Hint Fashion Magazine -- Art Crawl

Projection, in the pop-psychology sense of the word, usually isn’t very flattering on either the projector or the projectee. And this is especially true with Tony Oursler, an artist whose trademark videos project talking human faces onto doll-like and vaguely head-shaped forms. Both farcical and creepy, Oursler's work—like contemporary culture itself—blurs the line between humanity and technology so that the human image, artificially projected from the outside, simultaneously creates and reveals the neuroses trapped within. For his current show at Metro Pictures gallery, Oursler—whose older work was projected onto smoother and more typically round "heads"—has become more sculptural, combining eyes and mouths onto biomorphic shapes that come even closer to freakish reality.

It's the beginning of the summer group shows in Galleryland, when exhibition spaces try out newer artists en masse and mount thematic shows while they make like the French and get ready to take off August. But this month also marks the start of that biannual granddaddy of group shows in the city Peggy Guggenheim called home. The carnivalesque Venice Biennale kicks off June 15 (and runs through November 2) with countless Prosecco hangovers and work by over 200 artists concentrated in the city's Arsenale exhibition hall and the 32 national pavilions of the nearby Giardini gardens.

Following a predictable bout of art-world controversy—jaws dropped when Italy's right-wing culture minister tried to sneak in the conservative art critic Robert Hughes as the exhibition's director—the flagship Arsenale will be overseen by Francesco Bonami, a curator at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art who recently collaborated with designer Raf Simons on the Fourth Sex exhibition in Florence. Just in case you thought socio-critical art was going the way of pre-post-feminism and political correctness, Bonami has given his show the didactically anti-didactic theme of Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer. ("Dreams" and "conflicts" are also a good way to describe Bonami's wish to include a Palestinian "national" pavilion. Its details are still being worked out.)

Meanwhile, formally recognized and otherwise unoccupied countries are using their pavilions to showcase their artists-of-the-moment, from Denmark’s Olafur Eliasson (pictured left) and British dungmeister Chris Ofili to photographer Candida Höfer and the late Martin Kippenberger, both of whom are flying the flag for Germany. Fred Wilson, an African-American artist known for reinstalling museum displays to point out their cultural biases, will be representing for the US. Now if only he could do something with the White House.

He's shown us the dirty, dirty world of the adolescents we all secretly wish we'd been but are glad we weren't. And now we get to look into the dirty, dirty mind of Larry Clark himself. Punk Picasso, currently at Luhring Augustine gallery, is an autobiographical installation by the photographer and filmmaker best known for his seedy photo books Tulsa and Teenage Lust, as well as his 1995 flick Kids (pictured left), which launched Chloe Sevigny's career as the ever-present Jennifer Aniston of subculture. With collected newspaper clippings, letters and nudie photos galore (a limited edition book, also called Punk Picasso, will be released next month), this show documents the life of the influential 60-year-old and his descent into the realm of teenage raunch, three-ways and sex-for-drugs. Topping it all off is the irony of a warning posted at the gallery's entrance: this show is unsuitable for children.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

All those who've had enough of the now-ubiquitous Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas (with Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid well on their way), raise your hands and give a shout out to New York's New Museum (583 Broadway, 212-219-1222). An art world veteran of the road less traveled, the museum has avoided what's quickly becoming architectural cliché by choosing Tokyo architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA to build its proposed $35 million new home on the Lower East Side. The project is slated for completion in 2006… Meanwhile, only a year after installing the last ton of steel in his heavy-metal conTEMPorary gallery (pictured above, 14 Charles Lane), designed by vanguard artist-cum-architect Vito Acconci, New York gallery owner and art world provocateur Kenny Schachter says he's in serious negotiations to build a 6500-square-foot, Acconci-designed spread in south Chelsea. "The idea is to overdesign the gallery," says Schachter, whose over-the-top plans also include a bar and café with business partners Damon Dash and L.A. nightlifer Jon Sidel. We can just hear the Chelsea art establishment murmur "there goes the neighborhood"... Speaking of which, groover gallerist and bar owner Gavin Brown is moving his Elizabeth Peytons (436 W. 15th St., 212-627-5258) from Chelsea to the West Village, where word has it he's opening a new gallery on the corner of Greenwich and Leroy in September. Heavy drinkers unable to stumble below 14th Street will be relieved to know that Passerby, the bar attached to his current space, is apparently staying put.

It's a topsy-turvy world for hipster art chick Meredith Danluck. In her current show, a doctored keyboard produces a random series of notes and chords while a video loops generic images of breakdancers and rockers. Nearby, the utopian geodesic dome (pictured left) has been fragmented to become an uninhabitable structure not unlike current examples of wireframe architecture. It's an oddball mix that, cryptically, only makes sense with Danluck's even odder inclusion of abstract paintings. Suddenly, the show becomes about the old avant-garde—which placed Abstract Expressionism on that singular path known as "forward"—versus the less clearly defined new avant-garde, a disintegration of avant-gardism by an avant-garde of disintegration.

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