Rebecca Nemser

FRIDA KAHLO’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird shows her in a jungle with butter­flies in her hair and a hummingbird dangling from a thorn necklace that pierces her neck, drawing small red drops of blood. “I never painted dreams,” she said. “I painted my own reality.”

“All these images are oblit­erated, defaced, lost. It’s about those marginal, mundane expe­ri­ences that are for some reason signif­icant to her. There are certain things about her work that are myste­rious. They remain myste­rious. And she trea­sures that mysteriousness.”

ROBERT WILSON’S VISION is struc­tured like a journey — a journey that moves from morning to night — from white to black — from the past to the future — from birth to death. A journey that has no beginning and no end, but all takes place in a timeless, endless present.

When you look up, all those frag­ments convey a vertig­inous sense of disin­te­gration, and decay. But when you look down, every­thing is compressed onto a single shiny surface, and it’s beau­tiful. All that debris — all that waste and pain — is trans­formed into art.

The prayers were long, thin strips of paper or canvas, newsprint, photographs, or tinsel, embell­ished with drawings, paint, cut‑outs, dried roses, gold leaf, buttons, beads. Some were abstract; some had words; others had musical nota­tions written on them. One prayer was made from a piece of old, paint‑splattered blue jeans, with a peace symbol and love beads.

Being inside MATT MULLICAN’s instal­lation is like being inside Matt Mullican’s mind — a dizzying expe­rience. He’s constantly clas­si­fying and re-ordering every­thing. “It’s the first time I’ve arranged my meaning as objects in space depicting my meaning,” he says.

SOPHIE CALLE borrows elements from detective novels, philo­sophical inves­ti­ga­tions, the film noir, the nouveau roman, docu­mentary photog­raphy, love letters, art movies, B-movies, John Cage’s theories of randomness, and Joseph Beuys’s actions. She combines them in star­tling ways, as medi­ta­tions on the myste­rious spaces between self and other.

The canvas curled back like a white wave. The light turned red. Silhou­ettes of dancers moved through the white space like brush­strokes moving across a picture plane. The light turned white. The ceiling rippled and billowed. Silence. White light. I was taking notes, and the only sound I could hear was the sound of my own writing. It was over.

Every viewer who chooses to partic­ipate will have a different expe­rience. For me, it was a moving medi­tation on loss, change, and getting a second chance. As one of the char­acters in William Faulkner’s novel The Wild Palms says, “Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.”

Standing at the center of the spiral, I see the backs of all the chairs facing away from me, and feel a tremendous shock of lone­liness and loss. Looking down from the balcony, I see that the chairs are the beginning of a spiral that could go on forever.

The Situ­a­tionists called for an art of excess, delirium, outrage, and social change. They believed that capi­talism had turned contem­porary life into a society of “spec­tacle” that its inhab­i­tants could only passively watch and consume. Situ­a­tionism would bring art out of the museums and into the streets, and sabotage the society of spec­tacle by creating situ­a­tions in which people could turn their own lives into a creative experience.

RITSUKO TAHO’s ever-changing instal­lation is a spare but elegant invi­tation to partic­ipate in a work of art, both literally and metaphor­i­cally – by bringing more leaves, and by making a leap of imag­i­nation that trans­forms a heap of trash on a vacant lot into a poem in silver and brown.

Sculptor JOHN UDVARDY sees the aesthetic possi­bil­ities in an old whittled paddle or a forked birch branch, and he knows how to make a curve from a green sapling. But most of all, he brings to his mate­rials a feeling that every mark matters: every stick, every thread, every shell, every bone.

As a very young man, OTTO PIENE saw the sky reflected in a sea at long last calm: “The feeling of being reborn has never left me.” Out of this rebirth came “a love for the sky, the desire to point at it, to show how beau­tiful it is, how it makes us live and feel alive.”

Artists and scien­tists. working in neon, laser, steam, smoke, video, pyrotechnics, film, inflated and flying sculpture, and other celestial navi­ga­tions, cele­brate the sky as a medium of expression, trans­mission, and space.