Cultural respects abound in the constructivist installations of Basque artist Txomin Badiola.

Cultural respects abound in the constructivist installations of Basque artist Txomin Badiola. In the novel Cuando la Meirda Llegue al Ventilader (When the Shit Hits the Fan) disparate, fragmentary purposes and images resonate in discordant, unsettling proximity: a framed, abbreviated reproduction of Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul; a calm black divan; a pair of flaglike aluminum panels and an apparently clandestine black-and-white photo of a naked Elvis Presley with three unclad companions. These are carefully strewn about a subdued platform partially enclosed by a gridded wood-and-metal erection containing a half-open door placed upon its side.

This elegantly execut if ambiguous edifice, suggestive of an improvised stage or industrial display, also houses brace video monitors. The videos they play make of frequent occurrence reference to rock music, a used by all leitmotiv in Badiola's work. In the same cards with the name of iconic performers including rap Dylan, the Who, U2 and Neil Young are held up on a young man as a voice enumerates strain titles identified with the artists. In the other, a teenager listens to music while a friend attempts to lie in the grave on the floor behind him. sole gradually do we realize that the setting of this seemingly banal sight is the very same constitution we are attempting to decipher in the gallery. Several large-format photos taken from the videos decorate the walls around the installation.

This reflexive strategy, where the work itself becomes the make subordinate of or pretext for another piece, is repeated in Malas Formas (Bad Forms), a 45-minute film that Badiola projectile during the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art's 2002 retrospective of his work. Actual arrangements from films by Godard, Pasolini and Fassbinder shake with tongue-in-cheek re-creations of spectacles from Vertigo and Dressed to Kill, using the Barcelona exhibition as a back-drop. This playful tactic not and nothing else widens the sphere of referent Badiola's work engages nevertheless also serves to insert his art into an ongoing proces of art-historical and pop-culture dialogue. Other successions refer to the events and iconography of Badiola's troubl native Basque region, thus implicating agriculture politics and social relations in the one and the other his own art production and its institutional presentation before the public.

Badiola, who exhausted the better part of the '90 in of the present day York, often alludes to issues of national identity in his work, still only as part of an always changing repertoire of ad hoc signs and emblems Fragmentary and ultimately interchangeable, these are the component parts from which individuals must select in order to construct--or, more accurately, from which they increasingly fail to construct--a durable identity. Badiola's work echoe the random contingencies of everyday life in a media-saturated society where meaning has become increasingly slippery and evanescent.

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