My inner philistine was wondering what the museum guards watching over Rudolf Stingel's art at the Whitney last week were thinking. Stingel hails from the Tyrol, that Alpine region where Italy blends into Austria, and though he's lived in New York for over two decades, his sensibility seems distinctly Old World—almost Viennese in its cunning and ambiguity. Zigzagging between figuration and abstraction, his disparate oeuvre is filled with conceptual antics, optical pleasures, and abject traces of his melancholy presence. His fans says he's investigating "the impossibility of painting"to that end, he's cast radiators in orange resin, hung broadloom soiled with his footprints on walls, and carved into puke-pink Styrofoam. At times visually dazzling, his work is also strangely off-putting—flirting on the one hand with decay, and on the other with... More >>>