Courtesy Klosterfelde, Berlin

Christian Jankowski, "Kochstudio" (2004). Installation of four videos and kitchen furniture, 90 min.

March 2009 Field Guide

Ellen Gallagher

Jerzy Grotowski

Nina Könnemann

Yto Barrada and Hala Elkoussy

Do Look Back in Anger

James Coleman

The Collection

William Kentridge: Five Themes

John Baldessari Adrian Piper Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78 Less Is More at This Year’s Frieze The Frieze Fringe In Museums Rivane Neuenschwander Rocket Woman

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Best known for smart-alecky art antics like phoning a series of Italian TV fortune-tellers to predict his success at the Venice Biennale (Telemistica [1999]); commissioning a popular Texas pastor to deliver a televised sermon on art production (The Holy Artwork [2001]); and casting children as artists John Baldessari and Adrian Piper, among others (The Matrix Effect [2000]), Christian Jankowski has made a career of exploring the artworld’s good and bad points (meaning and beauty, greed and hierarchy) through jesting, jousting good fun. But as the economy melts, and with it the attendant art market, the queries the German video artist has continually posed over his career—"What’s the value of art? How free is the free artist? Do art and commerce influence each other?"—stick to the ribs more than ever. Thus, his newest survey, opening this month at Vienna’s BAWAG, will likely plumb such questions with renewed urgency .

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"Christian Jankowski" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' March 2009 Table of Contents.