A global cacophony

Pittsburgh — The Internet magazine artnet maintains a useful list of contemporary art fairs and biennial exhibitions, whose numbers have grown like kudzu since the 1980s. For the final four months of 2004, the list includes 31 entries.

One-third of these are biennials and other such periodic festivals, organized by national and local governments or independent museums and art agencies from Gwangju, South Korea, to Lodz, Poland. The other two-thirds are commercial events -- like Art Basel Miami Beach, a glamorous international gathering of high-end and hipster galleries, large or small, that today concludes its four-day sales-fest in South Florida. In these autumn festivals, thousands of contemporary artists and tens of thousands of artworks have been put on view.

Nestled amid all this global activity is a granddaddy of the genre -- the 54th installment of the Carnegie International. Now a quadrennial or quinquennial exhibition launched by industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie 108 years ago, Pittsburgh’s bright idea didn’t have much competition in 1896.

European art academies had their annual salons, and a world’s fair format with national art pavilions had recently been concocted for the first Venice Biennale. (It helped inspire Carnegie.) But that was about it. Nation-states were proliferating around the world, and the Venice Biennale and the Carnegie International emerged as important symbols (which also included the inauguration of the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm) for new networks of trade and communication.

Over time, however, the context for the Carnegie International has changed dramatically. Globalization is remaking the established system of international networks, and transnational corporations are edging out nation-states as agencies of influence and power. What, for example, is Al Qaeda if not a stateless corporation with global reach?

Carnegie curator Laura Hoptman is acutely aware of the shift. Her selection of artists for this installment of the exhibition unfortunately leans too heavily on tepid talents, many of them not widely known. Yet Hoptman is nonetheless to be applauded for attempting to get a grip on an elusive phenomenon. Periods of tumult, such as our own, are hard to pin down and decipher.

Here’s a symptom of the show’s problem: Thirty-eight artists are showing in this year’s Carnegie International, but potentially the most resonant single work cannot be seen, except serendipitously. Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan withdrew his work from its initial display, and now it is being shown only on sporadic occasions. If you happen to be in Pittsburgh at the right moment -- I wasn’t -- you’re welcome to see it.

Still, merely on description the unseen sculpture captures the imagination -- and in a way only a handful of the other exhibited works do. A life-size wax effigy of President Kennedy is laid out in an open coffin for public viewing. Dressed in a natty dark suit and tie -- but conspicuously barefoot, a Catholic symbol of humility -- the pristine body shows none of the physical damage of the epochal 1963 assassination. This is Kennedy as if he had died peacefully in his sleep, rather than having had his brains splattered across his stunned wife’s pink suit.

Cattelan has ordered that the open casket be set out in a Victorian reception room just off the Carnegie Museum’s entrance, rather than in a gallery. (The ornate room is regularly used for museum functions, which is why the sculpture can’t always be viewed.) I imagine this stately installation work to be a formal, public funeral for a mythic idea of an idealized 1960s. As a child of that era, the thought gives me chills.

Hoptman, like other biennial curators, has largely given up the false premise that these types of exhibitions can survey either “new trends,” which are routinely marketed like potato chips at the various commercial art fairs, or “the best art internationally” of the last several years, which is impossible in a global environment. Instead, she has organized a theme exhibition -- even though she doesn’t like the term. What she’s looking for is not a shared content in art but a common impulse that drives artists to make their work.

ETHICAL ISSUES

Unlike last summer’s Site Santa Fe, whose theme of “the grotesque in art” could have been assembled almost any time in the last 50 years, the 54th Carnegie International is concerned with the distinctive experience of life in our so-far awful new millennium. For Americans, the big events between the last Carnegie (in 1999) and the current one are obviously Sept. 11 and the Iraq war.

If these epic traumas showed us anything it is that domestic society, global stability and hope for world harmony are threatened by the grave inequalities that separate the haves from the have-nots -- and by America’s conspicuous role in that stark disparity. Cattelan’s public burial of an idealized ethos resonates with this knowledge.

Hoptman puts ethical issues front and center in her exhibition. Two of the most powerful works come at the beginning.

The first is “Kuba,” a video installation by Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman, who was also among the few standouts at the international art festival Documenta two years ago. Ataman, a UCLA film school graduate in the 1980s, skillfully endows even the most mundane activity with a sense of epic weight.

“Kuba” documents the lives of 40 men, women and young people who live in grinding poverty in an Istanbul shantytown. Eight rows of five beat-up television sets are placed atop beat-up tables and in front of beat-up chairs. Each screen shows an individual interview, set at a low volume, so that the entire room is filled with murmurs.

A visitor is invited to wander among the flickering throng, stopping to sit and listen where he wishes. Some stories are tragic, some wicked; some are funny, some frightening. In the grid of human stories, a sense of individual dignity meets an embodiment of collective equality.

A gallery beyond Ataman’s holds a virtual mini-retrospective of drawings by Robert Crumb, the quintessential 1960s “comix” artist. The 83 works survey the tales of Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Fritz the Cat and, somewhat later, the denizens of Crumb’s “Weirdo” comic books.

A richly ambiguous social satirist and a technically brilliant draftsman, Crumb sets his characters’ antic activities within a standard format that’s as old as the comics. The conservative visual format and the radical narratives therefore convey a collision between normalcy and eccentricity -- a one-two punch that sets the artist apart.

Drawing is a leitmotif of this Carnegie International. (Hoptman is a former curator of drawings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.) It informs the work of a quarter of the artists, and Crumb’s socially observant, defiantly candid work is positioned as its late 20th century archetype. An extended, first-rate essay in the show’s catalog accompanies his mini-retrospective.

But the quality of the rest is uneven at best. It dilutes the show’s impact.

Another mini-retrospective -- 55 works -- surveys the output of a little-known Croatian artist named Dimitrije Basicevic (1921-87), who used the name Mangelos. Writing in tempera on cardboard, paper and world globes, the art historian and critic composed a rather conventional set of neo-Dada aphorisms about the modern absurdity of social, political and artistic life.

Mangelos, who worked secretly during an era of Soviet repression, was an underground artist of a different sort from Crumb. Plainly Mangelos has been chosen as a symbol -- a spiritual ancestor for our own increasingly authoritarian time. But the work is monotonous and familiar.

Peruvian artist Fernando Bryce makes pedestrian pen-and-ink copies of newspapers, propaganda broadsheets and photographs, which result in a dull Conceptual anthology of social strife that is a weak descendant of celebrated work by Gerhard Richter. Japanese artist Kaoru Arima doodles on white space in international newspapers, making wan personal diaries that are watered-down derivatives of On Kawara’s Conceptual rigor.

A graphic emphasis is also encountered in Julie Mehretu’s invigorating paintings, where architectural blueprints are one prominent element that informs her explosive linear style. It also undergirds Chiho Aoshima’s apocalyptic, digitally drawn, 40-foot wall mural, whose wide-eyed characters drowning in a flood of fire and lava derive from Japanese comics.

Where drawing is encountered most surreptitiously, though, is in the film and video animation by Katarzyna Kozyra, Paul Chan, Harun Farocki and Robert Breer. Animation is drawing in motion.

ANIMATION EFFORTS

Chan’s “Now Let Us Praise American Leftists” employs computer-modeling software used by police departments, but its tongue-in-cheek identification of “troublesome” social types through an analysis of facial hair is like a corny “Saturday Night Live” skit gone horribly wrong. Farocki makes ham-fisted montages using archival military-surveillance film and video.

Kozyra’s “The Rite of Spring” is a very witty but finally slight “ballet” constructed from thousands of still images of senior citizens posing in pagan “nude” costumes for an orgiastic, life-enhancing dance. (Inexplicably, the video is shown as an installation on a half-dozen screens suspended within a gallery.) The most compelling film animation is by Breer, a septuagenarian master of the genre. His “What Goes Up” is a scintillating, finally poignant exercise in the simple joy of being alive to human experience -- as might be guessed from the slyly erotic double-entendre of the film’s title. Breer’s inclusion is the show’s most delightful surprise.

The figurative painters Mamma Andersson, Peter Doig and Neo Rauch all share a fondness for staining, slathering on thick pigment, outlining, dribbling paint and more, all within a single canvas. Using multiple techniques breaks up the surface and makes the imagery visually discordant. Part of the aim is plainly to exploit painting’s distinctive advantage over the slick, seamless and repetitive surface of photographs.

In the case of Rauch, who was raised in East Germany and learned a Socialist Realist aesthetic, the hybrid quality of the paint handling is turned toward an especially productive end. Familiar imagery -- athletes, industrial landscapes, zoo animals -- is rendered exceedingly strange.

The other first-rate paintings in the show are by Mark Grotjahn, the only L.A. artist in this year’s Carnegie. Ten abstractions, each nominally monochrome, turn a long, narrow gallery into a light-filled chapel of luminous secular spirit.

Each vertical canvas is bisected by a wide band of color from which rays of similar hue emanate. The artist’s name appears to have been carved into the pigment along one edge, revealing a different color of under-painting -- lime beneath violet, for example, or green beneath crimson. Light catches the uniform linear brushstrokes, enhancing the radiance.

The paintings are strangely moving. Grotjahn calls the odd composition a butterfly, which seems purely for the purpose of description. For me it recalls the “star gate” in the final segment of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where two seemingly infinite planes of streaming color open a perceptual entry into another reality. The difference is that Grotjahn’s paintings let you know that there may be mystery hidden beneath the surface, but the surface alone offers sufficient wonders for a lifetime of discovery.

WHAT RESONATES

Among the other satisfying entries in the show are a touching suite of secular devotional paintings by Francis Alys, a hexagonal video installation on the theme of urban alienation by Ugo Rondinone and a “disco greenhouse” by Carsten Holler, which turns a Minimalist glass box into a walk-in laboratory experiment on visual and olfactory delirium. In all, only about one-quarter of the exhibition resonates.

More typical is Trisha Donnelly’s “Night Is Coming,” in which those portentous words, fading in and out of view, are projected above the museum’s flamboyant Neo-Classical grand staircase; or Jeremy Deller’s pop T-shirts and shopping bags in the museum store, each printed with a cliche such as “You are loved!” or “Wisdom is better than weapons of war.” Trite, academic gestures of Conceptual art seem especially snotty in this disconnected moment, when unspeakable human suffering is expanding.

The curator means to chronicle a shared intention among diverse artists -- an objective she describes in the catalog as “the search for what it is to be human.” But does that make sense as an organizing principle? For artists, shouldn’t that quality be a given? Are there really artists of significance today, or in earlier epochs, for whom that search didn’t matter?

The show’s predicament resides in the divergence between artistic intention, which is privately held, and the viewer’s actual encounter with art objects, environments and situations. Those don’t always allow for the artist’s private quest to go public, and that’s what happens too often here.