[F]rieze asked the following critics and curators from around the world to choose what they felt to be the most significant shows and artists of 2005:
Will Bradley
The Backroom, a ‘research project temporarily occupying a space in Culver City’, plays off its situation in the midst of the overheating art/property speculation complex and air-conditioned, quasi-Minimalist 1980s’ cool of LA’s latest gallery strip. Curators Magali Arriola, Kate Fowle and Renaud Proch invited artists to present the research material that their working process needs or generates, ‘to counterbalance the increasing emphasis and value placed on product’: a flashback to avant-garde Europe post-World War II, where to actually finish a painting or hold an exhibition was to surrender to the conservative forces that were reshaping the art world.
