despite a few faults, we re-print...

Kim Levin, The Village Voice, December 23, 2004

NONE OF THE ABOVE
SWISS INSTITUTE

You'd never guess when you enter the apparently empty exhibition space that minuscule works by 44 artists - Fischli & Weiss's polyeurethane peanut shells, Tony Matelli's brass cigarette butt, Alix Lambert's painting on a fingernail clipping and a grain of rice, and Laurent Pache's tack among them - are hiding in plain sight, along with David Adamo's cliff-hanger: a tiny wall painter on a scaffold halfway up a vast empty wall. Sylvie Fleury scatters a bit of glitter, Rudolf Stingel veneers a few floorboards, and Martin Creed leaves crumpled wads of paper lying about. Others make alterations to the clock or the exit sign, or hide their works under a chair, atop a wall, or - as Massimo Bartolini's golden pill (which now sits on the counter) was during the opening- nestled in someone's fist. And you might not suspect there's a dialogue going on. Steven Parrino's mini-monochrome (a miniature of Robert Barr's tiny black monochrome hanging in the same spot last month) nods to the Swiss Institute's previous show, as does a snapshot by that show's artist-curator, Olivier Mosset. And Maurizio Cattelan's doll, clinging to a windowpane, is a likeness of artist John Armleder, who curated this one- raising the cleverness quotient a notch, lowering the bar for reductivist art, and hugely enlarging the post-conceptual parameters of minimalism.