie institutions and gallery
scene that Whiting refers to here constituted
the local arts estabhshment at the time.
Whiting's claims about artists such as
Foulkes, Celmins, and Chicago, who were
excluded in different ways from this net-
work, would be more legible, however, if
she were to discuss in more detail the power
these galleries and museums wielded in the
postwar Los Angeles art world.
Overaii, however, my criticisms here
pale in comparison to the pioneering con-
tribution Whiting has made to the scholar-
ship on this topic. Pop L.A is a well-written,
highly readable book, and Whiting's detailed
readings of art objects as well as the public-
ity material that often accompanied them
(her analysis of a Vogue article about Hockney
stands out here) add much to the literature
on the individual artists she discusses. In the
breadth of art she covers ajid her focused
arguments about their relationships to the
spaces and local liistories of Los Angeies,
Wliiting's project will be central to any
further work on West Coast art in the post-
war period.
Ken Allan is an assistant professor of art history
ac Seattle University and a contributing editor for
X-tro; Contemporary Art Quarterly. He received his
PhD from the University of Chicago in 2005 and
is working on a book about artistic practice, social
space, and spectatorship in 1960s Los Angeles.
1. James Meyer, "Another Minimalism," A Minimal
Future? An as Object 1958-1968 (Los Angeles:
Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), 33-49.
2. Robert Frank's book The Americans was. how-
ever, one of Ruscha's major influences early in his
career See Silvia Wolf, Ed Ruscha and Photography
(New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art/SteidI Veriag, 2004), 270-71.
3. For a historiographic study of this approach in
che discipline of art history, see Thomas Dacosta
Kaufmann. Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004).
IOS artjournal
Gego: Exploding the
Field
Monica Amor
Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel, eds.
Gego (957-/988:Thinking the Line.
Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2oo6, 240 pp.,
62 color ills,, tit b / w . $55 paper.
Mari Carmen Ramirez, Catherine de
Zegher, Robert Storr, and Josefina
Manrique. Gego: Between Transparency
and the /nvisib/e. Houston: Museum uf Fine
Arts, and New Haven:Yale University Press,
2006. 256 pp., 85 color ills.. 25 b/w. S^o
paper.
The number of publications devoted to the
work of the Venezuelan artist Gego (Getrud
Goldschmidt, I9r2-i994) in the last five
years has suddenly repositioned her as a
figure to reckon with in the 6elds of post-
war drawing and sculpture. Her presence
in group exhibitions, the recent surveys
devoted to the artist, and her increasing
appearance in classrooms all pose impor-
tant questions about canon formation and
about the idiosyncratic dynamics of a field
exposed to the uneven dial<:)gues between an
entrenched conservatism, still pronounced
in certain areas such as academia, and prac-
tices open to artistic and aesthetic paradigms
that deviate from mainstream art-historical
narratives. La.st year alone, four exhibitions
and corresponding catalogues higlilighcing
specific areas of Gego's artistic production
appeared: Gego s-^gy-s^Sfi.ThmkmQ the Line,
curated by Nadja Rottner and Peter Weibel
(which paired Gego's work with that of
artist Ruth Vollmer); Gego; Between Traiuparency
and the Invisible, curated by Mari Carmen
Ramirez (which emphasized the artist's ded-
ication to drawing); Gejjo: Defying Structures,
curated by mysetl" and Bartomeu Mari
(which focused on her second, most impor-
tant environmental work, the Chorros ofthe
early 1970s); and G«go;Arehitecl, curated by
Hannia Gomez (devoted to Gego's public
works and architectural background). Here,
I will address the first two publications,
which follow the classical format of exhibi-
tion catalogues, with essays by guest writers,
a section of plates, a chronology, and a
bibliography on the artist. Thinking the line
also includes interviews and criticism by
contemporaries of Gego, sufficient to give
the reader a taste ofthe local reception of
her work, but not enough to make this
section representative ofthe enthusiastic
responses Gego generated in the Venezuelan
intelligentsia. This gesture of inclusion,
though, is crucial, as it gives voice to impor-
tant interpreters of Gego s work whose
words, in the recent literature, tend to be
obsctired by Alfred H. Barr, Jr.'s one-time
(unrecorded) comment on Gego's "parallac-
tical charm."'
Bruno Bosteels opens Thinking the Line
with a text that attends to issues of inclusion
and exclusion. His Introduction summarizes
debates of the 1990s that emphasize the pit-
falls of geographic categorization in the arts
and problematizes the linguistic/conceptual
hierarchies in which Latin American art is
inscribed—the latter always rendered the
marked term ofthe unmarked/marked
binary and therefore implicitly considered
incomplete or lesser. Bosteels's excursus
on modernity, colonialism, and the politics
of neoliberalism concludes with doubts
regarding Gego's public-art works, situated
as they are (or were) in banks, shopping
malls, "and other monuments to the world
of global marketing and finance" (24).
Abruptly, Bosteels decides not to address
these works—-which among Gego's critics
have received httle or no attention, presum-
ably because many of these criucs have
never been to Caracas to see them in situ,
or because they indeed are sometimes radi-
cally different from her more vulnerable and
radical environments and drawings. Instead
he turns to Gegos best-known works (the
series Reticuldreas, Trunks, Sircams, Drawings
without Paper, and others) which he evokes
in tandem with various theoretical tropes:
"purport" (Louis Hjelmslev). "diagram,"
"rhizome," and "immanence" (Deleuze),
"disclphne" and "control" (Foucautt,
Deleuze}, and "suture." (Jacques-Alain
Miller). These are provocative suggestions,
no doubt, but instead ofleading to a close
and elaborated reading of specific works,
Bosteels dwells on three major themes treated
repeatedly in the literature on Gego: the rhi-
zomatic, the organic and constructivist mod-
els, and the status ofthe subject/viewer.'
These references echo arguments rehearsed
by a host of international critics who have
paid httle attention to the local or contem-
porary reception ofthe work, raising, in
passing, questions about amnesia and obht-
eration in the canonization of noncanonical
figures and their concomitant cultural and
geographical contexts.
In the same catalogue, Juan Ledezma
takes up the issue ofthe medium in Gego's
work to assert the artist's materialist drive
and ponder the collective dimension pro-
duced by her work. He does this through
the lens of prewar constructivism by track-
ing themes relevant to Gego's work such
as the organic and constructivist models
(again), the engagement with architeccural
space, and the viewer's interaction with the
work (one in which the spectator's moment
of recognition or conceptual clarity, pro-
duced in the viewing of classic constructivist
works such as Aleksandr Rodchenko's Spatial
Constructions, is frustrated). Yet the prewar
constructivist practices tliat are Ledezma's
frame of reference—aesthetic and produc-
tive models that in dialogue with a revolu-
tionary culture redefined the art object in
terms of functionality—are at odds with the
ingrained "failure" (from a Utopian stand-
point) inscribed in Gego's Reticuldreas and
Drawings without Paper. To be fair, Ledezma
attends to the public dimension of Gego's
work, an element which can indeed be com-
pared to constructivism's emphasis on col-
lective reception, as long as historical differ-
ences are kept under check. Furthermore,
through an allusion to the formative role of
transrational language in constructivism,
Ledezma makes alterity, defamiliarization,
and the suspension of conventions the foun-
dation of a new pubhc space common to
106 WINTER 1007
constructivism and Gego's work.This
emphasis on a public, sodal reading of
Gego's work, associated with the stams of
the suhject in it. is one of the characteristic
traits ofthe recent literature on Gego. It
implies a displacement from tectonics to an
"expanded field" that alters our traditional
understanding of the effect and affect of
works of art.
This expanded social field also concerns
Kaira Marie Cabanas's argument in her
contribution to the catalogue. To her, the
phenomenological dimension ofthe 1969
environmental Reticularea is intimately related
to Gego's "doing" of geometry—which
suggests that rather than using geometry
and mathematics as models, Gego's work is
invested in a situated materiality that "enacts
a spatio-temporal negotiation, which ftmc-
tions in tandem with the collaborative
production of a social space" (74).To sup-
port her claim. Cabanas indexes the 1969
Reticuidreu's photographic record, wherein the
work is always pictured with people—an
observation that has to be credited to the
photographer Peter Honig who in 1982. on
the occasion of Reticuldrea's installation in
Germany, wrote to Gego that he could not
conceive the work without people, without
taking into account the close relationship
between ohserver and work.' This conclu-
sion is preceded by a discussion of the dif-
ferences between Gego's phenomenological
work and kinetic art's optical manipulations
(a model of visuality tbat Cabanas problem-
atically conflates with Rosalind Krauss's
diagnosis of Greenbergian opticahty, an
association that fails to account for Krauss's
well-known rejection of any possible affini-
ties between the models of perception pre-
scribed by Op and kinetic art and modernist
opticahty).'* While Cabanas's analysis adds
to Luis Enriquez Perez Oramas's take on the
differences between Gego and kinetic art,
her discussion of Jesiis Soto's work as not
addressing "a real empirical body" (as
Gego's work does) immediately calls to
mind the hyperhaptic Pfnetrable.s of Soto,
the first of which, like Gego's RetictiMreo.
was made in the late 1960s, and in wliich
ohserver and work literally become one.^
There is no doubt that among those interest-
ed in assessing Gego's oeuvre vis-a-vi.s tliat
of Soto, this environmental, ludic, and hap-
tic crux will have to be accounted for. A
complex theoretical detour weaves these
main arguments. By alluding to Jean-
Frangois Lyotard's "paralogy" (as he charac-
terizes a postmodern science concerned
with "instability," "openness," and "distur-
bance"), Cabaiias divorces Gego's use of
geometry from any idealized analytical
model, be it empirical or rational. From
paralogy to enunciative performativity, and
from there to social space, the argument
does not always roll smoothly, but the
author's emphasis on Gego's "doing" of
geometry nicely holds the terms of her
discussion together.
Two contrasting articles, one by Hannah
Feldman arguing for a multinational reading
of Gego's work, and another by Juheta
Gonzalez favoring its association with its
social local context, complement the texts
discussed above. The first rehearses ideas set
forth by Marta Traba concerning Venezuelan
geometric abstraction's apparent disregard
for the country's social ills and concomitant
quest for cultural and infrastructural moder-
nity While Feldman describes these works'
unwillingness to deal with their "mess[y]
historical circumstances" (6i), Gego used
the word messj' (in English) in her sketches
to define some of the pieces that made up
the Reticularea. Of course this line of thought
does not indicate a desire to deal directly
with social context, but it suggests Gego's
distance from the technosdentific orienta-
tions of kineticism—a distance that critics
contemporaneous to the work and more
recent local reviewers have been at pains to
describe.* Feldman rightly notes that Gego's
work calls for a layered and complex reading
that takes into account her experiences of
displacement, exile, and,! would add, other-
ness (let's not forget that in addition to her
status as immigrant, she was a woman, and
not a young one when she produced her
most successful work). Aren't these condi-
tions what trigger such strong affinities
between Gego's work and the projects of
emigre artists such as Mira Schendell, Eva
Hesse,Yayoi Kusama, and (as the exhibition
from which this catalogue ensues suggests)
Ruth Vollmer? Signaled by the experience
of displacement, these works seem to be
engaged in a poetics of unhomehness. a
fiight from the certainty of medium-
specificity and spatial monumentahty,
toward an aesthetic practice of material
vulnerability, and, as Bosteels and Cabanas
suggest, of immanence. But I cannot agree
with Feldman's assertion that "the efforts
made to assert Gego's national identity as
seamlessly Venezuelan reflect not only the
concems of market economies, but also, and
precisely, the discomfort that indeterminate
categories of being arouse in societies con-
ditioned to subsume difference" (65).Traba,
for one. was happy to define Gego's work as
European, while in my own writings I have
forcefully argued for what bas been called a
"local" reading ofthe work—! prefer to des-
ignate it an architectonic reading that nei-
ther excludes a nomadic one nor allies itself
with the national.' As notes from her teach-
ing indicate, Gego was an attentive observer
of her urban surroundings, so it was the dis-
ruptive and precarious logic of the work,
along with Gego's emphasis on basic shel-
tering, that led me to read her work as a fig-
uration of the urban disarray of the city and
the shantytowns that border it.**
Finally, a series of poetic comments
on Gego's knotting and linking procedures,
written by Luis Enrique Perez Oranias,
wraps up this well-rounded publication,
fully illtistrated with Gego's by now well-
known works.The book is, no doubt, a seri-
ous contribution to the hterature on Gego
by a group of young scholars genuinely
interested in understanding tlie specificity
of this artist's work and its situation within
the history of postwar art.
While physically and structurally very
similar 10 Thinking the Line, the catalogue
Between Transparenc)' and the InvisiWe is a very dif-
ferent kind of publication. The main text, by
the curator Mari Carmen Ramirez, investi-
107 art journal
gates the theme of transparency to propose
a detailed formal reading of Gego's work,
particularly her drawings. In Ramirez's
account, Gego's drawings and constructions
oscillate between the illusion of lines "float-
ing in layers of thin air" and that of'"three-
dimensional structures that read, in space,
like two-dimensional drawings" (23),This
produces an oscillation that Ramirez calls
the "in-between dimension," indicative ofthe
artist's understanding of art as piercing "the
strata ofthe visible world to point out the
veiled components of a bigger totality that
is invisible to the eye" (24). As she notes,
"The ability to suggest this alt-encompassing
entity represented by the invisible, in turn,
required carefully establishing the relations
between its parts" (24). In a way this is a
very faithful reading ofthe work. Not only
does Ramirez rely heavily on Gego's own
notes and writings (collected recendy in a
posthumous pubhcation), but like Traba.
who back in 1977 defined Gego's work as
organic because it corresponded "to the
internal order that is verified in nature,
the adequate relations of the parts to the
whole," she underlines the idea of structure
and wholeness, a sort of cosmic communion
between work and universe that, as Ramirez
acknowledges, also informs Uie crilic Guy
Brett's recent approach to Gego's work.'
One can detect here a divide in the
hterature on the artist, since this "cosmic"
reading is at odds with the fragmented,
disruptive, "rhizomatic," and materialistic
interpreutions tliat emphasize the situation-
al dimensions of Gego's work, how it inter-
acts with the viewer bypassing contempla-
tive models of .spectatorship. Instead, for
Ramirez, "Gego's art stresses permanence
and contemplation of the infinite possibili-
ties of making visihle the multiple layers of
space" (33).This essay represents the most
sustained look at Gego's drawings, without
a doubt foundational to the artist's work,
and Ramirez is attentive to close readings
and illuminating pairings (between Gego's
works and those of Paul Klee and Josef
Aibers. for example) that befit her curatorial
talents. Her detailed account however
neglects any attempt to group or systematize
the mad array that constitutes Gego's two-
dimensional work—a challenging task that
remains to be done.
This curators' publication (which con-
trasts with the young scholars' catalogue
discussed first) also includes essays by
Catherine de Zegher and Robert Scorr.
Within the small but growing circle of
Gego's connoisseurs, de Zegher is known
for having introduced Gego's work to an
internadonal audience in ber seminal 1996
book and exhibition Inside iheVisible.'iAn Elliptical
Traverse of 2oih Century Art in, of, and from the
Feminine. The lauer proposed a provocative
and parallel trajectory for modern and con-
temporary art that took into account tbe
feminine as a site of singular aesthetic pro-
duction. Here, de Zegber opens her essay
with some heavy paternal figures (Alexander
Calder, Rodchenko, Umbeno Boccioni,
Pablo Picasso, Georges Vantongerloo, Marcel
Duchamp) to address the notion of drawing
in space—a historically grounded pursuit
that she does not account for aiid wliich
remains to be addressed as a backdrop
against which Gego's work operates. Her
contemporary references instead include
surprises such as tbe fascinating work of the
Czech artist Karel Malich (wbom Rottner
and Weibel thought of pairing witb Gego
before setding on Volhner), but this sugges-
tive association, despite die two beautiful
works by the artist illtistrated in the essay, is
not elaborated. Tbere is not mucb of a con-
crete argument here. De Zegher provides a
rough summary of Gego's work trajectory
and then suggests several intriguing paths of
investigation tbat draw little on dose read-
ings of tbe art but rely instead on various
other interpretations and sources. The effect
is patcby and scattered, despite tbe introduc-
tion of tbemes relevant to Gego's work such
as "weaving" as medium and process, and
the "informe." De Zegher's grand conclusion
is that Gego's work "inspires social change
and political commitment on a global scale"
{73), an assertion tbat is not properly quali-
fied in the essay In addition, de Zegher's
text problematically draws on translations,
descriptions, and archival materials import-
ed from recently published work on Gego
that are nonetheless not cited in ber essay."
Storr closes tbe publication's essays witb
a panoramic overview of the sculptural sce-
nario of tbe postwar period and the status of
geometric abstraction in the United States.
He too relates Gego's work to prewar con-
structivism, but instead of engaging in tbe
bistoricist account Ledezma details, he
underlines formal correlations, processes,
and use of materials. Comparisons are tbe
backbone of Storr s essay, and while sugges-
tive, they at times seem to respond more
to Storr's own interests (Tony Smith, Brice
Marden) than to a sustained analysis of the
work. Pieces sucb as Kusama's Infinile Nets
from the i96os seem more pertinent in a
discussion of Gego's webs, an often-over-
looked association that 1 was happy to see
here Storr too lingers on Gego's drawings
and linear manipulations, and his beautiful
descriptions attest to bis admiration for the
work. Specifically, be refers to the Drawings
wiihoul Paper (doue in the 1970s and 1980s)
and how diey distance themselves from
traditional notions of gestiu-e, autbor, atid
subject despite their artisanal nature. He is
closer to a materialist reading of the works:
tbeir "figurations and 'markings' are there-
fore able to foreground their own material
reality against the equally material back-
ground of the wall" (93). The latter, he con-
cludes, is one of the "least appreciated but
most graceful, surprising, and open-ended
artistic enterprises of the second half of the
twentieth-century" (93).This catalogue also
dehvers a detailed, illustrated chronology,
with notations on Gego's technical develop-
ments, life, and statements regarding her
work, compiled by Josefina Manrique,
wbich is of great value. Tbe volume's plates
expand our enjoyment of Gego's work, since
tbey include numerous two-dimensional
works that are little known and bave never
been reproduced.
Both publications will contribute sig-
nificantly to a fuller appreciation of Gego's
work, especially since tbey complement eacb
other in tbeir distinctive approaches and in
the material covered.They propose venues of
invesdgation tliat challenge well-established
patterns of research in the field of contem-
porary art of the r96os and 1970s. It remains
to be seen what art history does with these
deviatiom from the norm.
Monica Amor is assistant professor of modern
and contemporary art at the Mar/land Institute
College of Art. She recently curated a survey of
Gego's work for the Serralves Foundation in
Porto and has been working on the archiiecturall/
inflected work of artists in contemporary art.
I. Often cited in the literature on Gego, Barr's
phrase "parailactical charm" was first quoted by
Hanni Ossott in fier important analysis, written in
dose collaboration with the artist, of Gego's
work. However, the author never provides a bib-
liographical reference. We might assume that it
2007
was Gego who gave Ossott that information,
Hanni Ossott, Gego (Caracas: Museo de Arte
Contemporaneo. 1977). 14.
2. The Deleuzian rhizome was first associated to
Gego's work in a letter to the artist written by the
German architect Christian Thiel, who assisted
her in the installation of her Reticuldrea at the
Alte Oper in Frankfurt in 1982; Thiel, letter to
Gego, November 12. 1983. Personal Archives,
Gego Foundation. Caracas. The or;ganic-natural
metaphor in Gego's work was posited by the
Argentinean critic Marta Traba back in 1977;
Traba. Gego (Caracas: Museo de Arte Contem-
poraneo de Caracas, 1977), n. p. The tension
between the sensuous (or organic) and the con-
structive was explicitly treated in Ossott, 6. The
viewer's fusion with the work, specifically her
RetJcularea, was carefully described by Roberto
Guevara in 1969; Guevara, "Reticularea de
Gego," HNoc/onol (Caracas), June 10, 1969.
3. Peter Honig, letter to Gego, December 17,
1982, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation,
Caracas.
4. Rosalind Krauss, "Afterthoughts on Op." Art
Wernot/ono/9, no. 5 (June 1965).
5.1 myself also suggested the clear divide
between the work of Soto and Gego in a lecture
delivered at Harvard in the fall of 2003 by alluding
to Soto's classical kinetic work and was reminded
by Yve-Alain Bois of die playfulness and tactility of
these works by Soto which relate to rather than
contrast with Reticuiarea.
6. OssDtt and Traba both insisted on the differ-
ence between Gego's and the kineticists' project.
More recently Luis Enrique Perez Oramas has
written the most thorough account on the sub-
ject. See, for example, his "Gego and the Analytic
Context of Cinetismo," in Inverted Utopias: Avant-
Garde An in Latin America, ed. Mari Carmen
Ramirez and Hector Olea (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), And, as previously men-
tioned. Cabanas attempts the same in her essay
discussed above.
7. Traba, n.p.
8. This emphasis on sheltering surfaced in her
classes to architecture students at the Central
University. See Gego, '"Programacion de unas
charlas durante el ler semestre Febrero-Mayo
1965," typewritten document. Personal Archives,
Gego Foundation, Caracas, I address this point in
my dissertation "Defying Structures: Gego and the
Crisis of Geometric Abstraction in the Americas"
(Graduate School and University Center of the
City University of New York, New York, 2002),
and in my essay, "Another Geometry: Gego's
Reiicuiersa 1969-1982," October I 13 (Summer
2005): 120-25.
9. Gego. Sabiduras ar\<i Other Texts: Writings
by Gego. ed. Maria Helena Huizi and Josefina
Manrique (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press. 2005). Traba, Gego, n.p. Guy
Brett. "Gego's Force Fields," in Mari Carmen
Ramirez et al.. Questioning the LJr\e: Gego in
Context (Houston: International Center for the
Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston, 2003).
10,1 must note here a handful of striking coinci-
dences between my 2005 text "Another
Geome«7: Gego's Reticularea 1969-1982" (see
n, 8) and de Zegher's, Some involve the use o l
exactly the same translation (made by me from
the Spanish) of a newer-published statement by
Gego and of archival material not available in
English, which de Zegher cites using the same
nomenclature 1 devised in my research. Other
instances involve the importation of the same
terms or words to describe the Reticuldrea. as
when ) write: "Indeed, the dispersed body of the
Reticu/drea is woven into space itself.,,. The
viewer, too, is woven into theftet/cu/oreaand the
surrounding space . . . " ( I I 4 ) . And de Zegher:
"The undetermined and dispersed body of
Retkularea seems woven into space, and the
viewer appears woven into It as well as into its
surrounding space" [67). Elsewhere I note: "Local
reviewers also emphasized the enveloping quality
of the environment, which could not be appre-
hended as a definite whole but instead had to be
expenenced. The operation was one of fusion
with the work rather than analytical observation of
the work" (114). De Zegher writes: "Enveloped by
the environment of Reticulareo, the experience is
one of sensuous apprehension and of fusion with
the work rather than merely optical, analytical
observation of it" (73).
After the Neo-Avant-
Garde? New-Genre
Conceptual Art and the
Institution of Critique
Godfre Leung
Alexander Alberro and Sabeth
Buchmann, eds. Art after Conceptual Art.
Cambridge, MA, and Vienna: MIT Press/
Geiierali Foundation, 2006. 240 pp., 75 b / w
ills, $30 paper.
John C. Welchman, ed. Institutional
Critique and After. Ziirich: JRP/Ringier,
2007. 400 pp,, 76 b/w ills. I25 paper.
The new voltnnes Art after Concepiual Art and
Institutionai Critique ond After speaJc to a present
crisis in writing on critical art. Predictably,
the nattire of this crisis is harcUy coherent,
neither within the individual vnltimes nor
between them. Both seek to revise the canon
of critical postwar art that the emerging
generation of art historians encountered iji
college syllabi as getiealogies of avant-garde
movements. At certain points, this project
seems to arise from a paradigm shift in artis-
tic production and, at others, merely from a
generational shift among critics. Indeed, the
o/lers in Ait after Conceptual Art and Institutionol
Criti<jue and After refer as much to the reigning
definilions of conceptual art and institution-
al critique as they do to a historical break,
whetlier real or imaginary, with these art
movements.
For many contributors, the object of cri-
tique has shifted. Issues such as globalization
and the demand for art to address localized
audiences necessitate a rethinking of the
prevailing definitions of critical art, which
are generally tmderstood in relation to aes-
thetic and institutional concerns. Some of
these positions look to new strategies of
artistic practice that have come to promi-
nence in the last fifteen years, associated
with the models of new-gerye pubhc art
and relational aesthetics, identifying in them
relevant, new directions to engage with the
reoriented object of critical art. Others cite
tlie current art's mode of critique. For pro-
ponents of tliis position, the emergence of
new media presents new aesthetic criteria
that problematize the genealogies of the
avant-garde that have come to stand in for
histories of critical art.
109 art jaiirna!
A less radical position supposes institu-
tional critique's obsolescence now that it has
achieved "oflicial" critical art status in both
the museum and the academy. Against such
claims, some contributors recuperate the
prevailing narratives, positioning recent
artistic strategies as part of an unbroken
trajectory of the postwar neo-avant-garde;
what comes after institutional critique, then,
is an evolution of it. We also encounter cri-
tiques of these artistic strategies, arguing for
the continued relevance of the traditional
model of institutional criiique in the present.
An afier Concepiual Art is divided into three
sections. Three older and well-known essays
by established scholars of conceptual art make
up the bulk of the first section. These essays,
by Benjamin H, D. Bucliloh (1982).Thomas
Crow (1995), atid Helen Molesworth
(2000), prefigure the debates in the two
ensuing sections by revising accepted
notions of conceptual art and its subgenre
of institutional critique from their respective
historical moments. The second section takes
an art-bistorical tack, mounting arguments
toward a rewriting of the history of concep-
tual art. Luiza Nader works through early
conceptualism s engagement with language
to conclude that the Polish artist Jaroslaw
Kozlowski's books must be understood
within tlie context of their production in
cold war-era Poland. Unlike the better-
known work of Joseph Kosuth and Mel
Bochner, Nader argues, Kozlowski's critique
of representation was not merely self-refer-
entia!; it presented a resistance to the Polish
state and its institutionalization of sociahst
reahsm as its official art, Gregor Stemmrich
and Helmut Draxler situate canonical works
of institutional critique in relation to specific
media practices. Stemmrich identifies in
Michael Asher and Dan Graham's work an
attention to cinema and television, respec-
tively, and reorients the focus of their cri-
tiques from the institutions of art to the ide-
ological work of the media sphere. Draxler
revisits Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel
Buren, Hans Haacke, and John Knight to
propose a subversive use of advertising and
design in their work, argtiing that design
provided a critical tool with which to work
through art's own complex imbrication with
capitalism. The volume ends with essays by
Edit Andras, Elizabetli Ferrell, and Henrik
Olesen that identify emergent discourses in
the art of the present. These essays represent
the volume's most valuable contribution to