All Buttoned Up
'G.W. – Long Live the President'; America's first political button (1789)
‘G.W. – Long Live the President’ - not some plea to elect George W. Bush to a third term, but America’s first political button, commemorating George Washington’s inauguration in 1789. Campaign badges have a long and illustrious history in the US; created anonymously, they’re democratic and often plain-speaking, witty and kitsch. All of which has been seen over this fortnight of political theatre, the presidential nominating conventions, where first the Democrats then the Republicans officially name their candidates among the flashing lights, confetti, balloons, flags – and badges. The events can sometimes feel a little like an off-the-hook Hans Haacke piece. How else can you explain the delegate with a baseball cap covered with several miniature toilets (because the economy has gone down the drain), or the Californian sisters who drove to Denver in a vintage Volvo station wagon (the official car of the American liberal) entirely covered in Obama bumper stickers?
Buttons and campaign swag took off in the 1820s with an increase in suffrage. When voting rights expanded beyond the landed gentry, meaning that all white men could vote, politics became a heady affair: campaigns gave away trinkets and buttons supporting candidates became common. The first to make broad use of them was Andrew Jackson. (Incidentally, Jackson is also credited with giving birth to both the Democratic Party and its key symbol, the donkey. His rivals called him ‘jackass…’) Still, long before Jackson and political kitsch caught on, people were making their partisan leanings manifest. In Constantinople men painted their fingernails to indicate their party of choice: green for Hypatius and blue for Justinius.
The Smithsonian has a collection of some 30,000 political buttons, collected by Harry Rubenstein and Larry Bird, the institution’s curators of political ephemera. I caught up with them as they drove along I-25 on a collecting trip to the Denver convention. Larry explains that US politics has a stronger tradition of buttons than in the UK, ‘because instead of voting for the party, you’re voting for the person’, adding that the most popular era was the 1950s. Then you got classic designs like the Ike button, just ‘I-K-E’ in red, white and blue. It was distributed to people by the carload. ‘From the very beginning of American politics though,’ Larry says, ‘people would sew metal discs to clothes and partisan newspapers gave out campaign ribbons for free, distributing them with papers. That’s what led to buttons as we know it.’
Gary Hart, whose presidential hopes were ruined after a widely reported affair, was greeted with this button when he re-entered the race in 1988
The political badge has developed with technological advances. 1860 wasn’t just the year of Lincoln’s election but also the date of the first patent for buttons using photo reproductions. (The patent, no. 29652. included an illustration of Abraham Lincoln sporting a soul patch.) In 1896 buttons became cheaper and more colorful as paper images were wrapped around a metal disc and covered with celluloid. For the Republican convention in St. Louis, a New York delegate ordered 25,000 McKinley buttons. According to an 1896 New York Times article, the buttons read ‘Count Us For McKinley’, a subtle reference to the year’s big campaign issue, whether to stick with the gold standard for currency. The badges sported McKinley’s profile, which the Times deemed ‘much too sharp to be Napoleonic.’ Nonetheless, they were, by all accounts, ‘very effective agents in bringing about a McKinley victory’ at the convention.
Buttons sometimes have more symbolic meaning than simply the name on the badge. In 1868, despite the fact that they couldn’t vote, African-American women in the south would walk miles to get Republican buttons much to the chagrin of their white employers. (Lincoln was a Republican and had abolished slavery three years previously.) Teddy Roosevelt’s first button for the 1904 election showed him having lunch with Booker T. Washington. The button had a one word legend: ‘equality’. The New York Times wrote in 1903 that, ‘Colored men have been the first to wear the button and many are to be seen with the badge adorning their coat lapels.’
Political kitsch has included everything from chamber pots emblazoned with candidates’ names to juice tins. During the 1960s, ‘Gold Water, the right drink for conservative taste’ , endorsed Barry Goldwater, while a Lyndon B. Johnson-themed beverage read, ‘A drink for health care’ (state-funded healthcare for the elderly and poor was part of Johnson’s Great Society legislation). By 1968 the most popular button was ‘I want to be president too.’ (The Democratic candidates alone that year included Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Though president, Johnson dropped out of the race because of Vietnam’s unpopularity, while McCarthy and Kennedy ran a primary campaign that makes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s seem positively amiable).
My favourite campaign pin is simple, iconic and small: a tiny gold peanut. It advertises Jimmy Carter (a peanut farmer) but doesn’t include his name or platform. (Perhaps my love of it can be attributed to a personal connection: I wore the pin when campaigning for Carter when I was eight.) Larry explains, ‘With buttons, you really get the person. Voters connect individually, and people have a tangible connection to the campaign.’ For this reason Larry claims that if he had US$10,000 to spend as a campaign manager, he’d invest in buttons rather than adverts.
Despite the myriad buttons and badges at the conventions, campaign buttons have fallen off since their heyday in the ‘50s. In fact, they started to die out in the late ‘70s – about the same time that the Carter peanut came out. ‘That’s when campaigns started allocating their budgets for TV advertising,’ Larry explains. ‘Now I have to pay you a dollar to put your message on my chest,’ he says with disgust.
In a sea of puns, flags and stars, the peanut – like the IKE button of which Larry is so fond – is also remarkable for its simplicity. Now, despite their lurid appearances at the conventions, buttons have become anodyne. McCain’s include a green one targeting the Irish with a shamrock over the ‘I’, pictures of McCain against an American flag, a simple star (perhaps a reference to his military service), slogans like ‘Country First’ and ‘Ready from Day One’, a phrase recently associated with Hillary, women for McCain, race fans for McCain (with the checkered flag). Obama’s buttons naturally include ‘Yes We Can’, pictures of his family, even the ‘terrorist’ fist bump with Michelle, not to mention ‘Republicans for Obama’, ‘Asian-American Pacific Islanders for Obama’, ‘Latinos for Obama’, ‘Veterans for Obama’ and a gay pride Obama with a rainbow. (Nixon’s 1972 campaign made representing different ethnic groups a requirement. He had buttons for the Polish, Armenians, Irish, Estonians…). The best of either campaigns, though, is the smallest: a one-inch ‘O’ logo.
‘The Obama logo is good,’ Harry says. ‘It has the potential to be an icon like that Carter peanut. That graphic, the ‘O’ with the sun rising is refreshing, and you’d expect to see that reflected in buttons with a new look, but most materials are produced by vendors outside the campaign, so it hasn’t crossed over.’ Those looking for well-designed buttons should turn to the left-leaning magazine The Nation. Graphics legend Milton Glaser has designed their badges including the simple, iconic McBush.
Jennifer Kabat
Jennifer Kabat is a design critic based in New York.
Imaginary Soundtracks
Of all the descriptions of the Penguin Café Orchestra I’ve come across – ‘modern semi-acoustic chamber music’ and ‘imaginary folklore’ being two of the duller examples – my favourite has to be ‘the soundtrack to a macrobiotic dinner party in Winchester in 1979’, as coined by blogger ‘stevie t’ some years ago. Listening to this summer’s carefully remastered reissues of their first six albums – Music from the Penguin Café (1976), Penguin Café Orchestra (1981), Broadcasting from Home (1984), Signs of Life (1987), When in Rome (1989) and Union Café (1993) – I find myself thinking not of kora players in Senegal or a folk session in an Irish pub, as some of their more demonstratively cosmopolitan musical confections strove to evoke, but of certain post-1960s English archetypes.
Penguin Café Orchestra, ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ (live)
Written for piano, violin, cello and guitar, occasionally augmented by more unusual instruments such as harmoniums or elastic bands, Penguin Café Orchestra’s music conjures images of 1970s progressive academics in denim jackets or cheesecloth skirts with lectureships at provincial polytechnics and broods of ruddy-faced precocious children – the sort David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury satirized in novels such as Changing Places and The History Man (both 1975). Their work shares the same sensibility as that odd brand of British art that includes painters such as Tom Philips or Ian Hamilton Finlay; artists strangely adrift from the canon of international Modernism who would make semi-figurative paintings about, say, the Golden Section or classical philosophy. Song titles such as ‘Pythagoras’s Trousers’ or ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ put me in mind of Brian Eno, whose Obscure Records label released the first Penguin Café album, and Peter Greenaway films – all those clever anachronisms, archly constructed plots and Michael Nyman Minimalist-lite soundtracks. Even the group’s album covers – paintings by artist Emily Young of, well, penguins engaged in various human activities – look like whimsical 1960s psychedelia rather than the sort of flatly literal Surrealism they evidently aspired to be. In some senses the Penguin Café Orchestra sound like eccentric academics – erudite and skilled, if a little aloof from real world realities – yet there is something attractively homespun about them too, a characteristic which in recent years has led to their music having a more nebulous influence on advertising and cinema.
A romantic idealism shaped the Orchestra. The group was formed by composer Simon Jeffes in 1972, after having had a particularly lucid vision whilst recovering from food poisoning. He dreamt of a nightmarish concrete apartment block inhabited by lonely individuals isolated from each other by a highly technological society. The following day, Jeffes went to the beach and had another vision, this time of ‘the Penguin Café’, where a kind of spontaneous, passionate, sociable creativity could flourish. Jeffes, whose experiences in the worlds of both popular and academic classical music had left him feeling dissatisfied, began to write the kind of music he imagined would be played in the café. ‘Ideally I suppose it’s the sort of music you want to hear, music that will lift your spirit. It’s the sort of music played by imagined wild, free, mountain people creating sounds of a subtle dreamlike quality. It is cafe music, but café in the sense of a place where people’s spirits communicate and mingle, a place where music is played that often touches the heart of the listener.’
Wild and free mountain music is possibly the last thing you would think of on hearing Jeffes’ ensemble – it is too self-aware and cultured for that. ‘Pythagoras’s Trousers’, for instance, or ‘Music For a Found Harmonium’, which opens with the gentle sounds of a wheezing harmonium and develops into something approximating a celtic folk dance, sound forced rather than instinctive. Although the pieces can occasionally seem like the result of an in-joke amongst classically trained musicians about, say, the use of major fifths in late-Baroque chamber music, at its best the music exudes humour and warmth. It is wonderfully idiosyncratic, simply following its own interests with no care about whether anyone thinks it’s ‘cool’ or not. ‘Air a Danser’, which opens Penguin Café Orchestra, was inspired by Madagascan zither music and fuses swooping string phrases with cheery, easy-going repeated guitar figures. ‘Cage Dead’, composed after the death of John Cage, is simple and languid: a short phrase repeated over and over, carried along by gentle percussion instruments which sound like soft, muted Indian tablas. Pieces such as ‘Nothing Really Blue’, ‘Oscar Tango’ and ‘Numbers 1–4’ are quiet, delicate and controlled compositions for piano and strings, thoughtful studies that never slip into the heart-on-sleeve lyricism courted in pieces such as ‘Air’ or the sweetly titled but cloying ‘Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter’.
One2One advert (1996) featuring the PCO’s ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’
Jeffes died in 1997 at the tragically early age of 48, after which the Orchestra disbanded, coming together last year for a ten-year anniversary reunion. Their music, however, has had a lasting influence – not so much on the work of musicians today, but in the broader world of film and advertising. When used by companies as diverse as Eurotunnel, The Independent, The Economist, IBM, Volvo and Hewlett Packard, and One2One/T-Mobile, and in films such as Napoleon Dynamite (2005), Penguin Café Orchestra’s music more often than not denotes a certain kind of whimsy, or kookiness. Their most famous track ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’ (made with a sample of the old busy line telephone signal, rubber band and violins) has now become the template soundtrack for any number of mobile phone, building society or car ads. These kinds of commercial usually depict a demographically balanced cross-section of ordinary people talking about their hopes and dreams, or witnessing cutesy, pseudo-‘magic realist’ phenomena, such as cars inexplicably floating in mid-air, or millions of coloured balls bouncing through the streets. These feel-good moments of collective reverie are invariably accompanied by, if not some singer-songwriter of Vashti Bunyan or Jose Gonzales’ ilk, then Penguin Café-esque music: endearingly folksy but tinged with a little electronica or pulsing, Philip Glass-esque strings, as if to suggest that the high-tech product being sold to you is somehow benign, community-spirited and designed with the greater well-being of the world in mind.
Given Jeffes’ original vision for the ensemble, the uses that have been found for their brand of music strike me as sad. If the Penguin Café Orchestra’s work is the aural equivalent of discussing nuclear disarmament over a lentil bake and elderflower wine in late-‘70s Winchester, then it is now also an elegy to a bygone, more idealistic era.
Dan Fox
Dan Fox is associate editor of frieze.
Modern Ruins
Photograph courtesy of Clear Eyes
At the Hauntology Now symposium earlier this year (part of the Atmospheres 2 festival, at the Museum Of Garden History), writer Christopher Woodward showed some extraordinary slides of Detroit’s Fordist architecture. Now fallen into picturesque dilapidation, the buildings seemed to form a post-industrial counterpart to the Roman ruins that were the traditional objects of Romantic reverie. Walking in ruins places us in a strange state of temporal dislocation, in which the past is simultaneously absent and present, for which Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ (in Spectres Of Marx, 1993). In the past three or four years, the concept of hauntology has been revived in discussions about predominantly musical artefacts that seem to dwell in cultural ruins. As an alternative to postmodern exhaustion, acts like Philip Jeck, The Caretaker and Mercury Prize favourite Burial have produced dilapidated versions of past forms, interred beneath a fog of crackle.
Extending the analysis presented in his book In Ruins (2002), Woodward argued that we need to poeticize such relics of the near past. Woodward – who was oddly enthusiastic about the ‘development’ of East London taking place as part of the 2012 mega-project – overlooked the way in which these activities are already underway precisely in the areas of the East End on which the Olympic follies are being erected. Witness, for instance, the Heronbone blog, once described as ‘located between W.G. Sebald, Wiley from Roll Deep and Iain Sinclair’, but now disappeared, like many of the stretches of the Lea Valley which it evoked in fragmentary entries written in a rogue poetry infused with the rhymes and rhythms of pirate radio; the psychogeographical collages in the Savage Messiah fanzine and website, which draws a fractured map of London by following lines of social antagonism; the work of Sinclair himself, whose passionate hostility to 2012 informs his latest project, a book about Hackney; the photographer Stephen Gill’s Architecture In Reverse (2007), which traces the Lea’s transformation in a series of eerie pictures. Late last year, Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places (2007), reported on a journey that he and Sinclair had taken through Gill’s stalking grounds, savouring the bizarre interfusions of dereliction and overgrowth: ‘green algae thickening the canal water to the texture of snooker baize, massive old ent-like willows, escaped apple-tree orchards, buddleia lolling from brickwork and bridge edge, the witches’ garden of rubble heaps.’
Poetics connects with politics here. Late-capitalist time is bound into a seamless circuit organized by PR: the past is diminished to a sequence of anniversaries to be commemorated; the future is projected forward as a series of pseudo-events. Evidently, these future events are not waiting passively to happen; they are already operative in the present. 2012, reputedly the year of the Mayan apocalypse, already functions in London as a target date for the culmination of intitiatives that have no connection to the Olympics as such. As the jaded carnival of 2012 proves, we live in the permanent shadow of pseudo-events that never really happen, but which are always being anticipated. These pseudo-events never happen precisely because they are not events at all; there is nothing unpredictable or unexpected about them.
The theory of the event – what constitutes a genuine event; how to maintain fidelity to an event that has ‘ended’ – has been the subject of some of the most urgent philosophical work of the past 30 years. Baudrillard, for example, was one of the first to understand the way in which postmodern culture retrospectively converts actual events into pseudo-events. Witness the way in which May ‘68 – an event that was so crucial for Baudrillard, as well as Deleuze-Guattari and Badiou – has become the occasion for another empty commemoration on the year of its 40th anniversary. It is, perhaps, the very featurelessness of the current ’eventless horizon’ which has motivated the turn to spectrality; hauntology is about attuning ourselves to the ways in which traces of events continue to perturb the present. What is important here is not the reiteration of the actual past, but the persistence of what never actually happened, but might have – the logic of events that failed to fully enfold but which can still be returned to.
The eventless time of postmodernity has its correlation in the collapse of differentiated spaces. The Economist recently described a new nomadism, which, it claimed, has nothing to do with the commonplace understanding of nomadism as equivalent in meaning to migration. This wireless nomadism frees workers from offices, allowing them to perform immaterial labour in ‘physically inhabited but psychologically evacuated’ spaces such as coffee bar franchises, the very archetype of the so-called ‘third place’, a zone which is neither at home nor work. On entering these cloned spaces, you could be anywhere. This vertigo of placelessness produces what I have called ‘nomadalgia’ (a counterpart of hauntology): all those interchangeable hotel lobbies and fast food concourses induce a craving for a specific sense of space . One response to nomadalgia might be a return to the pre-industrial sacred spaces which Paul Devereux, another of the speakers at the hauntology event, is producing fascinating ‘archaeoacoustic’ studies of. But I would prefer to remain in the ruins, to reclaim the wasteland for a reinvigorated modernism, a modernism that, at the moment, exists – or rather insists – only in a spectral form.
Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher is a writer based in Kent. His blog can be found at http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/.
Mark’s presentation from Hauntology Now.
Frieze Writer’s Prize 2008
frieze writer’s prize 2008 is judged by Tate Triennial curator Nicolas Bourriaud, frieze co-editor Jennifer Higgie and Guardian critic Adrian Searle.
The winning entrant will be commissioned to write a review for the October issue of frieze and be awarded £2000. Two further awards of £500 will be made for outstanding entries.
The winner of this year’s writer’s prize is:
William Gass’s review of Milena Dragicevic, ‘OF ANTS’, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna, Austria
Runners up:
Graham T. Beck’s review of Mike Nelson’s ‘A Psychic Vacuum’, The Old Essex Street Market, New York, USA and Conor Carville’s review of ‘Somnambular Existence’, Louise Bourgeois at the Tate Modern, London, UK
We would also like to highly commend the following writers:
Kate Forde, Tyler Friedman, Clay Lerner, J. MacNeill Miller, Chris Moore and Marianne Templeton
Jennifer Higgie
Let the Games Begin
The Olympics have always been about jingoism, just check out the outfits competing nations parade in the opening ceremony. In the past, US representatives have worn cowboy hats and boots (this year they will be looking preppy in Ralph Lauren), while this year Canadian athletes will wear outfits patterned with a maple leaf along with something vaguely Chinese-inspired. (The typeface for ‘Canada’ itself is like the graphic equivalent of pidgen English, all slanting lines at jaunty angles.) But after the pageantry of the opening, Olympic uniforms keep things comparatively simple: Australia is in green and gold; New Zealand is in its national black; in 2004, the US track and field uniform was red, white and blue with a sans serif ‘USA’ (this year it’s a block capital logo with a star in the centre of the third letter).
China, however, are ahead of the pack with a complex graphic language developed for them by Nike. (Nike are not the only company involved in the China’s uniforms – contracts are highly prized. Adidas shelled out US$80 million for the privilege of dressing the Chinese team on the podium as well as the Olympics’ employees and volunteers). Adidas uniforms are adorned with what they are terming a ‘lucky cloud’, that grew out of a design competition – what better way to drum up local pride? – while Nike’s designs play to the host country’s burgeoning nationalism by incorporating the Terracotta Army, Maoist graphics, and the lyrics to the national anthem.
Of course companies like Nike and Adidas want to woo China: the country represents a marketing nirvana with millions of potential new customers. ‘China is the growth market for the next ten years’, Jonathan Chajet, strategic director of brand consultancy Interbrand, recently told the New York Times. The Games represent the perfect backdrop for a high-profile launch, and the entire country will be watching.
Usually when a corporation goes abroad, as with Coca-Cola, you’ll get the same logo and the same product: McDonald’s is ‘Lovin’ It’ in the Holy Land, but it’s neither kosher nor halal (in fact its restaurants serve meat and dairy together); the iPod sold in San Francisco is the same as is sold in Karachi. In China, however, Nike is going beyond the simple colour-blocking typical of national uniforms with an entire iconographic language that aims to capture patriotic pride.
Just as the end of the 19th century saw the rise of national over religious identity, so too the end of the 20th century saw the multinational supercede the national. In some cases, the corporation is now greater than the nation state. With the Olympics, though, something different is happening: the multinational’s success lies in its mimicry of the nation, in its skill at adopting national symbols. A straightforwardly Marxist analysis tracking the path of capital would ignore why this shift is happening. In China today nationalism is part of youth culture.
In the west, teenagers are almost expected to be anti-Bush and to oppose the war in Iraq. No one mobilizes patriotic protests via the Internet, as China’s students did recently with the torch relay. In the US Chinese students protested the protests, and in China set up boycotts of companies from countries that students and bloggers thought had dishonored their nation. Given this context, it’s not surprising that nationalism plays well there – as well as on the country’s Olympic uniforms. Nike’s designer dealing with uniforms, William Mak, has described this design approach as, ‘looking back blazing forward. China has a compelling 5000-year history, it’s also opening up now and becoming a superpower. For us as Chinese, this is a chance to show people who we are now. People are really proud here, and I like to think about this as a big coming of age party for China.’
After Athens 2004, track athletes told Nike that they felt like superheroes in their national uniform, an image that was a little too western for Mak’s Shanghai-based team of Chinese designers. In China, heroism isn’t about comic book characters so much as personal sacrifice – sacrificing yourself for your country or emperor – and the warrior within, a familiar trope in martial arts movies. Together, they became the inspiration for the graphic on the back of the uniform (typically underused real estate, displaying the athlete’s name, number and country). Now every inch is used.
With Mak’s stated mission to merge the past with the present, the Terracotta Army was an unsurprising choice. Its 8000 soldiers were buried in 210 BC with Qin Shi Huangdi, the brutal emperor who first unified the nation and whose name literally became China’s. At the warriors’ burial site was found a mask of a mythical beast thought to have served as a doorknocker that prevented bad luck from entering. Now with its connection to sacrifice, China’s founding and protection, the mask has been turned into a stylized pattern that is the central focus of the nation’s graphics. Square in the centre is the Chinese symbol for China, since the team wanted the country name not only to be in English as regulations require.
The font on the front comes from Maoist propaganda posters. That these can even be unironically appropriated is stunning; the posters have transformed from representations of Mao to symbols of all that was wrong with Maoism, to now serving as a tool for national identity. Perhaps the most surprising element of the uniforms is one that the cameras will never see. Inside, just above the chest, are the Chinese characters for ‘arise’ and ‘march on’, taken from the national anthem, the ‘March of the Volunteers’ – a secret message for athletes to carry onto the field.
Mak’s team struggled to get the right red on the uniform. They matched the Chinese flag exactly, trying different hues under TV and stadium lighting to make sure that the colour was correct. Red has much relevance in China, where, as well as appearing on the flag, it represents celebration and good luck. Other companies have been less successful in their borrowings: this spring Adidas recalled a line of shirts and bags on which the company’s distinctive leaf logo was embedded in China’s star. Many journalists even claimed that the German company had broken the law (the flag can’t be used commercially). People voted against Adidas’s appropriation in online polls, and Forbes reported that 50% of those voters vowed not to buy any Adidas product in the future. Getting the references right is no small matter here.
The Olympics are turning out to be a baroque display of patriotism, a melding of corporation and nation, as well as a marketing opportunity. Not only are ads appealing to national pride, but, at a time when young people are sensitive to outsiders, companies are trying to out Chinese the Chinese themselves.
Jennifer Kabat
Jennifer Kabat is a design critic based in New York.
A Duchamp Moment
Once upon a time it was easy to distinguish design from art: designers had briefs from clients, practical problems to solve; artists found their own problems. But something has been happening to design – something as significant, in its way, as what happened to painting when photography came along. It’s been getting more conceptual, more playful, more self-directed, less tied to clients, less servile, less practical. Design is, you might say, having its Marcel Duchamp moment.
When Dexter Sinister – an art-design collective founded by the makers of design review Dot Dot Dot – were approached last year to do something for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the curators gave the team a rather unusual choice: they could design the biennial catalogue, or they could be artists in the show. Feeling that giving the catalogue shape and form – the traditional role of the graphic designer – would be limiting, Dexter Sinister instead opted to set up an alternative press office during the biennial, a document-processing unit in a paneled room. Like some weird amalgam of Kafka, Lewis Carroll, and Pynchon, the Commander’s Room, for the three-month duration of the biennial, became a semi-official parallel world producing documents-as-art. In a similar blurring of boundaries – ‘performative publishing’, they call it – the group produced Dot Dot Dot’s 15th issue live in a Geneva gallery.
There are many reasons this shift is happening now. Dexter Sinister, in an interview about their Geneva performance, gave an interestingly practical one: when they moved from the Netherlands to the USA, they were no longer able to get state subsidy for their mostly non-commercial activities. The move towards the art world was a way to get funding; they shook the institutional tree.
In an age when computers make simple graphic design tasks accessible to non-professionals, professional graphic designers have diversified as a distinction strategy. Designers like London collective Åbäke and Alex Rich have turned increasingly to teaching, workshops, cooking, and conceptual projects made for their own pleasure (and their portfolios): exchanging plants at Columbia Flower Market; turning human limbs into typography; making guerilla repairs to broken park benches. Rich calls these projects ‘gentle interventions’.
There’s freedom from the tyranny of the client and the brief in design-for-teaching (Åbäke have spent much of the last year at the Royal College of Art’s Communication department), but also in design-for-exhibition – when I interviewed Icelandic design collective Vík Prjónsdóttir earlier this year about their whimsical design products (balaclava hats with moustaches built in; blankets shaped like volcanoes), half of them were in New York retraining to be artists. Since their work is already conceived with exhibitions and magazine coverage in mind, the leap to the art world will be a small one.
There’s another reason design might be sidling up to art, at least in the west. Increasingly, we’re seeing design-for-production heading east to workshop nations like India and China. Sure, a lot of products (the very computers, for instance, that allow anyone to be a graphic designer) are still designed in the west and manufactured in the east, where labour costs are lower. But the lower-profile products which surround us are increasingly designed in the places they’re made in. Given their increasing distance from pragmatic production, western designers have had to find new roles, just as painters did when photography freed them from the demands of mimesis. Design has, as a result, arrived at its own kind of abstraction – a freedom from the object.
‘We do wonder whether graphic design is a job for life,’ Åbäke told me in an interview. ‘Could it be that we are anticipating graphic design’s visual obsolescence by cooking, teaching, editing, owning a record label and so on?’
At the same time, ethical concerns have also led a young generation of designers away from the guilt associated with unsustainable consumerism. The 1999 ICA exhibition ’Stealing Beauty: British Design Now‘ caught the beginnings of a turn away from design as a signifier of prestige and status. ‘Over the past few years,’ wrote curator Claire Catterall, ‘design has offered an instant passport to a sophisticated image: you spend your money and you get the look.’ ‘Stealing Beauty’ offered recycled, cheap and secondhand goods instead, but failed to avoid the post-materialist paradox: attempts to snub status-seeking quickly become new claims to status.
If design’s move towards the abstract has been modeled on art’s successful popularisation of its once-difficult conceptual wing, it’s also borrowed critical rigour from architecture. The recent – and influential – ’Forms of Inquiry‘ exhibition started at London’s Architecture Association, where its curator, the graphic designer Zak Kyes, is an art director. Subtitled ‘The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design’, the exhibition invited 19 graphic designers to make ‘inquiries’ into ‘the shared lineage between graphic design and architecture’. James Goggin used Ellsworth Kelly’s proposal for Ground Zero (a green void) to present ‘building nothing’ as a valid architectural gesture, Åbäke made a pseudo-metal t-shirt printed with the words ‘Pruitt-Igoe’ to signal the end of Modernism in the demolition of Minoru Yamasaki’s public housing projects.The elegantly serious asceticism made the show feel like a Liam Gillick installation.
Art-ready inquiries and interventions, performative publishing, conceptual and abstract design distanced from objects, briefs or clients; what one thinks of all this depends on whether one thinks design freed from production might lead somewhere interesting. The meeting of art and design could combine the worst of both worlds (pretension, intellectual over-compensation, in-jokes) or the best.
When Berlin designer Rafael Horzon teamed up with writer Ingo Niermann to form REDESIGNDEUTSCHLAND, their grandiose, pseudo-Modernist projects included the decimalisation of time, the simplification of the German and English languages, and a comprehensive new industrial standards unit. The team split up before achieving their final ambition: ‘REDESIGNWORLD’. Design’s connection with practical logistics in the real world raises the stakes, when it gets conceptual, high indeed.
Nick Currie
Nick Currie is a writer and musician based in Berlin. His blog can be found at http://imomus.livejournal.com/.
Playtime is Over
It’s like Dorothy’s house has crashed into Do-Ho Suh’s suburban home, courtesy of a diabolic tornado. On the other side of the gallery another fearsome projectile has ripped through an impeccably furnished IKEA living room, laid out by Los Carpinteros, leaving a trail of exploded fragments paused as though gravity did not exist. Mike Nelson has summoned a poltergeist party. Various pods have sprouted across the building like art-sores: Ernesto Neto’s is a huge fishnet pendant embellished with other pendulous, perfumed scrota; Tomas Saraceno’s, an inflatable, achromatic pleasure balloon; and Tobias Putrih has DIY-ed a ramshackle cinema whose inner grace belies its favela-like exterior.
These are some of the works on show in the Hayward Gallery’s ambitious architectural blockbuster, ‘Psycho Buildings’. With a title borrowed from Martin Kippenberger’s 1988 book, the exhibition provides nine artists and one architect with the Hayward’s Brutalist backdrop as a starting point and a brief that seems as simple as, ‘Let it rip!’ Maybe it’s Ralph Rugoff’s psychoanalytic way of telling us that, as the gallery’s still relatively new director, this hulk of obdurate concrete is his bitch now.
The Hayward turns 40 this year and ever since the gallery and its sister building, Queen Elizabeth Hall, opened they have borne the brunt of Londoners’ contempt. Adored by only the informed few (I rate it one of the best galleries in the world), Brutalism has remained a dogged blind-spot in British populist taste-tests. As the Smiths song goes, ‘Yes I know I’m unloveable / You don’t have to tell me’.
The angry-looking behemoth opened the same year that students rioted in Paris, which is why this show celebrates a double birthday of sorts. 1968: the Big Bang of modern intellectual activism and politics as aesthetics. There’s a nominal whiff of ‘60s references in several of the works in ‘Psycho Buildings’: Saraceno invokes visionary architect Buckminster Fuller as well as Austrian experimentalists Haus-Rucker-Co; Neto’s stretched fabrics recall fellow Brazilians such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark. Mike Nelson’s theatrical trashing of one of the galleries could almost have been a messier, malevolent version of Michael Asher’s ‘institutional critique’.
Mike Nelson, To the Memory of HP Lovecraft (1999)
But there’s another index of ’68-ism here that crystallizes a contemporary artistic fetish that may also be worth thinking about – and even worrying about. Austrian collective gelitin’s boating lake – in one of the Hayward’s terraces – demands interactivity and elicits a sense of carefree play (if you can forget the attendant at your side ensuring that you don’t drown or go over the edge). Atelier Bow Wow’s huge metallic prophylactic inserts itself in the gallery’s interior, with us, the visitors, playing accidental spermatozoa within. And Saraceno’s bouncy-ball dis-inhibits its participants into a giddy amorousness. Barbarella would feel at home in this frisson-zone.
These immersive works are in the lineage of other major sculptural interventions Londoners have enjoyed in the last few of years. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (2003) lulled Tate Modern visitors into an imaginary internalized beach scene. Carsten Höller’s Test Site (2006) inserted vertiginous slides in the same Turbine Hall, turning it into a ludic theme park in which play was considered critical engagement. And Jeppe Hein’s Distance (2007) at the Barbican Curve galleries was a consummate hit with young kids, who ran around screaming with excitement, desperate to see where the black balls would roll to next in the massive mini-rollercoaster ride. Christoph Büchel’s Coppermill installation (2007) led its guests from one unnerving Lynchian room to another, complete with secret hatches, and underworld mammoths. Despite the brooding ambience, one felt like a child allowed to rummage through a fabulous film-set.
For the Situationists, ‘play’ was a key aspect of personal and societal revolution. Taking inspiration in part from the libidinous freedom of both Surrealism and Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book Homo Ludens, Situationist desires deemed play to be subversive, unsettling and anti-establishmentarian. For ‘60s architects like Coop Himmelb(l)au and Haus-Rucker-Co, inflatable blobs and bouncy surfaces necessitated an altered form of human behaviour quite separate to bourgeois rectitude. Play was radically serious, and a radicalized future was at stake by agreeing to play seriously.
Is this the same kind of play that we continue to see today in many of contemporary art’s interactive playgrounds? I don’t think so. Play, today, is just play, the kind you might find at Alton Towers – or Blackpool Pleasure Beach. It’s play without subtext, without worry or unruly threat. Play as aesthetic salve.
I’m beginning to believe that this tendency fits neatly into a larger transformation that has seen art become fully embraced by the masses as just another branch of the entertainment industry (iconic architecture is, of course, another). Tate Modern’s staggering visitor numbers – 4.9 million a year and rising – attest to the touristic pull that contemporary art can have today. But Kant’s injunction that art once ought to be experienced as ‘disinterested aesthetic experience’ increasingly gives way to something else: a literal captivation of the viewer – a capitulation to the work with all your bodily attention. We are a growing generation of kidults. And kidults just want to have fun.
Neoliberalism casts art as a safe and entertaining consumer-friendly facet of the burgeoning experience economy. Saatchi’s ‘Sensation’ show in 1997 coincided with the momentous victory of New Labour, itself a symbolic stealth transformation of the once political left into Conservatism by another name. ‘Sensation’ provided a safe shock ’n’ awe art experience replete with the horror thrills of a good ghoulish flick. Like the blood in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965): ‘Don’t worry, it’s only red paint.’
At the risk of sounding like the Victor Meldrew of aesthetic theory (self-revelation comes at the strangest of times), let’s put it like this: if only the play were a little more psycho (as in Mike Nelson’s maligned, spectrally disturbed upper gallery intervention) and a little less playful. Then ‘Psycho Buildings’ would be truly deserving of its deliriously deranged title.
Shumon Basar
Shumon Basar is a London-based writer, editor and curator.
Born on the Kitchen Table
As creation myths go, the AACM’s seems fairly prosaic. Among jazz origin stories, more magical is the legendary Christmas Eve of 1939, when Charlie Parker is said to have improvised a bar of ‘Cherokee’, constituting what were very likely the first notes of bebop. The AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Music), on the other hand, was hatched at a kitchen table in a housing project on the South Side of Chicago. Written by George E. Lewis, a trombonist by training and a longtime AACM member himself, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music proves that humble origins can yield great promise.
By the late 1940s, bebop had already become somewhat codified, accepted without question by jazz circles and mainstream critics alike. It was, however, openly challenged by the emergence of ‘free’ jazz – as played by Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, who themselves had come out of bebop (the former’s 1960 Free Jazz album was released on a major label, Atlantic, and featured, incidentally, Jackson Pollock’s White Light, 1954, on the cover) – and by those, like Pharoah Sanders, who had already embraced globalized forms from Africa and the Caribbean. In the shadow of the growing acceptance of innovative jazz forms, as radio shows gradually shifted to rock and roll and as Chicago jazz clubs fell victim to local governmental discriminatory policies, a loose tangle of mostly Chicago-based musicians were creating ‘original’ music.
Early on, ‘creative music’ was interpreted through the matrix of jazz, and was primarily composed and played by African-Americans influenced by bebop. However, the AACM founders almost seem to have gone out of their way to avoid including the word in their collective title and mission. Lewis believes that the avoidance of ‘jazz’ was not only a way to do away with the constraints that the word and the genre presented, but was also a means by which members sought to broaden the scope of their livelihoods and creative outlets. Equally important to this notion of creative music was that the founders and early members were seeking to establish not so much a musical group or musicians’ union, but a robust and purposeful cultural organization.
It was a recording by Roscoe Mitchell that paved the way for the AACM’s entrance into the more mainstream jazz scene: released by Chicago’s Delmark label in 1966, Sound was radical in its realization of the equal roles sound and silence play in composition. (While this may sound hopelessly Cageian, it was Miles Davis who once said that he composed his best pieces by examining what to leave out, not what to include.) Acceptance, or some form of it, in popular jazz circles allowed the AACM to concentrate on other aims: setting up a music school for inner city children (which offers free tuition to this day); political involvement with the infamous segregated public housing from which many Chicagoan members were launched; as well as working diligently to find performance opportunities and venues for its members.
A Power Stronger Than Itself also serves as a distilled account of the Great Migration: countless members of the AACM were the sons and daughters of families that had migrated north to industrial cities (Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Indiana, and St. Louis) looking for work in the early decades of the twentieth century. Even though their experiences are a unique result of that phenomenon – poverty and single parenthood (saxophonist Fred Anderson); crumbling schools (Lewis himself) and public housing; military service (trumpeter Philip Cohran) – autodidactism and private inquiry marks many members’ affinity for the forms of improv that found a home within the AACM.
Until now, creative music and the South Side-based collective built around it has been regrettably underrecognized and long misrepresented. Following a decade of attentive research and interviewing, Lewis has not simply set out to reconstruct a meticulous history of the organization – indeed, he calls the book a mere ‘interim’ history – but to debunk popular misconceptions about the role of the organization in jazz and political milieus. Lewis takes readers beyond the more recognizable careers the organization launched – those of Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, for example – as well as detailing preceding collectives (such as the Experimental Band and the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group) and the politics of various musicians’ unions. Lewis doesn’t shrink from confronting the controversy of the not-so-amicable splintering of the Chicago and New York outposts of the organization (mended somewhat in recent years after the 40th anniversary of the group was celebrated), nor does he attempt to give the group a misrepresentative polish.
With extended discussions on composition that may be lost on a lay reader, A Power Stronger Than Itself may be scholarly but it is not out of touch: the crystalline study is thoroughly engaging, missing perhaps only a detailed family-tree-style chart at the beginning to lay out the cast of characters that Lewis so thoroughly unpacks. Even the most dedicated improvised music aficionado will find anecdotes, relationships and hitherto unknown performances and biographies laid out in stunning detail, culled from interviews and the audio tapes of early AACM meetings. The book is a graceful intertwining of oral history, hard research and insightful scrutiny of a complicated organism.
Eugenia Bell
Eugenia Bell is design editor of frieze.
Museu de Arte de São Paulo
There was no lavish reception last Friday, when the most important museum in the southern hemisphere opened its latest exhibition. The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) has decided to go quiet now it tries to survive yet another scandal. Seven months after the theft of a Picasso and a piece by Candido Portinari (both already recovered by local police), the Brazilian department of public prosecution finished an investigation of the museum’s accounting balances and concluded that the institution has been technically bankrupt since 2006. Its current debt amounts to US$13 million, a figure that could rise to US$20 million by 2010 if nothing changes.
Concerns have been raised in the public sphere about the privately run museum’s ability to continue operating and the possibility of putting its valuable collection – amounting to more than 7,000 works – at risk. There is more pressure than ever from government officials who want a seat on the institution’s board of trustees to try and avoid the damage that now seems imminent.
Less than a month ago, Veja, Brazil’s leading weekly magazine, published a photomontage of the museum in which it was riddled with cracks, ready to fall apart. The story exacerbated the already bruised public perception of MASP, following the theft of the two pieces last December. (At the time the museum had no alarm or 24-hour security personnel.) Since the incident, city police have kept a permanent base below the museum on Paulista Avenue, one of São Paulo’s most important thoroughfares and landmarks.
The government’s recent investigation also revealed alarming details about the way in which museum staff maintain the collection. According to the documents recently obtained by the press, records of acquisitions, loans and restoration were kept in disorganized piles of handwritten notes.
When they brought forth the results of the inquiry in a meeting behind closed doors, public officials asked the museum’s director, the architect Julio Neves, who has held the position for 14 years, and its trustees to sign a term of agreement according to which MASP would be legally bound to change its statute to allow government representatives to take seats on the board. The current administration has been accused of functioning like a secret society, despite the fact the museum is installed in a public building and most of its collection was acquired with government funding and donations.
Neves did not sign the term and asked for a month to look over the accusations, though officials refused to wait for 30 days. The government now studies entering into a legal dispute with the private association that runs the museum, which could result in public intervention.
What brings the government even closer to MASP is the fact that the building that houses the museum, a Modernist landmark designed by Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, belongs to the city of São Paulo and was ceded to MASP for a 40-year period that is due to expire in October. This deadline is now being used by city officials to pressure the museum into opening up its administration.
Up until now, however, there has been no clear sign that MASP is willing to negotiate. In a laconic interview published in the Folha de S.Paulo, Brazil’s most-read daily newspaper, Neves limited himself to saying he knew nothing about what the city officials wanted from MASP and denied that the current administration is against any public intervention.
Silas Martí
Silas Martí is a journalist who writes on visual arts for the Folha de S.Paulo.
Postcards from Manifesta
Thursday 17th July: Part 1
Just got back to my hotel room after attending the opening of Adam Budak’s ‘Principle Hope’ in Rovereto – one of the four exhibitions that combine to form Manifesta 7, this year being held in Italy’s South Tyrol region.
First things first. The four towns in which Manifesta is sited (to be precise, three towns and a fortress) are strung through the Adige valley, which stretches from the Austrian border near Innsbruck down to Lake Garda in the south. We flew to Verona, which is 40 minutes on an extremely comfortable train from Rovereto, and only 20 minutes more from the pretty town of Trento, where we are staying. Trento is the base for Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg’s ‘The Soul (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)’, which I’m off to see in a few minutes. Tomorrow we’re looking forward to the Raqs Media Collective’s ‘The Rest of Now’, in Bolzano, and the collaboratively curated ‘Scenarios’, in the hilltop fortress of Fortezza. It’s possible to buy a ticket for the exhibitions which includes travel between venues on all local rail and bus services.
Back to Budak’s exhibition. ‘Principle of Hope’ occupies a large building around two courtyards that formerly housed a tobacco factory, as well as a smaller warehouse space, ‘Ex Peterlini’, on the other side of town. The show’s title is borrowed from Ernst Bloch, and refers to the optimistic notion of ‘critical regionalism’, which, as Budak states, is ‘a means to resolve tensions between globalization and localism, modernity and tradition’ in which local life reaches a state of self-aware criticality. While this is doubtlessly an interesting starting point, the show does little in terms of elucidation. Long, discursive wall texts (in tiny font) accompany each work, dropping references to ‘trans-rational spatial categories’ or claims that ‘the artists penetrate the borderlines of knowledge and science’. Despite this, there are many excellent works (as well as plenty that were the aesthetic equivalent of eating ten cheese crackers with a dry mouth). Highlights for me included Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance (in which two suited gentleman sang German love songs inside a painted depiction of hell), João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva’s extraordinary installation of their quasi-archaeological films, and Barbora Klímová’s videoed restagings of canonical Czech performance art, accompanied by commentary by the original artists.
Now I’m running off to Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg’s contribution, which, from the list of artists, appears to be quite a different proposition.
Thursday 17th July: Part 2
What a relief! ‘The Soul (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)’, which has set up shop in Trento’s fascist-built Palazzo della Poste (its former post office, pictured above), provided many more enjoyable surprises than the exhibition in Rovereto. A short bus or train ride up the valley, Trento is the nominal centre of the region. It is also the town that wears a sense of its own history most proudly, something that is embodied in the medieval architecture dotted throughout the largely pedestrianised town centre.
Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg’s exhibition focuses on the idea of Europe as a political entity that is beginning to turn in on itself, a continent that regards its own psyche – or multitude of psyches – as the next frontier to be crossed, rather than its bulging geographical borders. Broadly speaking, this is a show about interiority, sharpening its political talons on the proposition that the psyche – or soul, as it was once called – is nothing more than a cultural construct, an idea that the Catholic church of Trento itself significantly contributed to some 500 years ago.
From Luigi Ontani’s sexualised holograms of Asian boys, and Bernd Ribbeck’s cosmic, lush, abstract ink drawings, it was clear that Franke and Peleg’s tastes are quite different to those of Budak. Pietro Roccasalva followed soon afterwards, with an extraordinary series of works over two adjacent rooms, one installation involving snaking neon and a small painting bearing the memorable title Jockey Full of Bourbon II (2006). Mostly, however, artists were given just one room each – turgid wall texts notable by their absence. The exhibition was spread principally over the first and second floors, the smallish rooms circling a central courtyard. A high proportion of the show is video- or film-based (I’d guess at around half), which in a hot, close climate does not make for a hugely enjoyable viewing experience. However the quality of the work countered the audience’s resentment: strong – and very often new – film and video works from Omer Fast, Karl Holmqvist, Rosalind Nashashibi, Javier Téllez, and Angela Melitopoulos were carefully presented, the last being a particular highlight and an artist previously unknown to me.
The exhibition also stood out for its use of mini-museums to break up the pace of the show. At various corners of the building galleries were given over to invited artists and academics who created displays on themes such as ‘The Museum of Projective Personality Testing’ (revealing various defunct psychoanalytical evaluation methods) or ‘The Museum of the Stealing of Souls’ (which explained how the notion that photography was thought by certain peoples to steal the subject’s soul is largely a colonial myth propagated by those hoping to extend the impression of these societies as innocent, primitive cultures). A lot to digest. I’ll sleep well tonight.
Friday 18th July: Part 1
We caught a bus first thing this morning which took about an hour up the valley to Fortezza, the site of the 1830s’ Habsburg hilltop fortress (in the South Tyrol there seems to be a great many hilltop fortresses) in which all six curators collaborated to produce the exhibition ‘Scenarios’. The derelict building has clearly had some care lavished upon it in preparation for Manifesta: elevators, cloakrooms, toilets – even a pair of striking elevated walkways over the river are installed sensitively and imaginatively. Following its role as a defensive military outpost, the fortress was put to use by the Nazis during World War II as a depository for stolen gold, and subsequently an ammunition depot (grids of metal lightning conductors are still nervously strapped over all its roofs).
Unable to pass up the offer of the site but understandably anxious about pitching art works against the heady atmospherics seeping from its walls, the curatorial team agreed to invite ten writers to contribute texts responding to the place, which were then recorded by actors and are exhibited as sound works throughout the building. A distinctly Sebaldian sediment of historical projections, testimonies and conjured memories is stirred through the fortress’s cold damp chambers. Diverse presentation techniques are employed: some pieces can be heard on headphones or out of speakers; others emanate from beneath Martino Gamper’s specially commissioned chairs. Margareth Obexer’s text Defending Europe (2008) can be heard by holding wooden discs, attached to taut strings, to one’s ear. Of course, sound work of this kind benefits from patience and reflective silence, both of which was in short supply amongst the excited hordes at the press opening this morning.
In contrast to the auditory nature of the exhibition’s core works, however, one large building is devoted to a silent film programme. Five films are projected on the interior walls of the darkened space, the most affecting of which is Harun Farocki’s extraordinary Respite (2007), a devastating reworking of found footage from the Westerbork concentration camp in which Farocki uses intertitles to direct our reading of the ostensibly innocent images. The film’s attention to the background hum of its source material chimed clearly not just with the audio works but also with sculptor Philippe Rahm’s installation Climate Uchronia (2008). Rahm had affixed ominous black-backed lightboxes over the outside of certain windows in the fortress, which reproduced exactly the effect of daylight in the room inside. Moments after watching Farocki’s film, listening to Mladen Dolar’s The Voice and the Fortress (2008) under the silently malignant light of one of Rahm’s lightboxes, I felt the exhibition pull focus for a moment into a cohesive, powerful and generous experience. And it’s not often you get to say that.
Friday 18th July: Part 2
We turned back down the valley for the final section of Manifesta 7: Raqs Media Collective’s ‘The Rest of Now’ in Bolzano’s Alumix building – a former aluminium factory on the edge of town, now surrounded by newer light industrial units, car dealerships and roundabouts. Raqs’ curatorial mood-board was a spidery diagram of ideas, which connected references to Futurism, to aluminium’s function as the metal of propulsion and violence, light and speed, industrial, social and artistic residue and sediment, environmentalism and ultimately the problem of how to deal with what is left over. Part of this thesis drew on and extended their 2005 essay ‘With Respect to Residue’, which they quoted in much of the exhibition’s literature.
The building itself provided Manifesta’s only large open exhibition space, all of the other shows having been divided into sequences of smaller rooms. This came as a pleasant change, the works having more room to interact and start their own non-linear conversations. The exhibition started well enough, with a presentation of the work of Italian underground musician and comic artist Professor Bad Trip, who died in 2006, which segued into a cyber-hippy bus driven across Europe by the Swedish founders of file-sharing website Pirate Bay, currently beset by copyright litigation. This was an early peak however; while the central space had a lively dynamic in terms of the placement of works (dominated by Zilvinas Kempinas’ videotape floor-to-ceiling Skylight Tower, 2008, and Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller’s wooden Cybermohalla Hub, 2007) the quality of the works themselves often seemed lacking, as if they were serving primarily to flesh out the curatorial premise. Clichés that most artists left behind after the first year at art school were dusted off for reuse: photographs printed onto fabric hung on clothes lines, piles of obsolete televisions, latex casts of dusty surfaces and a performance whose self-seriousness left me trying not to giggle were among the worst culprits. By now it was also possible to spot recurrent Manifesta trademarks: indexes and archives, audio-works, collaborative and/or research-based practices and allusions to post-war German guilt.
I should close this report with a caveat: my responses here are by no means consensual and I have spoken to plenty of people who have entirely different views on Manifesta to my own. There are those who feel that Franke and Peleg’s show in Trento was a safe, overly passive viewing experience, and that it was Budak who most challenged the viewer with a rigorous and incisively researched exhibition. Others have ventured that Raqs’ show in Bolzano’s Alumix building was the only piece of consistent and cohesive curation in Manifesta 7, and that the exhibition in the fortress was a monotone washout. Ultimately I think this is testament to the overall quality of the biennial, and of the fact that, while the four exhibitions may take distinctly different approaches, as whole Manifesta 7 is a tough, intelligent and serious endeavour, and worthy of the pan-European discussion that it hopes to instigate.
Jonathan Griffin
Jonathan Griffin is assistant editor of frieze.
Dead-Enders
Guillermo Habacuc Vargas's dog, Nativida, as presented in his 2007 exhibition, 'Exposición N° 1'
The art world has fielded a few examples of ‘dying’ as art this past year: there were Adel Abdessemed’s video accounts of a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat, and a doe being bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer; Guillermo Habacuc Vargas tied up a starving dog in a gallery; and for those on the Pro-Life side of the abortion debate, there was Aliza Shvarts, an undergraduate at Yale, who intended to exhibit her own blood from a series of self-induced miscarriages (until the university stepped in asking her to admit it was a hoax). All three artists aroused the predictable hue and cry – disturbed citizens were everywhere to be found, animal rights groups targeted Abdessemed and Vargas, while Yale sought to temper Shvarts. Helaine Klasky, a university spokeswoman, drew a discerning line between art and reality saying: ‘[Shvarts] is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art. Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.’ (Had they been real? Shvarts swears that her miscarriages were no creative fictions, but never mind that he-said-she-said game.)
Arthur Danto’s detector for sorting art from reality – ‘The question is not whether it is a good work of art or bad, but how is it art at all?’ (‘The Last Work of Art: Artworks and Real Things’) – has served as a reliable compass within the no man’s land between artistic creation and humdrum reality. But that compass begins to spin when dying is untied from life by being presented as art – it’s quite different from distinguishing a snow shovel from a ready-made. Perhaps the time has come for more prosaic questions of accountability: what do Abdessemed, Vargas and Shvarts claim for turning dying into art, and how will they conscientiously bear it out?
We have been here before: in 1977 Tom Otterness adopted a dog and summarily shot it at point-blank range (the sole subject of his unambiguously titled Shot Dog Film). Last year Otterness tried to put the affair behind him with a heart-felt apology: ‘Thirty years ago, when I was 25 years old, I made a film in which I shot a dog. It was an indefensible act that I am deeply sorry for.’ Aligning his callousness with youthful indulgence, Otterness seems to have come to terms with his film as being more reality than art (the puppy could only have agreed). Does this pass for accountability? After a 17-second video was posted on YouTube last March showing two US Marines tossing a puppy off a cliff, animal-rights groups and many others expected an immediate explanation. Lance Corporal David Motari, who threw the puppy off the cliff, tried his hand at absolution saying, ‘Usually what happens is we shoot them. I was being ‘creative’ that day and decided to throw the dog instead.’ Following an investigation the Marine Corps discharged Motari. Where does the difference between Otterness and Motari lie? Well, according to Motari’s explanation, Otterness should receive extra demerits for lacking creativity (though cliffs are admittedly in short supply in Manhattan). The difference is that art world precincts carry on as if they are responsibility-free zones, addicted to avant-garde sweet-spots tainted by divine arrogance. For example, when threats and public outrage forced the San Francisco Art Institute to close Abdessemed’s exhibition, ‘Don’t Trust Me’, SFAI’s President Chris Bratton rationalized an excuse via the press release: ‘The artist participated in an already-existing circuit of food production in a rural community in Mexico. The animals were raised for food, purchased, and professionally slaughtered. In fact, what causes the controversy is that Abdessemed, an artist, entered this exchange, filmed it, and exhibited it.’ This argument is off-kilter: is an artist no more than an uncritical instrument for channeling reality? Is this innocent reportage somehow freed of ethical responsibility?
Was Abdessemed engaged in some form of anthropological field work? Maybe some audience members watched with vague alarm, but judging from the public indignation and righteous anger expressed by The Animal Liberation Front (ALF), In Defense of Animals (IDA), and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) – all named in Bratton’s press release – none were shocked, they simply wanted to know what end Abdessemed’s videos served. Animals are exploited by humankind every day; some are clobbered to death for dinner, while others are injected with cancer tumors as researchers look for a cure. The question is, do the means justify the ends? If you’re hungry or dying of cancer, traditionally the answer has been go ahead. Is art exempt from the same questions of accountability and responsibility cancer researchers and others live up to? Abdessemed and the San Francisco Art Institute should have accounted for the measurable effects these videos supposedly promised. But they didn’t, or couldn’t. The art world has not traveled far from the point when Robert Morris closed his 1970 solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art to protest the Vietnam War. Imagine the scene. In the Oval Office Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman delicately approaches Richard Nixon:
Haldeman: Mr. President, more bad news. Robert Morris has just closed his exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art to protest the war.
Nixon: Morris is a son-of-a-bitch. I don’t need this now. What are our contingency plans? We knew this was a possibility. Is there any chance he’ll reconsider and re-open the exhibition? Get him on the phone!
Haldeman: I knew you would want to talk with him. He’s on line two Mr. President.
Morris is one of the most astute and gifted artists of the last half-century; what realistic expectation could he have harbored that slamming shut the Whitney’s doors would resound with measurable effect inside the corridors of power? And what lessons did Abdessemed carry away from that? None.
For his widely reviled exhibition, Guillermo Habacuc Vargas sent some street children to catch a stray dog he then named Natividad. Vargas tethered him, without food or water, inside a gallery in Managua, Nicaragua, but within sight of hundreds of dog biscuits glued to a gallery wall spelling out the words ‘Eres Lo Que Lees’ (You Are What You Read). According to the Guardian, Vargas claimed he wanted ‘to test the public’s reaction, and insisted none of the exhibition visitors intervened to stop the animal’s suffering.’ Protests and petitions followed. When word circulated that Natividad had died in the exhibition, death threats arrived though Vargas then claimed it had all been a hoax. This deception, Vargas said, was ‘to illustrate a point […] tens of thousands of stray dogs starve and die of illness each year in the streets and no one pays them a second thought.’ Is there a cause more naïve than this in a country where 68% live in poverty – 27% in extreme poverty – and the average annual income is US$326.20 per person? Were that not enough realism, according to the World Society for the Protection of Animals, of the 500 million dogs in the world, approximately 75% are strays. Vargas says ‘starvation and disease’ and we shrug because it takes no great imagination to see how little room there is for animals in the poverty equation when there are babies to feed. As a postscript to this pathetic stunt, Natividad was released to die on the streets, without Vargas delivering saving grace to the star of his show. What is this if not the gratuitous stoking of the old avant-gardist potbelly that burns desire with distrust; morbid curiosity on the one hand, and outrage on the other? It is a dead-ender’s game.
The real world teaches real lessons where dying is concerned. Suffering from agitation and psychosis, Esmin Elizabeth Green was admitted involuntarily on 1 June 2008 to New York’s Kings County Hospital Center, and placed in the waiting room of the psychiatric emergency facility. CCTV reveals that, after waiting nearly 24 hours, Green collapsed on the floor where she remained for about an hour, until she died. Half an hour after she collapsed the video shows a security guard walk into the waiting room, look at her, and walk away. Later in the footage, a member of hospital staff can be seen nudging Green with her foot before leaving. Throughout the entire affair others in the waiting room glance over but do no more. Although this was widely reported, coverage was nothing compared to the frenzied blogging over Natividad. What the coverage accomplished was the accountability the art world should be tuned in to: Kings County Hospital has been taken to court, and offending members of staff fired – many of whom may be found criminally negligent or guilty of malpractice.
Abdessemed, Vargas and Shvarts produce melodramas by imposing simplicity on complexity; they are the groundlings Hamlet condemns as ‘capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise.’ If the art world doesn’t know how to curb them without inviting accusations of censorship, the real world knows exactly what to do with them. If not scraps for the 24-hour news cycle, they provided pulp for blog-causes, while, in Shvarts’ case, controversy was turned quickly into commodity. The online trinket company Onch has created the ‘Aliza Shvarts’ pendant. ‘Onch’, apparently the jewelry-artist responsible for the design, coos: “After reading the story about artist Aliza Shvarts, i was so inspired, i made a piece named after her. Aliza is a Yale art student that has created quite a controversy in the art world! i LOVE IT!’
$45.00 without the chain. Would we prefer censorship to this? I wonder. Or are we on the outskirts of seeing a backlash that will re-jig Danto to say: the question is indeed whether it is a good work of art or bad? I am not sure that the art world has the stomach for either, but maybe that’s good rather than bad. So we will wait for the next iteration of Showpeople 2.0, who like rock stars and reality TV shows realize that they must up the ante to insure audience share. We won’t have to wait long because it appears that Gregor Schneider has a doctor in Düsseldorf who will help him find a volunteer prepared to die in public for an upcoming exhibition. Esmin Elizabeth Green won’t even be a footnote and accountability will again be ignored. Stay tuned.
Ronald Jones
Ronald Jones, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, leads the Experience Design Group at Konstfack University College of Art, Craft and Design in Stockholm. He writes this regular column for frieze.com
For Rent
Heaven has just closed. This was not some deistic version of heaven, and, God forbid, its proprietor would hardly have seen it as that. I’m talking about the restaurant Florent, which – for more than two decades – was a sort of revolving circus of drag queens and trannies (pre- and post-op), hipsters and politicians, artists and musicians. Even movie stars and average Joes congregated there.
My first visit was on my first day in New York – in fact my first night. I had been clubbing with a girl I’d just met, my new best friend, who guided me there through a maze of cobblestone streets, past idling diesel trucks and sides of raw beef to Gansevoort Street. The lower-case font of the pink neon sign read ‘florent’; the lettering above the door announced ‘R & L’. Inside: a long Formica lunch counter, tables pushed tightly together, filled with club kids, artists and more fun than one should have eating breakfast at 4.45 am.
I had moved to New York with a dream of writing a history of the 1980s art scene – East Village meets Soho; the whole stew of clubs and bands and film-makers; Richard Kern and Richard Prince; Robert Longo and Ida Applebroog; her daughter Beth B and Lydia Lunch. It was 1986 and I was 18, and Florent – although it was west – was heaven. The menu board over the cash register had forecasts – both political and meteorological – while the matches had images from the Yellow Pages stuck to them, sharing a common currency with the ransom-note graphics used on the band fliers I loved.
The restaurant had been founded the year before by Florent Morellet, the youngest son of French artist François Morellet (Florent Jr got his start after a rather scandalous opening party for his father at the Brooklyn Museum in 1985). Tibor Kalman, the idealistic and campaigning graphics guru, was in charge of Florent’s graphics. His firm, M&Co, is now nearly as famous for its alumni as its work; graduates include film director Mike Mills, artist Marlene McCarthy, as well as another bold iconoclast: Stefan Sagmeister. Florent was one of M&Co’s first clients and, according Scott Stowell (now head of renowned design studio Open), Kalman did the work for free, a handshake-deal meaning that the restaurant delivered catered lunch to the designers four days a week. Morellet never really wanted to advertise, so instead turned the ads into billboards for his left-leaning politics. ‘The work was great,’ Stowell – who is a former employee of M&Co – explains, ‘none of the typical concerns, like ‘is the name big enough?’ The standard was: if it were goofy, vernacular, vaguely political and homoerotic, it would work.’ In 1992, Stowell designed one of Florent’s most famous missives featuring Bush Sr.’s then-Vice President Dan Quayle. As Stowell explains, ‘Quayle was at a kids’ event at a school, and it was a spelling lesson. One of the children spelled ‘potato’ and Quayle said, ‘Son, I think you forgot something, something on the end, an ‘e’, a silent ‘e’.’’ For the ad Stowell took the headline from the New York Times, Xeroxed it over Quayle’s official portrait, and added a single line of copy: ‘Voter registration forms are available at Florent’.
When Kalman left for Italy to launch Colors magazine in 1993, Doug Riccardi – another M&Co alumnus – took over at Florent. The work quickly became less political: as Riccardi puts it, instead of, ‘bitchy queens yelling at each other, we turned to more funny things than just screaming.’
Morellet focused his advertising on what he termed the ‘high holy days’: Halloween, New Year’s and Bastille Day. Yet there were still menu boards like those shown in the restaurant’s 20th anniversary White Columns show: ‘you know you’re gay if…’ (The list includes ‘reading Wallpaper* and ‘wearing a collar clerical or not.’) Other boards advertised anti-war marches organized by the restaurant (which included continental breakfast/bus fare to DC and lunch: ‘RSVP maintenant’).
With rents in the Meatpacking District skyrocketing, Florent came to an end with a typographic joke: Riccardi dropped the ‘l’. Florent was now ‘For Rent’. The subtle quip fits the restaurant’s signature off-the-grid design. Florent’s contents and posters were auctioned on eBay, netting nearly US$38,000 according to Riccardi, all of which went to the staff. Now there are rumors that Morellet might run the Whitney’s new restaurant, and he has been in talks with Jet Blue to do the catering for their new JFK terminal, but it won’t be the same. Can you imagine some idealistic teenager making a pilgrimage to an airline terminal at nearly 5.00 am? And, of course, now, nearly a quarter century on such vernacular graphics are common enough to be banal. As Riccardi says, many of those fancy restaurants opening around the Meatpacking District come to him for Florent-style graphics. Goodbye Heaven.
Jennifer Kabat
Jennifer Kabat is a design critic based in New York.
Genuinely Rude
In October 2003 Japanese publisher Tetsuya Ozaki launched a new bilingual art magazine. ART iT‘s slogan promised something intriguingly un-Japanese: ‘genuinely rude art journalism’. Rude magazine journalism isn’t just un-Japanese because the Japanese are unfailingly polite, but because the Japanese magazine market has long been controlled – to an extent that we’re only now beginning to see in the West – by advertisers, PR and management companies. Most Japanese magazines are, effectively, catalogues; most Japanese editorial is advertorial.
Readers expecting articles calling Yoshitomo Nara ‘horribly twee’ or labeling Takashi Murakami a ‘sell-out’ were disappointed, though; ART iT, though good, hasn’t proved rude. It has supplied pretty much the same respectful artist profiles and tactful, vague, nuanced reviews – interspersed with gallery ads – found in many other art magazines.
So what’s the value of negativity in art journalism? What might criticism be without negativity, and what could ‘the big yes’ possibly mean without ‘the big no’ as its flip-side? Are we seeing ‘a crisis in critical negativity’? Are we ‘post-rude’, and, if so, is it healthy?
One could criticize the design of a car that may blow up on rear impact, but there’s no objective way to criticize the work of an artist. No lives were saved by Laura Cumming’s recent Observer review of the Serpentine’s Richard Prince retrospective (’the more one sees of his Joke paintings the more foolish one feels’). Perhaps the only losers here were the collectors who own one of Prince’s painted jokes (though, as economist Don Thompson notes in his recent book, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, broadsheet reviews seem to have zero effect on the market).
While daily newspapers adopt an overtly negative tone more often than specialist art publications, sometimes this is nothing more than a pandering to the conservatism and incomprehension of their readers – and no matter how repetitious Prince might be, he can’t compete with the tedium of the Evening Standard’s Brian Sewell repeatedly savaging Nick Serota. But at other times negative judgments are principled and entertaining – a sign that the writer really cares about art. The direct, relatively disinterested, unapologetically judgmental approach of the daily press is perhaps something art magazines could learn from.
Something art magazines could valuably avoid is the general tendency of the press to become more PR-led. Nick Davies, researching his book Flat Earth News, asked researchers at Cardiff University’s school of journalism to analyze more than 2000 news items in British newspapers, from The Times to the Daily Mail. They found that 60% of stories were taken directly from agencies and PR companies, and another 20% were wire and PR copy with a little original content added. Reporting this research in the London Review of Books, John Lanchester calculated that Britain has 47,800 PR people feeding stories to just 45,000 journalists. Figures for the art press aren’t known, but I’ve been getting so many gallery PR mails recently that I’ve had to make a special spam folder for them.
I’ve also noticed more screening going on: the press officer for one stable of artists demanded to know in advance exactly what I was going to write about one of his artists, with the implication that access to others would be conditional on my being on-message. He then proceeded to ask for a substantial fee for the right to reproduce a photo of the artist’s work. The kinds of restrictions and prohibitions once restricted to relations with advertisers, in other words, are now being extended into other areas. Where money and power relationships are cardinal, the text becomes the plastic and pliable element, the first thing that gives.
Nevertheless, power creates the conditions of its own undermining. Endless hype has the effect of making us long for some kind of critical knight errant to tilt at the PR mills. We long for Don Quixotes to puncture Panglossian claims that all’s for the best in the best of all possible art worlds. If it’s to be more than superficial bitching, though, negative criticism has to come from an authoritative figure, a trusted gatekeeper, but the hierarchies once imposed by Greenbergian colossuses have long since disappeared. Now, instead, we have a horizontal, postmodern plethora of personal opinions, all as good as each other, but some backed up – crucially – by money and power. Our model for media consumption is websites: if you don’t like one, don’t tick it off, click off to another.
Why, in that kind of world, would you bother to criticize an art show? Well, you might want to offset hype – curatorial as well as promotional hype. In Cumming’s Serpentine review she took a righteous swipe at ‘questioning, debating, subverting, raising issues and all those other art clichés unfortunately bequeathed by 1970s theorists’. You might want to show that art magazines really are part of ‘the fourth estate’, an independent media entity capable of counterbalancing power rather than kowtowing tamely to it. You might even be helping the artists themselves – control freaks with overweening egos, they don’t pay their assistants or their gallerists to tell them what they’re doing wrong.
It might be that impassioned writing reflecting a heartfelt personal stance is simply more interesting to read than tortoise-like caution and the langue de bois, the wooden tongue of officialdom. Or perhaps you just want to prove that Western art magazines are still in sufficiently rude health to be – where called for – genuinely rude.
Five years on, ART iT has dropped the ‘genuinely rude’ slogan from its masthead. The Japanese magazine now describes itself as ‘innovative, ambitious [...] a builder of networks’. Don’t knock it.
Nick Currie
Nick Currie is a writer and musician based in Berlin. His blog can be found at http://imomus.livejournal.com/.
My Bloody Valentine
What is most striking about My Bloody Valentine’s return to the stage this June – after 16 years of silence – is that they can only be compared to, well, My Bloody Valentine. Those heavy, woozy, chocolate-thick guitars; voices that drift in and out of an overdriven, distorted sound haze like distant figures emerging through shimmering heat; the throbbing, heavy-duty bass and jackhammer percussion – it still sounds as singular as ever, which in an era of guitar music that can feel like the result of an archeological trawl through rock’s back pages, is really saying something. The band’s studio sound is muscular but nuanced by a variety of texture and tone; charged with pent-up force like the air before a summer thunderstorm – in its own peculiarly sensuous way, their music is deeply romantic, even sultry. Their ability to utilize the basic physics of sound in order to give the impression that you are listening to vast orchestras of musicians is astonishing in its elegance: it’s often assumed that they created their style by multi-tracking many layers of guitars or using fancy effects units. Yet, for the most part, the My Bloody Valentine sound is nothing more complicated than a few cheap Fender Jaguar guitars fitted with loose whammy-bars and fed through a number of carefully rigged amplifiers. Their lyrics and song titles are uncomplicated or occasionally vaguely suggestive – ‘Soft as Snow (But Warm Inside)’, ‘Touched’, ‘Swallow’, ‘Honey Power’, ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’, ‘Cupid Come’ – and the vocals mixed softly into the overall texture, rather than demand the listener strain to decipher the words.
But one could drone on for hours about the artful innovations My Bloody Valentine made in guitar music and miss the fact that their music is very straightforward too: full of sun-kissed melodies and uncomplicated, shamelessly thumping rock outs. Fans of fey, jangly indie pop could enjoy the wistful harmonies and the band’s floppy-fringed sensitive student image, whilst those with more experimental tastes could dig the pitch-bending, textured guitars and ear-bleeding volume of their gigs. In the intervening years since the band’s two LPs were released – Isn’t Anything (1988) and Loveless (1992), reissued and repackaged this summer by Sony-BMG – their reputation has become as monumental as their sound and the stories that surround their slow, notoriously profligate and maddeningly perfectionist recording methods have become a kind of British indie equivalent of the Brian Wilson story. In his recent review of the album reissues on The Quietus website, Taylor Parkes argues that My Bloody Valentine ‘poisoned British guitar rock for more than half a decade (and left a legacy of laziness from which it’s never really recovered)’. This sounds like a harsh accusation, yet, as he elaborates on Simon Reynolds’ Blissblog, My Bloody Valentine made a kind of ‘sculpted noise’ ‘subtly and with great skill to create new atmospheres, while a thousand bands that emerged in the next few years just blasted away with a bunch of effects pedals and hoped for the best’. Parkes extends his theory beyond the ‘shoegazing’ bands who My Bloody Valentine initially spawned – Ride, Slowdive, Chapterhouse – even to bands such as Oasis: ‘very much a post-Valentines band, but with all the avant-garde stuff stripped away. They very definitely stole the big billowing guitar sound from Isn’t Anything while missing the point. They played neat Beatley songs which were too slight to stand up by themselves, so they reached for the blizzard-of-noise to give themselves a lift.’ To this I’d also add bands such as the unbearable Icelandic group Sigur Ros – the closest post-rock has come to sheer kitsch – who have turned My Bloody Valentine’s storm of dreaminess into a sickly ‘epic’ package, an over-rich sticky pudding of big guitars and cheap compositional tricks that have unimaginative broadsheet journalists reaching for adjectives such as ‘cathartic’ or ‘transcendent’. The US underground music scene may, over the last few years, have produced a number of bands who have radicalized the live gig experience – most notably Sunn0))) and Lightning Bolt – but no one has quite yet come up with a sound as distinctive as My Bloody Valentine achieved in the studio. This summer, for instance, the album Nouns by current darlings of the US underground, No Age, was released, sounding in places distinctly like an homage to Loveless.
The profile of My Bloody Valentine’s once reclusive frontman Kevin Shields has increased steadily over the past few years. He has worked with a range of artists, from Primal Scream to Patti Smith, and on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), a film which went some way to introducing bands such as My Bloody Valentine and Jesus and Mary Chain to a broader audience. Yet despite the perennial rumours about a possible third album, many were still surprised when it was announced last November that Shields, guitarist Bilinda Butcher, bassist Debbie Googe and drummer Colm O’Ciosoig would be playing a June gig at London’s Roundhouse. (Even in this era of reunion gigs and perpetual exhumation of rock heritage, it seemed My Bloody Valentine’s reputation for working at a glacially slow rate would condemn them to the history books, a landmark from the glory days of 1980s alternative music.) Tickets were snapped up the instant they went on sale, and more dates were added to answer demand, until five consecutive nights had sold out, in addition to gigs in Manchester, Glasgow and a small US tour. Tickets for a warm-up ‘rehearsal’ at London’s ICA could be found on eBay going for upwards of £300. All of which would’ve been small beer if this had been Arctic Monkeys we were talking about rather than an unglamorous, experimental Irish/British indie band from the early 1990s. But these are the days of YouTube and illegal downloads: the age of the LP as hallowed reliquary is long gone, and event culture – the flesh and blood experience – is in the ascendant once again. And this was, after all, the chance to see My Bloody Valentine: an opportunity which many who missed them the first time round (myself included) had thought was about as likely to happen as Thomas Pynchon doing a week-long poetry jam in Borders.
To a certain extent, the nostalgia driving box office sales for the Valentine’s comeback gigs highlights those areas of the late-1980s British underground often overlooked by the orthodox history of the period that places the hedonism of Acid House at the centre of developments in youth culture. My Bloody Valentine, although not uninfluenced by dance music, symbolize the introspective alternative to the then burgeoning rave scene, and remind us that for some people in the late 1980s, the sub-culture was not just that of all-night warehouse raves and weekends driving to Shoom in London or the Haçienda in Manchester, but of having backcombed hair and wearing paisley shirts bought from Oxfam; reading Melody Maker and wishing The Smiths hadn’t split up; tuning into John Peel on Radio 1; standing in beer-stained pub venues in provincial university towns drinking snakebite-and-black whilst watching Ride or The Pastels shamble around on stage.
(All this talk of their influence puts me in mind of Brian Eno’s theory that the Velvet Underground may never have sold that many records, but everyone who bought one went on to form a band. Were you to have climbed up onto the stage of the Roundhouse last weekend prior to the Valentine’s set and asked anyone ‘who is not currently, or has never been at any point between the years 1988 and 2008, a member of, or closely associated with, an indie, electronica or post-metal band’ to raise their hand, I doubt whether a single arm would’ve so much as twitched.)
Never the most charismatic of bands to watch on stage, hearing My Bloody Valentine play live is nonetheless, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, ‘like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick’. In the early 1990s, their reputation was for being one of the loudest bands on the planet, a title now perhaps held by Sunn0))), and a comparison I overheard a number of people making at the Roundhouse gig. Yet where Sunn0)))’s mastery of extreme volume is framed by the theatrics of heavy metal and the austerity of Minimalist composition, My Bloody Valentine’s is more like that of old-fashioned psychedelia in the tradition of Pink Floyd or Soft Machine; catchy melodies brought to you by way of huge Marshall amplifier stacks packing brute volumatic force. The psychedelia comparison doesn’t just stop with the decibel levels. There’s the band’s light show, a combination of celestial, technicolour patterns and rapid-fire found footage which looked like it had been culled from a 1960s Roger Corman flick. And it’s there in the Loveless-era tracks, influenced by early-1990s dance music: the bouncy drums propelling the song ‘Soon’ for instance, or the processed, sampled guitar sounds that can be heard throughout the album. (During the Roundhouse gig a few people of a certain age could be spotted dancing as if to some techno track rather than an explosive guitar band.)
Each song the band played was received by the audience as if like a long lost friend – the dreamy opener ‘I Only Said’, the spooky ‘Lose My Breath’ (the delicacy of the LP version given a bass-heavy gravitas by the volume at the gig), a rendition of ‘Soon’ that sent the crowd into paroxysms of delight, and the heavy, pummeling ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’. The nuances of My Bloody Valentine’s recorded material was buried in the sonic density of the live mix, yet what was lost in subtlety was made up for by sheer physicality, especially noticeable in the bone-shaking bass of ‘Only Shallow’, and the machinegun drum rolls on ‘Nothing Much to Lose’.
The most intense moment, however, was saved for last. Their near-legendary set-closer ‘You Made Me Realise’ features two minutes of song segueing into 20 minutes of ferocious, squalling feedback. Journalists reviewing My Bloody Valentine in the early ‘90s used to refer to this as ‘the death chord’, and now I understand why. As the final vocal cadence of the chorus died away, with Butcher and Shields dueting the line ‘you made me realise’, a single projected white line traced its way across the stage backdrop like a flat-lining life support machine. The sound began to swell and I could feel the air being pushed from the speakers against my body. Noise roared around the auditorium. Looking up at the ceiling of the Roundhouse, it seemed as if we were beneath a giant rocket engine about to consume us in a fireball. Some audience members had their eyes closed, smiling beatifically as they basked in the jet-engine scream that blasted through their bones. Many were wincing, hands in a vice-grip around their ears. One man, sat high up in the theatre circle, had his head tilted horizontally and was repeatedly banging it against the balcony rail. A woman barged past me, heading for the auditorium exit looking as if she were about to vomit. Some were laughing in disbelief at the audacity of the band’s gesture. Others seemed strangely numbed: their immunity to the sonic atom bomb detonating in front of them a mystery until one noticed the small rubber plugs wedged in their ears. On stage the four figures were drenched in purple, blue and pink light; shrouded in dry ice which might just as well have been smoke pouring from the ranks of overdriven Marshall amps, or from the guitarists’ fingers as they shredded fingers against strings. This was ‘the death chord’. The end of the gig, the end of your ears. The final reckoning. This was My Bloody Valentine.
Dan Fox
Dan Fox is associate editor of frieze.
It’s Only Natural
Twenty-year-old designer Gary Anderson with a CCA rep
Planet Green, a new cable channel dedicated entirely to eco concerns, was launched in the US last week. We’ve certainly come a long way since the green movement’s origins some 38 years ago, back when the recycling logo was launched on the first ever ‘Earth Day’.
To coincide with Earth Day 1970 (initially intended as a one-off event), Container Corporation of America sponsored a student competition to design a recycling logo. CCA was one of those liberal-minded corporate behemoths that no longer exist; they believed in good design and even sponsored the International Design Conference in Aspen. The corporation also happened to be the biggest manufacturer of recycled cardboard in the country.
‘For the love of the earth,’ as CCA president H.G. Van der Eb put it, the company asked for ‘a symbol that would remind concerned citizens that recycling or reuse of materials extends the life of our natural resources.’ The logo would go on packaging made from recycled materials to advertise that they were recycled – though it wasn’t intended to show people what might be recyclable, as happens today. The competition had few rules. The logo had to be reducible to two inches, and the winner would get US$2,500 with which to further his or her education as well as relinquish all rights to their design. CCA was forward-thinking enough to realize that a recycling logo would be of much use in the public domain.
Twenty-year-old Gary Anderson won the competition. Anderson wasn’t even a design student, though that’s not to say he wasn’t visually savvy – he studied architecture and planning at the University of Southern California, and says he entered the competition because it was something he could do on his own, not requiring an entire team as a building does.
The competition was judged at the 1970 Aspen Design Conference, the theme for which – ‘Environment By Design’ – attracted both designers and radicals, and, sometimes, radical designers. It was a moment of culture clash: people with long hair and bushy sideburns versus those still sporting short-back-and-sides. Design historian Alice Twemlow explains: ‘Ant Farm [a radical architecture collective] was there with busloads of Berkeley activists. The entire idea of a speaker on stage talking down to a passive audience was outmoded in the age of protests and teach-ins. So, you had Eliot Noyes and Saul Bass sitting down with these protestors who were talking about alienation, and poor Saul Bass was saying, ‘we just want to do a design conference here.’’
Anderson – a modest, softly-spoken architecture student – stumbled into the middle of this, and didn’t quite relate. ‘Around me all these people were talking about their conflict joining big companies and making logos that would further the military industrial complex,’ he recently remembered.
The logo’s press launch was held at CCA in September of the same year. There, one of the company’s designers bitterly told Anderson that they had only picked his logo because every other one had been so bad. Imagine saying that about a design that has since been printed, embossed and molded onto more things than anything else in history. Now Anderson himself talks about feeling distant from his design, almost divorced from it, as the logo has taken on a life of its own.
To create it, he combined a Möbius strip with M.C. Escher, who was increasingly popular at the time. But Anderson claimed that his design was also a reaction against the era’s discontent: ‘Angela Davis had just shot up the courthouse and the Manson murders had just happened. I wanted to move away from that, from the Haight-Ashbury poster art with its amorphous organic shapes to create something simpler and cleaner.’ He did just that with his circling arrows signifying interconnectedness. He also cites the recently launched wool trademark as an inspiration.
Anderson’s design has now been transformed and adopted in countless ways. ‘It’s been around so long, I’ve just gotten used to it like everyone has,’ he says in his understated way: ‘I like to see the variations in it. Some are smart and elegant and beautiful, the way they turn the design and you still recognize it.’
Unfortunately Planet Green’s logo, a large green dot, is not one of these designs. I doubt we’ll be talking about it in 40 years.
Jennifer Kabat
Jennifer Kabat is a design critic based in New York.
Weighing the Africa in South Africa
© Antoine de Ras
The morning papers on May 19 recorded a grim scene. A young Mozambican man was pictured on hands and knees, his body engulfed by flames. Set upon by a group of South African youths, the unidentified man had been stabbed and severely beaten before being set alight. Taken in Ramaphosa, an impoverished settlement east of Johannesburg, the photograph forms part of a mosaic of news photographs documenting the ruthless wave of attacks targeting African immigrants resident in South Africa’s townships.
Five days after the publication of the Ramaphosa photograph, the deceased man’s identity remained a mystery. On Friday May 23, Johannesburg’s The Star newspaper attempted to honour the man’s life with an obituary, of sorts. ‘They called him Mugza,’ read the front-page headline. The narration was sparse: the man had shared a shack with another Mozambican man, also murdered; the two had only recently arrived in the area. Accompanying the words was a new photograph. Taken four days after the attack, it showed a pair of shoes, a scattering of concrete blocks and a duvet heaped over a pile of burnt clothing, the latter belonging to the deceased. It was a devastating image, recalling Joel Sternfeld’s photograph of the Los Angeles roadside where Rodney King was beaten – even Roger Fenton’s famous study of a cannonball-strewn landscape in Crimea. Art-historical allusions and photographic doubling aside, what gave the photograph its real impact were the three schoolgirls in the distance. In one news report, it was claimed that school children in Alexandria (the Johannesburg township where the wave of xenophobic attacks first started) had laughed at terrified immigrants seeking shelter at police stations.
In his contribution to the South African edition of the ‘Africa Remix’ catalogue, published in 2007, Achille Mbembe, a Cameroonian social scientist and writer based in Johannesburg, makes a bold claim for his adopted city. A place of atrophying skyscrapers and recently constructed African head offices, of casinos, shopping malls and expensive sports cars, of levitating restaurants and electrified suburban compounds, Mbembe regards Johannesburg as ‘the centre of Afropolitanism par excellence’.
You don’t have to look too hard nowadays to see this newfangled word popping up in cultural criticism. (Holland Cotter, in his recent New York Times review of the pan-African group show ‘Flow’, currently on at the Studio Museum in Harlem, uses it.) But what does it mean? ‘Afropolitanism,’ writes Mbembe, ‘is not the same as Pan-Africanism or negritude. Afropolitanism is an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity – which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence on the continent and its people by the law of the world.’
Johannesburg, with its multiple racial and ethnic legacies and globalised economy, argues Mbembe, is a model for African development. ‘It is where an ethic of tolerance is being created, likely to revive African aesthetic and cultural creativity, in the same way as Harlem or New Orleans once did in the United States.’ There is some substance in these words, notwithstanding the evidence of people and their homes being torched, of the displaced seeking refuge in churches, police stations and tented camps in Johannesburg, of busses hurriedly ferrying African nationals out of the continent’s richest city, away from a confused citizenry desperately grappling with the contradictions of a post-apartheid enlightenment. There is truth. The thing is, it is a fragile one and coexists with other truths. Perhaps this what energises and so haunts Mbembe’s writings, what makes Okwui Enwezor’s ongoing curatorial projects – so critical and engaging – also fraught with ambiguity.
In a recent interview, author Chinua Achebe spoke of the competing narratives that have come to define Africa. Rather than banish the news photographer, whose subject is suffering, this signal figure suggested that we allow the contradictory pictures to coexist, that Africans strive to uphold the worldliness and mobility so much a part of their everyday life and history – notwithstanding the reality of its multiple shadows. Which reiterates, rather than contradicts, what Mbembe is arguing, just differently.
Coexistent with this attempt to define a ‘theory’ of cosmopolitan enlightenment, the recent pogroms in South Africa point to other, more furtive realities at play. One of these deals centrally with money: South Africa is the dominant economic power in sub-Saharan Africa. Where money exists, so too do impoverished economic migrants and culture. (Just take a walk around contemporary London.) One spin-off of this somewhat reduced reading is that South Africa has become an important conduit for trading into Africa, economically, politically, even culturally. Fact: five South African artists appear on ‘Flow’ – no other country enjoys as prominent a representation.
I recently interviewed Clive Kellner, director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, arguably the country’s foremost public institution, and put it to him that South Africa’s international successes have often been at the expense of Africa – more pointedly, that South Africa is a proxy for Africa. Lazy curators seeking to engage the continent visit South Africa, sleep and dine well, make a few easy selections, and fly back home, comfortable in the knowledge that Africa has somehow been represented. ‘Absolutely, I agree a lot,’ responded Kellner. ‘What happened with a lot of South African artists is that they entered these contemporary African shows, and then they get a gallery overseas, and then divorce themselves from South Africa and Africa – they just want to be international. Which is fine – labels are a problem – but there is a very particular process and trajectory they seem to go through.’
Which is not to gainsay the successes of South African artists internationally, nor to suggest that they are morally complicit in the xenophobic attacks. That would be plain ridiculous. But just like the ongoing debate about white South Africans and their debt to apartheid, the recent flare-up of xenophobia in the country highlights the very real debt that South Africans owe to Africa. It is a tangled debt, tied at once to anti-apartheid struggle history, current economics and, in this context, global art trends. Denying that any such debt is owed is tantamount to denying Mugza a name. It is a realization not lost on South Africans. On May 25, a Sunday, the country learnt that the 22-year-old man senselessly murdered in Ramaphosa had a name. He was Ernesto Nhmawavane.
Sean O’Toole
The New Museion
For the South Tyrol, cultural separateness has been a blessing and a curse ever since the region was given to Italy following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1919. Having been subject to a re-Italianification programme under Mussolini, during which Sicilians and Neapolitans were relocated to the area in order to counter its distinctly Germanic flavour (even now the population is largely bilingual), today the province enjoys administrative autonomy and a wealthy local government. Its new museum, in the town of Bolzano, owes its economically comfortable circumstances to the fact that it is funded by the provincial government, rather than that of the country. In fact the institution, Museion, has existed for more than 20 years, but has just moved into striking and imposing new premises designed by the Berlin architects Krüger Schuberth Vandreike. The building, which reportedly cost around €30 million, sits a few doors up from a notoriously dilapidated prison; while arts funding in the province comes under loc