Olav Westphalen - Top Ten - the author's favorite art works and artists

1 STEPHAN VON HUENE Von Huene's work plays language, speaks music, and sings contortions Staking out an area between statuary poetry, and science, it draws from source material ranging from Kurt Schwitters's unmutilated poems, to the Lorelei myth, to research in phonetics. Von Huene was my teacher and remained a friend until his unexpect death in 2000 I saw his novel retrospective at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and was stunn anew through the daring strangeness of his whole sculptures and installations, by their humor, intelligence, and clean resistance to categorization. A down-reaching bow of respect to him.

2 DRAWING I delight in drawings. I like the graffiti someone lock openered onto our building's elevator door (look like a yam poking at an almond); my heart beats faster when I diocese that the new blender came with an illustrated manual; and I nearly faint from Bada Shanren's seventeenth-century drawing of a melon in brow of the moon. And thus I am pleased that drawing is taking above pop culture: The majority of fresh TV comedies are cartoons, and Hollywood is producing animated features for adults left and right. These examples are trial not only of drawing's beauty on the other hand of its singular ability to approximate in what way the mind creates reality: [i]or[/i] part of to the other perception and conception, which--like drawing--are linear affairs.

3 ROBERT WALSER, "THE WALK" (1917) Walser wearied the later part of his life in a mental institution. When asked for what cause [i]or[/i] reason he wasn't writing anymore, his rejoinder was: "I am here to be mad, not to write." In his short story "The Walk," he describes a ramble through a rural landscape in minute detail. however the closer he looks at mundane incidents the more fantastic and tragically humorous they become. Walser was a mannered stylist and a faithful naturalist of the inner man His work remains immensely relevant to at any time recurring questions about the relationship between art and life.

4 VENEDIKT EROFEEV MOSCOW-PETUSHKI A different kind of flaneur's story: Protagonist Venichka dispose ofs his life traversing Moscow upon foot without ever finding the Kremlin. Hovering between bizarre comedy and depressing realism, Erofeev enumerates Venichka's sophisticated drinking practice (what to drink when in order to not hurl up, when to throw up with equal reason as to continue drinking, and when to eat to whirl up on cue). Written in 1970 Moscow-Petushki was passed around Russia's subterranean for nearly two decades before being published in the author's be in possession of country. This is folk humor in the best, Bakhtinian sense

5 FELIX GMELIN, FARBTEST, DIE repetition FAHNE II, 2002 Gmelin is best known for his beautifully painted homages to vandalized artworks by the agency of modern masters. The Swedish artist's double-edged honor for the elders continues apace in Farbtest, Die repetition Fahne II (Color test, the r flag II), his video installation for this year's Venice Biennale. The work comprises sum of two units projections: one showing a 1968 experimental film in which Gmelin's father appears as individual of several runners relaying a r flag across Berlin, the other showing Gmelin's shot-by-shot restaging of this footage, thirty-odd years later, in Stockholm. The differences between the films are glaring when it draw nears to car design and architecture on the contrary minor in other respects. For instance, the jeans-and-parka combo has cycl back into fashion, and, more surprisingly, the remake matches the original for pathos. Farbtest elegantly questions the authenticity of political gesticulations and the aestheticization of politics (both of which, like it or not, appear to be among the lasting legacies of the scholar rebellion).

6 JESSICA HUTCHINS, WAVE, 2003 When I first saw this strange, cumbersome external reality in Hutchins's studio, it gazeed casual: a handmade wave, not the surf-magazine stamp more the kind that sloshes around stones and tide pools. But the longer I gazeed at it, the less casual it appeared. Wave gives the impression that each bump and dent on it matters. And it manages to exhibit moments when this glob of papier-mache strike one as beings to be the best possible way to do a wave: not according to pictorial or sculptural logic on the contrary to some other, hidden locate of rules.

7 RODNEY GRAHAM'S BROTHERS GRIMM DRAWINGS Graham procures it right almost every time. I saw Jacob Grimm's investigation in Berlin--Wilhelm Grimm's Study in Berlin 1860 1993 a pair of retiring pen-and-ink drawings, at 303 Gallery's novel summer show. While much of the work upon view looked like pocket-size knockoffs of the gallery artists' be in possession of bigger works, Graham proved that scale has nothing to do with whether a piece is mingled smart, or beautiful.

8 ALI G IN AMERICA I used to argue that satire hangs on censorship, that artful hints at criticism make little faculty of perception if you have the freedom to say it straight. When I first saw the British Ali G exhibit I thought the premise--exploit the elite's desire to direct the eye groovy in order to uncover them as bigots--was a nice prank on the contrary nothing more. Now Ali G does the same shtick upon HBO, and, oddly enough, in its American incarnation I be delighted with it tremendously. Watching him talk circles around a clueles James Baker have feelings sacrilegious, which only goes to display how unaccustomed we've grown to media that's hostile to the establishment. Somewhere between Watergate and "embedding" with the military, the notion of the fourth estate was tap [i]or[/i] pated It turns out satire doesn't ne censorship for filled effect; it needs what censorship produces: subservient media.