The last week I’ve been visiting Chelsea quite a bit, and I’ve seen some really great stuff. Today I saw Guy Ben-Ner’s Stealing Beauty at Postmasters, which was a very intelligent video piece involving him, his family, and several IKEA stores around the world. They record a narrative - almost a soap opera - involving the definition of property and the invocation of a “children of the world unite” manifesto delivered by Ben-Ner’s pre-adolescent children - which all takes place - without permission - on different furniture display settings at different IKEAs. The film is brilliant in its discontinuity: each scene could be recorded on 4 or 5 different sets of furniture, all showing price tags in different languages, depending on what country’s IKEA they were in.

This show was described to me as “cute,” while I was with my History class at the Hans Haacke show at Paula Cooper (which is also very good, but needs historical context I think - the photographs are amazing). I do have to admit, there is a certain innocence in much of Ben-Ner’s production: brief camera directions in Portuguese, obviously overdubbed sound, and a weirdness with which he and his family utter their dialogue. But, cuteness aside, this particular work seemed less bitter and more hopeful than the usual critique of capitalism and materialism. (And there is very little innocence in Haacke’s critique of the same thing, but much more aestheticism.)

The best show I saw all week was Mike Disfarmer’s Women at Stephen Kasher Gallery. As such straightforward-seeming historical documents, the artist’s agenda seems to fade away (or remain “merely” documentary) and these people - these Americans - are revealed in images in a way that is neither awkward or graceful, but very piercing.