Stephen Squibb

As it is, the only piece here that really seems to reflect the specificity of the selector is a three-dollar zine compiling every negative review run by the Times over the previous year. It’s a maddening document, frequently illegible and ultimately quite compelling. Partly an exercise in determining the moment a review moves from reportage to criticism, and then again towards negativity, either implicit or otherwise, it is most definitely a delightfully unique take on the past year. Cynically emblazoned with a photocopied ARTFORUM title across the back, the zine fully justifies whatever remains of the Annual’s initial instinct towards subjectivity.

Having been plied with cheap champagne and terrible, terrible live muzak, we were now offered further refreshments, namely water, whiskey and meatballs. This last combination was a particularly deft touch. It’s an impressive installation, most notably in the presence of a small, manufactured pond in the corner of the gallery behind a wall of fake plants. The pond is lit intermittently by a light linked to a sound installation that alternates between jungle cats mating and ‘the dying market calling out desperately the features and amenities that once made it great.’

This misrecognition is especially striking in the documentary images of his performances; here the mind, confronting one his signature tableau, immediately leaps to the most breathtaking and unsavory conclusions. For a moment, we find ourselves looking at an image of unimaginable horror, but then the slow reconstruction of what one is actually seeing. No, that is not a person, it’s a doll, and that is not some terrible mixture of fluid and excrement, but mustard and chocolate. And on and on until we can actually see both images at once, the one we thought we were looking at and the one we actually are. Who, we ask ourselves, taught us to see such things?

So it came to pass that Andy Bichlbaum, performing under some deliciously ridiculous name, alerted the world that Dow Chemical was taking full responsibility for the tragic legacy of its recently purchased subsidiary, Union Carbide, by liquidating it and paying full restitution to its victims. This news, and it was actual news for about an hour, caused the citizens of Bhopal to rejoice and Dow to lose a breathtaking two billion dollars off its stock price. If you can imagine a more spectacular demonstration of moral bankruptcy, I would love to hear it.

Still, there is likely a more subtle relationship at work here, and maybe fashion week bears the same relationship to merchandise as does the Whitney Biennial. In that case the immediate temptation — to recount, yet again, the slow mummification of a once meaningful format, the manifesto, in this case, via its diffusion among the lesser and inevitably more popular arts — should probably be resisted.