A six-by-eight foot cube of thin, sagging plywood boards forms the entryway to Barry McGee’s sprawling exhibition One More Thing at the cavernous Deitch Projects space on Wooster Street. Stepping into an installation of riotous color and noise through the door in the far right corner, you look back over your shoulder to discover that you have just emerged from a crappy-looking truck turned over on its side.

“I left for Japan on October 25, 1984, unsuspecting that this date would mark the beginning of a 92 day countdown to the end of a love affair.” So begins Exquisite Pain, Sophie Calle’s suite of photographs and texts centered on the experience of intimate rejection.

Portraits inevitably fail to capture our inner life, yet we continue to pose.

A young woman crouches in a crumbling interior, her dark hair and deeply outlined eyes contrast sharply with her pale skin and a dilapidated white wall.

On a crisp fall afternoon in Greenpoint where she lives and works, Marsha Pels sat down to talk about her work.

A single shot of an abandoned beach at low tide in jumpy, color super-8 film, Ana Mendieta’s "Bird Run" (1974) has a wistful quality of emptiness for most of its silent two-minute duration.

"Mixed media" in the art world has lately meant something very specific: the conglomeration of materials and techniques arranged in a gallery and dubbed "installation." But the mixing of mediums does not always happen in one work; rather, genres may be cross-pollinated through simultaneous and ongoing practices.

In the wake of backlash against huge group shows like Documenta 11 (“too political—where’s the art?”) and the Venice Biennale (“too difficult”), this year’s Whitney Biennial, if nothing else, will be remembered as a Biennial for the people.

From Tara Donovan’s Styrofoam cups to Scott Hug’s bedroom installation, the banal materials of everyday life appear everywhere as art these days.

From modest pale pink silk tucked away in the "Intimates" department of Bloomingdale’s to fetish leather and red lace in the window of Trash and Vaudeville, lingerie is ultimately nothing more than a support system, the fabricated foundation of the modern female form.

Mention the name Gary Simmons to anyone engaged with contemporary art over the last decade and they are almost certainly to conjure up images of gold basketball sneakers in a police line-up and pint-sized KKK robes.

Deitch Projects Brooklyn


Graffiti on subway cars, yellow signs for street names and numbers, and hand-lettered flyers for a "Rappers Convention" all point to signs of life before Puff Daddy. Tragically coinciding with the violent murder of Run DMC’s Jam Master J, Yes Yes Y’All tells the story of a more peaceful time in hip hop history from which groups like Run DMC emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In The History of Sexuality Volume 1, Michel Foucault examines how discourse around sexuality, particularly the notion of repression, functions to regulate, control, and re-inscribe dominate power relationships.

As his contribution to Strangers, the first Triennial of Photography and Video, Beat Streuli filled the street-level, story-high glass windows enclosing The International Center for Photography’s bland architectural box in midtown with larger-than-life sized color photographs of people walking the streets of New York. Like a Gap ad by Philip-Lorca diCorcia printed by Andreas Gursky, the images are seductive, otherworldly, and appealing. They are a good advertisement for ICP and its mission to increase its visibility in the art world, exemplified by the creation of its very own regular group survey of contemporary artists working with photographic media.

Thomas Ruff’s recent show of large color abstractions and fussily appropriate vintage negatives was a strange climax to the artist’s concurrent European retrospective and the publication of Nudes, his digitally blurred images of Internet pornography paired with text by the French enfant terrible novelist of the moment, Michel Houellebecq.

In a 2001 installation at the Vespa gallery, a pioneering alternative contemporary art space in Gdnansk, Poland, Dorota Nieznalska exhibited “The Passion,” a giant metal cross suspended from the gallery’s ceiling onto which was projected a nude male torso.

Looking at Queens International is a bit like taking the 7 train. The elevated line that travels from Times Square all the way to Corona Park where the Queens Museum of Art occupies the former grounds of the 1964 World’s Fair is generally crowded, colorful, and chaotic.

The drawings in the current retrospective of works on paper by the Amsterdam-based, white South African artist Marlene Dumas offer a fine example of art as a translation of the personal into a strong visual language of the familiar and the ordinary.

at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts If anything can characterize contemporary China, it is the experience of rapid social and environmental change.

Frigid and Disko Bay at Bellwether FRIGID: 1. Intensely cold; lacking warmth or ardor. 2. Lacking imaginative qualities. 3. Abnormally adverse to sexual intercourse – used esp. of women.

After a summer full of flashy group shows, Sharon Horvath’s Recent Paintings is a quiet shift towards a more subtle and contemplative exploration of idea with a coherent formal vocabulary.  Horvath draws inspiration from everything from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to Tantric diagrams of energy and color, but ultimately the work is about the artist’s own visual language.