Still referred to as the «political» biennial, the 1993 edition included works like Pepòn Osorio's
installation Scene of the Crime (Whose Crime?)
Not exact matches
Insist they did: Robert Gober's handmade newspapers with headlines about the gay «threat» to marriage; the graffitilike scrawl on Pat Ward Williams's mural
of five young black men asking viewers «What You Lookn At»; and Pepón Osorio's
installation of a cramped Latino home featuring a corpse covered with a bloody sheet — The
Scene of the
Crime (Whose
Crime?).
Matthew Barney, Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhodes, Charles Ray, and a simulated
crime scene by Pepón Osorio all anticipate twenty years
of overblown
installations.
The ghostly nature
of photography has long fascinated Collishaw, from an early work in which he restaged the fake fairy photographs that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle to a recent
installation of terrifying
crime -
scene pictures.
The Los Angeles space offers an arsenal
of names like Sarah Cain, whose paintings and
installations land somewhere between Dr. Seuss and a
crime scene, and Brenna Youngblood, a collagist with personally and politically charged work.
Pointedly, Pepón Osorio's large - scale
installations avoid being heavy - handed:
Scene of the
Crime (Whose
Crime?)
Partly sculptural
installation, partly deconstructed painting à la Jackson Pollock, partly a performance vacated by the artist, partly the
scene of a violent
crime (Le Va has adocumented interest in detective novels), not even Artforum had any idea what to call Le Va's work — a November 1968 cover story dubbed it «distributional sculpture,» for lack
of a better term — but today, it's safe to dub it a watershed moment, with reverberations seen in such contemporary artists as Sarah Sze.