Lucky Number Seven: Seventh International Biennial Exhibition

Lucky Number Seven: Seventh International Biennial Exhibition

Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe

Through Jan. 4, 2009

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See the artworks here while you can, said Peter Goddard in the Toronto Star. You will never see them again. All 18 site-specific pieces were created expressly for this biennial exhibition and were “designed not to leave any physical trace” once it’s done. Some works are made of materials prone to decay. Others are interactive performances that can never be repeated: Bulgarian artist Luchezar Boyadjiev, for instance, hires local art students to “infiltrate visitors groups and later display what they hear.” Still others are less easily categorized. The theme of transience chosen by curator Lance Fung boldly flies in the face of current art market trends—for one thing, there’s nothing here that a collector can actually buy.

Fung also “gambled” by selecting artists from around the world who are barely known in this country, said Glen Helfand in Artinfo.com. These artists all came to visit Santa Fe for inspiration, which lends their work “a bit more local flavor” than it other­wise might have. Most of their creations are displayed at Site’s main gallery. But others are scattered all over town. Japanese artist Hiroshi Fuji’s sculptures, “made by volunteers from discarded water bottles,” are stuck on light posts outside the Santa Fe Opera. Australian Nick Mangan has turned an abandoned shop in a derelict part of town into an ersatz archaeological dig site. While most international exhibitions “exude the placeless aura of airports,” Lucky Number Seven brings the global art world into fruitful collision with its host city.

“But maybe the most truly courageous of this biennial’s artists” are those who work in the traditional forms of painting and sculpture, said Blake Gopnik in The Washington Post. Their works create links to the local environs in more subtle ways. Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, two French artists, melted down a bronze cowboy sculpture bought at a local shop, then “recast it into an image of alien abduction sculpted in precisely the same tchotchke style.” Toronto artist Scott Lyall asked local artists to collaboratively paint a mural. He then cut out a series of white stripes, “uniting its original composition, which was mostly an incoherent mix of styles and subjects, into a kind of orderly wallpaper pattern.” The sensibility of the finished work seems to belong both to the artist and to Santa Fe itself—“an almost perfect” encapsulation of the entire show.