Financial troubles at LA MOCA

Rescue plans proposed for the ailing West Coast institution

Throughout the 1960s the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum) was internationally renowned for its groundbreaking exhibitions of contemporary art; in 1962, the venue presented what is considered to be the first institutional exhibition of Pop, followed by the first retrospective of Marcel Duchamp as well as notable exhibitions of Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol and Kurt Schwitters, among others. But despite its strong programming and wide public support, the museum incurred a sizeable debt that, by 1974, was forcing the trustees to either declare bankruptcy or accept a rescue offer from local philanthropist and entrepreneur, Norton Simon. That year, Simon took control of the museum, saving its important collection of contemporary works, but significantly altering the institution’s identity and reputation.

Sadly, this scenario seems to be playing out once again with another of Los Angeles’ five major art museums: the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A. Since its opening in 1979, MOCA has established three exhibition locations throughout the city, built the premier permanent collection of contemporary art in the United States. and has helped distinguish L.A. as an important international art capital. Accordingly, the news in late November that the museum was facing imminent closure due to financial troubles came as some surprise. The Los Angeles Times reports that the museum’s US$40 million dollar endowment has dwindled to as low as US$7 million dollars, with US$20 million of its unrestricted funds being completely spent by mid-2007, at which time the museum began borrowing from its restricted accounts - money earmarked for specific uses like acquisitions and education - to cover normal operating costs. Although the current economic crisis delivered a substantial hit to the museum’s investment portfolio, MOCA director Jeremy Strick had long been operating the museum in the red. In the past ten years, the museum’s annual operating costs have nearly doubled with very little oversight. While Strick, who is allegedly negotiating the terms of his resignation, failed to keep the Board of Trustees’ spending in-check, the group of 29 volunteer trustees shares responsibility for this shocking mismanagement of funds. The California attorney general’s office is investigating the institution’s finances as is customary in such cases.

The news of the museum’s financial crisis shouldn’t be a complete surprise given their recent history of high-profile spending including lavish gala events featuring performances by Kanye West or Rufus Wainwright and over-the-top blockbuster shows like last winter’s ‘©Murakami’, which boasted a fully functioning in-gallery Louis Vuitton boutique.

Even after their money troubles went public this autumn, MOCA Deputy Director Ari Wiseman was spotted ‘shopping’ the booths at Art Basel Miami (a scenario that might mean the museum is trying to conduct ‘business as usual’, but more likely reveals a lack of tact on the part of its leaders).  Regardless, the announcement shook the L.A. art community eliciting an independent group of artists, critics, teachers and curators to gather an emergency rally to discuss the museum’s future. Following fast on the heels of the Democratic presidential victory and local protests over a ban on same-sex marriage, the impassioned rally on November 23rd - largely organized by L.A.-based artists Diana Thater and Cindy Bernard - set forth a grassroots petition of support and a plea to keep the museum independent.

That the museum’s independence might be jeopardized stemmed from rumours (officially substantiated on 16th December) that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art had proposed a merger to integrating MOCA’s collections into their own general holdings of art from antiquity to the present.  The L.A. art community has been vocally opposed to this solution as it would mean MOCA would essentially be reduced to a single curatorial department. And with the seriousness and strength of vision of MOCA senior curators, Paul Schimmel and Ann Goldstein, this merger would not only be an unlikely fit, but an enormous loss to the cultural landscape on which LACMA also relies. This week, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa urged the museum’s board to carefully review its options before making such a decision.

The other option on the table is a rescue proposal from notorious philanthropist-millionaire, Eli Broad, whose relationships with LACMA soured shortly after opening the Broad Museum of Contemporary Art, a US$60 million dollar monument to blue-chip collecting and addition to LACMA’s campus. In an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times, Broad offered MOCA US$15 million dollars up front and an additional US$15 million over the next five years assuming that the museum remains independent, keeping its Grand Avenue location in operation. MOCA’s board, which met again on 18th December, has yet to publicly respond to the proposition, but the local media (fueled by anonymous trustees) reports that while trustees are wary of the conditions The Broad Foundation might impose on them, they will likely accept the offer. As a footnote to the ongoing drama, Broad has revealed plans to build his own contemporary art museum in Beverly Hills, which could be read as a disavowal of Broad’s strategic stakes in MOCA.  L.A. can only hope that this bail-out proves that their city’s newest ‘Norton Simon’ is indeed capable of charity as well as vanity.

Catherine Taft

Catherine Taft is a writer and critic based in Los Angeles. 

The Kandinsky Prize

Controversy in the Moscow art world as ultra-nationalist painter Alexei Belyaev-Guintovt wins the Kandinsky Prize

With his black leather jacket and cropped silver hair, ultra-nationalist painter Alexei Belyaev-Guintovt looks more like a biker gang member from a sci-fi dystopia than a major contemporary artist. You would, in fact, have been hard pressed to find many who treated him as such until his surprise nomination for the Kandinsky Prize in November and subsequent victory shocked Moscow’s art world, creating its biggest scandal in several years.

It was as if Belyaev had become Russian art’s bête noire overnight. Ekaterina Degot, editor of popular art website openspace.ru, led a furious discussion in which she worried Belyaev would donate the €40,000 prize to ‘some kind of fascist party’, critic Alexandr Panov threatened to leave the profession in protest if Belyaev won, while jury member Andrei Erofeev suggested that, ‘They should give him the Leni Riefenshtal prize.’

The vitriol was such as to seem that, for many in Moscow’s close-knit art world, Belyaev’s nomination threatened their very sense of self. And it’s easy to see why. When most Russian artists attack or ignore the Putin regime, Belyaev actively embraces it. He is a member of philosopher Alexander Dugin’s slavishly pro-Kremlin Eurasian movement, which calls for ‘union with our great Eastern neighbours’ and anticipates ‘the blinding dawn of the new Russian Revolution – fascism as limitless as our lands, and red as our blood.’

His art is no less extreme: an advocate of ‘New Seriousness’, Belyaev unironically reinterprets Stalinist motifs in his ‘grand Statist style’. The prize-winning pieces, Daughterland (2007) and Brothers and Sisters (2007), emboss Stalinist Gothic symbols and Stalinist devotees in gold leaf so as to reclaim them for the present day. Belyaev’s earlier work includes portraits of fascist sympathizers such as Ezra Pound alongside the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini and Stalin, and ‘eschatological posters’ with slogans including ‘Glory to Russian Weapons!’ and ‘Burn Everything!’ He is even prepared to put his talents to state service. Invited to participate in the reconstruction of Tskhinvali after the Russo-Georgian War, Belyaev announced his plans to create ‘the city of the Sun, in the style of Stalin,’ because, ‘Stalinist architecture is the emanation of the sun.’

Perhaps the only unsurprising thing, in fact, about Belyaev’s beating out Sots Art legend Boris Orlov and Marxist Dmitry Gutov was the hysterical reaction it provoked. His acceptance speech was derailed after one sentence by 2007 winner Anatoly Osmolovsky’s screams of ‘Disgrace!’, causing general turmoil in the room and leading many to accuse the jury of awarding him the prize for his ideology rather than his art. But while the prospect of having Belyaev as Russian contemporary art’s official representative is justifiably troubling, the notion that he is representative and more contemporary than anyone else should be far greater cause for concern.

Here aesthetics and politics are necessarily intertwined. Simply judging by the former, Belyaev is not particularly significant – his work is uniformly over-the-top, stylistically simplistic and has little to offer behind its glossy exterior. But as an ambassador for the Putin era, it’s remarkably apt. Russian contemporary art’s rise out of the wasteland of the 1990s has, for all the dissenters in the ranks, been intricately tied with Putinism. The establishment of a legitimate art market in 2000 coincided with Vladimir Putin’s election, and its financial success over the past decade with Putin’s incorporation of wealth into the state apparatus and assertions of nostalgia for the Soviet era.

Belyaev’s work was unique among the nominees in reflecting this. While subtlety is not his strong point – the metaphors of ‘black gold’ and ‘red gold’ in the Daughterland cycle are as multi-layered as he gets – his reclamation of Stalinism for an era where money and power go hand in hand is a stark contrast to the unimaginative repetition and lazy juxtaposition of early-20th-century avant-garde and Soviet motifs that plagued the Kandinsky long-list. Even in the hands of a patently superior artist like Orlov, this seems inadequate grounds for winning a contemporary prize. His Parade of Astral Bodies (2008), in which Russian imperial eagles emerged from Kazimir Malevich’s omnipresent black square, was unanimously agreed by the judges to be the best of the three, but hardly differed from most of his work from the past few decades. Gutov’s Used (2008), which welded Soviet-era leftovers from his parents’ garage into metal grids, could likewise be mistaken for his early 1990s output.

But Belyaev, as the furore showed, is nothing if not relevant. The awards ceremony itself, a simultaneous celebration of the political épatage Russian art prides itself on flaunting and the nouveau-riche glamour behind it, seemed to confirm this. While Siberian duo Blue Noses, the self-described ‘most banned artists in Russia’, took compèring duties and devoted numerous segments to Russian art’s recent brushes with the law, the organizers shelled out for exclusive performances by Marina Abramovich and the Gao Brothers and sequestered a special zone in the audience for the ‘most valuable’ of the guests. Even though a dozen or so ‘leftist internationalists’ picketed outside, the enduring image from their anti-Belyaev protest was not their Swastika-studded banner and chants of ‘Shame on Kandinsky!’, but the frequency with which they had to make way for approaching luxury cars.

If Belyaev is persona non grata in Russian artistic discourse, he is perfectly at home among the oligarchs and jet-setters – he is represented by the appointment-only Triumph gallery, which he praises for its ‘metaphysical status’ and ‘palace style, reminiscent of a beautiful era.’ There’s absolutely no contradiction there. Belyaev’s glossy ultra-nationalism is a just winner as the only artist on the list who truly integrates Russia’s Soviet hangover with its hyper-capitalist present. His win is no triumph for Russian art – there is simply not enough case for him as a good artist – but insomuch as he has forced it to look away from black squares and stop cracking infantile jokes about Putin, Belyaev has done it a great service. What effect it has in the long term is up to his detractors to decide.

Max Seddon

Max Seddon is a writer and critic based in Moscow. 

Swap Shop

E-Flux Video Rental opens in Berlin

One of the unfortunate ironies of video art is that a medium which originally developed out of democratic desires has become the most tightly controlled of all contemporary art forms. Pictures of paintings are circulated in photographs, but in an era of rapid digital reproduction, gallerists and collectors are wary of allowing videos out of their sight. Simple good business demands maintaining scarcities; master copies are accordingly watched like Fort Knox. As a result, video artists often lack access to the work of their colleagues – a fact which perhaps goes some way to explain the extreme variation in artistic quality which still plagues the medium.  E-Flux Video Rental (EVR) aims to address this condition. Organized by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda’s international art organization e-flux, the scheme extends the pair’s interest in alternative models of art circulation by providing a free art video rental service along with a public screening room and a small art book library. Originally started as three travelling caravans the enterprise now incorporates two permanent branches – one in e-flux’s headquarters in Manhattan’s Chinatown, and a second in the back of an East Berlin supermarket. The third, which remains in transit, is currently to be found in Cali, Colombia.

EVR enlists local curators to source video art pieces from gallerists, most of whom, appreciating that more immaterial forms of economy are also at work in the art world, are happy to oblige. A DVD is dispatched, transferred onto video tape, and sent back. In this way, the scheme avoids directly challenging commercial power structures, to instead negotiate an alternative space within them.

The use of obsolete technology is important here. On the one hand, the choice is tactical: an analogue video is less easily copied than something in digital format, and so allows dealers to retain some security. On the other hand, there is also a tacit expression here of the under-notated topic of media ecology. Given forms of technologies nurture particular social patterns; with the advance of new technologies, these may be overrun. The return to the devices and formats of yesterday is thus something like the establishment of reserve parks for endangered species: an action worth undertaking to preserve threatened milieux.

EVR’s Berlin branch organizes regular weekly screenings as a means towards both expanding their archive and introducing a social element into proceedings. The programme on the evening of Thursday 11 December played-off against the general idea of the project in an interesting way. Curated by Florian Wüst and assembled around the theme of electricity, with particular stress on Doug Aitken’s name-making video installation Electric Earth (2000), the five pieces shown each explored the connections between space and the media, belief and technology, information and bodies.

Aitken’s evocative work centred on the breakdancer Ali ‘Giggi’ Johnson, moving eccentrically through a desolate urban landscape. Beginning with shots of Johnson slumped in front of a television with a remote-control in his hand, the work implants a strong suggestion that the subsequent scenes of the film, which feature no other actors besides Johnson himself, might amount to a media-generated hallucination. ‘A lot of times I dance so fast that I become what’s around me,’ says Johnson early on, ‘I absorb that energy [...] it’s like I eat it. That’s the only now I get.’

In orbit around Electric Earth were four lesser known efforts. The first of these, Franciszka and Stefan Themerson’s Polish short The Adventure of Good Citizen (1937) initially recalled – to my uncharitable mind – an episode of The Simpsons in which Krusty the Clown loses the rights to The Itchy & Scratchy Show and is forced to screen a baffling Eastern European equivalent in its place. Packed with clusters of extreme close-ups, the Themersons’ plot turns on a collective effort to stave off the apocalypse through the absurdist tactic of rigorously walking backwards. This, from a Polish film made in 1937, was undeniably historically pithy.

In the wake of this madcap extravaganza, Lotte Schreiber’s film quadro (2002), composed of still shots of Modernist architecture conjoined with guitar noise courtesy of architecture-film-soundtrack-specialist Stefan Németh, came off as sterile. By contrast, the location material which comprised Neil Beloufa’s documentary Kempinski (2007) – centred on the technological animism of a group of farmers in Mali – seemed to sprawl quickly beyond the director’s control.

The final video of the night, Maja Borg’s Ottica Zero (2007), was also the most directly relevant to EVR’s own concerns. Fusing together the theories and models of the futurist guru Jacque Fresco (founder of ‘The Venus Project’, c.1975-ongoing) with the possibly fictionalized story of the Italian movie actress Nadya Cazan, who elected one day to become a wandering mystic, the film presented two different approaches – one utopian, the other ascetic - to constructing alternative social models in the contemporary moment. More modest and limited than either of these, EVR’s own line seemed to me more strategic. The next screening, organized around the themes of ‘Home’ and ‘Alone’, is scheduled for Thursday 18 December.

Daniel Miller

Daniel Miller is a critic living in Berlin. 

Google Flu

Healthy design: how future epidemics are being predicted from search results

I am at the cutting-edge, part of some kind of avant-garde, an early adopter – all because I got sick. Fever, chills, runny nose – I have the ‘flu. I’m not supposed to though, not yet; at least not according to Google. The information behemoth knows when I (and other US citizens) should be contracting the influenza virus, and they know it just like they know which ads to put on webpages: by aggregating search terms.

Google Flu Trends tracks every time someone searches for the name of a ‘flu medication or types in their symptoms. Based on the individual’s IP address the application can predict where people are getting sick. Launched a few weeks ago, the system works even better than the US government’s own Centers for Disease Control, which depends upon a network of ‘sentinel’ doctors reporting the number of patients with the flu to track the virus’s spread. Only Google can do this faster, cheaper and more accurately.  The system was based on five years of search terms and CDC data, which showed that Google Flu Trends accurately predicted outbreaks, besting the federal government by around one to two weeks. A trial version was launched last year and has now been made available to all on google.org – the public corporation’s philanthropic arm. The site is also designed as a tool for public health officials, helping them plan for pandemics and determine where resources should be deployed.

The applications are elegant: a simple blue graph (of course in Google blue) and a clickable map. Designed with the same austerity as Google’s own homepage, the application’s true beauty goes deeper than what can be see on-screen. For example, search terms are dumb, basically small bits of anonymous discrete information that don’t relate to each other. I type in ‘aches and chills’ not thinking that it might impact anyone else; multiplied over millions and millions of searches, however, these terms produce a ‘flu map. It’s a perfect example of that hip trend in computing – ‘swarm intelligence’ or ‘collective intelligence’ – which operates like beehives, flocks of birds and ant colonies. Each animal acts independently, but each independent action taken together creates a ‘super organism’ much greater than the sum of its parts.

In the draft of a paper soon to be published in Nature, the researchers at Google explain, ‘Harnessing the collective intelligence of millions of users, Google web search logs can provide one of the most timely, broad reaching syndromic surveillance systems available today.’ Compare that to market behaviour whereby individual actions actually inflate responses. The first 100-dollar barrel of oil sent a panic through the market as does the news that Asian stocks are trading low. The financial markets work more like an echo chamber in which the individual amplifies a response and that response then amplifies what a person does – a bit like a yawn or cough in a crowded room.

The researchers write, ‘Online web searches, a new form of health-seeking behavior, are submitted by millions of users around the world each day [...] 90 million American adults search for medical information online each year.’ Google’s team went through all the search terms in ‘flu season, which included ‘high school basketball’, because the season apparently corresponds with ‘flu season. The search terms were tested with 450 million different models and can be broken down by state whereas the CDC’s data is only broken into eight different regions.

Now if you’re like me, you’re not a little spooked by such corporate prescience or the use to which a search term you believed was anonymous can be put. It raises questions of both privacy and how other organizations - even Google itself - may deploy the data collected in our increasingly well-networked world, in which server logs are repositories of information. Start to combine all that data and we’re not simply talking about losing personal privacy but group privacy. As John Markoff wrote recently in The New York Times, ‘Collective intelligence could make it possible for insurance companies for example to use behavioral data to covertly identify people suffering from a particular disease and deny them insurance coverage.’ One of the experts Markoff sites, Steve Steinberg, a computer scientist working in the financial industry, said, ‘This is one of the most significant technology trends I have seen in years; it also may be one of the most pernicious.’

There is the upside – at least with Google Flu Trends. ‘Flu can cause up to 500,000 deaths a year and in the 1918 ‘flu pandemic somewhere between 20 and 100 million people died. With increased travel and increased poverty due to global warming, the world is primed for another ‘flu crisis. Google wants to create a global version (though I’m unsure of how they deal with areas of the developing world without much computer access), as well as versions specifically dealing with densely populated urban areas.

The research does come with several caveats: for example, Google is unsure how publicity and press attention may affect behaviour and they remain tight-lipped on which search terms they used: ‘While we would like to present the full list of search queries […] upon hearing that Google is using specific queries for influenza surveillance, users may be inclined to submit some of the queries out of curiosity, leading to erroneous future estimates.’ Still, I did my part by Googling ‘muscle aches and fever’, just so they’d know one person in upstate New York was sick. It didn’t change anything: several days later, the incidence of ‘flu is still moderate here.

Jennifer Kabat

Jennifer Kabat is a design critic based in New York.

To Have or To Be

Collecting, living and re-reading Erich Fromm

As 1980 dawned I turned 20. That year Erich Fromm was 80, a New Left mystic living in Switzerland. 1980 was the year I read Fromm’s book To Have Or To Be. It was also the year he ceased to be; the Frankfurt School veteran died in early spring.

To Have Or To Be is a remarkable and powerful book, a humanist sermon that connects Meister Eckhart and Spinoza, Freud and Marx, and mounts a radical critique of late-20th-century life. For some - for me, certainly - it’s been attitude-forming and life-changing.

I’ve been re-reading Fromm’s book with the art world in mind, because it strikes me that it’s possible to see, and to live in, the art world in two very different ways: as the epitome, on the one hand, of what Fromm calls ‘the having mode’ (a place of objects, collectors, acquisitions, profit, auctions, investments) and, on the other, as a place where it’s possible to be entirely post-materialist - a succession of experiences, relationships, sensations and activities entirely untroubled by the question of ownership.

As someone who’s never owned a single work of art, and who’s made installations, interventions and performances without selling them, I certainly fit the second category better than the first. But I wonder to what extent they’re symbiotically related. Does ‘being’ in the art world depend on the infusion of money which is rooted in ‘having’? Could there be the free experience of wandering through all the art galleries in New York’s Chelsea district if those galleries weren’t touting their work for sale? What would a purely being-oriented experience of the art world resemble in a world where the having-oriented structures suddenly collapsed (shaken, say, by a cataclysmic financial crisis)? Would being lose some of its perverse appeal if it became the obligatory mode, and if ‘experience’ became the only possible way to interface with art?

Let’s look a little more closely at what Fromm says about the two modes of being. In Chapter 4, ‘What Is The Having Mode?’, Fromm lays out the basic binary. ‘We live in a society that rests on private property, profit, and power as the pillars of its existence,’ he says. Following economist R.H. Tawney, Fromm traces the derivation of the word ‘private’ to its Latin root in privare, meaning ‘to deprive of’. Private property involves someone depriving someone else of something which already exists.

Already I have some doubts about this; the system of ownership is also a system of production - the structure of ownership can bring things into being that previously didn’t exist. In the art world, we’d call this ‘commissioning’. Materials can be paid for in advance, and an artist’s basic security can be assured by the fact that his work will be owned. What’s more, owned works are often shared; many are sent out on loan for regular public display, where they become ‘experiences’ for all to enjoy for little or no money. On the other hand, episodes like the 2004 warehouse fire that destroyed a large part of Charles Saatchi’s collection show the downside of hoarding, and of concentrations of ownership.

For Fromm, some forms of ownership are more toxic than others. Once, he says, ownership meant taking care of things, and keeping them. Now, in accelerated consumer societies, possessions are sold quickly on, dumped, discarded, replaced. Once something is owned, no further effort is required for the property’s upkeep or its productive use.

The ‘having’ mode can be worse than irresponsible, it can be neurotic. Fromm connects ownership to Freud’s anal-erotic phase of psycho-sexual development, to ‘the character of a person whose main energy in life is directed toward having, saving, and hoarding money and material things as well as feelings, gestures, words, energy.’ In the mind of the stingy, stubborn, excessively orderly individual who never graduates from Freud’s late-anal stage, there’s a peculiar connection between money and faeces - gold and dirt. Fromm pulls no punches here: ‘The person exclusively concerned with having and possession is a neurotic, mentally sick person; hence it would follow that the society in which most of the members are anal characters is a sick society.’

So what of the ‘being’ mode? Asceticism isn’t the answer: ‘In the very attempt to suppress having and consuming, the person may be equally preoccupied with having and consuming’. Chapter five lays out - with some difficulty, because this mode is somewhat utopian - what the healthy being mode might consist of: ‘The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental characteristic is that of being active.’

Reverting to Marxian language, Fromm tells us that being is about an active productivity that manages to overcome alienation: ‘Nonalienated activity is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something and remaining related to what I produce [...] I call this nonalienated activity productive activity’.

Mapping this, again, to the art world, it’s tempting to see collectors as neurotic people stuck in the world of having and artists as free, healthy and productive creatures liberated into pure being. But Fromm won’t have this interpretation; he specifically tells us that being, ‘is not the capacity to create something new and original, as an artist or scientist may be creative. It might take the form of “productive passivity”.’ In other words, doing and making nothing might be the most effective way to be active and productive.

Here we encounter the mystical, paradoxical side of Frankfurt School thinking, the Eckhartian streak apparent also in Adorno (’In the end soul itself is the longing of the soulless for redemption’). But Fromm gives us an escape route from the endless slippage set up by the possibility that his having / being binary is a paradoxically symbiotic relationship; he tells us that being isn’t just the opposite of having, but also of appearing.

And with that Platonic thought all comparison with the art world must end because, for the visually-oriented - slaves of the retinal image, trapped in our pan-global Plato’s Cave of endless exhibitions - being and appearing are necessarily the same thing. 

Nick Currie

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

The Art Gallery of Ontario

Frank Gehry gives the Toronto museum a face-lift

Will starchitect Frank Gehry’s redesign transform the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) into a world renowned building?  That certainly seems to have been the goal of much of the recent museum-building in the city, though the results have been uneven.  Just down the street is Will Alsop’s CDN$42.5 million Ontario College of Art and Design, which preserved residents’ views of the park by putting the institution on stilts, though the project’s scale was ultimately limited by budget constraints.  Meanwhile, Daniel Libeskind’s recent addition to the Royal Ontario Museum feels tacky and slightly out-of-step with the city.  While it’s still too early to gauge how both Toronto and the international community will respond to the AGO, my own impressions are mixed: the CDN$300 million renovation, inspired by the late Ken Thomson’s recent bequest, is impressive but far from perfect.  The building’s location is less than ideal, many of the exhibitions lack sufficient curatorial direction and levels of accomplishment within these spaces is too often linked to the interests of their main donor. 

Some 2000 works from Thomson’s collection now occupy more than a quarter of AGO’s 110 galleries – making up nearly 50 % of the works displayed – though you’re more likely to read about how the architect’s early life in the city influenced the building than the complex effect a major gift can have on a museum’s collection-building strategy.  Given the criticisms that Gehry’s blockbuster museum projects have drawn – a perceived lack of sensitivity to the local area, for one – one would imagine his Canadian heritage would fuel hopes for this project.  As far as exterior treatments go, it’s difficult to say that Gehry has successfully integrated the AGO with the surrounding buildings: the narrow, adjacent street flanked by Victorian homes obscures all full-frontal views. Notably, the two largest physical changes to the building – the blown glass-like façade and the new addition of a cube housing contemporary galleries resting atop the old building at the rear of the museum – are much more impressive from within. 

The interior itself marks a return to Gehry’s earlier deconstructivist work, a decisive break from grander projects such as the Guggenheim Bilbao and Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall.  Intentionally subdued, the AGO is more response to the art it houses than the city block it was assigned. The exhibitions themselves – comprising Canadian, photography and contemporary, to name a few – hit some fairly significant highs and lows.  While none of these lows could be attributed to Gehry’s masterful and relatively restrained redesign, it may have inspired some ill-advised curatorial decisions.  For example, while Gehry seamlessly threads new architectural structures and finishings throughout the pre-existing rooms (virgin wooden floors; twirly staircases; recessed skylights), the museum’s strategic placement of recent work amongst the older art in the collection feels forced and awkward.

In other instances, the museum’s holdings are more thoughtfully placed.  Probably the best example of this is demonstrated in the Thomson Collection Canadian gallery, in which a large overhead window shapes Toronto’s northern light to fall in the same angular pattern as in Lawren Harris’ mountain-top paintings that hang just below.  Rarely has a relationship between architecture and painting been made so explicit through light alone.

A very different work, David Altmejd’s sprawling sculpture The Index (2007), couldn’t be more perfectly placed in the first-floor atrium.  The lattice and windows integrate with Altmejd’s taxidermied animals and mirror shards so seamlessly that the architecture and the exterior landscape look as though they could belong to the same piece.  Similarly, Giuseppe Penone’s The Hidden Life Within (2008) is remarkably improved when placed against Gallery Italia’s 450-foot-long view of neighboring Dundas Street framed by oversized wooden arched supports.

Yet these works – as well as Thomson’s exquisite European and medieval art collection, and the impressive early-twentieth-century galleries – are somewhat compromised by haphazardly curated spaces elsewhere.  The contemporary portion of the museum – a field largely unexplored by Thomson’s collection – is amongst the worst surveys I have seen. Poor curatorial direction and a lack of high-quality work means that the two chronologically organized floors resemble a cluttered flea-market.  A Helen Frankenthaler on the fifth floor is hung on a wall far too short for the size of the painting; a large black cube by Mona Hatoum obscures all the work around it; Brian Jungen’s golf bag totem poles are surrounded by so many other pieces that the usually grandiose structures appear cheap and tawdry.  World class institutions don’t make these very basic mistakes.

With that said, the museum did have the foresight to hire an architect who understood the importance of creating a building with the primary purpose of showcasing the finest works in its collection.  In this respect, the AGO has done very well; the galleries, the building, and the curation all achieve the highest levels of accomplishment. The hope is that Gehry’s clarity of vision will eventually extend throughout the museum. 

Paddy Johnson

Paddy Johnson is a critic who lives and works in New York. She maintains the blog Art Fag City.

The Double Club

All back to Carsten Höller's place

For Carsten Höller, art can never get too close to life. After putting slides in Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in 2006, Höller has returned to London with The Double Club: a bar, restaurant and dance floor where the Congo meets the west. The club – conceived by Höller and financed in part by Fondazione Prada – is located in an old warehouse in a dark alley behind Angel tube station. Far from a Congo-western fusion, the club has a split personality: visible, audible and even edible. 

The menu offers partridge or fumbwa (yam leaves cooked in peanut sauce). Art works by Andy Warhol and Chéri Samba adorn the restaurant walls. One half of the bar is a polished copper pub called ‘The Two Horses Riders Club’; the other half a make-shift shack surrounded by plastic tables and chairs. One wall flashes a painted advertisement for Primus Bière; another one wall is made of those blue Portuguese azuejos tiles, depicting Russian architect Georgi Krutikov’s Flying City (1928). The dance floor is a silvery circular disk, which can rotate to the tunes of Papa Wemba or M.I.A. 

Congo meeting the west is not an unproblematic encounter, whether one considers the brutal history of colonization under Belgian rule or the recent failure of a 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping force – the UN’s largest – to prevent the rebel General Laurent Nkunda from unleashing a humanitarian crisis at Goma. Höller’s project was first dubbed ‘Prada Congo Club’ and then quickly renamed ‘The Double Club’ as the crisis intensified. War is clearly bad for the brand. The opening last week coincided with a UN announcement that 3,000 more troops would be sent to DR Congo. As a gesture of solidarity – or justification – The Double Club profits will be donated to the UNICEF charity City of Joy which assists rape victims. 

‘I don’t like to make objects,’ says Höller, who prefers art works as experiences. The Stockholm-based artist has been travelling to Kinshasa for years, most recently to work on a film about the pivotal role of music in the capital. The late dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who seized power in 1965, was fond of saying, ‘Happy are those who sing and dance.’ In 1997, he was ousted by Laurent Kabila, who changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of Congo (his son Joseph Kabila now rules). Höller initially used film footage of Kinshasa concerts to make projections. Taking on the role of impresario, the artist invited two world-class stars to play in Stockholm: Werrason at Färgfabriken in 2004 and Koffi Olomide at Berns in 2005.

The Double Club is a more ambitious project – not without conflicts. The Congolese war is being fought right in London, albeit with other weapons. For live music, Höller had hoped to invite top Kinshasa bands, but his plans were thwarted by the Combattants de Londres. This group – said to be 4,000 strong in London and spreading to Paris and Brussels – prevents Congolese musicians from playing in Europe because they are viewed as supporting Joseph Kabila. After his father was assassinated in 2001, Kabila Jr. took over and was elected in 2006 in the country’s first ballot since the 1960s. ‘The regime is corrupt,’ says Alidor Mutoba, president of the Combattants. ‘The musicians supported Joseph Kabila, and the government used them.’ The Combattants believe that Rwandan president Paul Kagame is backing both President Kabila and the rebel General Nkunda to destablize the country. The alleged goal is to exploit the mineral-rich Kivu region, which holds more than half of the world’s supply of coltan, a mineral used for mobile-phone circuit boards. 

But just how do politicians use musicians? Bob White, a professor of anthropology at the Université de Montréal, speaks of ‘commercialized praise singing’. It goes by the name of libanga in Lingala, one of the country’s five languages. In English, we would say ‘dedications’, but libanga comes closer to advertising. Impoverished by pirates, the musicians live from fans who pay money to have their names sung out by the bands. The price depends on the artist and the format; for Koffi Olomide, the price ranges from 300 USD during a live performance to 3,000 USD on a recording. Under Mobutu, musicians were expected to praise the dictator’s programme of animation politique – or face consequences, like losing travel visas. They resisted by turning animation into ambiance – a complex word that White defines as ‘the buzz of a happening’. ‘It’s not like Brian Eno ambient music,’ explains White. ‘But the excited mood of a good show.’

SAPE – Société des ambianceurs et personnes élégantes (Society of buzz-makers and elegant people) – is another resistant offshoot that began in the 1980s between the foreign capitals Paris and Brazzaville through Nyarkos and Papa Wemba. Instead of donning the traditional Congolese garb dictated by Mobutu, the musicians started wearing Western designer clothes (and showed off the labels by wearing clothes inside-out). The musicians have become incredibly powerful in swaying public taste and public opinon – more so than politicians. Kabila Sr. called for patriotic songs: from a group album to praise the new currency franc congolais in 1998 to the hit To ko wa pona ekolo (We die for our country) by NC Zola and Souzy Kosseye. By contrast, Kabila Jr. ordered through government cultural officials what many consider propanda to win the 2006 election. It’s rumored that the most popular musicians were each paid 15,000 USD per song.

For the Combattants, the musicians should offer financial and moral support to the Congolese people. ‘The people are not happy,’ says Combattant Mutoba, echoing Mobutu’s slogan. ‘They don’t want to sing and to dance.’ The group claims to have been behind the cancellation of Koffi Olomide’s concert at London’s Coronet club in May 2007 and even Papa Wemba’s no-show for Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday celebration in Hyde Park last summer. Last week, Werrason filmed a plea to perform at The Double Club. ‘He cannot come here,’ says Mutoba. In addition to intimidating musicians, the group is alleged to have been associated with an arson attack on the DR Congo’s embassy in May 2007 in London and assaults on Congolese officials visiting the city. Faced with such resistance, Höller decided to invite Congolese musicians already living in London. 

It’s 8 pm at The Double Club. There’s no sign of the Combattants, who have given the club their silent blessing – for now. Africa Jambo – the first live London-based Congolese act – is taking requests for libanga. ‘Tonight, we play quiet,’ says singer Eugeune Makuta, noting that the band has been reduced from 15 members to a mere four. Singer and percussionist Aimé Bongongo – a proud Sapeur – is wearing a reminder of the on-going war and its victims: a sweatshirt bearing a peace sign made up of embroided outlines of human skulls. Will there be a dance tempo tonight? ‘It depends on the ambiance...’

By 11 pm, the place is packed. Höller’s goal becomes clear: separate the cultures; fuse the people. Guests ignore the aesthetic segregation throughout the club. Sapeurs in the latest look – beige furry suits – lounge at the Western copper bar. A Prada set is sitting in the Congo section on the plastic lawn chairs near the open BBQ. Even for cosmopolitan London, the crowd is mixed. The musician Bryan Ferry and the designer Peter Saville rub shoulders with the Popol Mukelenge, the host of the popular Congolese television culture show Bercy - Boulevard des Stars.

Given the fashion-conscious Sapeurs, one wonders why it took Prada so long to connect with them. Mukelenge calls them ‘fashion victims’. Yet some suspect that Prada may be trying to improve its status among the musicians, who favour the competition (the top designers are, in order of preference, Roberto Cavalli, Versace, Yoji Yamamoto, Jitrois, Comme des Garçons, Dolce & Gabbana). ‘Papa Wemba has never talked about Prada,’ notes Mukelenge, adding that the world star has already modeled for the Japanese designers Masatomo and Kassamoto. Muiccia Prada may be in for a disappointment. 

For Mukelenge, The Double Club holds other disappointments. He would like to see more Congolese in the decision-making process. Jan Kennedy, who was behind Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy restaurant, is the club director. Clemens Weisshaar and Reed Kram created the western designs while Höller managed the Congolese sections. Even the chef preparing fumbwa is not Congolese; it’s Mourad Mazouz of Momo and Sketch fame. ‘Our culture is being honored here,’ says Mukelenge. ‘We have failed in politics and in war, but not in culture. We would like to participate because we don’t want to fail in culture here.’ Is The Double Club yet another example of Western colonialization and imperialism? ‘No, but there must be a collaboration.’

Could The Double Club overcome its managerial segregation and become a site for a true encounter between Congo and the west? Or even talks between musicians and Combattants? There’s not much time to find out. In six months, the entire project will be dismantled and shipped off to Fondazione Prada in Milan. The foundation’s new building, which is being designed by Rem Koolhaas, will open in 2013 near the Piazzale Lodi in the former bottling factory of the Società Distillerie Italiano. Perhaps there’s still a chance for The Double Club to get even closer to reality: to turn the dreams of a broken country into a dialogue of hope.

Jennifer Allen

Jennifer Allen is a critic living in Berlin

Auckland

Could Auckland be the centre of the new 'Trans-Pacific' network?

Certain images come to mind when thinking about New Zealand: it’s clean, green, looks exactly like the landscapes in that film trilogy, everyone sounds just like those guys on HBO and most people live a holiday-park lifestyle.  Well forget it all. Conservation group WWF recently released a study indicating that New Zealand has the sixth largest ecological footprint in the world, behind the United States, Kuwait, Denmark, Australia and the United Arab Emirates; ‘100% pure’ is nothing more than a tourist-board campaign.

To oust another stereotype, New Zealand’s contemporary art scene also deserves attention. A walk down the Ponsonby end of Karangahape Road in Auckland this week offers exhibitions from an unlikely range of artists: Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex (showing at Artspace); Michael Stevenson, Francis Alÿs and Amit Charan (at Gambia Castle); Peter Madden (at Michael Lett); and Andrew Barber (at Stark White).  Despite the isolation of this small country, New Zealand maintains and nurtures a disproportionate amount of very good, engaging and well-informed artists.  Perhaps all those hours spent on long haul flights and other modes of transport is being put to good use; or, as renowned Kiwi physicist Ernest Rutherford once put it, ‘We don’t have the money, so we have to think.’

Despite the current flurry of great exhibitions on K-Road, Californian curator Brian Butler, on the eve of his departure from a three-year directorial tenure at the publicly funded Artspace, has suggested the New Zealand art world, and the region at large, would benefit from a change in outlook.  A shift towards what he refers to as a ‘Trans-Pacific’ focus, rather than what is perhaps more typical of a Commonwealth nation: deference to contemporary art’s northern epicentres, or worse, a navel-gazing local scene. Butler is familiar with our Trans-Atlantic counterpart, having run Los Angeles gallery 1301PE for many years before taking the position at Artspace. (The latter gallery maintains a healthy rotating-door policy for its directorship that has attracted, in recent years, the talents of German curator Tobias Berger, now at the NJP center in South Korea, and Australian Rhana Devenport, now the director at the Govett Brewster Gallery in New Zealand - home to the Len Lye collection.)

The notion of a Trans-Atlantic art world is arguably based on the notion that the best - and, to a certain extent, most collectable - art is to be found in the self-sufficient network of centres bordering the Atlantic. During the 1990s, for example, when post-colonial discourse was at its height, the Asia-Pacific rim was something of a fairground for biennial curators, but the attention was relatively short-lived. More recently, auction-house successes tend to propagate stereotypes about regional contemporary art scenes, epitomized by artists like Takeshi Murakami, Yue Minjin and the work of the late Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri from Australia.

However, with the once great economic powers of the 20th century rapidly revising free-market practices in an attempt to counter the finance industries’ widespread addiction to what FT journalist Gillian Tett calls ‘candy floss money’, times are changing. New alliances and networks are forming, and so Butler’s suggestion is not entirely unlikely.  But neither is it a new phenomenon in the region’s art world.  Many publicly funded institutions and galleries have been working together across the region for some time - the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane is the most obvious example.  But there is a synthesis between Butler’s Trans-Pacific idea (which would likely focus attention on monetary outcomes as well as the esoteric benefits of collaborative experimental exchanges) and the wider economic community. 

Following this year’s G8 gathering in Japan, it became apparent that the economic powerhouses of this decade are no longer the sitting members of G8.  Attention has fallen on the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India and China, but also Mexico, Australia, South Africa, Indonesia and South Korea. Whilst formally expanding the G8 is likely to reassure sitting members, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has been espousing his own version of the changing of the guard.  He has suggested that the immediate future will reveal the world’s most powerful economies in Australia’s ‘back yard’: specifically Indonesia (which is, according to Newsweek, starting to resemble the flourishing Indian economy of the ‘90s), but also China, India, Japan and South Korea. In a speech to the Sydney Asia Society in June, Rudd suggested initiating talks on an alliance between the Asia-Pacific region following the model of the EU, initially sitting alongside the current ties of APEC and ASEAN and eventually surpassing it. Such a strategy is ultimately about big business and trade, though it is tantilizing, however unlikely, to consider a shared regional currency, or an open-border policy for all member states, like that of the EU.

If the focus between the countries involved in the Australia’s new ‘very special friends’ network is trade, one has to wonder if there will be an effect on the art market. Whilst many working in the arts still baulk at the idea of a market-driven art world in the region, it is hard to ignore the wealthy professional- and middle-classes benefitting from the burgeoning economies of China, India and Australia (current stock market falls excluded for the moment) - though they are yet to have an obvious impact on the art world.  In New Zealand, especially, contemporary art and those dedicated to creating it, discussing it, writing about it and supporting it are tellingly absent from mainstream media sources.  The ‘art star’ phenomenon is a completely alien notion. While a local artist may garner media attention once they have been recognized abroad, it is rarely the reverse.  Michael Lett, a gallerist in Auckland, who works with a wide range of artists, international and New Zealand-based, suggests that it is simply part of the environment.  Lett spends much time trying to encourage his clients to find out more about the artists he shows in his space - many of whom produce work that provokes discourse abroad.  There is still a tendency amongst the small group of collectors in New Zealand to stick with what is familiar and recognizable - that which harks back to, or parodies, the work of the grandfathers of New Zealand contemporary art: Colin McCahon and Gordon Walters.  This sentiment was echoed by local artist Mladen Bizumic who is currently based in Berlin, during an interview with the New Zealand magazine The Listener.  He suggested that whilst ‘Aotearoa is producing an incredible number of good artists [...] we need to advance [...] a critical discussion around art.’ This comment is not about creating more funding opportunities - New Zealand already has many (the former Prime Minister Helen Clark personally oversaw the arts portfolio). Rather it is a backhand aimed at local print editors, many of whom seem addicted to the Associated Press wire and are largely indifferent towards content focused on contemporary art and culture. 

This situation is not for lack of events to comment on.  Aside from those Auckland galleries already mentioned, New Zealand maintains a healthy network of publicly funded spaces: the Adam Art Gallery, the Govett Brewster, and Wellington City Gallery being among the most interesting. In the wider region the arrival of new art fairs in Hong Kong, Shcontemporary in Shanghai, and the continued presence of the Melbourne Art Fair offers plenty of art-entertainment.  One would also hope that the plethora of biennials and triennials in the region - including, this year alone, the Yokohama triennial, Gwangju, Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore biennials and Guangzhou triennial - would aid the cause.  But as the curators for Yokohama suggested in the curatorial statement: ‘Quite often the same pieces circulate and at a certain point there is no longer a necessity to go.’ So what then? Do we just buy the catalogue and leave the event to passing tourists?

Perhaps so.  The New Zealand art community is adept at producing projects that fit into a A4 envelope or carry-on luggage.  This miniature publishing community continues to produce exceptional work: the online art magazine Natural Selection, during its brief life, gained a committed international audience and was included in the Documenta Magazine in 2007.  Artspace dedicates considerable energy to documenting the exhibition programme of the gallery in beautifully designed publications, ensuring that current New Zealand artists continue to have a presence internationally.  When CNZ, the government arts funding agency, ceased its funding of a New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Bienniale, Artspace enlisted the support of the country’s leading curators to produce a rich publication titled Speculation, which documents the work of a group of artists deemed worthy of exhibiting at the next bienniale.  The message was heeded and CNZ will again support a New Zealand pavilion in 2009, featuring Francis Upritchard and Judy Millar. 

Such a project seems to typify the current New Zealand art scene, one has the sense that many refuse to wait around hoping to be discovered and are taking matters into their own hands.  The Auckland space Gambia Castle, for example, is making a concerted effort to develop a new audience- and collector-base locally as well as abroad. Run by a group of young(ish) artists (Dan Arps, Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Fiona Connor, Simon Denny, Sarah Hopkinson, Daniel Malone, Tahi Moore, Kate Newby and Tao Wells), many of whom have already tripped around on the residency circuit or been central to an ‘experimental-artist-run’ venture before, Gambia Castle was opened as an alternative to the typical artist space.  Whilst it is concerned with presenting critically engaging exhibitions it is clearly also a promotional platform for the artists involved, all of whom have solo shows annually.  Sarah Hopkinson, the space’s administrator / writer / part-time curator suggests that Gambia Castle shares similarities with spaces she and the other artists involved discovered in Europe and the UK, not elsewhere in Australasia.  The space is open only as long as they continue to sell work, they do not apply for government grants, and welcome the freedom that this affords.  They have plans for future projects abroad and are wisely not waiting for the attention to come to them. Because, as appealing as Butler’s Trans-Pacific network or Rudd’s EU twin sounds, such endeavours are unlikely to manifest themselves soon.  Jerry Saltz recently quoted New Museum curator Laura Hoptman, who proposed that with the current global turmoil: ‘Art will flower and triumph not as a hobby, an investment, or a career, but as what it is and was - a life.’ For the majority of the art scene the latter has always the been the case in New Zealand, where curiosity, inventiveness and DIY reign, so maybe without even intending it, Auckland is in an enviable position. 

Nicola Harvey

Nicola Harvey is a writer and critic based in New Zealand. 

Of Time and the City

An interview with director Terence Davies

Terence Davies’ cinematic essay Of Time and the City was widely hailed as a masterpiece at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Although the film, the director’s first for a decade, did not win any prizes, it was recognized as part of the official selection by an honorary special screening. Not unlike Davies’ previous odes to Liverpool, The Long Day Closes (1992) and Distant Voices, Still Lives (1998), the film is a subjective expression of love, disdain and anomie for his home city and indeed himself.

Of Time and the City relies almost entirely on archival footage woven together by the director’s narration. At times tender and scornful, this is an especially brave move in the documentary world, where subjectivity is often equated with some kind of distortion of the essential ‘truth’. It would be reductive to label Of Time and the City a portrait of Liverpool; Davies stresses that, ‘it’s about age and mortality. It’s a different way of dealing with all those things which are important to me: the nature of time, the nature of mortality and the transience of life.’

Davies opts for the evocation of a specific feeling over didacticism: the feeling of oppressive Catholicism; the bodies of young men being brought back from the Korean War; the modest futility of a bereaved elderly woman. For Davies, modernity is characterized by different forms of loss: back-to-back housing replaced by tower blocks; classical music giving way – in the final shots of the film – to short-skirted teenage girls drinking alcopops.

This ‘feeling’ is induced by the claustrophobic collage of narration and archive footage juxtaposed with the graininess of Davies’ disillusioned voice. In one impossibly touching moment, Davies recounts the moment a male friend placed an arm around his shoulder at a bonfire celebration. We hear the narrator pleading for this one sincere moment to last a little longer – but then the moment is gone. 

The closest experiences I’ve had to watching Of Time and the City are Johan Grimonprez’s Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1998) and Bruce Weber’s A Letter to True (2004). These films place a similar importance on feeling and humanism, provoking an intense reaction that somehow liberates the viewer from immediate thought. As Davies explained: ‘I’m not interested in what happened next because that’s not interesting. I’ve always been more interested in what happened emotionally next because that’s something that is visceral and its associative, like music is.’

Davies has never cited Weber, Grimonprez, or in fact any contemporary documentary-maker as an inspiration. His only acknowledged influence has been Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain (1942): ‘It was my template because it’s not linear it’s impressionistic, its not about memories as such – it’s just impressionist.’ Werner Herzog’s notion of ‘ecstatic truth’ is possibly the most useful way to approach Of Time and the City’s intangibility. Both directors have equally cynical relationships with the idea of truth, and truth in their films often resides somewhere other than in the factually correct. Herzog has argued that: ‘There are very deep strata of truth inherent in cinema which we have almost stopped asking for. I seek a deeper truth than the cinéma vérité truth which only scratches the surface. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.’

We see this philosophy conveyed in the German director’s Lessons of Darkness (1992). The centrepiece of Massimiliano Gioni’s current ‘After Nature’ group show at the New Musuem, the documentary is primarily concerned with the aftermath of the Gulf War and the power struggle for oil that ensued. Where other film-makers may have delved in to the political and economical factors of this issue, Herzog adopted a technique of absurdist film-making that re-contextualised the situation.

Of Time and the City perhaps wouldn’t have been possible without the funding that Davies received because of Liverpool’s status as this year’s European Capital of Culture. (The film was produced on a modest budget of £250,000, granted by North West Vision and Media in celebration of the 2008 Capital of Culture scheme.) Without this, we may have had to wait another ten years before one of Davies’ scripts was commissioned, leaving us with a plethora of yet more safe documentaries such as James Marsh’s recent Man on Wire (2008) which favoured reenactment over metaphor.

The British film industry does not easily give birth to awkward films and Davies knows it: ‘That’s the hardest thing of all; when 25 year olds who know nothing tell you how to write a script.’ It’s time that the British film industry wholeheartedly embraced its talented film-makers rather than playing it safe. Tellingly, when I asked Davies if he had been influenced by the work of Bruce Weber he simply replied, ‘I don’t know who he is – I’m afraid that cinema has lost its magic for me.’

Daniel Tapper

Daniel Tapper is a film critic based in London. 

Your Name Here

Collaborative fiction and unpublishable books: reading Helen DeWitt's online-only novel

‘I’d like to publish it in the traditional way,’ insisted Helen DeWitt, author of The Last Samurai (2000), in a recent interview about her new online-only project, Your Name Here. But for her new novel to end up in Waterstone’s or Borders would undermine its whole reason for being. The book, which can be downloaded as a PDF from DeWitt’s website for the suggested price of US$8, is predicated on its own unpublishability and is both the culmination and the chronicle of DeWitt’s fruitless attempts to find a literary outlet for Ilya Gridneff, a (real-life) Australian journalist she met in a pub in Hackney. We don’t just get Gridneff’s rollicking emails, but also the emails from agents who don’t want to take on Gridneff, the emails from DeWitt apologizing to Gridneff about the agents, and an essay or two on the cowardice of modern publishing. Even the strands of the novel that have nothing to do with Gridneff – a dystopian satire called Lotteryland, a quasi-memoir about a suicidal Oxford student, and various other mingled fictions – are mostly about rejection and exclusion. Your Name Here is really not a book that could dress up in smart hard covers and keep its rebel pride intact.

With Gridneff’s undiscovered talent used as the pretext for the whole farrago, much of Your Name Here’s credibility rests on whether you think the journalist is deserving of DeWitt’s devotion. Indeed, Gridneff’s constant riffing, punning and ventriloquizing is often annoying rather than charmingly quirky. ‘He is […] Effortlessly offensive. Effortlessly funny,’ adds DeWitt, but nowhere in Gridneff’s despatches is there anything so jarringly comic as DeWitt’s own description, for instance, of a prostitute putting a condom on a penis, which ‘stands alertly to attention, a child submitting to scarf and mittens for a romp in the snow’. Gridneff is a good writer, but not, on this evidence, so special that we should put up with his inability or unwillingness to pay heed to usual formal restraints. At one point he considers writing ‘50 000 words of travel yarns’ about ‘pakistan and iran ad turkey [sic]’ – well, why not go ahead and write them?

With the internet throwing up so many genuinely unique new voices, why should attention be paid to those who are yet to find a proper vehicle for their expression? This needn’t entail a compromising move towards the comforts of conventional novelistic form; indeed, many emerging online projects are using non-traditional forms. To take a fairly arbitrary example, Chris Onstad, creator of the Achewood webcomic, is one of the very best of these newcomers, sharing with Gridneff a boozy, broken cadence. The difference between the two approaches is that Onstad has found his perfect medium – a crudely-drawn webcomic – while Gridneff is still searching.

Are Gridneff’s emails more worthwhile for floating in the midst of all this metafictional driftwood, or less so? Certainly, DeWitt’s itching impulse to undermine her own creation is pretty disconcerting. ‘You’re extremely aggrieved,’ she writes, for instance, at the beginning of chapter eight: ‘Instead of the wealth of stories you loved in the last book there are narrative strands which you find hard to follow […] You find yourself hoping yet another flimsy pretext will be found to introduce yet another totally superfluous second-person narrator.’ DeWitt often refuses to maintain the polite illusion that she and the reader are both having a wild time, though she predictably includes a doleful preemptive self-criticism of all her doleful preemptive self-criticisms: ‘A self-referential book that raises metaphysical questions as a pretext for talking about itself, doesn’t the book simply replicate the very neurosis that makes it so hard for you to be spontaneous except in the calculating, premeditated way that made you wonder whether you were a robot in the first place?’

Your Name Here is arduous, irritating and muddled, and yet, somehow, it does have a kind of brilliance. The density of ideas is exceptional, from the principal motifs (how can we trick Tolkien readers into learning Arabic instead of Elvish?) down to the offhand remarks (succeed at online poker by playing at 9am when the maximum number of jobless alcoholics are online). A lot of this fluorescence is totally irrelevant, but it still makes the average contemporary novel look eerily vacant. The same could be said of DeWitt’s deep engagement with the software of modern life: Your Name Here is full of details about spam email and tabloid journalism and karaoke bars and student loans that are, at least for a certain type of reader, instantly recognizable; and the point is not that DeWitt includes them, as many a lazier writer would, because they are recognizable or modern, but because they give some genuine insight.

All this, of course, comes at a price. If anything in Your Name Here is extraneous, then everything is: give it to a professional editor for some judicious cuts and you wouldn’t get much back. That would be a shame, but it doesn’t mean we must agree with DeWitt about the supposed cowardice of mainstream publishing. Nor does it mean we have to find this novel superior to its less frenetic peers (who, instead of 400 ideas each, might have just one, about love or war, and not even a single knowing mention of Google or Kreuzberg or Adorno).

Clarity, discipline and general appeal are a drag, but they’re usually better than the alternative. If you’re one of DeWitt’s ideal readers – if, perhaps, you are an editor of n+1, in which part of Your Name Here was excerpted – then you’ll know how to enjoy a restless postmodern experiment that sometimes reads like the entire internet miniaturized down to 580 pages. But that needn’t stop you from coming to two conclusions at once: that, yes, it’s well and good that this book should be read; and that, yes, it’s well and good that this book shouldn’t be published.

Ned Beauman

Ned Beauman is a writer based in London and commissioning editor of Another Man

The Debating Club

Predicting the future of the art market and criticism

In a speech last March, Barack Obama, who will win the White House next month, called for a fundamental renovation of financial regulatory policies, linking the sub-prime crisis to lax oversight.  It was by then too late to stem the tide of the current catastrophe.  Even in Obama’s second term his administration will do no more than begin the recovery – following the Great Depression it took 29 years for the market to regain its pre-Depression, inflation-adjusted peak – and no one should expect the United States to reemerge in a position of leadership when the upturn does arrive.  Just 32 years ago, as the U.S. celebrated its bicentennial, such a scenario was unthinkable – the decline of the U.S. has no equivalent in living memory. 

And where is the art world in all of this?  It is exercising its political arm, as it does every fourth year in the U.S., by holding benefit events for the Democratic National Committee. Yet amidst the financial crisis, by plan and coincidence, it’s worth noting that a re-invention of the art market’s basic business model is afoot. By coincidence, Sotheby’s opened its doors to the Damien Hirst auction – which capably garnered US$200.7 million in sales – on the same day that Lehman Brothers filed for the biggest bankruptcy in history.  There is nothing rapscallion about this if you can agree with critic Robert Hughes, who sensibly concedes that: ‘On the whole, money does artists much more good than harm. The idea that one benefits from cold water, crusts and debt collectors is now almost extinct, like belief in the reformatory power of flogging.’ Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in London, explained things from his side: ‘We’re still appealing to a small percentage of the world’s population, these people are sophisticated and they still have budgets for art.’

First framed as the herald of invulnerable economic strength within a fraction of the world’s population, auctions have since seen downturns, suggesting that the appeal of Sotheby’s waned as the worst financial crisis in 80 years began to sink in.  Who bought?  At the Hirst price-point the affair was a spectator sport for dealers and museums. Americans were noticeably absent though new collectors from the Middle East, Asia and Russia were active; unwittingly or not, they did the heavy lifting to put the new business model in place. 

This model has been in the planning for some time though for many it may have been difficult to predict.  One of its architects is Marc Porter of Christie’s, who, with admirable realism, reasoned: ‘To presume that the golden day of the ‘60s and that gallery system is what’s appropriate in a global art world may be a great disservice to artists and to collectors.  What we’re doing is ensuring that the art business evolves, so that the people who use the business are best served.’

Porter’s business model is as old as business itself: cutting out the middleman. An auction now provides the instrument for artists to bypass their galleries, along with their 50% commission on sales.  In Hirst’s case, with the help of the auction house’s ample experience, he marketed less the works of art to be auctioned than the pending scarcity of the signature themes that define his brand.  In the run-up to the auction Hirst said that he would no longer be making spin paintings and that there would be far fewer dead animal sculptures, sending the signal that this would be the last chance to acquire a hallmark work outside of the inflationary re-sale market.  So the Hirst auction was a matter of selling variations on popular themes to new collectors who believed that they were in a market with built-in shortages.  Seen in this light the phenomenon seems no more than routine business; create pitched desire in a marketplace defined by scarcity. 

While unlikely to overturn the old-fashioned business model all at once (selling art using the gallery’s prix fixe convention), casting the gallery as a business with fewer financial advantages for the artist is a paradigm shift with long-term consequences.  In the short-term, artists who command certain price-points will begin sending new work directly to auction with the immediate side-effect of helping to magnify and further marginalize the existing underclass of artists and galleries.  Eventually, the financial might of the auction houses will lead to the consolidation of the art business under a few owners just as in book-publishing, or the ongoing acquisition of private farms by international agri-businesses.  It is not a matter of if but when the most powerful galleries shift their business strategies towards becoming small-scaled auction houses to protect their brand by keeping their most lucrative artists from migrating to the established houses. In the meantime, auction houses will follow Christie’s lead leveraging its supply of art for auction through its acquisition of Haunch of Venison. 

This new business model will affect other sectors of the art world.  Stories of art critics shaping what Harold Rosenberg once called ‘the herd of independent minds’ by sparking feeding frenzies around an artist’s market are legendary.  But by contrast, Jerry Saltz opines that, ‘At no time in the last 50 years has what an art critic writes had less effect on the market than now’, which warns us that if art criticism’s influence on the market is waning now, it may well vanish in a marketplace ready to accommodate the ‘studio to auction’ business model. 

Saltz’s statement implies a certain freedom for criticism, but could it also spell out its inevitable irrelevance?  When significant artists from our era begin by-passing galleries, the traditional hunting grounds for critics, auction houses will be better positioned to take a firm hold on drafting history, if not manufacturing it all together.  And this trend will only be encouraged if critics from the intelligent magazines and newspapers fail to lift their self-imposed moratorium on reviewing auctions for fear of gaining back some of the influence Saltz sees fading. The dog just caught up with its tail. 

Yes, we can expect art criticism to continue its ennobling role as history’s first draft, but to what end if the history scripted by the auction houses drowns it out?  Already anemic, art criticism then becomes a debating club monitoring the underclass of artists, churning out drafts of their history, before becoming invisible when the auction houses begin to publish their own histories of art – a (marketing) move being incubated in publications like Sotheby’s Preview Magazine.

How does the following assessment sound? ‘To presume that the golden day of ‘60s art criticism is what’s appropriate in a global art world may be a great disservice to artists, to collectors, to art institutions and to history itself.’ Can we detect any immediate effects on art criticism in the aftermath of the Hirst auction?  Well, try to find a review of Hirst’s Sotheby’s exhibition ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’, which also happened to preview the works for auction, and what you will find are forecasts of the restructuring of the art market (September 17, 2008, Wall Street Journal), news round-ups in the entertainment section (September 7, 2008, The Times), and plenty of blogs fed by the inferiority complex that camps out in the underclass of artists, but no reviews in the conventional sense. 

Art critics either underestimate the impact of this new model for exhibiting and selling art, or are unwilling to acknowledge it out of some ethical prohibition that decrees auction houses off-limits.  I wonder if the readership noticed the difference when the vacuum of criticism was instantly filled by infotainment? 

While time will tell how the art market will weather this long-term financial crisis, the timing of introducing the ‘studio to auction’ model as the global markets began to collapse yielded a far more vulnerable position for the galleries than auction houses.  The galleries that will survive are the ones prepared to adapt to this unfolding complex of disruptive business innovations without giving in to it.  That’s realpolitik in the art world.  With Obama in the Oval Office perhaps the idea of change may become so infectious that even art critics will feel liberated, adapting their methods and means to account for this striking business model without fear they would be shouted down as art market collaborators.  Art criticism, were it to extent its reach beyond art’s appraisal, by taking a fundamentally different approach to defining problems and solutions across disciplines, may then subject the auction houses and their subsidiaries like Haunch of Venison, to critical analysis on a number of fronts simultaneously.  At the moment art critics are in default mode: escalating moral indignation over the dirty business of art.  Tsk-tsk!  I believe that segments of the discipline will abort their righteous anger act and change the form of its critical voice, otherwise we will be witness to the last writers to believe art criticism was a great power and the first to confront a dilemma which proved it was not.

Ronald Jones

Ronald Jones, an artist and critic, is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden.  At Konstfack he leads The Experience Design Group, and co-directs WIRE, the MA program in curatorial practice and critical writing.  He is a guest professor in Experience Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India.

Bangalore

India's third-largest city supports a busy community of galleries and artist-run spaces

If India is a country of extremes, then Bangalore (also known as Bengaluru) is India at its most schizophrenic: swish five-star hotels battle for space with ramshackle restaurants and rubbish dumps. The last few years have been a boom time for Bangalore’s construction and real estate sectors. While ‘India’s Silicon Valley’ is home to IT heavyweights Infosys, Wipro and TCS, the city’s infrastructure hasn’t kept pace with these developments.

Jaideep VG, editor of Time Out Bengaluru , notes that, ‘Bangalore is undergoing changes that are far more visible than those that occurred earlier – there has always been an influx of immigrants to this city; Marwaris, Sikhs, Tamilians and Biharis, but because of the increased amount of media space and income levels now, the differences these immigrants have brought to the city are far more evident. I believe this is one of the factors influencing artists here.’ But this city of call-centres is generating contemporary art too, supporting a thriving community of artists and gallerists. The two most prominent commercial galleries are GALLERYSKE – founded by Sunitha Kumar Emmart in 2003 – and Gallery Sumukha. The latter was established in 1996 by Premilla Baid and has mentored some interesting artists like Shantamani M. and Ravi Kashi. Bangalore’s artistic horizons are expanding further: well-known critic-curator Suman Gopinath is planning to start a gallery, Colab Art & Architecture, in early 2009 and the government-funded National Gallery of Modern Art is slated to launch its Bangalore chapter by December.

Bangalore’s constellation of star artists includes Alwar Balasubramaniam, famous for his mysterious white-on-white sculptures, and Ranjani Shettar, whose evanescent cloth and tamarind-powder installation Sun-sneezers blow light bubbles (2008) was at the ICA, Boston, in July. Equally feted are N.S. Harsha (winner of Cardiff’s Artes Mundi Award 2008) and Sheela Gowda – whose GALLERYSKE exhibition, ‘Crime Fiction’, continues until the end of October.

A newer kid on the block is 35-year-old Krishnaraj Chonat – a child of these shifting times. Chonat’s work pokes fun at the nouveau riche who live in Bangalore’s hilariously named (and hideously ornate) gated communities, such as Purva Venezia (modeled – billboards inform us – on Venice’s ‘magical landscapes’). His most recent work is The Coracle (2008), a life-size fibreglass boat fashioned to resemble a vast, multi-tiered cake. Perched higgledy-piggledy on top of each other are white-painted gothic columns, flower-patterned lampshades and Hindu deities that gleam like icing-sugar. A mosquito hovers sinisterly over this faux confection. (Like its Italian model, Purva Venezia has come to grief because it was built over a mosquito-infested swamp.)

However, Bangalore’s burgeoning economy has done more than provide artists with fodder for fun. ‘The last four years has meant that even artists at the bottom of the pile have felt a trickle-down effect’, says Avinash Veeraraghavan says, who, like Chonat and the Italian Andrea Anastasio, is another SKE artist with a background in design. Admittedly, not everyone is so delighted. ‘The real-estate boom has created an immense amount of wall-space that needs to be prettied up – hence the rise of banal, commissioned work’, complains Jaideep VG. Artist Navin Thomas agrees that the boom is a boon for ‘object art’ but not for non-commercial initiatives. Thomas (who has made his share of ‘object art’) is now turning his attention to other less commercial projects. One such – as yet untitled – endeavour is to hatch a bird in a cage that is populated by mechanical birds programmed to react to sound. Thomas wants to observe how the ‘speech’ patterns of the live animal will be affected by the interaction. Members of the public will be invited to see the work’s progress.

While Sunitha Kumar Emmart insists that GALLERYSKE supports non-commercial art – ‘Shows in our gallery are not meant for collectors per se’ – she confesses that there isn’t a wide audience: ‘With lack of public institutions, most people don’t visit galleries.’ Certainly, government bodies can’t be counted on to make a difference. The National Gallery of Modern Art has been in the offing since 2000, though its website still declares that ‘The branch will be fully operationalised during the year 2006.’ Newspapers believe that the claim will finally come good this year.

Obligatory grumbling aside, Bangalore’s artists aren’t especially bothered about government indifference. Because many local artists have had to fend for themselves, other funding models and support systems have emerged. Artist-led initiatives – like Suresh Jayaram’s 1 Shanti Road, based in his rambling family home – continue to thrive. While some critics protest that such tender-loving care has not led to many high-quality exhibitions, Jayaram points out that the gallery has helped to launch some now-successful young artists such as Tallur L.N. and Sakshi Gupta.

For Jaideep V.G., all this is proof that local practitioners are commendably community-spirited: ‘Bangalore artists are making socio-political statements through their work because they have immediate concerns about the world they live in.’ Gowda’s solo show, ‘Crime Fiction’, is easy to slot into this category: it investigates what constitutes a crime. Here, Spider (2008) comprises ropes of plaited black hair dangling from the ceiling, simulating intestines caked with dark blood. Gowda’s work seeks to complicate the way we ascribe guilt. The blood-like web of Spider makes us wonder whether the arachnid should be seen as an aggressor or a victim.

Meanwhile, curator Gopinath thinks that socio-political concerns like Gowda’s are excitingly endemic to contemporary Indian art in general. So, Colab will cover Indian art from all over the country, focusing on ‘Modernism in all its multiplicity’, she says. If Colab lives up to her promise, it will provide a boost to an already effervescent scene. 

Zehra Jumabhoy

Zehra Jumabhoy is a writer based in Bombay and assistant editor of ART India magazine

Venice 2008

A report from the 11th International Architecture Biennale

‘Architecture must go beyond buildings because buildings are not enough.’ So proclaims Aaron Betsky, curator of the eleventh Venice Architecture Biennale. And, when charged with filling a sprawling 10,000 square metres of exhibition space, it seems like a fair comment. Boring old buildings just won’t quite suffice; damned as the outmoded ‘tombs of architecture’, they must be transcended at all costs.

Yet after traipsing through the 300-metre long morgue of the Arsenale’s Corderie, past a procession of one-liners from an ageing avant-garde, I was longing for a plan and section. Or at least an idea.

Betsky has filled Venice’s majestic old rope factory with a series of large commissions from a chosen group he has christened the ‘Masters of the Experiment’ - namely his old buddies Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry and Coop Himmelb(l)au, who, judging from what is on show, have developed little since he brought them together for MoMA’s seminal 1988 ‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ show. The bloated relics of this ancien régime are offset by a handful of installations by a younger wave of ‘interdisciplinary multimedia collectives’, apparently set on pushing the latest techniques of interactive exhibition design towards no real purpose.

In an attempt to apply some theoretical gravitas to the formal whimsies on show, each piece is accompanied by a talking-head manifesto, often reminiscent of stilted lonely-hearts videos, as architects stumble over invented terms in an effort to impress. Next to Zaha Hadid’s ‘Lotus’ (2008), a convoluted tangle of a bed, desk and shelving entwined in sinuous fibreglass tendrils, Patrik Schumacher, the mathematical brain behind Hadid’s voluptuous undulations, robotically espouses the joys of ‘Parametricism, the great new style after Modernism.’ Conceiving buildings as a closed system of connected parameters, essentially designing through spreadsheets, this hallowed doctrine miraculously seems to produce the same kinds of twisting organic forms as Art Nouveau did a century earlier, only without the assured elegance.

The sense of being in a second-rate time warp continues, with other resurrected forms such as the ‘Feedback Space’ by Viennese provocateurs Coop Himmelb(l)au, an enormous inflatable jellyfish with throbbing LED panels responding to the heartbeat of whoever enters. Based on their ‘Astro-balloon’ proposal from 1969, the technology has apparently only just become available to realize a space with, ‘no physical ground plan, but a psychic one,’ where ‘walls no longer exist [...] our heartbeat becomes space, our face is the façade.’ This was all quite compelling in the heady days of hallucinogenic sci-fi experimentation, when Archigram were plotting their floating, walking cities, and Superstudio were dreaming of continuous monuments, but now it lacks the original sense of political urgency and suggestive possibility. You can almost see the layer of dust.

But it’s not just the older masters who are trying to recapture a bygone age. Young Swiss architect Phillipe Rahm, whose work usually explores the hidden environmental aspects of humidity and temperature (sadly lacking here due to technical difficulties), has chosen to fill his space with hairy naked hippies lounging around playing the chimes. Only the joss sticks are missing from his quaint tableau.

Further along, Dutch mavericks MVRDV are back with another 1980s computer game-based urban design tool and an animation of their ‘Skycar City’, a banal rendering of sub-Blade Runner skyrise urbanism. This sits next to Gregg Lynn’s remarkably ugly furniture made of plastic toys cut and fused together with the aid of a robot. Presented as a heroic new way to recycle, the resulting objects look more like Jeff Koons squeezed something through a mangle.

Breaking out of Betsky’s interminable corridor of lazy throwbacks, I was still holding out some hope for the Giardini. Mark Wigley, Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, was less optimistic: ‘It’s never a happy walk,’ he told me, ‘just look at people’s faces.’ And he’s got a point. The opening few days of this overblown extravaganza are indeed filled with fatigued faces and disillusioned stares, a symptom of the realization that architects are generally incapable of conveying a message with clarity and simplicity. Wigley is resigned: ‘You have to accept that most of the exhibits are bad, and then be completely surprised by the few that are good.’

And there were a few pleasant surprises. Junya Ishigami brings his weightless willowy world to the Japanese pavilion, clearing everything out and employing a ten-strong team to cover the white walls with immaculate pencil drawings of his poetic proposals for buildings in gardens. In these imaginary scenarios of cities organised in forests, fields and lakes, the plants are drawn in as much, if not more, detail than the architecture, suggesting a more egalitarian relationship between buildings and their surroundings – a subtle conception of sustainable growth, without the windmills and composting toilets.

Grassroots architecture gets a brief look-in too, with William Menking’s US pavilion dedicated to positioning practice in the context of its broader social remit, showcasing the Rural Studio’s US$25,000 house project as well as Teddy Cruz’s studies of the cross-cultural territory at the US-Mexican border. His work also creeps into the gargantuan Italian Pavilion in a room dedicated to practices that have hijacked Betsky’s theme of ‘Architecture Beyond Building’ to look at the social and political forces beyond architecture. Alejandro Aravena’s compelling projects with Chilean communities are exemplary in redefining social housing as an investment not an expense, developing an adaptable prototype to engage the residents in adding value to their own homes.

Perhaps the most provocative work on show, and the best critique of the Arsenale’s debauched funfair of contemporary starchitecture, can be found in the Polish pavilion, curated by Grzegorz Piątek and Jarosław Trybuś, which speculates on the future lives of six high-profile new buildings in Poland through impeccably doctored large-format photos. In 2047, with the death of books, Warsaw University Library becomes a temple of commerce, an SOM tower is transformed into a vertical cemetery, while a curvaceous Foster office block is reconfigured as a panopticon prison. Even the pavilion itself has been transformed into a hotel as a critique on the Giardini’s vacant state for much of the year. But it’s a brave step. ‘International exhibitions are based on an outdated principle which obliges every country to feature its showcase accomplishments,’ argues Piątek - ‘we have created a perverse antithesis of national promotional activities abroad.’ And in their dark dystopian scenarios, in which the forces of cultural change inevitably supercede the sluggish mechanisms of architectural production, there is a challenge to Betsky and his cronies; that architects need look not beyond building, but beyond their own navels.

Oliver Wainwright

Oliver Wainwright is an architect and critic living in London. 

Back to School

New and notable architecture and design books being released by English-language publishers this autumn

New and notable architecture and design books being released by English-language publishers this autumn.

Architecture

Conditions – Snøhetta: Architecture. Interior. Landscape.
Snøhetta eds (Lars Müller)

It was no small achievement when Norwegian firm Snøhetta was commissioned to design the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, a remarkably ambitious project to resurrect the ancient Library of Alexandria near the site of the original. In spite of the grand scale and statement of that project, the firm’s work delicately straddles architecture, interiors and landscape design in a wholly relevant way. There aren’t many firms today that have had more successes than failures, but the underknown Snøhetta is one of them. Lars Müller is publishing their beautiful monograph – the first from the firm.

Drafting Culture: A Social History of Architectural Graphics Standards
George Barnett Johnston (MIT Press)

First published in 1932 and now in its 11th edition (which includes a CD of CAD files), Architectural Graphics Standards is the reference book for those in the trade – it is simply taken for granted that every practicing architect owns the latest edition. This history of Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper’s ‘draftsman’s Bible’ constitutes an account of the gradual shift architecture took from pre- and interwar vocation to post-war academic-based profession. An honest, detailed investigation of the generational change in an oddly unreflective field.

Also: Writings on Architecture, Adam Caruso (Poligrafa); Stephan Jaklitsch: Habits, Patterns, Algorithms, 1998–2004, Oscar Riera Ojeda, ed. (Oro Editions).

Urbanism

I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas
Aron Vinegar (MIT Press)

Published in 1972, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas – which argued for the virtues of the ‘ordinary’ over the ‘heroic’ – remains one of the most influential and controversial books about architecture and urbanism and carried architectural debate into the public mind. In I am a Monument, Aron Vinegar argues that Learning from Las Vegas transcends its historical and theoretical origins and is in fact highly relevant to today’s architectural and visual culture. The most unusual – and perhaps most interesting – aspect of Vinegar’s book is his dissection of the design of the original edition (by Muriel Cooper) and Denise Scott Brown’s revised 1977 edition. A must.

Also: Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Augé / revised edition (Verso).

Technology

The Inner History of Devices
Sherry Turkle (MIT Press)

Sherry Turkle is an expert in investigating how technology enters our lives and is absorbed into our psyches. Using personal history, analysis and anthropology, this ‘intimate ethnography’ explores what so deeply connects humans to their machines, and why.

Graphic Design and Typography

Drawing is Thinking
Milton Glaser (The Overlook Press)

Nearly 200 pages of illustrations that walk the reader through the working process of the creator of the iconic I ♥ NY logo. To Milton Glaser, drawing is not simply representational but experiential. Elegant and fun.

Talking About Arabic
Mourad Boutros (Mark Batty)
English and French speakers are no longer alone in the ring when the argument over the prevailing lingua franca erupts. Where I lived in London, knowing Yoruba or Vietnamese would have served me better than English; here in New York City, some command of Spanish is now practically expected of residents. Increasingly, though, for reasons obvious and not entirely fortunate, the value of being familiar with the Arabic language and its culture is evident. This book should be required reading for anyone with even a modicum of interest in typography and design, and especially in the cultural sources and the contemporary applications of such. Mourad Boutros discusses everything from Arabic branding to religious and secular standards to traditional Arabic calligraphy.

Biography

Le Corbusier: A Life
Nicholas Fox Weber (Knopf)
Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation brings readers the first full biography of the most admired and maligned architect and planner of the 20th century. When every document of Corbusier’s working life has been published (from the sublime paint pallettes from Birkhauser to Phaidon’s almost vulgar Le Corbusier Le Grand), a cogent, traditional biography seems the right reaction to the visual overload, especially of the last decade. 

Eugenia Bell

Eugenia Bell is design editor of frieze. 

All Buttoned Up

Two months before the US presidential elections, a look at the history of badge design in American politics

‘G.W. – Long Live the President’ - not some plea to elect George W. Bush to a third term, but America’s first political button, commemorating George Washington’s inauguration in 1789. Campaign badges have a long and illustrious history in the US; created anonymously, they’re democratic and often plain-speaking, witty and kitsch. All of which has been seen over this fortnight of political theatre, the presidential nominating conventions, where first the Democrats then the Republicans officially name their candidates among the flashing lights, confetti, balloons, flags – and badges. The events can sometimes feel a little like an off-the-hook Hans Haacke piece. How else can you explain the delegate with a baseball cap covered with several miniature toilets (because the economy has gone down the drain), or the Californian sisters who drove to Denver in a vintage Volvo station wagon (the official car of the American liberal) entirely covered in Obama bumper stickers?

Buttons and campaign swag took off in the 1820s with an increase in suffrage. When voting rights expanded beyond the landed gentry, meaning that all white men could vote, politics became a heady affair: campaigns gave away trinkets and buttons supporting candidates became common. The first to make broad use of them was Andrew Jackson. (Incidentally, Jackson is also credited with giving birth to both the Democratic Party and its key symbol, the donkey. His rivals called him ‘jackass…’) Still, long before Jackson and political kitsch caught on, people were making their partisan leanings manifest. In Constantinople men painted their fingernails to indicate their party of choice: green for Hypatius and blue for Justinius.

The Smithsonian has a collection of some 30,000 political buttons, collected by Harry Rubenstein and Larry Bird, the institution’s curators of political ephemera. I caught up with them as they drove along I-25 on a collecting trip to the Denver convention. Larry explains that US politics has a stronger tradition of buttons than in the UK, ‘because instead of voting for the party, you’re voting for the person’, adding that the most popular era was the 1950s. Then you got classic designs like the Ike button, just ‘I-K-E’ in red, white and blue. It was distributed to people by the carload. ‘From the very beginning of American politics though,’ Larry says, ‘people would sew metal discs to clothes and partisan newspapers gave out campaign ribbons for free, distributing them with papers. That’s what led to buttons as we know it.’

The political badge has developed with technological advances. 1860 wasn’t just the year of Lincoln’s election but also the date of the first patent for buttons using photo reproductions. (The patent, no. 29652. included an illustration of Abraham Lincoln sporting a soul patch.) In 1896 buttons became cheaper and more colorful as paper images were wrapped around a metal disc and covered with celluloid. For the Republican convention in St. Louis, a New York delegate ordered 25,000 McKinley buttons. According to an 1896 New York Times article, the buttons read ‘Count Us For McKinley’, a subtle reference to the year’s big campaign issue, whether to stick with the gold standard for currency. The badges sported McKinley’s profile, which the Times deemed ‘much too sharp to be Napoleonic.’ Nonetheless, they were, by all accounts, ‘very effective agents in bringing about a McKinley victory’ at the convention. 

Buttons sometimes have more symbolic meaning than simply the name on the badge. In 1868, despite the fact that they couldn’t vote, African-American women in the south would walk miles to get Republican buttons much to the chagrin of their white employers. (Lincoln was a Republican and had abolished slavery three years previously.) Teddy Roosevelt’s first button for the 1904 election showed him having lunch with Booker T. Washington. The button had a one word legend: ‘equality’. The New York Times wrote in 1903 that, ‘Colored men have been the first to wear the button and many are to be seen with the badge adorning their coat lapels.’

Political kitsch has included everything from chamber pots emblazoned with candidates’ names to juice tins. During the 1960s, ‘Gold Water, the right drink for conservative taste’ , endorsed Barry Goldwater, while a Lyndon B. Johnson-themed beverage read, ‘A drink for health care’ (state-funded healthcare for the elderly and poor was part of Johnson’s Great Society legislation). By 1968 the most popular button was ‘I want to be president too.’ (The Democratic candidates alone that year included Johnson, Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. Though president, Johnson dropped out of the race because of Vietnam’s unpopularity, while McCarthy and Kennedy ran a primary campaign that makes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s seem positively amiable).

My favourite campaign pin is simple, iconic and small: a tiny gold peanut. It advertises Jimmy Carter (a peanut farmer) but doesn’t include his name or platform. (Perhaps my love of it can be attributed to a personal connection: I wore the pin when campaigning for Carter when I was eight.) Larry explains, ‘With buttons, you really get the person. Voters connect individually, and people have a tangible connection to the campaign.’ For this reason Larry claims that if he had US$10,000 to spend as a campaign manager, he’d invest in buttons rather than adverts. 

Despite the myriad buttons and badges at the conventions, campaign buttons have fallen off since their heyday in the ‘50s. In fact, they started to die out in the late ‘70s – about the same time that the Carter peanut came out.  ‘That’s when campaigns started allocating their budgets for TV advertising,’ Larry explains. ‘Now I have to pay you a dollar to put your message on my chest,’ he says with disgust.

In a sea of puns, flags and stars, the peanut – like the IKE button of which Larry is so fond – is also remarkable for its simplicity. Now, despite their lurid appearances at the conventions, buttons have become anodyne. McCain’s include a green one targeting the Irish with a shamrock over the ‘I’, pictures of McCain against an American flag, a simple star (perhaps a reference to his military service), slogans like ‘Country First’ and ‘Ready from Day One’, a phrase recently associated with Hillary, women for McCain, race fans for McCain (with the checkered flag). Obama’s buttons naturally include ‘Yes We Can’, pictures of his family, even the ‘terrorist’ fist bump with Michelle, not to mention ‘Republicans for Obama’, ‘Asian-American Pacific Islanders for Obama’, ‘Latinos for Obama’, ‘Veterans for Obama’ and a gay pride Obama with a rainbow. (Nixon’s 1972 campaign made representing different ethnic groups a requirement. He had buttons for the Polish, Armenians, Irish, Estonians…). The best of either campaigns, though, is the smallest: a one-inch ‘O’ logo.

‘The Obama logo is good,’ Harry says. ‘It has the potential to be an icon like that Carter peanut. That graphic, the ‘O’ with the sun rising is refreshing, and you’d expect to see that reflected in buttons with a new look, but most materials are produced by vendors outside the campaign, so it hasn’t crossed over.’ Those looking for well-designed buttons should turn to the left-leaning magazine The Nation. Graphics legend Milton Glaser has designed their badges including the simple, iconic McBush.

Jennifer Kabat

Jennifer Kabat is a design critic based in New York.

Imaginary Soundtracks

Revisiting the Penguin Café Orchestra

Of all the descriptions of the Penguin Café Orchestra I’ve come across – ‘modern semi-acoustic chamber music’ and ‘imaginary folklore’ being two of the duller examples – my favourite has to be ‘the soundtrack to a macrobiotic dinner party in Winchester in 1979’, as coined by blogger ‘stevie t’ some years ago. Listening to this summer’s carefully remastered reissues of their first six albums – Music from the Penguin Café (1976), Penguin Café Orchestra (1981), Broadcasting from Home (1984), Signs of Life (1987), When in Rome (1989) and Union Café (1993) – I find myself thinking not of kora players in Senegal or a folk session in an Irish pub, as some of their more demonstratively cosmopolitan musical confections strove to evoke, but of certain post-1960s English archetypes.

Written for piano, violin, cello and guitar, occasionally augmented by more unusual instruments such as harmoniums or elastic bands, Penguin Café Orchestra’s music conjures images of 1970s progressive academics in denim jackets or cheesecloth skirts with lectureships at provincial polytechnics and broods of ruddy-faced precocious children – the sort David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury satirized in novels such as Changing Places and The History Man (both 1975). Their work shares the same sensibility as that odd brand of British art that includes painters such as Tom Philips or Ian Hamilton Finlay; artists strangely adrift from the canon of international Modernism who would make semi-figurative paintings about, say, the Golden Section or classical philosophy. Song titles such as ‘Pythagoras’s Trousers’ or ‘Perpetuum Mobile’ put me in mind of Brian Eno, whose Obscure Records label released the first Penguin Café album, and Peter Greenaway films – all those clever anachronisms, archly constructed plots and Michael Nyman Minimalist-lite soundtracks. Even the group’s album covers – paintings by artist Emily Young of, well, penguins engaged in various human activities – look like whimsical 1960s psychedelia rather than the sort of flatly literal Surrealism they evidently aspired to be. In some senses the Penguin Café Orchestra sound like eccentric academics – erudite and skilled, if a little aloof from real world realities – yet there is something attractively homespun about them too, a characteristic which in recent years has led to their music having a more nebulous influence on advertising and cinema.

A romantic idealism shaped the Orchestra. The group was formed by composer Simon Jeffes in 1972, after having had a particularly lucid vision whilst recovering from food poisoning. He dreamt of a nightmarish concrete apartment block inhabited by lonely individuals isolated from each other by a highly technological society. The following day, Jeffes went to the beach and had another vision, this time of ‘the Penguin Café’, where a kind of spontaneous, passionate, sociable creativity could flourish. Jeffes, whose experiences in the worlds of both popular and academic classical music had left him feeling dissatisfied, began to write the kind of music he imagined would be played in the café. ‘Ideally I suppose it’s the sort of music you want to hear, music that will lift your spirit. It’s the sort of music played by imagined wild, free, mountain people creating sounds of a subtle dreamlike quality. It is cafe music, but café in the sense of a place where people’s spirits communicate and mingle, a place where music is played that often touches the heart of the listener.’

Wild and free mountain music is possibly the last thing you would think of on hearing Jeffes’ ensemble – it is too self-aware and cultured for that. ‘Pythagoras’s Trousers’, for instance, or ‘Music For a Found Harmonium’, which opens with the gentle sounds of a wheezing harmonium and develops into something approximating a celtic folk dance, sound forced rather than instinctive. Although the pieces can occasionally seem like the result of an in-joke amongst classically trained musicians about, say, the use of major fifths in late-Baroque chamber music, at its best the music exudes humour and warmth. It is wonderfully idiosyncratic, simply following its own interests with no care about whether anyone thinks it’s ‘cool’ or not. ‘Air a Danser’, which opens Penguin Café Orchestra, was inspired by Madagascan zither music and fuses swooping string phrases with cheery, easy-going repeated guitar figures. ‘Cage Dead’, composed after the death of John Cage, is simple and languid: a short phrase repeated over and over, carried along by gentle percussion instruments which sound like soft, muted Indian tablas. Pieces such as ‘Nothing Really Blue’, ‘Oscar Tango’ and ‘Numbers 1–4’ are quiet, delicate and controlled compositions for piano and strings, thoughtful studies that never slip into the heart-on-sleeve lyricism courted in pieces such as ‘Air’ or the sweetly titled but cloying ‘Cutting Branches for a Temporary Shelter’.

Jeffes died in 1997 at the tragically early age of 48, after which the Orchestra disbanded, coming together last year for a ten-year anniversary reunion. Their music, however, has had a lasting influence – not so much on the work of musicians today, but in the broader world of film and advertising. When used by companies as diverse as Eurotunnel, The Independent, The Economist, IBM, Volvo and Hewlett Packard, and One2One/T-Mobile, and in films such as Napoleon Dynamite (2005), Penguin Café Orchestra’s music more often than not denotes a certain kind of whimsy, or kookiness. Their most famous track ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’ (made with a sample of the old busy line telephone signal, rubber band and violins) has now become the template soundtrack for any number of mobile phone, building society or car ads. These kinds of commercial usually depict a demographically balanced cross-section of ordinary people talking about their hopes and dreams, or witnessing cutesy, pseudo-‘magic realist’ phenomena, such as cars inexplicably floating in mid-air, or millions of coloured balls bouncing through the streets. These feel-good moments of collective reverie are invariably accompanied by, if not some singer-songwriter of Vashti Bunyan or Jose Gonzales’ ilk, then Penguin Café-esque music: endearingly folksy but tinged with a little electronica or pulsing, Philip Glass-esque strings, as if to suggest that the high-tech product being sold to you is somehow benign, community-spirited and designed with the greater well-being of the world in mind. 

Given Jeffes’ original vision for the ensemble, the uses that have been found for their brand of music strike me as sad. If the Penguin Café Orchestra’s work is the aural equivalent of discussing nuclear disarmament over a lentil bake and elderflower wine in late-‘70s Winchester, then it is now also an elegy to a bygone, more idealistic era.

Dan Fox

Dan Fox is associate editor of frieze. 

Modern Ruins

Hauntology suggests new approaches to exporing the buildings of the recent past

At the Hauntology Now symposium earlier this year (part of the Atmospheres 2 festival, at the Museum Of Garden History), writer Christopher Woodward showed some extraordinary slides of Detroit’s Fordist architecture. Now fallen into picturesque dilapidation, the buildings seemed to form a post-industrial counterpart to the Roman ruins that were the traditional objects of Romantic reverie. Walking in ruins places us in a strange state of temporal dislocation, in which the past is simultaneously absent and present, for which Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ (in Spectres Of Marx, 1993). In the past three or four years, the concept of hauntology has been revived in discussions about predominantly musical artefacts that seem to dwell in cultural ruins. As an alternative to postmodern exhaustion, acts like Philip Jeck, The Caretaker and Mercury Prize favourite Burial have produced dilapidated versions of past forms, interred beneath a fog of crackle.

Extending the analysis presented in his book In Ruins (2002), Woodward argued that we need to poeticize such relics of the near past. Woodward – who was oddly enthusiastic about the ‘development’ of East London taking place as part of the 2012 mega-project – overlooked the way in which these activities are already underway precisely in the areas of the East End on which the Olympic follies are being erected. Witness, for instance, the Heronbone blog, once described as ‘located between W.G. Sebald, Wiley from Roll Deep and Iain Sinclair’, but now disappeared, like many of the stretches of the Lea Valley which it evoked in fragmentary entries written in a rogue poetry infused with the rhymes and rhythms of pirate radio; the psychogeographical collages in the Savage Messiah fanzine and website, which draws a fractured map of London by following lines of social antagonism; the work of Sinclair himself, whose passionate hostility to 2012 informs his latest project, a book about Hackney; the photographer Stephen Gil