International artists create diverse show

Carnegie international

Various Artists

Oct. 9 through march 20

Carnegie Museum of Art

4400… Carnegie international

Various Artists

Oct. 9 through march 20

Carnegie Museum of Art

4400 Forbes Avenue

(412) 622-3131

When the point of an exhibition is to showcase the greatest variety of art possible, the challenge becomes unity. The 2004 Carnegie International is incredibly varied by design, and it’s hard to think of a medium that’s not utilized somewhere in the show, but an overall characterization is very difficult to give.

Curator Laura Hoptman came from New York City, where she worked for 20 years before arriving in the completely new territory of Pittsburgh. There was some speculation before the opening of the show that her International — for referring to the triennial events as the property, or at least product, of the curator has now become the norm — would be more political than in years past. When asked if the events of September 11, 2001, were playing into the construction of the show, Hoptman responded simply “How could it not?”

And yet politics is not present everywhere in the show, even if the subject is certainly there. Harun Farocki’s “Eye/Machine” pieces are among the most obvious; they are montages of video taken from military surveillance, including images from cameras mounted on the ends of warheads. And while Farocki is far from being the only political artist, too many of the works are too apolitical for any specific ideology to be identified as an overarching concept.

The closest thing that Laura Hoptman’s sprawling, politicized show has to a greater theme is a difference of perspectives. Almost every piece seems to be concerned, in some manner, with a way of looking at things that’s not a first glance.

One might argue that art, especially contemporary art, could well be defined as a counterintuitive way of seeing the world. And, if one is to jump to a knee-jerk criticism of the show, it’s that very little of the art is particularly groundbreaking or surprising. But the artists of the International nonetheless seem to be preoccupied with accepted ways of viewing.

The subjects are old standbys of contemporary art, and usually signify the weakest moments of the International. There is war; there are gender issues — those afraid of nudity may want to consider avoiding this show, as the “adult content” warning signs are placed so sporadically as to be useless: sometimes halfway through a hall of pictures of naked people, sometimes out of view, but most of the time completely absent. There are issues of what art is — “we are all actors,” Pawel Althamer’s real-time movie suggests — and there are issues of culture differences. All the questions have been addressed before, and usually more effectively.

A real prize of the show is ceramicist Kathy Butterly, an established craftsman who made a lateral leap into the art world for the show. Her small, twisting creations are fun and serious, intricate and unpretentious.

Joining Butterly in crossing fields is biologist Carsten Holler, whose “Solandra Greenhouse” is, disappointingly, one of only two site-specific earthwork pieces in the International. Solandra produces pheromones that supposedly cause amorous feelings. Combining the plants with strobe lighting, Holler tries to artistically recreate falling in love.

Another strength of the show is its use of the museum, which becomes a piece of art at times. Weaving through the entire Carnegie Museum of Art and around the library and museum of natural history, the exhibition uses all the ample resources of Andrew Carnegie’s original building, embracing what many grand exhibitions are afraid of and fight against: its space.

One of the strongest pieces in the show is Jeremy Deller’s “Breaking News (Dedicated to Peter Watkins).” It is a fond memory of many Pittsburgh children to think of the first time they wandered the out-of-the-way corridor, between the halls of sculpture and architecture, where miniature rooms are recreated from various eras in history.

Deller has taken three of those rooms and mounted tiny televisions in them, each showing a battle from a war going on at the time in which the room is set. With whimsical anachronism, he makes the museum his canvas, but still makes a serious point that opulence and comfort can not always escape the bloody affairs of the world.

Senga Nengudi is another of the stronger artists in the exhibition. One group of her pieces is a series of abstract sculptures made from panty hose filled with sand. Another piece is an installation in a front hallway of the museum, made from sand. The installation plays upon the proximity of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and seems to resemble an excavation at first.

The show is not without its weak links — Trisha Donnelly’s performance art and sounds pieces are underwhelming at best and annoying at worst — and many of the artists create work that is adequate, but hardly revolutionary.

Hoptman seems to have gone too far out of her way to get a great deal of video in the show. One of the prime examples of this are the two theaters behind a fantastic mural by Chiho Aoshima, “Magma Spirit Explodes, Tsunami is Dreadful.” One theater has work by British artists Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, whose movies use some standard bizarre imagery to make some standard social points. The other has two parts of a series by trendy, young, Chinese auteur Yang Fudong.

While both parts have good imagery, they are each about 30 minutes long, making them an impractical choice for a museum exhibition, where audience attention span is usually exhausted by the five-minute mark.

Overall, though, the International is a strong show, even if it is not fully up to the hype that precedes and surrounds its opening. There are too few pieces of cutting-edge art — but the issues that the International reprises, for the most part, it does well.

The bad news is that it costs $2 to go, but the good news is that it will be here until March, and you can get more for your money by going with a docent, which is much better than reading the insufferably pretentious and highfalutin gallery guidebook (One artist, it notes, believes his works are “little windows” into “a more spiritual plane; one that the artist may or may not believe exists.” Please.)

If nothing else, the three years of effort and the big names make the International one of the most important art events in Pittsburgh, even if there’s little chance of discovering the next big thing among its works. And besides, to be this close to something as big as the International, and not to take advantage of it, would be criminal.