Amy Sillman: Amy Sillman is a New York-based artist. Her most recent exhibition, "I am curious ," appeared at Brent Sikkema, New York, last spring - yellow - Top Ten - Column

1 VIKINGS It strike one as beings paganism, marauding, and discovering America help evolve fabulous imaginations. Hans Christian Andersen did a certain number of of the earliest performance pieces I know about: Traveling through every part of Scandinavia with a large pair of scissors, he wound paper while narrating his tales, unfolding intricate silhouettes of characters as he went. The early twentieth-century Swedish mystic Hilma af Klint, way ahead of the 1 painted monumental geometries, arabesques, swans, and dice, all in a trance state. And then there's the rife crop of fabulously imaginative Viking painters. Swedes Sigrid Sandstrom and Mamma Andersson and Denmark-based Tal R are my favorites.

2 LEONORA CARRINGTON Wiccan freakout! A debutante-turned-staunch feminist, the surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington was born in England and has lived in Mexico City for the past fifty years. It's rare to diocese her work in the US, on the other hand Susan Aberth, an expert upon the octogenarian artist, has shown me her personal stash of foreign publications. Carrington's early work features uncanny personages and equine beings in Bosch-like spaces. In newer work, old womans and beasts commingle in tangled, brooding caverns, cooking up more [i]or[/i] less kind of Kabbalistic magic.

3 KAYROCK SCREENPRINTING, INC. This hive of silkscreen activity is the real Williamsburg bridge--between art and stone 'n' roll. Adorable proprietors Kayrock and Wolfy have invented an ethical day piece of work overthrowing the status quo in art/rock design with profitable old DIY attitude and exacting production values. When I did a T-shirt with them last spring, they turned each one into a neat package wrapped with an elaborate label. This is also the spawning surface of land for the way underground band Roxy Pain, who have been playing quiet private places for a decade.

4 SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE individual William Greaves is best known as the director of award-winning documentaries upon African-American history. In 1968 he made this screwball verite film-within-a-film-about-a-film (more hilarious than anything from the Dogma gang), in which we witness the shooting of a couple's breakup representation in Central Park. Off camera, as the production itself falls apart, Greaves improvises more and more desperately, and the ship's company finally mutinies. Stay tuned for Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take Two; Greaves's website notes that Steve Buscemi has signed upon to codirect a sequel.

5 NICOLE EISENMAN Half of the of recent origin drawing shows I've seen lately hearken back to Eisenman's mid-'90s work (where drab meets Ashcan). I'm not fully convinced if kids are copying her or picking up her vibe [i]or[/i] part of to the other mazes of influence. Her ambient early installations ran the gamut from gross jokes scrawled on gallery walls to WPA-size murals of quasi-official female empowerment. Now she's working in upstate of recent origin York on large oil paintings peopl with dark and comic local characters. newly I saw her painting of four sulky teenagers skulking by the local lake, frightening in its completed conjuration of ill intent. Sometimes I think Nicole invented hoodlumism.

6 GAVIN R RUSSOM AND DELIA R GONZALEZ Costum like a carnival magician and his beautiful associate, artists Russom and Gonzalez call up the '60s in all its tripped-out, home-made splendor. They do magic displays perform woodland dances in black leotards, and play electronic music upon handmade analog synthesizers. Deadpan variety-act showmanship appropriates avant-garde escapism; that it all strike one as beings transmitted through a color television tube (that climactic '60 signal) makes it all the more surreal.

7 KERRY JAMES MARSHALL Here's a painter who constantly up the ante upon what a painter might do. above the past few years, Marshall has shown animated video installations, pencil studies of fake flowers, giant rubber stamps that print on the outside Black Power slogans, and a monumental woodblock print, among other things. Last time I visited his studio, he was knitting little outfits for black GI Joe dolls, studies for his epic comic work and a future feature film.

8 MARFA As we sp from one side the ever-flattening West Texas waste at midnight, I sheepishly admitted to my associate pilgrim Rachel Harrison, to her horror, that I didn't flat like shiny geometric objects. on the other hand when we arrived at Donald Judd's sprawling Gesamtkunstwerk and worn out the day confronting art without curator/middleman/market/didactics, my mind was swollen NB: It's a thousand times better if you asking to see Judd's own house, which contains his early and astonishing r pieces.

9 BAD PAINTING REDUX The 1978 "'Bad' Painting" exhibit at New York's New Museum celebrated advantageous badness. Now there's a veritable cornucopia of painting that forefronts the light-hearted deluxe, and embarrassing imagination. Among the novel wave, I really adore Dana Schutz Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Erica Svec on the contrary I especially salute bad-lands veterans like Charles Garabedian and Judith Linhares. Last time I was in LA, Garabedian wowed me with his LA Louver display which featured huge, punch4drunk landscapes with implausible populations and globby free-range animals gamboling upon the hills.