Frieze Writer’s Prize 2008

The winner of the annual international award to discover and promote new art critics has been announced

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

To coincide with the opening of the Olympic Games, a look at how clothing corporations have tailored their designs to China

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

What happens when design collectives start acting like artists?

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

Large-scale sculptural interventions pull in the crowds, but can they play serious?

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

A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, George E. Lewis (University of Chicago Press, 2008)

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

Recent scandal at the bankrupt Brazilian museum

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

A series of regular reports from Manifesta 7

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

Adel Abdessemed, Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, and Aliza Shvarts; the art of dying

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

The design legacy of the recently closed Restaurant Florent in Manhattan

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

How polite should art criticism be?

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

Roundhouse, London, UK

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

Looking back to the forgotten origins of the recycling logo

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

Sean O'Toole looks at how South African contemporary art is too often used to represent the whole continent

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

A South Tyrol institution gets an impressive new home

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 local control, the police force and prisons are funded by the state.

Such tensions are not lost on Corinne Diserens, the recently appointed director of the museum. Part of the building’s development includes a dramatic serpentine double-bridge that creates a new connection between the Mussolini-built, Italianate district of the town and the older Germanic town centre - the building, significantly, offers entrances facing in both directions. While Diserens refuses to commit to showing the work of ‘local’ artists (‘International artists are all local somewhere’ she says), Museion’s programme includes curatorial research coordinated with Bolzano’s university, residencies for visiting artists, and, remarkably, a public lending library. The director sees no reason why Museion should not combine its role as a laboratory and a catalyst for production with the maintenance and cultivation of a high quality collection of modern and contemporary art.

Museion’s first exhibition in its new premises, the inauspiciously titled ‘Peripheral Vision and Collective Body’, is both an example and an illustration of this approach. An example because of the way in which it integrates pieces from the existing collection with borrowed works and newly commissioned projects. An illustration because of its discussions around the individual’s relation to collective consciousness, and the ways in which micro narratives bob, drift and swim against the currents of the macro. In historical terms the exhibition draws on the dialogue between the American post-war avant-garde, its European influences and the artists who have had subsequently to position themselves in relation to it. (Visitors are greeted by recreation of Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919 Model of the Monument to the Third International placed next to Art & Language’s Portrait of V.I Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock (I) and (II), both 1978-79.) The exhibition describes a movement towards a preoccupation with the individual, the anachronistic and the bodily specific. Videos of actions by Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham and Robert Morris provide precedents to works such as Sediments sediments (Figures of speech) (2007) by Allora and Calzadilla, in which two prostrate opera singers perform fragments from key historical speeches surrounded by apocalyptic plaster shards.

Perhaps the exhibition’s most fruitful thematic investigation is into the idea of ‘peripheral vision’, understood on one level in its neurological sense: the sensorial perception of things not just on the edge of vision but invisible things sensed, touched, felt to be there. In Allan McCullom’s remarkable The Kansas and Missouri Topographical Model Donation Project (2003), the artist is photographed delivering unpainted models of each state (ostensibly flat white slabs) to 120 small museums. Alongside Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Walther Pichler and Carsten Höller’s installations and sculptures that invited physical engagement, is Anri Sala’s Ulysses (2008). Amongst scattered and incomplete clues to the form of the band Franz Ferdinand’s unreleased single ‘Ulysses’ was a score, made up of quotations from James Joyce’s novel of the same name, displayed in front of a drum kit. At night, a live image of the drum kit was projected on the facade of the museum; visitors were invited to take up the sticks and translate the score into music, upsetting the sequence of dispersal from public to private to which pop traditionally adheres. The work was emblematic of the way in which Museion is creating space for individual engagement within projects that operate on a wider, international level: the micro contributing actively and critically to the macro.

Jonathan Griffin

Jonathan Griffin is assistant editor of frieze. 

Controversy in Sydney

An exhibition by Australian artist Bill Henson was closed last week following allegations of child pornography

It’s not often that the prime minister of Australia makes a public statement evaluating art. It’s even more unusual for that assessment to be that an artist’s work is ‘revolting’ and devoid of artistic merit. It is positively striking when the artist involved is perhaps the most prominent the nation has produced, a figure who had previously represented the country at the Venice Biennale and whose work is in the collections of the Guggenheim, the National Gallery of Australia, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and, ironically, the Australian High Court. So what precisely is going on around Bill Henson?

On Thursday May 22nd, shortly before the much anticipated opening of Henson’s new show at Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney, the exhibition space was visited by uniformed police, sent after a complaint from a ‘concerned member of the public’. The exhibition was subsequently closed to the public, while criminal charges have been laid against both the artist and the gallerists, Roslyn and Tony Oxley. The charge related to the ‘depicting of a child under the age of 16 years in a sexual context [sic].’

The Australian media has whipped itself into a glassy eyed frenzy. The next morning, most of tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph’s front page was set aside for the headline, ‘CHILD PORN ‘ART’ RAID’. Above, in slightly smaller lettering, stood, ‘VICTORY FOR DECENCY AS POLICE CLOSE GALLERY’. The accompanying photograph showed two plods walking up the stairs of the gallery, with a small inset of one of the controversial photographs, an image of a girl with downcast eyes and a look of almost beatific reserve.

Inside the newspaper, the chorus of disgust was almost unanimous. Morris Iemma, the premier of New South Wales, declared: ‘As a father of four I find it offensive and disgusting. I don’t understand why parents would agree to allow their kids to be photographed like this.’ Barry O’Farrell, the leader of the opposition, concurred: ‘sexualisation of children under the guise of art is totally unacceptable’. Frank Sartor, the Minister for the Arts and Planning, engaged in barely perceptible hedging when he said: ‘I have been shown some of the images and I don’t like them.’ Most surprising of all, the nation’s newly elected Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd weighed in with, ‘I find them absolutely revolting. Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected. I have a very deep view of this. For God’s sake, let’s just allow kids to be kids. Whatever the artistic view of the merits of that sort of stuff – frankly I don’t think there are any – just allow kids to be kids.’

What was at stake? Apparently, several pictures contained images of topless pubescent girls, and, in one image, the genitals of the girl are visible, though partially obscured by her hand. The children were photographed in solo portraits, with the careful chiaroscuro that characterises Henson’s work. They are naked and alone, but the work evokes Goya rather than Balthus, and the meditative exultation of their faces looks more akin to religious art than a skin mag. Nothing in the background, setting, or framing suggests sex. How on earth, one wonders, does mere nudity constitute ‘a sexual context’?

No such nuances troubled Hetty Johnston, the child protection campaigner, who declared of Henson: ‘he has a tendency to depict children naked and that is porn.’ By the Johnston equation, any image of a naked child is porn. It’s an astounding conclusion, because it means that from this moment of history on – mark the date well – images of naked children are more sexual than images of naked adults. After all, no one contests that it is possible to make images of an adult woman, stark naked, and call it ‘art’; the nude is probably art’s most visited theme. But the image of a naked child is so arousing, according to Johnston, that any aesthetic distance will be overwhelmed and barely dormant urges will be awakened.

Funnily enough, 65,000 people saw Bill Henson’s retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2004-05. According to curator Judy Annear they had, ‘not one single complaint’ during the exhibition. Quite the contrary: the exhibition was declared a triumph and Henson was compared to Caravaggio with predictable frequency.

The entire farcical spectacle appears to have been triggered by an opinion piece by right-wing columnist Miranda Devine, entitled ’Moral Backlash Over Sexing Up of Our Children‘, that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on the morning that police searched Roslyn Oxley9. Devine mentioned the ‘budding breasts of puberty on full display’ in Henson’s work as a more or less irrelevant example in an article nominally concerned with the ‘sexualisation of children in the media’. The majority of the rest of the column was devoted to lambasting both girl’s magazines and department store catalogues: ‘artists, perverts, academics, libertarians, the media and advertising industries, respectable corporations and the porn industry [...] define down [sic] community standards,’ eroding ‘the special protection once afforded childhood.’

Devine’s observations, smug as they are, simply don’t make sense. Community standards regarding paedophilia have not been ‘defined down’; rather, we are witnessing the emergence of a full-blown moral panic that ironically – and tragically – worsens the problem. The obvious point that Devine and Johnston seem to have missed is that imposing a taboo inevitably leads to the hyper-eroticisation of what lies beyond it. Far from protecting the ‘sanctity of childhood’, whatever that means, the crude declaration that all photos of nude children are pornographic makes it impossible to look at these images without seeing them through the lens of a hypothetical paedophile – and retrospectively transforms them into porn. Not that Johnston is going to let it rest there. As the ‘concerned member of the public’, on May 24th she told the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘I did make a complaint yesterday, absolutely, I asked them to prosecute, both the gallery and the photographer, but I’d like to see the parents as well looked into. What parent in their right mind would allow their 12- or 13-year-old to strip off naked and display themselves all over the internet? That’s not in the interests of the child.’

The parents have been duly warned, but the ironies are cruel. On the same page that The Daily Telegraph ran the headline ’Who would call this art?’ (May 23), an insert breathlessly announced: ‘See the censored versions of the photos’ in the tabloid’s online ‘gallery’.  In an astonishing display of cynicism, the girls’ nipples were covered with a black rectangle – for propriety’s sake, no doubt – but their faces were left exposed, stripping them of their privacy and declaring them victims of sexual molestation in a single eager gesture.

Depending on your distance, these displays of moral rectitude in Sydney have been either comic or tragic. Earlier this week, Henson said of his works that they represent a point, ‘half in childhood, half in the adult world,’ that ‘creates a floating world of expectation and uncertainty.’ There’s been no such subtlety shown in Sydney of late, and it may be some time before it’s possible to see Henson’s works again for the beauty they so patently contain.

Adam Jasper

Primary Colours

Looking at the outpouring of design projects surrounding the Democrat candidates and previous presidential campaigns

Maybe all the pollsters telling Hillary she’s toast needed to look no further than my tiny village for their prognostications. It recently got its first bit of graffiti and it was pro-Obama, no less. Looming from a retaining wall by the road into town was a stencil of Senator Obama looking a little like Che Guevara. Until a couple weeks ago, nary a spray-painted swear word polluted the pastoral surrounds of Margaretville, New York (pop. 600, if you’re lucky), an area that is far more red than blue. Most cars proudly display yellow support-our-troops stickers – not to mention ones saying, ‘Gun Control Means Using Both Hands.’ And yet the creative outpouring surrounding Obama’s campaign has reached even here.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Obama lists his alternative career choice as architect and is the first ever presidential candidate to have been born in the 1960s, the artistically-inclined have taken his ‘Yes, we can’ mantra in various directions. Arcade Fire are playing gigs for him while will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas had his ‘We are the World’ moment roping in all sorts of stars for a little light rap. Shepard Fairey, creator of the ubiquitous André the Giant ‘Obey Giant’ image, has come up with stickers and posters inspired by the World War II-era Works Progress Administration posters. (They’ve of course quickly sold out, now going for upwards of US$500 on eBay.) There’s even an entire Flickr group solely dedicated to Obama street art with nearly 300 images including a Banksy-style Obama addressing the US.

MoveOn.org hosted a make-your-own-Obama-ad competition: Obama In 30 Seconds’ was something like a political Pop Idol, complete with an odd combination of ‘celebrity’ judges – among them Matt Damon, Lawrence Lessig and Moby – that saw 5.5 million votes cast. The half-minute submissions ranged from claymation globes to hand-drawn animation, not to mention a few Obamacans – Republicans who have made the switch. The ads generally all have a warm and fuzzy feel-good factor which rarely appears anymore in American political campaigns. My favorite was Josh Garrett’s They Said He Wasn’t Prepared: the voiceover describes a little-known, inexperienced senator from Illinois whom people said couldn’t be president. The twist? It’s Abe Lincoln.

This certainly isn’t the first election year to get artists’ involvement. Eugène Delacroix was recycled for the Mondale-Ferraro campaign in 1984 in honour of the first woman on the vice presidential ticket, while, in 1972, Warhol took on Nixon. In a pro-McGovern poster, Tricky Dick was rendered acid pink and institutional green (both of which remind me, bizarrely, of the picture of my dad standing alongside Pat Nixon and Imelda Marcos that I coloured in with highlighters during a punk rock phase in high school).

And Hillary, what does she get? Lest you think me partisan, quick Google searches for ‘hillary graffiti’ and ‘hillary street art’ – even ‘Hillary Clinton’ – netted nothing: no one is picking up the spray can for her. Though Elton John did play a benefit concert at Radio City and she can count Marc Jacobs on her side. In 2004 after the last election Jacobs designed T-shirts emblazoned with a Che-style image of Hillary’s face (what is it with Democrats and Cuban radicals?). His Bleeker Street store windows crowed, ‘Hillary for President’ when she was still just the junior senator from New York. Now he’s reprised the effort with a new tee: an airbrushed Hillary beams forth, looking some 30 years younger and sporting a toothy teen-girl grin. The only dash of colour on the shirt is her flag pin. Need I say more? The flag plays well in the sticks.

Just this last week, as if trying to get some traction against Obama, Tony Puryear, screenwriter for the 1996 Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser, has created a new Clinton poster. It looks hauntingly familiar, reprising Fairey’s ‘30s-era graphics, faded shades, imperial visage – and nearly the same typeface used by the Obama campaign (only the tip of the ‘A’ is different). As Karl Marx said in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), ‘First time tragedy, second time farce.’ He was talking about political dynasties after all.

Jennifer Kabat

Jennifer Kabat is a design critic based in New York.

The Joyous Wake and Burial of Patrick Ireland

Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

In 1972, in response to the tragic events of Bloody Sunday in Derry, Ireland, when 26 unarmed civil rights protesters were shot and 14 killed by members of the British Parachute Regiment, Irish/American artist, novelist, theorist and critic, Brian O’Doherty, undertook to sign his artworks Patrick Ireland, ‘until such time as the British military presence is removed from Northern Ireland and all citizens are granted their civil rights.’

As these conditions have now been fulfilled, after 36 years of making art as Patrick Ireland, O’Doherty joyfully reclaimed his birth name – a gesture to celebrate the restoration of peace in Northern Ireland – with the symbolic burial of his alter ego (an effigy with a ‘death mask’ placed in a simple wooden coffin).

On the windy evening of Tuesday 20 May 2008 in the grounds of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Art historian and museum director, Michael Rush, a former Jesuit priest, conducted this happiest of funerals. At the graveside, friends of the artist read five poems in English, French, Spanish, German and Irish. The event concluded with Alannah O’Kelly performing an extraordinary, bone-chilling ‘keening’ – a traditional Irish mourning wail.

In his last moments Patrick Ireland, dressed in white and with his face covered with a white stocking (as he was in the 1972 performance) held the hands of his wife, historian and novelist Barbara Novak and senior curator, Christina Kennedy. He concluded his life by pulling the mask off his face and throwing it exuberantly into the grave, along with a handful of dirt. ‘We are burying hate’, said the artist, ‘it’s not often you get the chance to do that’. The evening concluded with a lively dinner and loving speeches to both the buried and re-born artists in the chapel of the Irish Museum of Modern Art.

Patrick Ireland (1972-2008) is dead. Long live Brian O’Doherty.

Jennifer Higgie

From issue 101 of frieze: Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith’s review of Brian O’Doherty / Patrick Ireland at Dublin City Gallery

From issue 80 of frieze: an interview with Brian O’Doherty

Watching 20GB of Art TV

Does television ever really understand art?

They came from the hard drives of kind neighbours, from YouTube, from my favourite semi-legal filesharing service: 20 gigabytes of major blockbuster art television series made over the last 40 years or so. There’s Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series (1969, 1.36 GB), Ways of Seeing with John Berger (1972, 1.37 GB), Shock of the New with Robert Hughes (1980, 2.72 GB), This Is Modern Art with Matthew Collings (1999, 2.53 GB) and Art21 (2001-7, and a whumping 10.9 GB if you download the lot).

Over the last two months I’ve been stimulated by all this art television data, but somewhat exhausted – perhaps like the medium of television itself. I’m left with some interlocking narratives and some big questions. Does television ever really understand art? When television looks at art, does it ever do anything more than express its own terminal television-ness? And why does art seem to bring out the self-parodic in television?

What we mostly see, in all these series, is the same basic scenario: an authoritative man with a radio mic clipped under his lapel, walking and talking us through the Sistine Chapel or a James Turrell installation, telling us how we really had to be there. The medium speaks – tastefully or brashly, and with silly music and graphics – its own inability to speak, and its own constant doubt that anyone will actually watch this inability being enacted. It ends up looking – with increasingly flip decadence – at itself. So let’s look at it.

Confronted with this mass of art data, where to begin? Well, what about the openings of each series? Civilisation’s establishing sequence stifles us with high culture: baroque organ music, shots of cathedrals, Boticellis, skyscrapers, monuments all over the world, captions, and finally the debonair Clark strolling – hands in tweedy pockets, a cross between a Cambridge don and a Tory MP – past the Louvre, quoting Ruskin.

Berger begins his Ways of Seeing series with a direct Oedipal challenge to Clark’s genteel authority figure; he walks up to a classical painting in a gallery, opens a penknife and begins cutting the precious canvas out of its frame. ‘I want to question,’ he tells us, ‘some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting.’ The intellectual penknife he’ll use in this first programme is a combination of his own puritan-Marxist gravitas and Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936), but first we’ll have to get past the space age graphics of the title sequence, Berger’s Open University shirt and hair, and a certain Monty Python feel to it all.

It may be this ‘datedness’ which has prevented the BBC ever making Ways of Seeing available on DVD (they’re up to Series 7 of ‘80s BBC sitcom Terry and June) – if that’s the case, the corporation is quite wrongheaded. Not only does Ways of Seeing chime entertainingly with Look Around You, it provides us with a valuable and refreshing seriousness and radicalism which has never resurfaced in television’s treatment of the arts: the message that ways of seeing are ideologically determined, and can change.

Ways of Seeing is a fabulous series, one we can laugh at and laugh with simultaneously. It may very well have the last laugh; its commitment to questioning and to change allows Berger’s series to transcend television, and therefore the power to survive television’s demise. Because – to television’s great surprise – it looks like it’s going to wither before art does. The paint tube has already outlasted the cathode ray tube.

1980’s Shock of the New begins with some fabulously cheesy BBC Radiophonic Workshop music by Peter Howell and a wonderful-slash-dubious ripple-effect graphic montage showing, in quick succession, the Eiffel Tower, some paella, a Renoir, Las Vegas, Mondrian, a pretty girl drinking Coke, some Warhols, some skyscrapers, a gesticulating Hitler… and already it’s too much, too pompous and too swaggering.

Nevertheless, Robert Hughes is an arch, arrogant, engaging presenter with fabulous language skills – a tanned, handsome outback Augustus with the sharp wit of a Gore Vidal – and 1980 is the perfect vantage point from which to look back at a Modernism then being replaced by the self-devouring snake of Postmodernism. With a big budget and a big subject, Shock of the New is a sharper, more cynical and contemporary update to the Civilisation formula, but it lacks Berger’s ideological commitment (politically Hughes takes a ‘plague on both your houses’, centrist approach, comparing, for instance, Mussolini’s neo-classical buildings to the Lincoln Center) and certainly doesn’t transcend television’s own clichés.

Still, there are plenty of transcendent moments in Shock of the New: when fragments of Eno’s Music for Films (1978) underpin images of skyscrapers, for example, or when Hughes walks us with a mistrustful quip through the wrought-iron gallery district of SoHo at the peak of its hot-panted perkiness.

Weirdly enough, the art television made in the late nineties and early noughties feels more shudder-worthy and remote than the 70s stuff – old enough to be dated, but not to be either a valuable historical document or retro-cool. A combination of British self-deprecation and late postmodern televisual self-referencing make Matthew Collings’ This is Modern Art slightly squirm-inducing; in place of Hughes’ lapidary aphorisms and manly authority we get Collings telling us, in a self-referential way, how he enjoyed Andy Warhol’s philosophy book as a student, ‘and I expect I’ll be coming round one of these aisles and reading extracts from it at any moment, if this ironic easy listening soundtrack is anything to go by.’ And of course, seconds later, there he is in the supermarket, reading us bits of Warhol accompanied by ironic lounge music.

So why does it now feel like it’s art rather than television which is poised to survive, to retain credibility? It’s not just because television ate itself, lost its authority to represent, precisely by tail-chasing tricks like these. After all, art did too. It’s not just that television lost its belief in progress, its chance to question the status quo, its ethical fervour to educate and improve, the passion of its political commitment. Art did too. I think the reason is a purely technical one: television can be digitized, art can’t. Television, after eating itself, gets eaten by the Internet. Art doesn’t.

‘Capitalism plus electronics gave us a new habitat; our forest of media,’ Hughes tells us in Shock of the New, right on the threshold of the postmodern era. ‘The problem for art was how to survive there, how to adapt to it, because otherwise, it was feared, art would go under.’ But what if financial and cultural survival was posited, precisely, on not becoming just another tree in that forest of media?

That may be the surprise ending to this story about art and television: we now count television in gigabytes. The fact that no-one counts art that way may be part of the reason art still counts.

Nick Currie

Nick Currie is a writer and musician based in Berlin. His blog can be found at http://imomus.livejournal.com/.

2008 Turner Prize Shortlist Announced

Three women are in the running for this year's prize, which will be awarded in December to a British-based artist under 50

Nominees:

Runa Islam
Mark Leckey
Goshka Macuga
Cathy Wilkes

Although 1997’s shortlist - won by Gillian Wearing - comprised four female artists, Tomm