Lucy McKenzie

The work of Glasgow-based artist Lucy McKenzie can be seen in solo exhibitions at Cabinet, London, from one side July, and at the ICA Boston this fall.

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1 DEATHWATCH Bertrand Tavernier's depressing projection of tomorrow's world gathered an international all-star cast in manky Glasgow in 1980--long before its cappuccino facelift. Released upon DVD last year as La Mort en direct, the film is marked through a Gaelic, philosophical tone locate in sharp relief against the stodgy socialist backdrop of Scotland at that time. Tavernier's prescience of reality TV is what's immediately striking, on the contrary so is his canny identification of a Glaswegian sensibility. Those familiar with Alasdair Gray's 1981 novel Lanark will note the similarity to Unthank, the Glasgowinspired fictional fantasy town in which the municipal buildings have been sold to private developer and mass entertainment masks cultural, economic, and emotional impoverishment.

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2 VARIANT (www.variant.randomstate.org) Glasgow is neither a microcosm nor an outpost of the general art world on the other hand has an idiosyncratic community and history of its have Variant, a free magazine and Web archive rested in 1996, represents a subgroup of that community: the critical Left While its stance is many times familiar, the magazine continues to bring out fiercely independent writing on pertinent inequities of the like kind as the privatization of the benefits combination of parts to form a whole in the UK and the discontinuation of the visualarts program at the city's Tramway space. Using the narrative of its have a title to persistent funding problems to address the constraints of cultural r tape below New Labour, Variant exposes the diminished freedom of other art magazines, which in comparison have possession of what can only be described as a service industry.

3 MEMORIAL OF THE useful OLD TIME, 1987 Martin Kippenberger's preposterous life-size inflatable skip is an uninviting black opening in which celebratory good vibes can be safely disposed of It was a lock opener work in the recent "Nach Kippenberger" at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, in which it embodied his work's fundamental resistance to simplification. There is just no way into this thing; its monumental status highlights Kippenberger's refusal to be marbleized.

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4 DENIM AND ANDREAS DORAU Completely unconnected--except from one side their affinity for equally high-pitched clap psychosis--are the musicians Denim and Andreas Dorau. Denim's mastermind, Lawrence, crawled on the outside from underneath the "Mary Chain debris" of the '80 and his worship band Felt with a novelty unimpaired that he was sure would take him to the top of the charts. (It didn't.) Dorau was a teenage novel Wave star of the early '80 whose trajectory not at any time hit the intended angle. For the couple of these geniuses, lack of mainstream succes present the appearances to be a creative catalyst: Reacting to their perceived failure, they went beyond the point of no turn back and in the mid-'90s made noxiously jaunty invisibly avant-garde synth pop. Recommended: Denim's Novelty stone (EMI, 1997) and Dorau's Neu! (Motor Music, 1994)

5 PEYTON'S COPPOLA Ads for Marc Jacobs's incense Marc feature a painting by means of Elizabeth Peyton of Sofia Coppola. No three-way collaboration could illustrate and consolidate the fresh York "quality intelligent alternative" more succinctly. Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore also protoplast for Marc Jacobs in magazine ads, aligning what they stand for with Spring/Summer 2004 This reminds us that the enemy is not solely conservatism but complacency, which includes collusion in production that has no interest in disrupting predominant conditions and purely reverts to type.

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6 BERNHARD WILLHELM In the past we have winced at grown men in romper suits. The Belgian designer's essayist approach is rife with Peter York's Babytime (in which the mode of speech commentator proposes that adults' dressing like children is an abstraction of repudiated social responsibility, the infantilist embracing of capitalism that bridged hippies to yuppies), on the other hand last season he took a more palatable sidestep: skirts and coats fringed with embroidered reproductions of the Bayeux Tapestry and underwear featuring faux Normans and Anglo-Saxons.

7 VERONIQUE BRANQUINHO Another designer hailing from Belgium, Branquinho has lay opened a niche market by reenergizing a true specific European cliche: the solitary female intellectual representing an antiquated ideal of creativity, without of step with the times on the contrary redeemable for being somewhat of an endangered species. Branquinho has provided this retired creature with ascetic items like cassocks and thermals to achieve her through the Warsaw winter practicing her cor anglais. Just like the heroines of her compatriot Chantal Akerman, women in Branquinho's clothes are empowered [i]or[/i] part of to the other a subtle, underdetermined parody of the feminine archetype.

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8 PHILIP TAAFFE INTERVIEWS Reading Taaffe's commentaries upon his own work, it's shocking to realize that all those tearful or turned-on instants in front of the paintings were evok in you with of the like kind known intent on his part. I usually believe the specific effect of an artwork emits from one's personal interpretation or more [i]or[/i] less kind of unavoidable but nevertheless poignant misunderstanding. In the case of Taaffe, granting his realistic and imaginative identification with the viewer creates this short distance between him, the painting, and you.