The cover image for this issue of Artkrush is a detail of a photograph that captures a young woman trying out Piero Golia's Manifest Destiny. This installation at SITE Santa Fe's 2008 Biennial was just an ordinary viewing mezzanine designed by husband/wife architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, until the puckish Golia severed the ledge and installed eight mattresses beneath its now-opened end. What remained was a tempting plank to be walked by gallery patrons, concluding with a 16-foot plunge onto a black-polyurethane-foam landing pad. The invitation literally deconstructs Tsien and Williams' high-concept, high-pedigree building, collapsing the art show's assumed solemnity.

Born in 1974 in Naples, Italy, Golia has lived in Los Angeles for the last six years. He trained as a chemical engineer, but decided to follow the more lucrative path of art. Now both an art-world bambino terribile and a biennial darling, he is represented by no less than than four dealers: Bortolami Gallery in New York, Maze in Turin, Cosmic Galerie in Paris, and Galleri Christina Wilson in Copenhagen. With international solo and group shows peppering his résumé, he has also participated in the 2008 California Biennial, the Busan Biennale 2008, the second Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, PERFORMA 05, the 2003 Prague Biennale, and the 2001 Tirana Biennial. His 2004 film Killer Shrimps, a mockumentary about murderous crustaceans, was selected for that year's Venice Film Festival, and in 2005, he founded the popular LA Mountain School of Arts with Eric Wesley.

A dreamer realist, an existentialist superhero, and a magician who's also a self-professed loser, Golia has run an unprecedented gamut of stunts, dares, and what he calls "conceptual bullshit." Much of his work is the stuff of postmodern legend. For 2001's Tattoo, he convinced a stranger to permanently adorn her back with his self-portrait. A ribbon captioned the smiling, bearded bust, with the phrase "Piero My Idol," marking the act as one of both artistic hubris and self-mocking whimsy. Golia also rowed across the Adriatic Sea in 2001, reversing the route taken by many Albanians fleeing to Italy. In so doing, he contributed to the Turin Biennial by becoming Albania's first recorded illegal Italian immigrant. For It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, in 2003, Golia imported the entire facade of an Amsterdam building to the confines of Perry Rubenstein. He performed another curious relocation in January 2005, when he vanished from New York, resurfacing in Copenhagen in February without a trace of his activity in-between. Golia's actions are easy to understand, difficult to explain, and belong as much to the mystic as the art world.
- Lauren McKee