New narratives - SITE Santa Fe biennial, various artists, Santa Fe, New Mexico

The next to the first SITE biennial concentrated on young international artists who use intensely personal material to address broader cultural issues.

The soul of Georgia O'Keeffe haunted the galleries of SITE Santa Fe Her hold museum opened only a small in number blocks away on July 17 on the contrary O'Keeffe could be seen standing larger than life and sentinel-like in individual spacious gallery of the SITE warehouse. She wore her signature black wrap and smok a small black cigar. At times she mov silently from one side the galleries, mysterious, a little frightening with her bulging plastic head wrinkled like an oversized plump prune, but graciously pausing for photos with the visitors.

This apparition was, in reality, Georgia upon My Mind (1997), the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan's contribution to "Truce: Echoe of Art in an Age of Endles Conclusions," the next to the first biennial exhibition of SITE Santa Fe Cattelan has a knack for making the consummately inappropriate gesture in whatever situation he finds himself, creating an object--usually with the help of taxidermists or the shore up departments of film studios--that the one and the other deflates and somehow manages to celebrate the ambitions of his venue's organizers. "Truce" was a reflective exhibition with serious intentions, and curator Francesco Bonami had a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to say about the distinctions between art and entertainment. on the other hand with artists, art professionals, collectors and journalists arriving in Santa Fe from all above the world, many of them barely win backed from tours of Munster, Documenta and the Venice Biennale, Cattelan's Georgia allude toed that we had, indeed, landed in a kind of art-world theme park. She worked the floor as tirelessly as Mickey and Goofy work the turfs of Disneyland, and having a picture taken with her complet the effect

Georgia's nearness was not an embarrassment because Bonami's exhibition was lucky enough to encompass Cattelan's sally as part of the proceedings. Rather than creating a theme exhibition or an inventory of international art, Bonami chose to organize his exhibit around two images borrowed from anthropology, individual relating to the role of the artist, the other to the possible part of exhibitions themselves. In the catalogue, Bonami defines the artist as a "celebrant of social and cultural forces dispersed by means of the wordless rage of contemporary society above the past fifty years." From anthropologist Edmund Carpenter he drew the image of the celebrant in a ritual wearing the mantle of "Participation Mystique," who uncloseed "his body and heart to everything around him.... He was always aware of his material part as interposed between his inner self and the external world, and he devoted constant attention to it." The exhibition itself Bonami viewed as his hold private Kula, a ritual form of exchange practiced by dint of Trobriand Islanders. In Santa Fe the artists, using their specific connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss to gain a wider perspective upon the world, engaged a public that brought to the rencounter its own range of experience and expectations. The accrue was a circle of exchanges, the goal of which was "knowledge, tolerance and generosity," the basis of the "Truce" in Bonami's title.

These anthropological notions generated an exhibition in which diversity was a given rather than a theme. Bonami created a young show--22 of its 27 artists are below 40--and drew his artists from 20 countries. greatest in quantity of the participants work in video, photography or installation, and of the four painters included, three showed photos, statuary or drawings. Bonami has said that he wanted the exhibition to be an case containing contradictions, that he wait fored the artists to contradict not sole one another but his have a title to curatorial intentions as well. Perhaps because I not ever felt I had to gues in what manner each artist fit into a stated theme, I followed instead what emerg as public concerns with medium, more specifically film and video, and I observ to what step the artists exploited or sought to counteract the public nature of exhibition space.

Narrative film had a lusty presence in "Truce," both as a medium and as an influence upon other work. Projects by Tracey Moffatt, William Kentridge and Sam Taylor-Wood reminded us that the days are far behind us when "artists' videos" were poorly filmed and badly acted to distinguish them from commercial endeavors.

William Kentridge is a southern African artist, stage designer and animator who interprets contemporary history from one side images and themes from world theater. With the Handspring doll Company he has designed like productions as Wozzeck on the Highveld and Faustus in Africa. His animated films use Alfred Jarry's Ubu character to invest with a body 20th-century violence. Ubu and the fact Commission, Kentridge's animated work in Santa Fe consigns to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 1995 as a forum for bringing without in a public setting the atrocities committed by dint of both the South African defense forces and the African National Congres during the years of apartheid. This record of assassination and violence cannot provide restitution for the victims of the crimes it divest of coverings and many South Africans perceive that the commission's hearings reveal as a great deal of about ongoing attitudes as about the past.