Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect - Christopher Grimes - Los Angeles

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck with Media Farzin


Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin’s exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery, ‘Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect’, casts Alexander Calder and his docile abstractions as the unlikely protagonists in a tale of international intrigue, a tangled narrative tracing the twinned histories of the US interest in Venezuelan and Iranian oil following World War II. The story takes us from a Caracas hotel owned by Nelson Rockefeller to MoMA in the 1940s, from atomic test sites in the Bikini Atoll to Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art and housing developments by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. It threads through maps, photographs, Calder replicas and Calder-esque installations, a haze of scholarly quotations, and the pages of New York Magazine (which ran an article titled ‘Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect’ in January 1954). The catch, of course, is that none of this is fictional: Calder played a significant role in the large-scale propaganda efforts undertaken by the US as it sought to cultivate new diplomatic relations and gain oil reserves during and after the war.

The objects which drive Farzin and Yazbeck’s story are almost too good to be true, conveying a historical moment – and its ironies and tensions – with minimal means and maximum force. The miniature Model of Alexander Calder’s Tower with mobile, 1943 (2007-9) highlights a period in Calder’s career when he drew upon the hulking skeletons of oil derricks, of all things, as inspiration for his metal-frame sculptures.R.S.V.P, 1939 (2007-9) is a reproduction of an invitation conceived by former MoMA staff member Frances Collins and a professional printer friend. The expensive, flowery invite sarcastically invites guests to the opening of the ‘new museum of standard oil’. Its front is stamped with a small crown above the motto ‘Oil that glitters is not gold’ – a dig at Rockefeller (then president of MoMA). (Rockefeller may be the most infamous embodiment of the collusion between private and government interests that characterized the time: as the head of intelligence in Latin America during the war, he commissioned MoMA to arrange several art exhibitions which toured the region.)

Relying as it does upon historical narrative and extensive wall copy, this type of show – the critical presentation of information gathered through extensive research – risks becoming textually top-heavy. Visual material can easily become only illustrative, and is not always an adequate counter-weight to sheer factual overload. What saves ‘Cultural Diplomacy’ is its focus upon Calder’s artistic output as the ground for a particularly topical history lesson. If Calder’s work – unthreatening, expedient – is shown to have been uniquely suited to a specific Cold War political agenda, Farzin and Yazbeck take him up once again as a sort of blank slate.

The centrepiece in this exercise is Didactic Panel and Model of Alexander Calder’s Vertical Constellation with Bomb, 1943 (2007-9), featuring a miniaturized sculpture where a ‘constellation’ of bulbous white wooden forms seem to ricochet from the impact of a rocket which hovers just to the side. An accompanying textbook diagram is subtly altered: each of the sculpture’s forms are labeled, many in joking congruence with their shape. Churchill is bulbous, Stalin appears to wear a bulky hat, and the meeting of Einstein and Hitler in a distant corner transforms the entirety into a teasing conspiracy theory, still shaped by Calder’s unmistakable hand.

‘Cultural Diplomacy’ evades the convenient narrative structures of cause and effect, or the presentation of wrongs to be righted, for an earnest and even playful exercise in history-writing. In just one of the many instances in which Farzin and Yazbeck show how the vicissitudes of multiple historical moments – including our own – might cluster around a single object, in Didactic Panel a running narration of parallel events (1945: authorization of the Manhattan project) (2007-9) stands in quiet contrast to Calder’s ominously vague statements of the time: ‘the sculpture had the suggestion of some kind of cosmic, nuclear gases – which I won’t try to explain. I was interested in the extremely delicate, open composition’.



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Continental Rifts - Fowler Museum - Los Angeles

Contemporary Time-based works from Africa


A number of recent exhibitions have taken it upon themselves to complicate prevailing conceptions of Africa as a monolithic culture or ‘global problem’. Shows like the traveling ‘Africa Remix’ (2005) and last year’s ‘Flow’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem sought to combat misplaced generalizations with a barrage of specificities, bringing together large numbers of artists from across the continent in a celebratory display of Africa’s teeming heterogeneity. Such an approach largely reiterates a view of the continent as a singular whole – albeit one now appreciated for its diversity.

‘Continental Rifts’ smartly takes five artists who are cited as ‘deeply connected’ to Africa, yet who are positioned in, outside and around the continent in such a way that they can hardly be seen as part of an equation ‘adding up’ to an African whole. Alfredo Jaar, Berni Searle, Yto Barrada, Cláudia Crostóvão and Georgia Papageorge were born in Chile, South Africa, France and Angola, often to parents of different nationalities (Moroccan, Portuguese); they live and work in equally diverse locations. The artists’ repeated distancing from and returns to Africa have led to their common conviction that the place is fundamentally elusive, impossible to pin down.

The real strength of ‘Continental Rifts’ is its curatorial model. If each artist suggests that myth (both personal and public) is one way of understanding place, curator Mary Nooter Roberts utilizes myth to productively re-specify old disciplinary ‘spaces’ – the over-generalized concepts of both ‘Africa’ and ‘African art’.

The loose and allegorical video sequences of Searle and Papageorge benefit from company. The presence of other videos – that engage more explicitly with myths of family and media – show Searle’s and Papageorge’s works to be mythifying endeavours too. Home and Away (2003) shows Searle floating quietly in the Mediterranean strait between Morocco and Spain, embodying the fluidity of national identity; Papageorge’s Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire: Namibia/Brazil (2001) documents long strips of red cloth – indicated as symbols of ‘both rupture and reconciliation’ in the exhibition text – as they flap loudly in the wind along the Brazilian and Namibian coasts.

Africa consistently appears as the object of entangled fiction and fact. In Crostóvão’s short, two-screen video, The Imaginary Journey (2008), a young man wistfully recites an imagined trip to his birthplace, where his parents buried a family treasure before being forced to flee the country. He reminisces in the future tense: ‘To be able to say, “I was there, your house is still standing...’’.’ The accompanying video of city streets is punctuated with poignant images of an empty house which has filled almost entirely with sand. In contrast, in Fata Morgana (2005-6), Crostóvão interviews individuals born in Africa though who left as children. The documentary slides quickly into humour as people express the most ardent and incongruous of opinions regarding a place that they hardly remember.

Alfredo Jaar’s ten-chapter film Muxima (2005) takes on African histories of war, AIDS and the church – issues that the media routinely brings into distorted focus for a global audience. If the traditional Bantu song chosen by Jaar invigorates some scenes – a motor boat carrying five stoic men staring straight ahead seems to be driven forward by the music itself – it is completely unmemorable in others: a heart-in-mouth sequence which follows a young man as he hunts land mines in dense undergrowth is so riveting that the music hardly matters. In a similarly documentary vein, Barrada records an amicable garden meal in Tangiers (The Botanist, 2007); colour photographs trace the contest between iris tingitana (Moroccan iris) and encroaching commercial developments outside of the city (Iris Tingitana, 2007).

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Walead Beshty - LAXART - Los Angeles

In typical Walead Beshty form, 'Passages' imbues indexical traces with a conceptual heft and aesthetic appeal that is nearly impossible not to find seductive. X-ray lines relay an unexposed film's transit across borders; a mirrored floor's expanding web of cracks testifies to the passage of visitors through the gallery; a series of black and white slides bears witness to the demise of the American shopping mall; a billboard on nearby La Cienega Boulevard shows enlarged dust particles from Los Angeles' notoriously smoggy atmosphere. There are no loose ends here. Yet the overwhelming neatness of Beshty's presentation establishes an unsettling neutrality around the far more complex realities documented by his work.

In the series Passages, (2009) a series of nebulous large-scale colour prints confesses its trajectory through an airport X-ray machine in the form of blurred lines and hazy irregularities. Echoing the processes of fingerprinting and body scans used in the increasingly politicized zone of the airport, the images are an appreciable evocation of the legislative and ideological transformations of a post- 9/11 world, as felt by every traveler. (The project is an intentional exercise stemming from an earlier accident, when film Beshty had taken of the deserted Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in Berlin was run through x-ray machines during his travels - and later shown at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.) They are also thoroughly charming abstract fields of fading colour: the new systems of corporeal degradation exercized in airports since September 2001, which establish a state of exception as a civic norm, are rendered oddly palatable.

Beshty's accompanying projects similarly circle around the notion of 'having been there': Untitled (2009), a reflective floor of cracked, shatter-proof glass, progressively deteriorates as it is walked upon by visitors, in a reiteration of another of Beshty's Whitney Biennial installations, where cubes of glass were shipped in standardized FedEx boxes, gathering the marks of their journey as they went.

The slide projection American Passages (2001-ongoing) is a black-and-white eulogy to the deserted shopping malls of middle America. Beshty himself likens the series to the late-19th-century archives of Eugène Atget and Charles Marville, who created their photographic records of France's urban and architectural past on the eve of its disappearance. Beshty's dissolving slides are accompanied by a distilled version of the soundtrack to the shopping mall zombie film of 1978, 'Dawn of the Dead'.

As Beshty's emphasis on facticity - his unabashed fetishization of the indexical - becomes increasingly apparent, it becomes less clear as to exactly why he wants us to believe in the unaltered reality of his subjects. If Passages' large-scale photographs take on the airport as a newly important political terrain, it reflects no real desire to inspire political conviction. Beshty recently noted that, 'The prints are seductive, and there's nothing wrong with that. They'd look good over a couch: that's fine.' Nor does American Passages constitute a nostalgia-driven plea for the preservation of obsolete regional shopping centres: the malls shown as empty and unused often still function in new ways - as community gathering places where people exercise, eat at the food courts, or just hang out.

The trio of works at LAXART are at once rooted in fact and indifferent to it. Paradoxically, Beshty's romanticization of the index only distances us from its referents in the airport, the shopping centre, or the gallery. We are left uncomfortably unsure as to what extent to the artist engages with the situations he addresses; and yet, in provoking this shadowy dissatisfaction, Beshty challenges our notions of 'engagement' as an artistic obligation. His timely observations and dexterous manipulations of visual fact leave a lingering uncertainty: what kind of inquiry does 'Passages' actually make? Is it an inquiry at all, or an adroit exercise in deflection?

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Hard Targets - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

'Hard Targets: Masculinity and Sport' sets out to investigate constructions of masculinity as they appear in mainstream athletic culture, through the work of artists Mark Bradford, Harun Farocki, Brian Jungen, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Collier Schorr and Joe Sola. Curator Christopher Bedford is concerned with representation: he wants to reform an archetype, a symbolic figure – the ‘masculine’ subject as it is presented through the rituals of sport. Such archetypes certainly populate the broader discursive field that surrounds athletic practice: they are consistently reiterated in the press, by sport fans, and in the cinema. As legible stereotypes they are easy enough to ‘unmask’, and Jungen and Bradford do so with some wit. Other works resist this particular framework. Schorr and Leonardo, for example, point to how individual athletes develop their identities on the playing field, where standards of physical capability act as a foil to – and in some cases transcend – a gendered vision of identity.

For his series Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005), Jungen stitched Nike Air Jordan sneakers into sculptures that resemble the masks, sticks and ceremonial accessories produced by the First Nations of the Northwest Coast. Jungen’s work begins and ends with the objects themselves. He positions his ‘prototypes’ as a critique of athletic branding and capitalist consumerism in general, expressing deep skepticism towards the idea that identity of any sort can be bought and sold. Although he does not directly intervene in, or appropriate from, the realm of advertising, Bradford riffs on the mainstream media’s perpetuation of a specialized iconography linking sport and masculinity. In his video Practice (2003), the artist – a tall, young black man – casts himself in the legible stereotype of an American basketball player. A close-up video shows the artist as he feints, bounces a ball and throws hoops: his uniform, in the Los Angeles Lakers’ iconic purple and yellow, is a cumbersome billowing skirt. Bradford’s athlete is positioned in antagonistic opposition to his uniform, a signifier which reduces the individual to gender, team and number, and which Bradford literalizes as an encumbrance.

Leonardo and Schorr focus on athletic practice itself. They position the body as an abstract entity whose ability to perform within sport’s matrix of physical demand and temporal immediacy dominates individual players’ ongoing efforts to establish and maintain athletic identity. Sport’s defining standards are shown to routinely push questions of gender aside.

Schorr’s photographs of half-naked adolescent wrestlers present singular moments of intense mental concentration and physical strain. 152 lbs (H.T.) (2003) shows a young man’s head and torso as he hangs from an unseen support outside the image’s frame. Covered in a sheen of sweat, his downturned face grimaces at the approaching pain, muscles straining against a counter-force which, it appears, may out-do him. Rather than ‘freezing’ a moment or ‘stopping’ time, Schorr’s record of lived bodily experience becomes an index of the perpetually ongoing, moment-to-moment mental engagement of athletes. Leonardo’s sculpture Bull in the Ring (2008) emphasizes a very similar point. A large ring of ominous black football helmets hang from the ceiling, facing inwards toward a final helmet which hangs alone – replicating a football drill in which individual players are trained to prepare for attack from all sides. Leonardo’s helmets are stand-ins for individual bodies, hollow shells which make a presence out of absence and evoke a sort of ghostly physicality. As supplements to a set of invisible bodies, Leonardo’s symbolic prosthetics suggest that athletes are fundamentally defined by their ability to perpetually push their own physical limits.

‘Hard Targets’ neglects to distinguish between a broader ‘culture of sport’ and actual sporting practice. Such a distinction would perhaps lay the ground for a more explicit investigation of their overlap – their conflicts and complicities – and would greatly illuminate the works selected. Harun Farocki’s Deep Play (2007) is characteristic of this. The 12-screen film shows how sport provides a formal site for the construction of identity through conforming to (or resisting) a set of over-drawn ‘masculine’ ideals construed in terms of emotion, of physical prowess, and of pain. The work is a hypnotic rendering of the 2006 World Cup championship between France and Italy. Alongside (and atop) documentary evidence the artist presents multiple, real-time schematized views of the game. Players challenge each other, butting chests. They insult one another; they engage in utterly transparent histrionics. And yet the presence of Farocki’s digitized moving schemas on top of real-time television coverage shows this all to be an ongoing sham. The trajectories of players’ movements, each traced as a coloured line, eventually accumulate into an abstracted knot – we cannot tell where choreographed movement ends, and where players depart from the ‘masculinized’ theatrical script, to exert their own will to act. This is a knot which athletes themselves cannot unravel.

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Street Level - ICA - Boston

(Originally appeared Frieze magazine Nov-Dec 2008.)

At the Boston ICA's 'Street Level', artists Mark Bradford, William Cordova, and Robin Rhode scrape, scratch, layer, draw, and dance in an effort to get under the skin of the cities they call home. 19 works – video, sculpture, giant canvases – face off across three smallish rooms. Their sheer proximity pushes them into dialogue; conversation proves to be electric. Physical artefacts and visual codes from Los Angeles, Lima, Miami, New York, Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Berlin shift across media, uniquely reified as each artist formulates his own 'language of the street'. In a world obsessed with reserving space, space, and more space for art display, ICA associate curator Jen Mergel's savvy rehanging of 'Street Level' (originally organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University) suggests that there is no such thing as too small.

Bradford's large-scale cartographic canvases are a case in point: the fact that they are partially about shifts in scale eases their transition into the galleries' modest space. Layered posters from the Los Angeles streets – worn, torn and faded – provide a topographical base for street grids made up of lengths of string and neon cut-outs. Bradford's transferral to canvas of the color codes used by city utility workers is a quietly insistent class commentary – a politicisation of the familiar bird's-eye view which is echoed in another of his projects, currently at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles. At Steve Turner, Bradford has painted a jagged message – 'HELP US' – on the roof, in pointed imitation of the devastating scene that helicopter rescuers (and president George W. Bush) would have seen in the aftermath of the 2005 hurricane Katrina.

Bradford's Black Wall Street (2006) [top image] at the ICA is punctuated by two bursts of red, yellow, white and blue: city blocks shaded in hots and colds suddenly look like a pair of exploding stars in space. Cordova, too, elevates one of his recurring ciphers – the lowly automobile tire – to a celestial level in daniel boone, pat boone, y mary boone (or firestone) (2006-2007), a large-scale collage hung directly across from the mammoth 'Black Wall Street'. Hundreds of glossy tires cut out from advertisements are sprinkled across a sheet of paper in an exquisite, make-shift Milky Way. Discarded tires are but one of the common body of objects which unite Cordova's drawings, collages, and installations. As tires, broken stereo speakers, stacks of old records, and used books pile up across his work, we are faced with the problem of accumulation. What to do with these objects we once so rabidly accrued, which are now a burden? Wholesalers, Retailers, & Bullshitters (2005) sets the mood: a small container truck, covered in grafitti and missing a wheel, is at sea on an opulent flat ground of gold leaf. Bereft and damaged, the truck – once a glorious carrier of goods for mass consumption – is itself now valueless. But Cordova is determined to make us acknowledge, and even treasure, such detritus.

Any old object will do for Robin Rhode: for him, it's more about the how and the where of their use. Rhode's videos and still photographs are conceived as successive frames which trace a Muybridge-like flow of stop-action movement. He himself is the main actor in his mini-performances, which he stages in Johannesburg's public spaces and in a Berlin studio. But most of his props are two-dimensional – nothing more than silhouettes drawn on a wall or a floor. In Catch Air (2003), Rhode appears to skateboard weightlessly through a half-pipe chalked on the ground; in Untitled, Dreamhouses (2005), he catches a downpour of falling cars, tables, and chairs with super-human strength; and in Untitled, Harvest (2005), he reaps a bed of tall-stemmed spray-painted flowers with long, sweeping cuts. Rhode's transposition of a typically photographic process into drawing is brilliantly done: the marks of erasure left after re-drawing his props for each shot are utterly convincing as the false index of his props' trajectories through three-dimensional space.

Critics frequently invoke Rhode's background as a mixed-race South African to explain his choice of objects, setting, and media, but the Rhode brought out by 'Street Level' is one whose 'urban-ness' resists the hasty imposition of identity politics. His settings (rubble-filled alleys), his costuming (a sporty uniform of track suit, sneakers, and knitted cap), and his grafitti approach all testify that this thinking artist is also a city boy who knows what he's talking about. If Bradford's knowing reprisals of the bird's-eye view single out the social inequalities and injustices built into so many urban environments, Rhode's scenarios offer half-real, half-imagined alternatives – singular moments where, in the asphalt back-lots of Johannesburg, he manages to transcend the constraints of the everyday. Beginning with objects and viewpoints that feel eminently familiar, all three artists send us on a merry journey of associations, only to give us pause when their diverse visual innuendos accumulate to do what every well-designed language should: give novel expression to their beliefs, beautifully.

Profile: Tatiana Trouvé, artist

(Originally appeared Art Monthly magazine).In the late 90s, the Paris-based artist Tatiana Trouvé began working on the series of drawings and installations that would later become her breakthrough project, the Bureau d'Activités Implicites (Office of Implicit Activities). The BAI immersed viewers in an isolated environment where objects and activities were organized with exaggerated specificity, according to Trouvé's own criteria. Although she has vastly widened the scope of her more recent projects, Trouvé continues to conceive of them in the manner of the original BAI – as a series of highly controlled, closed systems. 'The aleatory', Trouvé has said, 'must be completely constructed'.[1]

Born in Italy in 1968, Trouvé studied fine arts at the Villa Arson in Nice before making her home in Paris. Now one of France's most prominent young contemporary artists, she first began attracting attention in 2001 when she received the prestigious Prix Ricard. By this time, Trouvé had been working on the BAI for nearly five years. The BAI was an evolving series of discrete architectural 'modules' with the partial openness of office cubicles, but gutted, re-shaped, and made of varying materials according to their contents. For the most famous of the modules, the Module administratif (Administrative Module), Trouvé fought paper with paper, organizing, manipulating, and cataloguing the numerous rejection letters she received as she entered the highly bureaucratized French art world. The Module à reminiscence (Reminiscence Module) consisted of a sealed, mirrored cylinder containing archived memories on scraps of paper. In both, the contents of the modules were efficiently sealed up and stamped with function-oriented titles – an air-tight approach which discouraged any search for meaning outside the systematically re-constituted worlds of the BAI.

In 2000, Trouvé began transforming of a series of miniature architectural models that had once occupied the BAI into full-fledged, three-dimensional sculptural installations called polders. This marked a transitional point in her work: in later projects, she has displayed an increasing interest in extending the scope of her immersive exhibitions to include an explicit – yet always intensely controlled – investigation of multiple dimensions. At full-size, polders are half the scale of the objects they take after: chairs, gymnastics equipment, and other furnishings. By subtly manipulating objects whose standard size viewers were accustomed to relating to their own, Trouvé also heightened their awareness of the exhibition space as a total environment. In the face of Trouvé's shrunken polders, viewers felt oversized – newly aware of the surrounding space, and their place within it.

Trouvé's current Centre Pompidou exhibition, '4 between 3 and 2', (which she was invited to design as the 2007 recipient of the Prix Marcel Duchamp) extends the polders' spatial games one step further, easing viewers through a series of dimensional shifts, as hinted at by the exhibition's title. The exhibition – one of a number of upcoming shows, including projects at Manifesta 7, the Turin Triennial, and the Kunsthall in Bergen, Norway – features drawings, sculptures, waist-high glass doors which open off the main gallery space into miniature mirrored passages, and two growing piles of black sand.

Formal consistency is a linchpin of Trouvé's work: her totalizing aesthetic drives our own desire to believe completely, and lose ourselves in, her worlds. The three-dimensional works in '4 between 3 and 2' are highly linear compositions, and familiar forms move smoothly between free-standing installations and two-dimensional drawings. A rope tossed into the air is fixed in place as it reaches its peak, freezing a moment in time. Yet the attenuated cast-iron installation looks more like an exquisite scribble from one of the neighboring drawings than something one can walk around. In turn, Trouvé's drawings are extension environments of the typically monotone gallery space: bare rooms or slices of deserted landscape house strange objects (in the form of metallic appliqués) resembling Trouvé's sculptures. Other props – metal bedframes and tables; what appear to be generators, old radios, and heaters – are distinguished by the same subdued hues, industrially-produced lines, and metallic fittings that have come to be Trouvé trade-marks.

Some of Trouvé's most compelling works are drawings. In a 2005 volume of illustrations entitled Djinns, her investigation of multiple, interchangeable worlds corresponds closely to her games across multiple dimensions in '4 between 3 and 2'. (The title of the book, which also includes an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and a text by Arno Geiger, is a reference to Trouvé's childhood spent in Senegal, where it is widely believed that djinns, or spirits, coexist in a world parallel to our own.) Djinns compiles new and re-worked drawings of environments and objects of Trouvé's imagining, acting as a hermetic capsule within which we are nonetheless granted complete freedom of movement. Printed on a range of different papers – rough, smooth, transluscent, opaque – in varying tones, the book's format allows Trouvé to layer her worlds as she layers pages.

Of Djinns, she has said: 'I would very much like this book to construct a kind of progression, as if one opened a door giving access to a room, then from there access to another, and I would like this journey to be psychological first and foremost.'[2] For all the fluidity of movement across dimensions at the Centre Pompidou exhibition – from four to three to two, and back again – one has the impression of being carefully led by a guiding hand. Apparent escape routes all prove to be false. Upon close scrutiny, it becomes clear that the enigmatic mirrored passages opening off the main gallery simply turn a right angle, leading back to the same enclosed space where one stands.

At '4 between 3 and 2', two small holes in the wall let in silent streams of black sand which mount in spreading piles on the floor. Trouvé has spoken of this mesmerizing work as a vector which draws viewers to imagine the invisible, corresponding space which is gradually emptied as the gallery itself fills with sand.[2] But a far more preoccupying issue is this unknown place's effect on the immediate environment we occupy. The sand continues flowing with an hourglass' quiet urgency: eventually her universe will fill up completely. Even as she punches through the retaining walls of her multidimensional world, seemingly opening it up, Trouvé reminds us of its closed, limited nature.


[1] 'Il faudra que l'aléatoire soit complètement construit.' From an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in the artist's book Djinns (2005). Translated into English in Djinns as 'The random has to be constructed.'
[2] Ibid.
[3] In 'Tatiana Trouvé', Violane Boutet de Monvel. Art Review no. 23, June 2003.

Images courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris.

Jan Mot Gallery - Brussels

Jan Mot Gallery's current exhibit is called 'The title of this show is a list that includes the dates in which each of the exhibited works were first made, the dates in which some of them were remade by the artists and the dates in which they were last shown'. There's no hope now: if you have finished reading, you are already hurtling headlong into the conceptual loop established by artist-curator Mario Garcia Torres and the artists William Anastasi, Eduardo Costa, Dan Graham, and Stephen Kaltenbach.

Works include Lee Lozano's Time (classified as 'date to be completed'), comprised of two strings stretched between four nails, and strung through a small metallic disk (owned by Kaltenbach and listed under his name); Kaltenbach's Modern Drapery (1968), an oval piece of felt whose folded presentation is reconfigured by each new installer; and William Anastasi's Subway Drawings (n.d.), seismographic scribbles where the artist put pencil to paper and let the movement of the train guide his hand.

Despite their visual understatement, we would be wrong to take these pieces as exercises in aesthetic or conceptual reductionism. Where reduction implies the pursuit of a 'zero point' – prohibiting the extension of a work's meaning beyond its self-stated limits – the works on display are united by their conscious accommodation of outside interference. Ceding control of his work's presentation, Kaltenbach hands over his auctorial authority to an unknown individual, while Anastasi's drawings are equally as much an index of the train's movement as the artist's own autographic mark.

Demanding an altered understanding of the role of the author and the status of the artworks themselves, Kaltenbach and Anastasi question the same terms which are taken up by the exhibition's title, and thrown even more drastically into crisis by Eduardo Costa's corresponding artwork, A Piece That Is... (1969 - 2008). Costa's contribution is an enlarged, framed typewritten sentence which reads: 'A piece that is essentially the same as a piece made by any of the first conceptual artists, dated two years earlier than the original and signed by somebody else. Eduardo Costa 1970'.

In the exhibition title, the compulsive practice of specifying dates to establish an artistic genealogy takes on a slightly ridiculous edge – and underscores the slippery status of the events being chronologically pinpointed. Costa, too, tangles us up in time in order to cast doubt on the status of the art object itself, establishing a cycle of uncertainty which continues ad infinitum: is the typewritten sentence of A Piece That Is... an example of the endeavor it describes, a later 'copycat' work falsely dated two years early? Or does it represent precisely the opposite, the paradigm of conceptual originality – an initial, original move designed to engender follow-up works whose very form would serve as Costa's authorial stamp in perpetuity? I'd go with the latter. If the display of these artists side-by-side shows one thing, it is how they revel in the convoluted system into which they have been born. Costa and the others are trapped in a maze of someone else's making, but they respond with gleeful high jinks – driven more by the prankster's faith in the perpetuation of mischief than the reformer's impulse to destroy.

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