My Top Ten of 2004

I have to admit that I didn't get out as much this year as in past years, so I'm officially entitling my list "My Ten Favorite Art Experiences of 2004".  The list ranges from art exhibits to individual artworks to books and is not meant to be a "best of" list...just my favorites.
1. Opening night of "This is the Future" an exhibit organized by the artist collective Dos Pestaneos at Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta.  An art circus, opening night featured kickboxers fighting to an avant garde electric guitar performance and women inside a sheer octagonal sphere crocheting artworks which would  then be attached to string and travel across the gallery in tubes for sale at the gift shop.
2. Bernd & Hilla Becher at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.  Quite possibly the most beautifully installed exhibition I have ever seen, the show displayed all the Becher's typologies in gridded blocks in spare white spaces.  I left the exhibit reminded more of Sol Lewitt and Agnes Marin than of any of the Becher's students. 
3. Glenn Brown at Gagosian, New York.  So elegant and freaky.
4. Vik Muniz, Bette Davis, from Pictures of Diamonds.  The ogling over "all those diamonds" at the Armory Show proves Vik's point about the substituted power of a photograph.  Vik's choice of diamonds also hints that he perhaps has reached a zenith in his "Pictures of" series.  Hopefully we'll see a new direction from him the next time around.
5. Kathryn Refi, Driving Routes, at Solomon Projects, Atlanta. Displayed in a grid to resemble a calender page, Refi's thirty-one line drawings represent the driving routes she took every day in a particular month.
6. Chris Verene, Crystal at Eighteen (at left), the Contemporary, Atlanta.  Verene's mid career survey may have been a little incohesive to those not already familiar with his work, but his new Galesburg photos were right on the money.
7. Jim Hodges cut photograph at the Whitney Biennial, New York.  A simple action that added dazzling beauty and complexity to Hodge's photograph of a tree.
8. Abelardo Morell, Camera Obscura (the book). At first there is nothing special about this collection of Morell's camera obscura images apart from the images themselves.  The book, however, allows the viewer to look at the works upside down adding a new dimension of oddity.
9. Scott McFarland, Inspecting, Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto.  McFarland is part of the new wave of conceptual photographers coming out of Vancouver.  "Inspecting" is from his garden series that in part, explores the parallels between photography and gardening.  In a way, the picture is a symbolic representation of the photographic process.
10.   Kojo Griffin, "Now and Then"  Announcement , Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York. Kojo's show was very impressive but I thought the pop up invitation was delightful and fitting.  Rumor has it that Griffin's anthropomorphic figures will not be present in his next body of work.