Anton Vidokle is a Moscow born, New York based artist. His work has been exhibited in international exhibitions such as Dakar Biennale, Lodz Biennale, Utopia Station at Venice Biennale; Made in Mexico, ICA Boston/UCLA Hammer; Form-Specific, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Do It, Museo Carillo Gil, Mexico DF; Urgent painting, Musee d'art Modern de la Ville de Paris, Imagine Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, Without you I am nothing, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, Greater New York, PS1 New York; and many other. Next year he will be an artist in residence at ArtPace, San Antonio.
Geometry excites Anton Vidokle. This perky show of a variety of the Moscow-born, New York -based artist's works includes two plastic newspaper-vending machines holding English and Turkish versions of a tabloid newspaper, Popular Geometry, produced by Vidokle. The papers contain a compilation of published articles on different public-sculpture projects as well as stencils of three-dimensional geometric figures for readers to cut out and assemble. This work, which was produced in collaboration with Julieta Aranda, betrayed the craving among contemporary artists for the heroic bronze cubes, triangles, and other geometric figures that constituted the good old Modernism that once transformed the streets and squares of European and American cities. But while the post-postmodernist West may no longer be eager to spend millions of dollars on public art of this sort, the Third World is ready for the less expensive version of it.
The most striking work in the show was the photographic documentation of a public-art project Vidokle realized in Mexico City, where he gradually, module by module, applied red paint to the ugly concrete facade of the modern building housing the Salto del Agua metro station. This effort is more reminiscent of the way streets were decorated in post-revolutionary St. Petersburg than in late-Modernist city developments.
Vidokle's passion for public-art projects has its parallel in the literary world. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, some critics, proclaiming the death of the novel in Europe and the United States, allowed that it could still be written in "underdeveloped" Latin America. -Konstantin Akinsha, Artnews June 2004