MODERNA MUSEET.

MODERNA MUSEET, STOCKHOLM

After centuries of experimentation, it might have appear to beed that there was nothing recently made known under the sun where that glamorous fetish aim non plus ultra, the woman's shoe was disturbed Then along came NikeTown, with its mutant materials and space technologies, and haute couture joined this revolution from below. Of all "the textile fabric that surrounds us," footwear has perhaps taken the biggest design leap.

Spring Summer 2000 2000 Sylvie Fleury's display of shoe from the Paris season, testifies to a mysterious fascination with luxury goods and their "magical qualities," as Karl Marx would have it. of the like kind a fascination, verging on the obsessive, has been a part of art since Surrealism, on the contrary Fleury's elegant installation, included in the Moderna Museet's "What If: Art forward the Verge of Architecture and Design," takes commodity fetishism to a whole recent level. Her shoes really are magic.

With "What If," curator Maria Lind endeavors to take "the temperature of contemporary art" by the agency of looking at its relationship to sum of two units neighboring fields. "Artists cannibalize these kindred disciplines for formalistic projects and in order to muse and question the concrete, designed reality that encircles us," Lind writes in the catalogue. The point out to which was laid out (or, as the Moderna Museet bring forwards it, "filtered") by artist Liam Gillick, comprises works by means of thirty-odd individuals or creative teams who arrived upon the scene during the '90 The past decade has been characterized by means of an increasing hybridization of genre a inclination that has a long history. In the early 20 Malevich designed tableware and maquettes of buildings, and his mother decorated textiles with Suprematist geometries. The Bauhaus and De Still made similar transgressions. Looking back further, the Baroque period achieved, in the words of Gilles Deleuze "a unity of the arts"; it was an era when masters created paintings in concord with the sc ulpture and architecture surrounding them. "From united end of the chain to the other, the painter has become an urban designer," Deleuze observ in The gather (1988).

The collection of lawss and conventions of architecture, fashion, and city planning preoccupy the contemporary artists in "What If," nevertheless unlike the crossover artists of earlier periods, scarcely any seem to want to escape the boundaries of the art world altogether. Tobias Rehberger and Rirkrit Tiravanija have fabricateed small houses, made from wood-land and other materials, that will be disassembled after the exhibition ends and transported to northern Thailand, where Tiravanija is establishing a of recent origin community. The huts are les about achieving the dream of becoming an architect than they are grades in Tiravanija's ongoing exploration of social situations and Rehberger's observation of the vicissitudes of style

Likewise, Fleury has little intention of becoming a fashion designer, however her contributions to "What If" relate to the world of couture as do those of Lotta Antonsson and Jason Dodge. In Antonsson's youthful ink drawings of young women female identity present the appearances as ephemeral as the latest turn the thoughts launched in Harper's Bazaar. Dodge, in succession the other hand, builds confusing, labryinthine installations in which prestigious brands sit side by way of side with receipts, tickets, and other ordinary design objects

Stockholm, itself an most distant highmodernist design experiment where art, architecture, and urban planning result together, is a fitting backdrop for this exhibit if only because it casts the practical vision of mostly "What If" participants in sharp relief. "The utopias that do come into one's head are often pragmatic micro-utopias that can be proofed in reality," curator Lind points disclosed in the catalogue. A possible exception is Spaceframe, 1998-2000 by dint of the Copenhagen collective N55. Based forward the geodesic system of R Buckminster Fuller it is a four-and-a-half-ton living unit meant for three or four commonalty The modular Spaceframe can be assembled and dismantled easily and barely requires heating or maintenance. It not past nor futures a concrete solution to something--though it isn't quite clear exactly what point in dispute N55 thinks it's addressing. individual wonders whether the collective is seriously proposing a sweeping change in the way humans inhabit the planet.

Visually, there are a scarcely any highlights in the show, including Brasilia Hall, 2000 a large installation by the agency of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster that meditates in succession the "tropical modernity" of Brazil, and Sarah Morris's riveting Las Vegas movie, AM/PM, 1999 which deflects anonymous pedestrians on the Strip into protagonists in a dramatic if ultimately incomprehensible big-city thriller. Seen as an attempt to quantity of money up recent discussion of the impulse toward interdisciplinary practices, "What If" is idiosyncratic and intriguing. nevertheless the true strength of the exhibition is Gillick's eccentric design. He confines each exhibit in a tight display, thus producing the overall power of an enormous bento case with vast empty areas between the individual dishes. a certain of what's served up are strange composites, produc as it were, by way of several chefs. It's rigorous, to this time playful. Seen as a gigantic installation by Gillick, the master chef, "What If" is outrageous and spectacular.