New Times Give Survey a New Focus

When the first Carnegie International opened in 1896, the exhibition had the field of periodic international surveys of recent art all to itself. Then came Venice, Italy, with its “world’s fair” style Biennale, focused on national pavilions and mostly European Modern art, and eventually, following the chaos and devastation of World War II, Germany’s historically and politically minded Documenta.

Today, in addition to these venerable warhorses, big international survey shows are presented all over the globe--in Taiwan, Turkey, India, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, England and elsewhere. The phenomenon, born in the 1980s and driven as much by a desire for international tourism as for international art, verges on becoming a Biennial of the Month Club. Every few weeks a new group of internationally dispersed artists seems to be offered up as a snapshot of contemporary art around the globe.

This proliferation of biennials, triennials, quadrennials and other -ennial surveys means that the artistic context in which the 1999 Carnegie International opened on Nov. 6 is fundamentally different from what it was at its birth in 1896--or even 1982, when the scope of its ambition was revived after a period of relative dormancy. The availability of cheap international travel today, the huge expansion of the contemporary art world, the recent emergence of art exhibitions as a common form of mass entertainment and the steadily accelerating speed of communications have conspired to create a wonderfully peculiar paradox: Globalism is rendering the Carnegie International local.

The show is now a distinctly regional event. If you’re in the vicinity of Pittsburgh, by all means see it. Work by about a third of its 41 artists is challenging, satisfying and would likely reward sustained viewing--and, for events like this, that’s a pretty high ratio.

If you follow contemporary art, though, missing the Carnegie isn’t likely to matter much. The show contains no surprises (which in itself isn’t surprising) and the thematic claims based on post-structural theory made by curator Madeleine Grynsztejn conform to prevailing institutional norms.

This year’s Carnegie Prize for the outstanding work in the show was awarded to William Kentridge, the 44-year-old South African artist whose animated films turn on an interesting use of drawing. His 8-minute, 22-second “Stereoscope” plays against today’s successful commercial standard for popular animation. Rather than being composed from thousands of slick, colorful, carefully hand-drawn animation cels, Kentridge’s films are made from a small handful of gritty charcoal drawings.

Each is worked, reworked, erased and altered, with every change photographed as one frame of film. The visual result is dark, tactile and highly personal, an ambiguous narrative of loss and renewal with the visceral, shape-shifting quality of an anxiety-ridden dream. Stylistic and emotional suggestions of Goya and Max Beckmann abound.

In a sense, Kentridge is paradigmatic of the distinctive relationship between internationalism and localism that the Carnegie now embodies. Six years after South African apartheid’s official repudiation, the country has quietly slipped from the dramatic center of the international stage. The end of a long-standing cultural boycott was marked by the establishment of the Johannesburg Biennial, in which Kentridge participated in 1995, and by his subsequent inclusion in the last Documenta.

Indeed, the 1999 Carnegie International is almost exclusively a mix-and-match assembly of artists who have participated in other such international surveys--from Sydney to Munster, Venice to Kwangju--during the last several years. Critic Peter Schjeldahl’s useful term “festival art” describes the genre of work typically encountered in these shows. Awarding the Carnegie Prize to a filmmaker underscores the theatrical punch now expected of the genre.

Matthew Barney’s captivating, oddly touching sex film, “Cremaster 2,” is also on hand (screened daily in a museum auditorium), as is the exceptional, multiscreen video projection “Gamma,” by Jane and Louise Wilson. A cold, crisp, precisely ordered tour through an abandoned American missile base in England, “Gamma” is projected onto four screens in opposing corners of a darkened gallery, creating a crystalline hall of mirrors at once hypnotically seductive and icily remote.

Ann Hamilton, whose installation in the American pavilion at this summer’s Venice Bienniale was poorly received, rebounds here with a poignant extravaganza: Tiny invisible tubes hidden in a big white wall emit nearly imperceptible droplets of water, quietly transforming museum architecture into a weeping membrane. Kara Walker dramatically transforms the surrounding walls of a classical sculpture hall, complete with white plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture, into an elegantly raucous display of mostly black paper silhouettes of racially charged sex and violence, work and play, history and fantasy.

In an outdoor courtyard Denmark’s Olafur Eliasson has built a reflecting pool with a “fountain” of steam rising from jets in the center--an exquisite field of elemental transformation that may turn elegiac once winter temperatures freeze the water in the pool, leaving it a memory of liquidity.

Equally fragile--if utterly different in form--is the magnificent construction by Sarah Sze. A delicate, skeletal sculpture glued together from toothpicks and matchsticks seems determined to colonize the entire museum, climbing up into the rafters, nibbling through walls and gobbling up electrical fans, lamps and potted plants along the way. Nature is subsumed in the relentless, ant-like march of fragile, combustible civilization.

On the more traditional, less festival-oriented side, there’s some compelling painting in the Carnegie, including John Currin’s extravagantly impossible nudes; Luc Tuyman’s spare and strangely haunted essays in painterly faith, which derive from unsentimental photographs of a contemporary Passion play; and Alex Katz’s close-up vista of autumnal tree branches, composed from sweeping arcs of tan and brown and animated strokes of orange against a golden field.

Franz Ackermann’s several dozen gouaches of spectral and spectacular architecture represent a traveler’s search for an always elusive home (such drawings surely resonate with travelers on the international festival circuit). Takashi Murakami has painted the walls of a gallery in dull metallic paint, which establishes a suitable environment for his wild sculptural cyborg-nymphs (if you’re going to make comic book robots in three dimensions, vulgarity is inescapable).

Murakami’s post-Pop sculptures are among the most aggressively entertainment-oriented works in the show. Los Angeles, the global capital of entertainment, hasn’t been of much interest to past Carnegie Internationals, though, and once again the show’s artistic focus remains largely fixed on New York and Europe. The pleasant paintings here by Edward Ruscha (incongruous layering of text over landscape) and Laura Owens (including mirror-image canvases conceptually derived from Gerhard Richter) aren’t among the best lately being made in L.A., while Diana Thater offers still another variation of her video installation on the familiar theme of acculturated nature--this time featuring scuba divers swimming with dolphins, rather than animal trainers working with monkeys, horses or zebras.

* “1999 Carnegie International,” Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Ave., (412) 688-8690, through March 26. Web site: https://www.carnegieinternational.org.