Could it be that Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s anthropodino actually felt a tad small? The statistics for this succession of cavelike chambers and corridors, many of them adorned with spice-filled stalactites, suggest it should have been otherwise. Organized by curator Tom Eccles for Creative Time, anthropodino measured 180 by 120 feet overall, with one elephantine spice-laden trunk drooping an impressive 60 vertical feet. A marvel of tinted translucent Lycra stretched over bone-shaped plywood supports, it was billed as Neto’s largest sculptural work to date.

Gaylen Gerber’s reputation rests largely on his tactic of significantly altering the normal, expected viewing conditions in which the work of his colleagues is seen. He eschews the term “collaboration,” disavowing the shared intentions that term implies. This recent “two-person project” with Joe Scanlan was a departure: Gerber showed three site-specific works which, while framing Scanlan’s sculpture, also functioned autonomously.

Chinese video artist Yang Fudong has gained international recognition for his poetic, dreamlike meditations on Chinese culture and identity, most fully expressed in his epic five-part work, Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003-07), currently on view at the Asia Society in New York [see article this issue]. East of Que Village (2007), installed recently at Marian Goodman, is a sharp departure from that approach. Created for a 2007 exhibition at Tate Liverpool titled “The Real Thing: New Art from China,” the roughly 21-minute, black-and-white work seems indeed brutally, even painfully real. Projected on six screens, it depicts scenes from daily life in the artist’s native village, a desolate and desperately poor settlement whose human inhabitants are shown mutely performing prosaic tasks—eating, feeding animals and, in one scene, pulling together what appears to be a rather pathetic New Year’s parade. But the real focus is a pack of wild dogs that lurk<

There were no “smart” classrooms or endowed professorships at “The University of Trash.” From the start of the 12-week exhibition, however, a reading group on Karl Marx’s Capital met at the Sculpture Center every Thursday, and silkscreening workshops and free-radio seminars frequently took place. Architecturally too, things were out of the ordinary: in lieu of the gothic spires and red-brick facades that grace so many college campuses, the University offered bales of flattened cardboard boxes, wooden scaffolding, outsize paper lamps and a “Jacuzzi” filled with mattress foam. The esthetics and the ethics of this institution were DIY. One might describe it as a space devoted to radical fun.

Anna May Wong, the first Asian-American to achieve Hollywood stardom, is the perfect subject for Patty Chang, who in recent years has made videos exploring the collision of stereotypes and mistranslations in the West’s appropriation of Chinese culture. A darling of Europe, where Wong fled after encountering severe discrimination in the United States, the film star was interviewed by critical theorist Walter Benjamin, who wrote about the encounter in Die literarische Welt in 1928. Chang contemporizes this encounter in her new video installation, The Product Love—Die Ware Liebe (2009), the centerpiece of this show.