Richard Aldrich

Corvi-Mora, London, UK

Richard Aldrich’s ‘Narrative with 5 Characters’ places the grid of the theatre against the space of the gallery.  With a clear nod to Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search Of An Author (1921), Aldrich abstracts and reduces theatre’s basic elements - from character and narrative, to stage, set and verse. In the schematic he creates for his new exhibition at Corvi-Mora, sculptural objects and abstract paintings act as representational stand-ins for each of these elements.

Not very much of this is immediately transparent: the show is a puzzle to be solved, its title providing a primary key (though an artist statement offers another road map of sorts). The visitor is presented with a series of small abstract paintings and one decidedly un-abstract painting, outlining what appears to be a handful of dwarves straight out of Snow White.  A green puppet dragon, a small concrete letter ‘O’, a paper bag and another trollish figure fill out the gallery space.

The objects demand deciphering; the sculptural objects are relatively easy to identify as four of the title’s five characters, and the dwarf painting quickly asserts itself as the fifth.  Each of the ‘characters’ seems to reference an element of stagecraft - puppetry, masks, language and symbols.  The remaining abstract paintings are designated by Aldrich as the ‘conceptual architecture’ within which the play takes place: in other words, the theatre space itself.

This is all good fun, and, despite the conceptual underpinnings of the show (which, although each work has been individually titled, seems to make best sense as a single installation), there is something playful in the unexpected images that Aldrich’s premise allows. The plush puppet is a particularly good joke, and, in combination with the collection of gnomes, cuts clearly against the abstraction of the paintings.

That concrete divide, which Aldrich makes between abstraction and narrative, designates the kind of theatre he means - as, perhaps, does the world of dungeons and dragons he evokes.  It’s maybe not a world in which abstraction can obliquely lead to narrative, or where the set and the stage can act as a character.  But it is one that is evocative enough, and the discord between conceptual art and traditional theatre seems to be where Aldrich situates his installation.

Katie Kitamura

Judith Hopf

Croy Nielsen, Berlin, Germany

A convoy of black beamers pulls up to a farm and four spectators in clown make-up exit the vehicles to take up peeking positions over a wall. In a sand-covered horse school, Judith Hopf (for it is she) stands alert and expressionless, clutching the bridle of a well-groomed horse. ’Sieben minus Vier’, one of the spectators says, and the horse stamps three times. A second onlooker laughs hysterically. A third says: ’Eintausenddreiundvierzig minus eintausendachtunddriezig.’ The horse stamps a foot seven times.

This short video piece, entitled Zählen! (Count!, 2008), is presented in Croy Nielsen alongside three brightly coloured abstract woodcuts and a cheerful-looking circus whip. Produced at the same time, both are thematically, if lightly, related. The source material is the unusual story of Wilhelm Von Osten, a Berlin high school mathematics teacher, phrenologist, showman and mystic. At the beginning of the twentieth century, working from Darwinian postulates, Von Osten successfully managed to train his horse Hans in elementary arithmetic. The horse quickly became a sensation, making the front cover of The New York Times and prompting the German board of eduction to convene a 13-man board of inquiry.

The Hans Commission reported back in 1907. Analyzing the Hans’ arithmetical acumen in terms of what would henceforth be called the ‘Clever Hans effect’, the commission concluded that the horse’s true acuity lay in the realms of psychology. Rather than determining the mathematical answers directly, Hans worked, as many of us do, by decoding the correct solution from the body language of his interlocutors. As his stamping foot approached the magic number, the crowd would tighten up with tense excitement, subconsciously cuing the beast towards stopping correctly.

Hopf has sometimes been regarded as a political artist concerned with the exploration of power structures, something that comes through strongly, if unusually, in Zählen!. What is the relation between the crowd and the spectacle? How deep does the ‘Clever Hans effect’ go? In the video itself the self-possession of Hopf’s own character (not to mention the know-it-all nonchalance of the horse) establishes a sharp contrast with the clownishness of the spectators (Hopf sides with the horse). At the same time, these questions also extend beyond the video to embrace the observational context in which it is itself embedded. How do the aesthetic effects of a white-cube environment cue the reception of the art it contains?

This is an old question, granted, but Hopf poses it idiosyncratically, from a quieter and more curious angle. Equally, independent of Zählen!’s narrative and theoretical qualities, there also remain its mathematical qualities. Due to the crisp starkness of the montage, it is hard to watch the film without continually counting. Four spectators. Three BMWs. Two sums. One horse. 

Daniel Miller

Carrie Schneider

Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, USA

In Finland, where there are few hours of daylight in which to make photographs, it’s no wonder that sunset and dusk are the constant backdrop for Carrie Schneider’s self-portrait project, which recently took her to the Nordic country for ten months. Diffused and fading light ushers in the romance of the landscape tradition - fantastic, quixotic - and sets the stage for an ensuing romance, for these are also portraits of the artist in various states of closeness with herself and others.

Schneider engages the landscape, from ice-cold lakes to damp earth, through immersion. She crafts a regal headdress from juniper bushes, and another from lichen and bark; she gets dirt on her face from repeated falls on a rocky seashore; she wades, clad in a costume, in an inlet under orange skies. In earlier work Schneider was seen embracing clumps of earth on the beach and in the woods, and the stint in Finland seems to have given her confidence to ‘get weird’, as she puts it.

WE (Baltic Version) (2007) is a vision or a sighting of some rare creature. The artist is wrapped in skin-tight, black-and-white graphic fabric that covers her face as she emerges from the water, fingertips just scraping the still surface, in a hauntingly silent way that only people without faces can express. Schneider found inspiration in native bird plumage—a natural camouflage in winter but jarring in spring - and dressed herself in a similar pattern. The artist channels the majesty of her surrounds and momentarily plays its role with costumes. She exudes power; she feeds off it from the land. This is apparent in her forward-facing poses, displaying what she knows to the camera.

It might be going too far to say that the artist is spiritualized by the land, but certainly magical things do occur. In the video Dress of Good Weather> (2008), the artist’s white skirt momentarily catches an image of orange clouds projected from the sky, and she is perplexed. Following that, Schneider is seen frame after frame falling upon the ground as if compelled by some force above or below. The gift of the stratosphere is immediately revoked and she is doomed to the earth. The short sequence contains some trappings of a mythological narrative: a mortal punished for stealing beauty.

In another video, Utö (2008), filmed on the eponymous island, more mystical moments occur when the artist stands at the spraying seashore and her body splinters off. Her second self dashes away quickly, later to be rejoined as fingers that softly meet her hand. This action thematically ties together a mood running through Schneider’s work—of simultaneous separation and reconciliation, or the kernel of loss that kindles within love. The Kiss (2008) borrows Magritte’s famous subject of a couple’s kiss separated by shrouded heads; can we ever fully know the interior of our lover’s thoughts?

It’s a well-worn adage that you cannot escape yourself simply by fleeing to a foreign locale, but Schneider gets pretty close to transforming her identity via Finlandic culture. Much of Schneider’s past work considered how familial relationships temper identity; here, landscape and culture provide similar nurturing contexts. In the vein of photographer Francesca Woodman, Schneider blends body and surrounds. She is seen hiding, yet peeking through her costume; camouflaged, but sticking out; at home in a new land, and also lost on a desert island.

Jason Foumberg

From One Revolution to Another

Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France

Curated by Jeremy Deller, the Palais de Tokyo’s ‘From One Revolution to Another’ is a multi-faceted and joyful ode to creativity and spontaneity. Invited to curate a show within the institution’s ‘Carte Blanche’ exhibition series, which began last year with Ugo Rondinone, Deller has brought his ongoing investigation into democracy, self-representation and pop phenomena to Paris. Organized in groups of archives, the exhibition display sits between a museum of contemporary social culture and an autonomous presentation of objects and attitudes that are intentionally not classified as ‘art’.

The main hall is entirely occupied by the notable ‘Folk Archive’ project (1999-2005), a collection of objects and ephemera that documents an incredible range of reactions to official celebrations of British culture at the turn of the millennium. Hanging from the ceiling of the large exhibition space are dozens of banners, produced for political demonstrations over the last 20 years by Ed Hall, which stand like a parade of rage, craftsmanship and derision. At turns naïve and obscene, this cacophony of inventiveness and reactionary spirit is a test-bed for how vital and contradictory common feelings towards the globalization and the politics of identity are today.

The remaining rooms host other multi-media displays that can be seen as autonomous exhibitions, though they all form a coherent statement about the birth of specific cultural phenomena: the beginning of rock in France; early Soviet experiments in sound and music; the proletarian background of British popular music (with a particular eye on glam rock); and the use of art techniques in therapeutic approaches. Every section – developed in collaboration with a number of artists, writers and theoreticians including Scott King, Matthew Higgs, Alan Kane, Marc Touché, Matt Price and Andrei Smirnov – can be read as different chapters of a larger book about creativity as a matter of urgency. At least, a book about love.

If the ‘90s were all about post-colonial perspectives, this seems to be the consecration of a post-cultural studies approach: the end of a hierarchical and cynical appropriation of aspects of low culture as a dandyish, false critical attitude. ‘From One Revolution to Another’ does not even ‘appropriate’ things because it doesn’t rely on a tradition of exploitation but, on the contrary, threatens popular phenomena in their original meaning and dignity. And it doesn’t ask the viewer for any elated and oblivious form of participation.

Alessandro Rabottini

Thomas Scheibitz

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Berlin, Germany

Thomas Scheibitz was a savvy inaugural choice for Sprüth Magers’ new space in Berlin. Scheibitz is a very popular artist right now: having represented Germany in the 2005 Venice Biennale, he has amassed an enviable list of major solo international exhibitions and – as a multitude of flattering reviews attest – even more fans. Scheibitz could be said to be something of a painter’s sculptor, or a sculptor’s painter. His colourful, quasi-abstract, neo-Pop works riff on the relationship between art’s two traditional genres. However, this show, playfully entitled ‘The Goldilocks Zone’ – apparently in astronomical terms a region of space where conditions are favourable for life (not too hot, and not too cold, just like the blonde-locked lady liked her porridge) – limits itself to an exploration in sculptural form. And the gallery’s vast, shiny space, formerly both a ballroom and a university lecture hall, plays home to 25 of Scheibitz’s multi-media works.

The first room, the smaller of the two, is occupied by the show’s title piece, Goldilocks Zone (2008), a steel globe painted with orange, grey and white oils, and, next to that, 69.512 (2008), a light installation made from MDF that looks a little like a deconstructed Union Jack. But dominating the room is Masterplan Table (2008), a brilliant work – a sort of counter to the artist’s vitrine, more a chemist’s bench – that acts as a kind of meta-thesis on Scheibitz’s practice. An arrangement of curious and vernacular objects are made into abstract forms; architectural wooden frames and tiles sit next to speakers and hard-drives, transformed with shiny modulated ceramic surfaces. Scheibitz’s sculptures are just as charismatic and confusing as his paintings. Based upon the artist’s index of forms, accrued from the everyday, mass media and art history, objects become part of a structuralist play on meaning, and sculptural form exists as the point of articulation between hermeneutics and appearances.

The next space is much more riotous. Twenty-two brightly coloured sculptures, of various scales and constructed from MDF, resin, Plexiglas, wood, fabric and steel, form a sort of three-dimensional canvas. The works seemingly reference the post-painterly abstraction of Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland, the Pop and deconstructed forms of Richard Smith, with a kind of dishevelled nu-rave aesthetic. These lively, generic forms appear clean and mass-produced, strangely close to the anonymous and collective aesthetics of public sculpture, logos, font design, graphics manuals – the debris of consumerist symbolism. But in most cases, as soon as you get closer you see that the seemingly homogenous surfaces are stained in lacquer and uneven painterly washes that defy the expected perfection of abstraction, and instead gesture to something far more interesting. Scheibitz grew up in communist East Germany and apparently his father is a monumental mason. I can’t help thinking this is important to his work. Scheibitz’s sculptures are like contemporary culture’s semantic gravestones; art for a post-utopian world. 

Sarah James

James White

Max Wigram Gallery, London, UK

Framed by shell-shock markets and shock-value artists, James White’s new show at Max Wigram - his third at the gallery - offers a staid anomaly: a scrupulously constructed picture of the unremarkable. Nothing particularly innovative or surprising jumps out here.  White’s brand of photorealism is meticulous though hardly groundbreaking, when placed against such recent reappraisals as last year’s ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ at the Hayward Gallery. White’s focus on banal subjects treads a well-worn path, as does his emphasis on formalist concerns. Yet in its very blasé character, White’s paintings manage to strike a chord.

The exhibition comprises two new series: ‘The Rough with the Smooth’ (2008) and ‘Relationships’ (2006-8). In both, White chooses unheroic objects for subject matter - sinks, aeroplane trays, chocolate bars - which he paints onto plywood sheets and places in Perspex vitrines.  Presented in this way, the images’ identity becomes increasingly slippery.  The glossy Perspex emulates photography’s smooth yet intangible picture plane, while the monochrome palette accentuates the sculptural side of White’s resolutely domestic subjects. Glimpses of brushwork emerge upon closer examination, only heightening this confusion over medium. Suddenly, hooked by formalist concerns, we find ourselves fascinated by the daily sights that usually fail to snag the eye.

In Broken (2008), a shattered wine glass has a statuesque beauty, offset by its lack of psychological or emotional significance.  Likewise, in Dad’s Deck (2008), the reflective cover of a record player generates flat expanses and volumes that contain a purely formal appeal.  If it is said that photographs have no ‘surface’, here, as the series’ titles suggest, images are all about surfaces, textures and formal relationships.

In Twix (2008), a stained white table with its cheap chocolate and radio has a clichéd air.  We have seen this average scene too many times for it to produce even a spark of interest.  Yet in this lies a certain appeal: as a record of our society’s profoundly blasé attitude - towards art as much as the objects we encounter on a daily basis - White’s image achieves an eerie poignancy.

The smaller upstairs space contains three works from the ‘Relationships’ series, which White based upon snapshots taken during a solitary flight from Berlin to London.  Again the emphasis is on the casually expended, such as carefully rendered coffee cups and wrappers on an aeroplane tray. These images are less successful than those downstairs.  The deep shadows and staged compositions again attempt to add a psychological element, which feels forced and self-conscious.  In Relationships I (2008), for instance, White depicts a used creamer container resting on the corner of an otherwise empty tray.  The solitary container presents itself as a forlorn object, yet the result simply feels contrived.  If only White had stuck to his shiny Twix bars, blissfully devoid of emotions.

Katherine Holmgren

Joe Bradley

CANADA, New York, USA

This will be a very un-politically correct piece of art criticism. The faint of heart are encouraged to stop reading now. That said, I was recently impressed to hear a New York artist criticize, with distinctly un-PC disdain, a fellow artist for producing work that was ‘not retarded enough’. ‘Retardation’ being the acme of advanced art and any un-self-conscious betrayals of earnest intelligence an act of philistinism, it is as if, over the course of the past five years, a kind of compulsory Dada has integrated itself into the fabric of a good deal of New York art-making. The higher the ‘durr’-factor, the better, apparently, the art. And with this exhibition at CANADA, entitled ‘Schmagoo Paintings’, Joe Bradley has thrown down the ‘durr’ gauntlet. Because it doesn’t get much more retarded than this.

Departing from the slightly less ‘durr’ primary-colour minimalist figures he showed at the Whitney Biennial this year, Bradley has produced an exhibition of seven mid-size ‘paintings’ on unprimed canvases (all works 2008). Six of the seven works bluntly feature stick figures, grease-pencil drawings which can be read as: a human figure, a fish in an open mouth, a cross, a Superman symbol, the number 23, and a line towards the bottom of a canvas (a deadpan mouth?) - while the seventh, titled Untitled (Schmutz Painting), bears nothing but the dirt from the floor upon which it was stretched. There is, incidentally, a lot of schmutz, for the same reason, on the other works as well.

One thing that can said about Bradley’s work is that it responds to the art-fair attention-span of our time. It can (and should) be consumed in no less than the time it takes to walk in, chortle, and walk out of the gallery. When Martin Barré (a very generous reference) did just as little with white canvases and black spray paint in the early 1960s, it was radical and even beautiful. But here and now with Bradley it is just plain dumb, though that is the point. Whether I, or anyone, likes it or dislikes it is actually beside the point. Which is also very much the point. This kind of work wields the uncanny ability to render all who enter its orbit complicit. It’s a kind of 2008 Lower East Side counterpart to Jeff Koons - though rendered much more poorly. Squarely operating within a paradigm of post-sincerity - it is neither sincere or insincere, having transcended such issues - its mere existence acts as a cerebral black hole, engendering critical paralysis. Any possible reaction you may have to it has been foreseen and theoretically integrated into the work, such that reacting is vain. Whether you like it or not, you’re a fool. And if you profess indifference to it you’re likewise a fool, because such painterly antics require a stand that no one can make. It’s like a work of high modernist fiction - Borges, or Cortazar perhaps - in which you realize that you are part of the plot, but by the time you do - standing in front of the painting or reading this review - it’s too late.

Chris Sharp

Roy Voss

Matt's Gallery, London, UK

Walk from behind the heavy, painted backdrop into the exhibition space at Matt’s Gallery and Roy Voss’s installation appears sparse. Such immediate emptiness can feel alarmingly oppressive.

Initially attention is drawn to the two floor-to-ceiling black and white photocopies of mountain ranges that seem to stretch out endlessly in front of you. At the bottom of these photographs you can make out roughly-made support structures that hold up large white letters. Both of these signs spell out ‘Come’ – a simple entreatment of the tourist board for you the viewer to visit this epic beauty. Only when you turn the corner of this thin, crudely finished wall do you see its pendant, with ‘There’ spelt out in the same direct manner. ‘Come There’, it reads on this new completion. Grammatical folly of a poorly thought-out tourism campaign or a linguistic microcosm of the unsolvable divide between reality and fiction? There is, of course, a place you will never be, in that as once you arrive it becomes here – it is a never attainable eventuality.

The great outdoors and the country living ideals that are peddled by tourist boards are rare – if not totally unrealistic – examples of living closer to nature. Voss gestures toward either a bygone era or a more saccharine version of a place barely in existence outside of our nostalgic imaginings. The addition of text returns the image to the lexicon of advertising, the view becoming less about the documentation of natural beauty and more about offering a product for consumption. The mountains are so nondescript that they could stand for the Scottish highlands as easily as they could for the Colorado Rockies.

These prospects are all staged within subtly delineated spaces that use the language of set-design to create vast spaces from minimal structures. Within this a simple code of situation unfolds: cables on the ground suggest sea; tall wooden platforms become land; objects that stand on these platforms are creatures or man-made constructions. The scene is laid out as one might imagine a future natural history museum might render disappeared surroundings, with evidence gleaned from the historical dregs found in photographs, back gardens, attics and the fading memories of those old enough to piece together its decaying story. It is fragmented and incomplete, without veneer or polish, and punctuated by the paraphernalia of sentimental living – where objects are kept long after luster fades. Ceramic figurines, as well as carvings of animals, lighthouses and wooden boats, have been crudely attached to light fittings. The light bulbs that engulf the ornaments and make them functional beacons of bright and unforgiving light underpin in my mind Voss’s evident kinship with the craft of isolation – the kind of satisfying hotchpotch that occurs when ideas are in abundance and the wanton use of pristine materials is not. Voss’s exhibition sets a timely question as to where a real symbiotic relationship with nature can sit within our need to market and take all kinds of experience as a packaged and consumable product.

Ilsa Colsell

Nought to Sixty

ICA, London, UK

I’m sorry I missed the first instalment of the ICA’s ambitious new rolling project. Programmed over six months from May to November this year, ‘Nought to Sixty’ promises to provide space for 60 emerging artists based in the UK and Ireland in the form of week-long exhibitions, performances, talks, interventions, off-site projects and film screenings. A monthly magazine gathers information on exhibiting artists, essays and a ‘gazetteer’ – a section profiling ‘activities and resources within the emerging art scenes of Britain and Ireland’ such as artist-run spaces or peripatetic curatorial organisations. The project’s watchword is definitely ‘platform’ rather than ‘survey’ – that is, coming from below, rather than above. The magazine’s first page states emphatically that, ‘the season is not intended to announce any new generation or style, but to build up a multi-faceted portrait of the emerging art scene […] and to provide a space for exchange’, acknowledging the institution’s ‘founding role as a club for artists and a laboratory for experimentation’.

Admirable sentiments indeed, but also a handy caveat for what could amount to a thoroughly mixed bag of practitioners. That said, I was largely impressed when I visited last night. The standout piece was Seamus Harahan’s Valley of Jehosephat/Version – In Your Mind (2007), a two-screen video installation featuring hand-held footage of the Bloody Sunday commemorative march in Derry, Northern Ireland. Depending on at what point you entered, the solemn, surreal and frequently sublimely beautiful images of crowds moving through foggy streets were either accompanied by Bryan Ferry’s ‘In Your Mind’ (1977) or, when the projection flipped to the opposite wall, Max Romeo’s 1978 reggae track ‘Valley of Jehosephat/Version’. The effect was a vividly familiar one: the awareness that while the unfolding events are somehow significant, momentous even, one cannot help one’s attention drifting to the edges of the action (in this case the attendant television crews and other spectators) or providing one’s own internal and incongruous soundtrack. This is dense and intriguing territory, but few artists manage to make such convincing inroads into it with such lightness of means.

Alastair MacKinven, who showed paintings and sculpture in the neighbouring room, also sought to unbalance the viewer. His wonky, expressionist renderings of M.C. Escher’s famously wonky (but immaculately rendered) infinite staircase are accompanied by oddly elegant handrails attached to the wall nearby. The idea that viewers might need to steady themselves because of the sensorial power of a painting is itself hilarious, but it is doubly funny when the paintings in question are themselves quite so off-kilter. 

A performative video work by Aileen Campbell was less enjoyable principally because it was the viewer who was expected to do the performing. Onscreen text commanded the reluctant audience to make vocal noises according to the size and colour of circles moving about the screen. The exercise seemed less moronic when we were shepherded into a neighbouring room, swapping places with the other half of the audience. There, a film featuring shots of musicians and a ship moving along a river was accompanied by sounds similar to those we had just been coerced into making next door. It might have been our own voices, or it might have been a live link to the other half of the audience. Either way, the work threw more light on the awkward social dynamic of an art audience forced into participation than it did on the overlooked (or ‘over-listened’?) formal qualities of the human voice.

It was pleasing however to see three artists’ work that fitted together so well – not so much in terms of style, but in the way it responded to the formal restraints of the galleries, the show and the ambitions of the wider project. In other parts of the ICA building, Matthew Darbyshire had appropriated lighting designs from locations as diverse as the windows of Selfridges department store and the lobby of Hackney Community College, creating deliberately bland colour-field installations from unwittingly bland corporate branding. Part of his installation, in the gallery’s front windows, will remain in place over the next six months, changing colour as the show progresses. I’m looking forward to seeing what new work will join it. 

Jonathan Griffin

Be Takerng Pattanopas

Catherine Schubert Fine Art, Bangkok, Thailand

Be Takerng Pattanopas’s first solo exhibition in his native city seems like an anomaly when placed alongside the work of his contemporaries. The artist’s large, weighty and labour-intensive sculptures stand apart from the quirky, pop cultural and usually time-based works so favoured by local galleries and the art press. Yuree Kensaku’s appropriation of household objects in terms of manga-inspired surrealism is a case in point, or Navin Rawanchaikul’s embracing of Bollywood vulgarity with his billboard-sized paintings. while Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook recently filmed Thai farmers discussing examples of 19th-century French painting (’Why is she naked?’, one asks of a Manet). Pattanopas’s concerns – questions of revelation and truth, of physical impermanence and contingency versus the universal – consciously move towards the profound end of the spectrum, pervading his monolithic encasements of (what appears to be) human flesh and tissue. The works demand careful deliberation to the extent that deliberation becomes the point.

A series of photographs of earlier installations signal the artist’s interest in aspects of Buddhist iconography and thought. Relief sculptures of kouroi-like figures are lit to suggest a ghostly presence due to shifting perceptions of mass and space. These works have a devotional quality and refer to statues of Buddha in Thai temples, where gilded bronze is lit to appear weightless in order to address matters of impermanence and transcendence. Pattanopas’s current concern with the interior of the human body is a radical shift but he retains an interest in the illusion of corporeality and aims for contemplative rather than sensational effects. Three wall-mounted cases of rusted steel (naut-i, 2008) have apertures through which one can glimpse seemingly endless tunnels of fleshy ‘stuff’. But while the red-and-yellow naut-i 1 and naut-i 3 might suggest the journey of an endoscope, nauti-2 is a cool blue-and-white interior landscape. These works refer to the idea of journeying outwards (to metaphorically journey inwards), the punning of ‘not I’, as well as the Pali term ‘anatta’, meaning selflessness. Sustained engagement with the works’ interiors reveals Pattanopas’s manipulation of silicone and painted wire mesh, but the infinite tunnels’ enigmatic association nevertheless remain compelling.

In a demanding essay that accompanies the exhibition, also titled ‘Interior Horizons’, Lawrence Chua writes that Pattanopas’s sculptures ‘remind us of the uncanny spaces that we inhabit in the global capitalist economy’. There is certainly a suggestion of how the human body may both register and resist objectification in the works; at their most powerful, however, they also resist contexts that would otherwise fix interpretation.

Brian Curtin

Primavera

MCA, Sydney, Australia

In the foyer of the MCA in Sydney sits a glistening pink puddle. Like a giant pile of viscera or a very unlucky icecream, it slowly loses form on the gallery floor. It’s all that remains of Marcus Canning’s Pink Wienie (2008), an inflatable version of Sleeping Beauty’s castle injection-moulded from hot pink silicon. ‘Wienie’ is a term invented by Walt Disney to describe the visual magnet that draws visitors in to the heart of a theme-park. The word on the street is that Canning’s wienie was structurally unsound and collapsed before the opening of the show. It took some convincing to persuade me that the rupture was accidental, as it seemed rather the point. Art galleries are very much theme-parks for the middle classes, and so there’s no better place to set a moral parable about a society that has amused itself to death.

Hannah Matthews, curator of this years ‘Primavera’, assured me that she had nothing so tendentious in mind. This year’s ‘Primavera’ is unthemed, although the central tenet of the show, presenting work by Australian artists under the age of 35, remains unchanged. That’s probably theme enough: in the past two decades, ‘Primavera’ has been at least partly responsible for launching the careers of internationally successful artists such Shaun Gladwell and Mikala Dwyer, and, as a consequence, attracts a kind of judicious sporting appraisal on the part of the Sydney art punters, who enjoy it the way Bertolt Brecht enjoyed a boxing match, laying muttered bets on who’s going to make and who’s going to break.

This year’s front-runners are ambitious Sydney duos Soda_Jerk (Dom and Dan Angelino) and Ms & Mr (Stephanie and Richard Nova Milne). Both couples enjoy a homeground advantage and they use it well. Soda_Jerk are remix artists, who splice together footage in order to make the films they’d actually like to see. This year, it’s Astro Black: A History of Hip-hop (2007), in which they rework Sun Ra’s 1974 sci-fi Space is the Place, culminating with a sequence in which Flavor Flav returns to earth on the giant UFO from Independence Day (1996). Equally invested in the uncanny, Ms & Mr make works celebrating their happy marriage. That would be nauseatingly saccharine if it wasn’t for the intentionally creepy way in which they do it, retrospectively adding their adult selves to Super-8 family videos and childhood drawings. By interpolating themselves into each other’s histories, they turn ‘I’ll always be there’ into ‘I was always already there’, which is a hair-raising proposition when you stop to think about it.

Mark Hilton is a respected member of the Melbourne arts scene, well known for his work with local artist-run initiatives. His beautifully produced light-boxes present various bloody gangland events in the style of an ethnographic artifact, a parody of the ideologically driven cliché that cultural diversity brings cultural riches. The light-box Champion (2006) is painted in the style of a Persian court painting, in which time and space are conflated to provide a God’s eye view. Except in this case, the historical events depicted are a particularly loathsome and notorious gang rape committed in Sydney eight years ago. The biggest surprise here is that the city press, normally beside itself with joy at any opportunity to be outraged by contemporary art, seems to have noticed nothing amiss. As Hilton says, ‘my work rewards closer inspection.’

Danielle Freakley’s project, The Quote Generator (2008), includes footage of dozens of conversations in which she attempts to navigate through everyday interactions speaking only in fragments taken from movies and books. It’s cringe-inducingly awkward, and there seems to be a fair amount of evidence in her film footage that people find this sort of thing extremely annoying in real life, but, watching her persist, one can’t help but feel there is something heroic in her stubborn commitment to her quest. Somehow Freakley oscillates between being a victim of her own artifice, and, because she’s chosen her own mode of torture, somehow compellingly free.

Also to be seen are works by Tarryn Gill and Pilar Mata Dupont, Ariel Hassan, Paul Knight, Moya McKenna and Gemma Smith.

Adam Jasper

Elmgreen & Dragset

Victoria Miro Gallery, London, UK

The party’s long over at Victoria Miro, but the remnants of revelry remain — cigarette butts and empty beer bottles strewn about, debris swept into a corner and drinks abandoned on top of a speaker. A lone jacket hangs in the coat room amid hundreds of empty hangers; a single balloon lies wilted on the dance floor, illuminated by a blinking spotlight. The installation is by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the artists who installed a Prada boutique in the middle of the Texas desert and who transplanted the waiting rooms and sterile corridors of the welfare state to the Serpentine Gallery. This time, they’ve transformed Victoria Miro into a club called ‘The Mirror’, evoking the loneliness of the end of a party and the alienation of another failed attempt at social connection.

The Romantics viewed ancient ruins with melancholy; these clubland vestiges, while not very Romantic, still impart a sense of futility and sadness. This sadness isn’t just about being alone after everyone’s left, it’s also about the loneliness of being surrounded by others and still failing to establish real connections. The show speaks to the frustration of conversations yelped over thudding basslines, voices straining to surmount decibellic hurdles. It speaks to the disappointment of hollow exchanges repeated again and again to no avail (a choreography brilliantly visualized by Maya Deren in her 1946 film Ritual in Transfigured Time). It suggests that all tomorrow’s parties have an inevitable ending: ‘When midnight comes around / She’ll turn once more to Sunday’s clown / And cry behind the door.’

It’s the fodder of a Smiths song. Likewise, the show feels a bit gloomy, but also resonant and clever. For example, a mirror on the gallery’s ceiling reveals an inaccessible second level with a VIP area and spinning turntables, titled ‘All Those Parties I was Never Invited to…’ But the artists’ cleverness sometimes subverts the power of the project, breaking the illusion of the transformed gallery space. The Mirror’s lavatory is one example: in addition to its unrealistic layout and fake graffiti (’Fashion fags go home!’), the feet of two mannequins are visible in one stall. The inclusion is cute, maybe, but also silly and distracting.

Mostly, the club’s familiar, illusory space feels melancholic and meaningful. Then you happen upon a mannequin in a tracksuit and trainers. You can’t help but wonder if the project is really profound, or merely a mockery of toilet-stall liaisons and booze-soaked partygoers weepy and alone at the end of the night.

Yet it’s hard not be a little skeptical of the exhibition, given that it comes from the fashionable Berlin-based duo Elmgreen and Dragset and the Victoria Miro Gallery, which hosts its own parties and private openings for the glamorous and deep-pocketed. In this sense, is the gallery so different from The Mirror? Are the black walls and a disco ball even necessary?

Natasha Degen

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

Arndt & Partner, Berlin, Germany

A sheet of paper lies on the floor, having slipped from the stand it was mounted on. Bearing the legend ‘The Strong Breath’, the sheet instructs visitors to climb one of the ladders placed by a large white wooden cube. You wait for another gallery visitor to climb the other ladder, before engaging in a blowing contest, each contestant aiming to propel a small sailboat floating in a circular pond on the top of the cube to the other person’s perimeter.

Except that there is no sailboat – either at some point it has sunk, or else there never was one in the first place. It is hard to tell with Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, a pair who often deploy absurdist strategies in the course of their general enquiry into the problem of utopia. Was utopia once a concrete possibility, or was the idea always a signposted fiction? I ask the gallery attendant: he confirms that a sailboat once existed.

The Kabakovs are having a busy autumn. In Moscow, the artists currently enjoy a city-wide retrospective, centred on the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum and embracing Daria Zhukova’s new contemporary art space, The Garage. In Berlin, Arndt & Partner have responded by running a smaller selection of the artists’ work parallel to the Russian show.

Taking up four rooms on the first floor of their Mitte gallery, the exhibition includes, in addition to the installation (The White Cube, 2005), six supporting pencil and ink drawings and three intricately patterned carpets from 2005 and 2006, respectively entitled The Flying, The Flying #3 and The Flying #4.

The carpets are good. Embroidering images of flight and levitation (#2 depicts a family drawing room suspended over a city; The Flying depicts boys and girls clutching the wing of a soaring plane and #4 shows a flying man, likely Kabakov himself, dressed in a business suit) the pieces are basically well-crafted fantasy scenes that extend Kabakovian motifs that first began to appear in his work in the early 1970s. But these motifs are particularly well-suited to this new choice of medium, which allows them to stage both an illustrative retreat into the romance of fantasy, and a modern refashioning of an everyday object habitually unused to such imagery. Equally, in their status as floor-based objects, patterned after the sky, yet hung on a gallery wall, the rugs stage a thought-provoking dialectic of surfaces. Are the images they depict intended as grounds to be walked on, or pictures on walls to be gazed at?

The exhibition’s centrepiece is a 2005 model sculpture named The Eternal Emigrant which the Kabakovs one day hope to place near the Reichstag building as a permanent public art project. Depicting a man splayed in two over a cut-away section of the Berlin Wall, his torso hanging down one side, his legs dangling limp down the other, there is something both anguished and comic about it, like a man struggling vainly, yet heroically, with an umbrella in a hurricane. Although the proposal appears as eccentric at first, on deeper reflection it seems an appropriate metaphor for the course of human history.

Daniel Miller

Katinka Bock

La Synagogue de Delme, Delme, France

Locked in a windowless cell by his fellow Carmelite brothers for disobedience, 16th-century monk San Juan de la Cruz composed spiritual canticles like ‘Song between the Soul and the Beloved’ celebrating the soul’s enchantment with the absolute: ‘the silent music, the sonorous solitude, the supper that recreates and enamours’. In the border region of Alsace-Lorraine, artist Katinka Bock stages a cabalistic banquet at Delme’s deconsecrated synagogue where objects gather in a similar ‘sonorous solitude’.  Ja (2008), an installation of white PVC tubes and metal support rods, runs across the main sanctuary from a groundwater well, once the source of a women’s ritual bath. The occasional drip-drop of water from the pipes seems an ironic attempt to synchronize the inaudible internal chants of Bock’s quiescent congregation with the arrhythmic time of its inconstant beat.

Entitled ‘Kanon’, German for a musical passage sung or played by various performers at fixed intervals of pitch and time, Bock’s exhibition is a canticle in its own right, whose barely perceptible vibrations gently urge the invisible into the sphere of the material.  In Aussicht zu zweit (Two Views, 2008), a small mirror in the synagogue’s upper balconies hangs in a corner away from the viewer to face a Moresque window. However, in seeking out the comforting image of its own reflection, the mirror draws the exposed outside into the sheltered sanctum. In Blue Corner (2008), a block of wood is dressed in a leather cover that slides down on one side to reveal a cut corner. The block recalls the RGB colour cube while the absent volume corresponds to the first synthetic colour, Prussian Blue; if combined, the hues remaining after Prussian Blue’s subtraction result in the same fleshy colour as the cube’s enveloping suede skin.  Interior unfolds to exterior, colour becomes form and the phenomenological lived body transcends to the sublime.

In Kompass (2008) sheets of cardboard nailed to the wall at their centres are left to tilt at their own will.  The minimal drawings are like homemade devices that serve to orient a psychological space in which two places can be perceived and navigated simultaneously:  the present is but a fold in time that unites the past and the present.  In Je te tiens (I’ve Got You, 2008), an old chair tempts the viewer to sit down and disrupt the fragile equilibrium achieved by panes of glass propped against the seat back and separated from each other by bent sewing needles.  In Strange Fruits (2008), forms sculpted in wet clay and dropped from a scaffolding in Bock’s studio have the voluptuous curves of Hans Arp’s biomorphic marble sculptures - rounded bodies caught in what Arp called ‘concretion’, the process of taking shape.

At the exhibition’s opening, locals played Eric Satie’s rarely performed Vexations (1893), on their home pianos at staggered intervals. ‘To play this motif 840 times in succession,’ wrote Satie at the top of the single-page score, ‘it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.’ In ‘Kanon’, Bock’s works gather, transfixed, performing the motionless dance of inertia to silent music: their slight bodies push and pull against each other, endeavouring to find that tense stillness of being where the absolute resides. 

Emily Verla Bovino

Blake Rayne

Sutton Lane - Paris, Paris, France

There are four paintings on display at Blake Rayne’s new Sutton Lane exhibition: three on the left wall, one on the right. At first glance these appear to be rather similar - blandly decorative, even. Each is made from three panels of canvas and each panel has been pleated and spray-painted, forming geometric bands that have been sewn together to make the painting. The upper and lower panels are not completely primed along their horizontal edges, so each painting is bracketed by a small stretch of raw canvas. The works are also framed, however, and one notices that not all of the frames are the same: the three paintings on the left wall are framed in white while that on the right is in red. One notices, too, that this highlighted painting is hung much higher than the others. This has the effect not only of again singling it out but also of activating the space between the walls, so that one’s attention moves within each painting as well as between them, looking around the gallery to where — if one hadn’t already noticed — shipping crates are displayed. These block much of the room and mask, or mark, the fourth corner of the gallery.

Rayne’s art is an art of correspondences. The four crates correspond to the four paintings; the marked fourth corner of the four-cornered room corresponds to the single red-framed work; the textile pattern of the paintings corresponds to and reiterates, as if by magnification, the ready-made weave of the canvas. Rayne’s work is also about selection, with painting understood not as an object but rather as a set of (transparent) choices. The artist makes visible the process behind the creation, transport and display of these paintings, beginning with his choice of canvas, continuing with his choice of pleats and folds, then his selection of one band, among many, as they are laid out on his studio floor, and finally his selection of one painting to set apart, on high and in red. Nothing is trumpeted, though; nothing is really ever announced. Despite the artist’s ambition, there is no conceptual blustering, nor any unpleasant display of technical savvy. This is because Rayne’s art is, also, crucially, one of attention and quiet concentration. His palette, with its nuanced tonal range and analytic-cubist twinkling of greys and pale, silvered browns, is indicative. Or look again at the painted textile patterns, which are almost perfectly uninteresting and yet also almost sumptuous, and watch them flicker, almost imperceptibly, between the two. Rayne’s elegance is measured by his closeness to banality. There is another way to say this: the controlled correspondences that Rayne orchestrates are, in Duchamp’s coinage, infra-mince. That is, they are significant precisely because they verge on the almost completely insubstantial. 

David Lewis

Chim ↑ Pom

Mujin-to Production, Tokyo, Japan

If art is going to include an element of shock, then it can’t be the type that just wears off with repeated viewings. The provocative must also be evocative – enough to spark fire-cracker explosions of thoughts and insights, where the inconceivable suddenly becomes incontrovertible. Insights like: man’s best friend is not the dog, but the rat! The Third World is living off the trash of the First! The weapons of former despots should be drafted into a war against financial inequality!

Or: this ‘bunch of pricks’ might just save Japanese contemporary art!

OK, I take that last one back. A literal translation of ‘Chim ↑ Pom’, the name of a six-person artist group whose third ‘solo’ exhibition in Tokyo in as many months is now at Mujin-to Production, probably wouldn’t be as coarse as that. Penis, perhaps, or something more cute, maybe - like pecker or willy. The point is that in a local art scene long verging on the ‘yawn’ side of staid, even that’s enough to make these guys sound immediately fresh.

Chim ↑ Pom formed in 2005 – a collection of wandering art graduate asteroids pulled into orbit around slacker art star, Makoto Aida. ‘Basically we met each other during drinking sessions with Aida’, member Yasutaka Hayashi explained to me a few months ago. Ellie, the group’s only woman (or gyaru – gal – as she says in the lingo of her peroxide-and-dark-makeup generation), had modeled for Aida’s paintings. The group’s leader, though, is Ryuta Ushiro. It was he who explained the concept behind their controversial exhibition two months ago at Hiromi Yoshii gallery. ‘The only thing rats, crows and humans have in common is garbage,’ he announced, as if that totally explained why we were peering through a one-way mirror into a small concrete room in which a rat, a crow and a human (Toshinori Mizuno, one of the group’s members), were about to spend two weeks living off trash.

After two weeks, of course, the crow had died, but the others had pulled through, apparently having formed some kind of Free Trade Agreement between ground-hugging scavengers. Accompanying that performance/installation, Becoming friend, eating each other or falling down together (2008), there was a video documenting how the crow had been ‘rescued’ in a midnight raid on one of the traps installed in the metropolis by the famously anti-crow Tokyo Governor, Shintaro Ishihara. ‘We took your crows!’ the artists can be seen scrawling on a sign outside, adding the tag ‘C ↑ Shepherd’ and jokingly aligning themselves with Japan’s environmentalist tormentor, Paul Watson.

In the current exhibition, Chim ↑ Pom are showing work that they made during a recent trip to Bali alongside other new work. The Bali piece, Saya mau perigi ke TPA (Take me to the garbage disposal plant, 2008), includes a video showing Ellie in the guise of a cashed-up bimbo chick tourist cavorting in a helicopter above a giant garbage tip. As she dumps junk from about 200 meters up, a local community of recyclers sifts through the refuse below. Japanese dropping garbage on their poorer Asian neighbours?! The offensiveness is only just outweighed by the knowledge that the artists’ primary target isn’t the Indonesians, but their own, unthinking countrymen.

Chim ↑ Pom produces work at a pace that only a six-person group could manage. In just three years they have built up a mind-boggling oeuvre that includes taxidermied rats, bleached and dyed bright yellow to resemble the video game character Pikachu, a biennale guerrilla performance held at the Tokyo Disney Resort’s version of Venice, the mustering of hundreds of wild crows to the National Diet Building in Tokyo, the destruction of Louis Vuitton handbags in Cambodia using unexploded landmines, and Hard Rock Café signs drawn with kerosene-hoses and lighters (one of the new works in the current show).

Where it’s all heading is anybody’s guess; what it tells us about Japan is crystal clear. Shock like that of confronting a live crow in a gallery hasn’t figured in Japanese art since the late 1960s, when, to a backdrop of student and left-wing riots, Hi-Red Center donned lab coats and started polishing the sidewalks with toothbrushes. The prosperity and peace of the ‘80s and ‘90s steered local artists towards a predominantly refined academicism. Nowadays, with China’s emergence as a geopolitical power, the pension scandal (millions of records were lost) and a spate of random stabbing crimes, cracks have appeared in the nation’s veneer of confident affluence. All of a sudden satire, cynicism and subversion are back on the table, and Chim ↑ Pom aren’t wasting a second.

Edan Corkill

Zineb Sedira

The Wapping Project, London, UK

The French-born, London-based artist Zineb Sedira is perhaps best known for pieces such as Mother Tongue (2002), a video triptych showing the generational shift of languages in her family over the course of successive migrations – her Algerian parents’ Arabic, her own French, and her daughter’s English. Showing Sedira speaking to her mother on one screen, the artist speaking to her daughter on another, and Sedira’s mother and daughter unable to converse on a third, this work brought into sharp relief the ineluctable consequences of immigration and the set of intimate means of communication – tender looks and gestures – existing within and outside a shared language. While displacement is still a central theme in MiddleSea (2008), currently showing at The Wapping Project, the biographical element has disappeared. Since her film Saphir (2006), and even before with the video And the Road Goes On (2005), Sedira’s work has taken a new direction; freed from the self-representation of her early works, it has opened up to reach further beyond the personal.

MiddleSea is undoubtedly the most accomplished work to date in this new phase of Sedira’s practice. Set on a ship cruising from Algiers to Marseilles, it unravels like a ballade, a visual meditation on the state of transit. The camera wanders over the white decks, sometimes catching the breathtaking immensity of the horizon, sometimes, in a series of verging-on-abstract shots, capturing the ethereal beauty of the tiniest details, the sea water caught in the deck’s rusted paint or the droplets in the boat’s wake. A man, alone, rambles in the empty corridors of the deserted vessel. He seems to be waiting, caught in a bubble of suspended time. It’s the Mediterranean, but it could be anywhere. The sky, the sea, the ship and the lonely figure, function like the schematic elements of an endlessly repeated story of departure and ever-delayed returns. The soundtrack, composed by Mikhail Karikis – a deft amalgam of location recordings, instrumental snippets and sound collages – comes to disturb the film’s almost too-smooth aesthetic. Combining unnervingly high pitches with the heavy breathing of the ship’s engine, it reinforces the overruling feeling of melancholic uneasiness and gives to MiddleSea a depth inaccessible to the visual alone.

No space could be better suited for the display of this film than the galleries of The Wapping Project, a former hydraulic power station; the metallic equipment that punctuates the venue seems to echo the boat’s maritime gears. This juxtaposition works especially well with the photographs and light boxes displayed in the back rooms. Singling out a detail of the vessel – a bright red handle, the luminously white sirens – they could almost be the continuation or the sublimation of these relics of the building’s industrial past. These shots also further Sedira’s take on abstraction already sketched in MiddleSea. The ‘Another Side’ series (2008) turns the ship’s mundane machinery into enticing compositions of textures and depths of field; in the photographic triptych A View To Sea (2008), the quay of an anonymous port becomes the dynamic diagonals of a Constructivist arrangement. After Sedira’s 2006 exhibition ‘Saphir’ at the Photographers’ Gallery, this show confirms a real turn in the work of an artist, who, without denying her former interests, has developed her practice outside the sometimes narrowing conceptual framework of identity and diaspora. 

Coline Milliard

Phoebe Washburn

Zach Feuer, New York, USA

As the global economy heads towards meltdown and the American government contemplates a daunting repair job, Phoebe Washburn’s large-scale installations have acquired super-added relevance.  Following her memorable installation at the Whitney Biennial, Washburn’s current exhibition at Zach Feuer presents another self-contained ecosystem, one that brings to mind nightmares both ecological and economic.

Sardonic and strange, Washburn’s machines operate according to a deliberately obscured logic.  The gallery abounds in sporadic bursts of neon colour; pipes, plywood boards and fish tanks full of murky liquid are hauled into the most unlikely of production lines.

Tickle the Shitstem (2008) emphasizes the capitalist rationale that underlies Washburn’s relentless machines in the sale of goods ‘produced’ by the installation.  These goods range from pencils and T-shirts to bottles of undrinkable liquid (accompanied by the tart warning, ‘Liquid in ORT bottles not to be ingested’).  There are also neon-tinted sea urchins - pale and delicate, the occasional aesthetic byproduct of the capitalist machine.

These goods are sold from a stand that is prominently placed in the front gallery, and provide a visible purpose and narrative to the otherwise mysterious machine.  The gallery attendant manning the stand also lends an incongruous human presence; Washburn’s machine exerts its fascination through the improbable course of its seemingly self-regulated production. 

But Washburn’s machine is also deeply personal, albeit in the most emblematic of ways.  If the unconscious is a factory, then Washburn’s factory touches upon the workings of the unconscious. Equal parts fantasy and nightmare, pulsating with drive and desire, the machine is also distinctly idiosyncratic.  The irregular logic of the installation’s individual components - a washing machine here, a collection of golf balls there - is what lends the work its sense of deep unease.

The sheer unlikeliness of Washburn’s installations, which are full of both humor and unspecified menace, give them their own distinct life.  They are not unlike a parade of Frankenstein’s monsters: lovingly constructed products of a singular mind, which nonetheless succeed in reflecting the most alarming elements of our social life.

Katie Kitamura

Kate Newby & Nick Austin

Western Park, Auckland, New Zealand

Fake seagulls, a folded newspaper and a telescope in an inner city park were the basic elements of ‘Hold Still’, Kate Newby and Nick Austin’s project for ‘One Day Sculpture’, a series of temporary public commissions taking place throughout New Zealand over the next year. Part of a strongly curated series of one-day events, the day drew together features of Austin’s quizzical assemblages and paintings (which borrow from vernacular forms such as the sandwich and the crossword puzzle) and the gestural energy of Newby’s personalized messages made as actions (for example, Thinking with My Body, 2006 saw the artist work with a length of rope, tied to the gallery window sill and fixed across street). The artists’ collaborative response to the 24-hour brief maintained a lightness and rigor that local audiences have come to expect from their practices.

Developed by the Litmus Research Initiative at the Massey University School of Fine Arts, Wellington, ‘One Day Sculpture’ is the outcome of curator Claire Doherty’s 2006 curatorial residency in New Zealand and aims to ‘stretch the format of a scattered-site exhibition over time and place’. Doherty has previously criticized the biennal model, and this programme - of 20 commissions over 12 months, each existing for a maximum of one day only - purposefully offers an antithetical move, allowing the work produced and its reception to operate on a cumulative scale. The upshot is a scenario where it is difficult, practically, to visit every commission; an intentional situation, given that, here in New Zealand, the local is necessarily often acknowledged as the primary site of engagement.

Newby and Austin’s title, ‘Hold Still’, suggested a way through these concerns. Existing from 9.00am to 9.00pm, in Western Park in central Auckland, the work created a kind of diorama in situ. The mannered yet visually quiet tableau of a ready-made seagull decoy (made from polystyrene and chicken feathers) placed on top of a park bench, and perching on the day’s paper - the quintessential single-day artefact, perhaps? - was framed in the viewfinder of a brand new telescope to create a kind of Étant donnés (1946-66) en plein air. To break the short circuit affect of the viewer’s position, the telescope and the object given to view, some oddly balanced rocks under the table, and a couple of other gulls on another bench across the park expanded the work from the view through the lens.

Through detailing a view of the park, this simple construction gave a kaleidoscope-like effect to the act of looking. The idea of looking at a work through a telescope literalized a frame and a perspective, and joked about the difficulty of being quiet contemplation outside the white cube - perhaps poking fun at those who aren’t looking for art within a public context. As a limited-time-only event, the work was often surrounded by viewers watching other viewers’ viewing.  (Of course, in the tradition of English landscape gardening, the park itself is an invented view, a picturesque space for aesthetic contemplation.) Once you got to have a turn, there was an unexpected kick in that the magnifying lens made an already absurdly artificial scene look even more unreal - something like a stereoscopic postcard. The surprise of the sight through the viewfinder amplified the comedy of concentrating on a common seagull. In this way ‘Hold Still’ was the best kind of joke, creating an occasion out of the transformation of the familiar, and asserting with a casual confidence art’s great potential to shift our awareness - even just for a day - of that which already surrounds us. 

Louise Menzies

Nicole Wermers

Herald St, London, UK

It’s easy to imagine a back-story of addiction, creation and persecution behind Nicole Wermers’ work. The artist has become known for an assortment of mock-Modernist units fitted with ashtrays, tables bedecked in sand and nicotine sticks, and a series of sculptures significantly titled ‘French Junkies’ (2002). Are these, perhaps, the by-products of a bad habit, grandchildren of Baudelaire’s odes to opium and hashish? Is art itself an addiction?

Nixing such musings is Wermers’ latest exhibition, ‘Public Rain’, which unshackles itself of the art/drug paradigm in order to directly confront the underlying resonance of such a theory: the dispersal of desire within contemporary urban life. Street decorations - lighting, hoardings, anti-slip floor plates - have, depending on your viewpoint, either a humdrum or sinister shadow.  Behind every lamppost looms the dark presence of behavioural science, by-laws and the town planner’s paranoia of a litigious public. A more cogent question, therefore, would be: can such elements of control be recuperated by pleasure?

‘Public Rain’ addresses this tension in terms of a mobile experience of space. Four aluminium rectangles, Filialen #6 - #9, (all works, 2008), mounted opposite Herald Street’s large opaque windows, mirror the extramural hubbub of the ever-frantic Cambridge Heath Road, rendering the passing traffic as streaky shades of gold and silver. Formally, the Filialen works recall industrial design, both in the material, and through a scattering of surface reliefs derived from the grips on floor plates commonly used in shopping malls and event venues. Here, however, they are arranged in a decorative array, like elegantly descending autumn leaves.

Wermers’ ambivalent reference to nature is not incidental: ‘Filialen’, translates from the German as ‘branches’, in the sense of high-street chain shops. The word is civic rather than arboreal, but we are nevertheless put on guard for a quick detour around the theory of nature-as-artifice. Untitled Bench is a forked, transparent acrylic box of suspiciously branch-like form, containing three blocks of stone, which sit mutely, as if waiting to accrue meaningfulness. Deliberately deflationary, Untitled Bench rests happily at the level of ornament, glossing over the cryptic depth of Robert Smithson’s rockeries. The trick could work, but unfortunately, as ornament, both Untitled Bench and Filialen aren’t particularly alluring, and neither do the allusions to ‘nature’ seem to amount to much.

Dominating the gallery’s second room is Spa, a walk-through sculpture composed of three conjoined hoops of stainless steel, which echo the space’s three entranceways. The work speaks of alarmed shop doorways, shopping malls, concert halls and other crossover points between public and commercial zones. Like the Filialen, there is a sense of footwork involved here that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Robert Morris exhibition 40 years ago. The difference, of course, is that Wermers’ sculptures already look like art: we’re dealing with culture as a mimetic addiction of forms. The aesthetics of dependency are, indeed, a potent metaphor for art. Yet in attempting to escape this formula’s cruder renditions by substituting a hazy sense of ‘nature’, ‘Public Rain’ tended to say less about design, commerce and subjectivity than one might hope for.

Colin Perry

From Six Mile Village to Three Shadows

Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, China

‘From Six Mile Village to Three Shadows’, an exhibition of new work by photographers RongRong and inri, documents a cycle of destruction and construction that spans several years — from the demolition of the couple’s hometown Liulitun (literally ‘Six Mile Village’ in Chinese) in 2003, to the opening of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre four years later. It’s a portrait of contemporary China, where Haussmann-scale demolition has yielded an unprecedented construction boom, and a depiction of life, itself a cycle of beginnings and endings, amid this rapid development.

The exhibition begins with the final days of Six Mile Village. In one photograph, the couple sits perched atop the doorway of a half-demolished building, surrounded by fresh white lilies and holding bunches of flowers in a funerary gesture. In another, the two artists are seen through this same doorway, posed amid rubble. This time, their naked bodies are draped on a ladder, their faces obscured by their cascading hair. Another documentary-style sequence ends the exhibit: photographs of the construction of Three Shadows, the first contemporary art centre in China devoted to photography and video art, founded by RongRong and inri last year.

In contrast, the photographs in between these two sequences — between the death of Six Mile Village and the birth of Three Shadows — have neither a documentary style nor an explicit narrative. These intensely personal, lyrical photographs explore the artists’ relationship and the theme of reproduction. There’s a series of up-close, almost abstract images of inri’s pregnant belly, shot in dramatic chiaroscuro, and photographs of ethereal interiors in which the artists engage in sexual acts. The couple also appears in a series of formal family portraits, wearing stereotypically-Chinese garb, and again in the foreground of grand, beautifully-shot landscapes, now with their small child.

China’s dizzying development is presented as a parallel for the life cycle, with an urban landscape as fleeting as the procession of generations. But, for RongRong and inri, this setting is merely a context for their love story. The artists, appearing almost identical with their long black hair, exist apart, absorbed in their romance. By inserting themselves into every shot — side-by-side, holding hands — they render the show uncomfortably intimate, and the viewer a voyeur. 

Natasha Degen

assume vivid astro focus

Peres Projects, Berlin, Germany

‘Aqui volvemos adornos frivolos’ (Here we return to frivolous ornaments, 2008) is the new show by New York-based Brazilian artist Eli Sudbrack’s collective, assume vivid astro focus. The latest in a series of projects that involve the construction of three-dimensional spaces christened with performances, it opened in Berlin with a characteristic bang, and, as promised, much frivolous adornment. The buzz that surrounds avaf was more than palpable as you approached the isolated space of Peres Projects and glimpsed the metallic, geometric, mish-mashed and neon-splashed installation through the half-open windows. Once in the gallery, there is a black-plastic wallpapered room displaying electrically coloured framed collages of girls in erotic poses, some with texts twirling around their asses. You are invited to enter the world of avaf on hands and knees, by crawling through a DIY tunnel of MDF, a journey punctuated with occasional portholes, which – once you poke your head through – reveal the explosive deconstructed installation. At the end of the burrow you emerge into a disco anti-chamber with a huge rotating neon pyramid. DayGlo pointy masks and glasses donned, this already psychedelic space begins to glitter and shift.

Obvious precursors to avaf’s playful empowerment of the viewer are Hélio Oiticica’s ‘penetrávels’ and ‘parangolés’, the mobile sculptures and costumes the Brazilian artist created during the 1960s and ‘70s. And, not surprisingly, several critics have cited this colourful cannibalism of the earlier Tropicália movement as an obvious precedent. However, avaf assert that they often feel disconnected from the art press, which ‘is guilty of referencing them in comparison to a recent past, as if the past is always necessary to understand the present.’ Instead they propose a ‘test to challenge writers and critics to refrain from relating an artist to any past, and to talk about the work from a present point of view.’ Indeed, the frenzied celebration of the new becomes the central goal of avaf. Some clues as to the evolution of their neo avant-garde campaign is offered in the ‘to do list’ prepared for every avaf event, which brings together a motley crew of ideas and inspirations: Hiro Yamagata, alchemy, coloured plastics, Richard Bernstein, Frederick Kiesler, Captain Horlock, a recent Grace Jones concert, and illegal late-’80s raves.

avaf’s energetic and generous objectives remind me most of Ian Svenonius’s cultish band Weird War. However, unlike the alternative music scene, one might expect such a hedonistic spirit to be co-opted all too easily into the more uptight and self-conscious staging of excess that is the modus operandi of the mainstream art world. But critically engaging with the art institution is central to the radicality of avaf, and they reject its associated elitist pomp. Instead they proclaim, ‘We are not interested in the whole star fuckers scene. We want to live a simple life and hang out with simple people like us. We want to be contaminated by other people. We want to have friends. We believe in generosity and equality, in sharing and inclusiveness.’ In utilizing the party as a site for subversion, in restaging sexual politics in the present, and in engendering an aesthetic and ethic grounded in collective optimism, avaf are definitely well worth contaminating.

Sarah James

Royal Art Lodge

Pippy Houldsworth, London, UK

The Royal Art Lodge’s paintings might be small – each is only two inches square – yet they tackle some of life’s biggest questions. Death, despair and divorce all make an appearance in the 160 works that are displayed, in groups of ten, at Pippy Houldsworth’s west London space, though melancholia is offset by a surreal humour and clever wordplay that saves the paintings from becoming too earnest.

The works are simplistic in style, the deliberately naïve imagery expressing a specific thought that is often reiterated in text included within the paintings. Some are blackly humorous – one shows a man falling from a ladder, with ‘Starting Over’ written in bold along its base – while others are almost cartoon-like, such as the painting of an impassive goat with a mouse hanging from its mouth, accompanied by the words ‘Goat as cat’. The works’ varied tone is perhaps due to the Royal Art Lodge’s collaborative nature. The collective now consists of just three artists – Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama and Neil Farber, all of whom have had considerable solo success – though there has been eight artists in total since the group’s formation in 1996. The RAL’s history is already taking on its own mythology, in part because of the location of the group’s first meeting at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Western Canada. 

Winnipeg is now so closely linked to the collective that it feels impossible not to mention the city when discussing their work. Its extremity plays a part in this, and perhaps also in why the group first came about – the nearest major city, Minneapolis, is seven hours drive away, and the Winnipeg weather is equally uncompromising, with notoriously long winters. It was supposedly the cold that encouraged the group to stay indoors making art, though this doesn’t account for either their prolifically wide-ranging work – which includes films and installations alongside the paintings and drawings – or their longevity.

There is a certain fascination in how so many artistic egos are able to produce a consistent body over a long period. In an interview with David Shrigley in the catalogue accompanying this exhibition, the RAL (who talk as one) play this down, describing the project as ‘an experiment that came out of mutual admiration’ while also remarking on it being ‘a casual way to make art while hanging out with friends’. Shrigley is an appropriate choice as interviewer for the piece, as the RAL cover similar tragicomic ground to his own work (though Shrigley notes that he finds the notion of working as part of a collective impossible). 

The RAL’s history shouldn’t detract from the work itself, however, which is charming, unsettling and rewarding in turn. The work has strong parallels with the solo output of the three artists left involved, especially Dzama, but there is a sense of game-playing or sparring that gives these paintings the feeling of one-liners, gags between friends, which is perhaps what they are. As in Shrigley’s work, though, there is also the sense of some essential truth being hidden within the joke, and the show’s content is likely to make visitors smile and wince in equal measure as it details the violent and absurd nature of everyday life.

Eliza Williams

Anya Gallaccio

Camden Arts Centre, London, UK

Anya Gallaccio’s new installation at Camden Arts Centre addresses certain topical concerns of our time – particularly environmentalism – while continuing the artist’s ongoing interest in our complex relationship with the natural world.

For that open space within (2008), Gallaccio has filled the smaller gallery at Camden with a section of a horse chestnut tree, recently removed from a London park after it died. The tree is huge, filling the high-ceilinged space, its branches pushing against the windows and walls as though they were about to burst out of the building at any moment. In spite of its mighty presence, however, the tree is obviously lifeless: its limbs are hacked and re-pinned, held in place by crisscrossing struts and ropes. These accoutrements give an impression of Frankenstein’s monster, brutally rebuilt and harnessed, despite the fact that all its sections have sprung from the same organic form. This method of reconstruction has created a curious mixture of both the real tree and a representation of it.

This is not the first time that Gallaccio has brought trees into a gallery space: in 2002 she filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with tree trunks that stood mutely in the long space, stunted by the amputation of all their limbs. In the sculptural work Because Nothing Has Changed (2000), Gallaccio adorned a bronze tree with bright red porcelain apples, and later created a revised version incorporating the best-known aspect of her work, Because I Could Not Stop (2002), which was strewn with real apples that rotted over the course of the show.

Her installation at Camden depends similarly on both a quiet event – the reconstructed tree will be dismantled at the end of the exhibition – and a traditionally sculptural form. There are countless depictions of nature and trees in art, yet here is the real thing. The tree’s bearing brings forth memories of country walks or childhood games of conkers, but it remains still and cruelly tethered, ready to be scrutinised.

Gallaccio apparently drew inspiration for the work from Camden Arts Centre’s garden and from the notion of bringing the outdoors inside. However, what is more striking is not the garden but the relentless presence of the Finchley Road outside the window. The effect of the passing traffic is disorientating, with the inside space appearing more natural than the mechanical world outside. Whether deliberately intended by the artist or not, it feels difficult not to see the work in political terms, as a commentary on the increasingly bleak proclamations that are emerging about our environmental future. 

Eliza Williams

Sights from a Steeple

Ibid Projects, London, UK

The summer has arrived at last so instead of complaining about the fact that it hasn’t we can now complain about how ‘muggy’ it is. Another thing usually worth complaining about at this time of year are the ‘summer shows’ put on by commercial galleries. Always hit-and-miss affairs, these are normally either filler whilst the gallerists go to wherever they go in the summer, or a chance for someone at the gallery (or a hired freelancer) to stretch their curatorial muscle with a thematic group show.

Ibid’s summer show, ‘Sights From the Steeple’, falls into the latter category. The works presented, according to the press release, take their cue from late-Romantic views on love and loss, as well as ‘attitudes of austerity and self-restraint.’ The title, taken from a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne first published in the collection Twice-Told Tales (1837), gives some sense of what is on offer here: the works, imbued with gothic wistfulness, will constitute an ‘antidote to the traditional summer show’. But all is not lost. Two works in particular, by Karl Holmqvist and Ulla Von Brandenburg, make the trip worthwhile. The other artists in the show – Gregor Hildebrandt, Jorinde Voigt, Barbara Wolff and Skafte Kuhn – are too easily packaged and explained away by the theme. Kuhn’s diptych, an etching on glass, Untitled (Hervor aus Gebrigen des Nichtmehr / Coming from the mountain of the bygone) (2007), depicts English goth rockers Bauhaus alongside a sampling of their lyrics, translated into antiquated German. Referencing the collision of ‘80s pop music with gothic imagery is well-trodden ground.

Von Brandenburg is represented by a film, Geist (2007), in which a figure draped in a white sheet activates a 16mm camera, aimed at an area of park land with trees in the distance. As the figure nears the trees, moving almost out of view, the reel finishes and the film loops. This pastische of Victorian quasi-scientific recordings of paranormal phenomena juts uncomfortably – or maybe all too comfortably, which is of course the point – against the form of performance-based video from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The fact that the theoretical underpinnings of conceptual and post-conceptual practices can be mapped to certain tropes of late-Romantic thought and art is by no means revelatory, but in this context adds a touch of critical sophistication.

Holmqvist accompanies a small photocopied book of his poems (available to peruse, but not to take away) with a manifestation of a work that has been recycled several times since its first outing in 1991, and which normally accompanies a performance. It consists of three empty wine bottles with simple orange labels emblazoned with the title of the work: Give Poetry a Try (1991–2008). Behind these, on the wall, there is a framed list of handwritten instructions encouraging viewers to make candle holders out of recently emptied bottles and to write their own poetry. The last two read: ‘4. Read poem out to yourself and/or someone else’, and ‘5. Ready.’ Holmqvist humorously punctures the Romantic view of poetry as a privileged, exulted form, while simultaneously casting doubt on the contemporary dictum that everyone has ‘talent’. 

Dan Kidner

John Armleder

Simon Lee, London, UK

John Armleder is known for collapsing the perceived distinctions between distinct methods of display.  Manipulating the exhibition space to create a logic of equivalents – in which a design object achieves significance equal to a painting or found object – his new show at Simon Lee relies on the careful juxtaposition of elements and a purely formal interest in the question of framing. 

Armleder works with a range of elements for the show – wall paintings; individual drip- and pour-canvases; trademark furniture pieces – that are arranged to create a series of unexpected visual relationships. For example, the graphic, mechanical repetition of the wall paintings is strikingly juxtaposed with the organic form of the drip and pour paintings. Multiple frames also appear in the gallery, each of which alter and suggest different ways of seeing.  This layering attains a particular complexity in the sole furniture work in the exhibition, Sunny side up (FS) (2008).  Set against a wall painting featuring a repeated spider graphic, a canvas – bisected into blocks of red and blue – is viewed through the slats of a wood recliner that is set before the two paintings.  The effect is one of multiple cuts across the canvas, a perennial process of division and fragmentation.

This ‘dwindling’ of space seems to be a kind of formal rebuttal of context.  While the deliberate manipulation of the exhibition space implicitly refers to an established art historical language and convention, Armleder is equally interested in the fragile and arbitrary nature of signification. This is probably most evident in the particularity of Armleder’s titles: the exhibition title, ‘Scrambled and Poached’, is as good a description as any of the way in which linguistic meaning is formed. Many of the titles in the show are themselves formed from a process of free association – a wall painting is titled after a nearby restaurant, or formulated from the initials of a gallerist – and have the playful logic of dreams. 

From this perspective, the manner in which Armleder organizes the gallery space seems to have as much to do with chance as it does deliberation. One of the most startling works in the exhibition is Biotite (2008), a canvas featuring a geometric design of gold eggs, set against a wall painting of a matching ovoid pattern.  The sudden alignment of visual language produces an odd sense of order and meaning, and also a kind of grace.  But that grace is achieved precisely out of the scrambling of languages elsewhere in the gallery – in yet another final case of cannily drawn contrast.

Katie Kitamura

Only Connect

Art in General, New York, USA

‘What is that?!’, a bemused young woman asks, pointing at an arrangement of oscillating standing fans that whistle and chirp. Her companion’s response is barely audible, but the woman’s retort rings out, ricocheting off the glass walls: ‘That’s art?!’

In Larry Bamburg’s Whistlers, Chirpers, Trillers: One Down (2008), a Plexiglass handrail, resembling those inside the Bloomberg Tower elevators, is swung back and forth by the rotating fans. A sheet of paper from a Bloomberg scratchpad flaps in the light breeze which, blown through pen caps and plastic funnels, produces the sound of birdsong that pervades the entire multilevel office space. Opposite the Bloomberg radio and television studios, below tickers that forecast weather with animated displays of thunderstorms and sunny skies, the low-tech kinetic sculpture simulates a natural habitat within the psychedelic simulated reality of architect César Pelli’s colourful glass design.  In the open environment, workstations are streamlined strips of Bloomberg terminals: the signature double-screened monitors of the Bloomberg terminals flash news and financial data in a UNIX platform, ordered along stretches of desks. The only evidence of individuals among the ‘team’ is the occasional rhinestone-studded monitor frame, perhaps a trophy for high sales achieved.  Thus the do-it-yourself aesthetic of the five artists selected by curator Cecilia Alemani for ‘Only Connect’, Art in General’s fourth exhibition at the Bloomberg Towers, seems a determined quest for the intimacy of dialogue in a space where communication is instead the impersonal relay of information to be manipulated and transformed into data with market value. 

While the previous three iterations of the Art in General-Bloomberg Tower collaboration were limited to the building’s elevator platforms, ‘Only Connect’ wanders. On the glass wall of a meeting room, Mafalda Santos draws diagrams of artist rankings from artfacts.net, studies in solipsism limited to artists whose work Santos has recently seen. On the windows of another meeting room, Patrick Tuttofuoco’s Chindia (2008) merges China and India in a collage of photographs from his travels to create his own imaginary capital of glocalization. In Three Flying Buttresses for a Wall, (2008) Heather Rowe hides thin plywood buttresses in a niche nearby employees’ workstations, positioning them millimetres away from the wall that they should theoretically support.  Tiny nails used in construction are never completely hammered in and only two long strips of glass clamped to the precarious structures keep them standing. Installed on a rarely used elevator platform, An Architecture of Silence (2008) plays the ultra low frequency sound of a song composed by artist Tom Kotik’s band at high amplitudes: two small speakers embedded in a music stand pop, buzz, and jump without sounding a single note. 

‘Only Connect! [...] Live in fragments no longer’, Margaret exclaims in E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). For Alemani, curating an exhibition in a corporate context has meant cutting the convoluted art-speak so as to engage the outspoken, often brazenly critical Bloomberg workforce, unafraid to pose ingenuous questions – like ‘that’s art?!’ – and unconvinced by art historical justifications or impressive quotations from Baudrillard, Foucault or Lacan. But aside from its work within the worn-out cliché of bringing contemporary art to new audiences, ‘Only Connect’ has provided those art professionals involved in its organization with the invaluable opportunity to put their own practice in question.  Arriving one morning for a guided tour of the exhibition, Alemani found a group of giggling employees gathered before a colleague quizzically reading aloud from the exhibition brochure’s introduction to Bamburg’s work.  ‘Are you making fun of me? I wrote that!’ Alemani exclaimed. 

Emily Verla Bovino

Robert Morris

Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, London, UK

Today’s memorials are not heroes on horseback but Minimalist forms, inviting viewers to fill their blank, stark spaces with personalized meaning. So it’s curious that Robert Morris, a Minimalist-gone-figurative, chooses to take on the memorial genre for his latest project. In ‘Morning Star Evening Star’ at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers, Morris presents a series of wall-mounted reliefs – four cenotaphs memorializing victims of America’s recent wars. Begun in 1981, the first of the Reagan years, the series was finally completed this year, bearing the strong mark of today’s political climate. 

The centrepiece of the exhibit, Standard Terror (1981-1987-2008), features an American flag constructed from heavy black felt, over which a modified version of the Nazi Reichadler presides. In profile, the eagle’s outstretched wings and hooked beak are identical to the Nazi emblem, but instead of grasping a wreath of oak leaves surrounding a swastika, the eagle grips a circle emblazoned with the words ‘Standard Terror’. The message is clear. However, just as the label ‘Nazi’ is deployed in political smears, conveniently assigned to one’s opponents, Morris’s visual rhetoric is affecting but also easy.

The flag’s corners are framed by fibreglass casts, each revealing fragments of machinery and human remains, like snapshots of an exhumed mass grave. Two buckets rest on the lower casts, flanking the flag. Morris maintains symmetry by balancing the eagle above with a bench below the wall relief. The bench and buckets refer to waterboarding, a form of torture that involves strapping a subject to an inclined board and forcing water into his breathing passages to simulate drowning. Symbolic of the dubiously-legal methods the CIA used to interrogate terrorism suspects, these torture implements further implicate the ‘Nazi-like’ American regime.

But is the suggested equivalence of America’s war on terror and Nazism, an ideology now synonymous with the darkest shade of evil, cogent? Neither original nor nuanced, the comparison smacks of oversimplification and hyperbole. The work’s mass grave imagery and foreboding, all-black presentation only add to its didactic visual vocabulary. The other three reliefs are similarly manipulative (and suggest why memorials have abandoned the language of explicit narrative). In Morning Terror (1987-2000-2008), Morris, having already invoked Nazism, turns to another obvious provocation: the victimization of children. The work consists of a cream-coloured cast from which adult and baby faces emerge like death masks. Skeletons and bones are also interspersed. In front of the cast, child-sized clothing hangs from a metal rod, linking innocence with violence and death.

Despite the purported political urgency of these works, their real strength is formal: the use of encaustic and the depiction of American flags evoke Jasper Johns; the fibreglass casts recall Rodin’s The Gates of Hell (1880-1917). Such mixing and matching is typical of Morris, whose retrospectives can sometimes seem like exercises in pastiche. From spare fibreglass forms to tangled felt sculptures to blindfolded graphite drawings, his work has ranged from Minimalism to performance art to earthworks to Conceptual art to Neo-Expressionism. Appropriation, not politics, is what Morris does best. 

Natasha Degen

The Way In Which It Landed

Tate Britain, London, UK

Ryan Gander’s projects as an artist – and now, with ‘The Way in Which it Landed’, as a curator – often feel like the tricks, puzzles and riddles of a benign but infuriating uncle. His approach has the power to return me to childhood, to the mad frustration of learning that the coin isn’t in the other hand either, that there isn’t a correct solution, or if there is, the person who knows it prefers to watch you wriggle rather than spill the beans.

For Tate Britain’s Art Now space, Gander has delivered a wily two-part conundrum of an exhibition. The first part consists of 16 paintings and photographs from Tate’s collection, hung in the exact same configuration that Gander found them on a display panel in the Tate storage vaults. The ostensibly random selection thus sees a large dark photo-work by Boyd Webb brooding beneath Stanley Spencer’s spring-fresh Terry’s Lane, Cookham (1933), and the wrinkled yellow swimming costume of the girl in Rineke Dijkstra’s now iconic Kolobrzeg, Poland, July 26 1992 (1992) crackling with an intensity that its neighbour, a sludgy Maurice Utrillo from 1910, clearly lacks.

Happenstance comparisons can of course also expose hitherto unrevealed nuances in and allegiances between images. I tried to see some; I failed. Before trying harder I began to wonder whether I really wanted to – whether there was anything meaningful in such an endeavour or whether the essential truth of the configuration was its randomness, its lack of meaning. Maybe meaning here was a trick, an illusion. In the exhibition guide, artist Lucy Clout acknowledges the ‘fine line between a red herring and its malicious cousin the “wild goose chase”’. I started thinking of enraging uncles again.

Clout’s own work is amongst the strongest in the second side of the exhibition-puzzle: work by five youngish artists who Gander admires, installed around and in front of the wall of pictures from the collection. Perhaps you might expect them to respond to Gander’s haphazard art history lesson; in fact they are all so self-assured that they seem to be ignoring it like a class of determinedly wayward children. Only Aurélien Froment, whose video Théâtre de poche (Pocket Theatre, 2007) is placed in the entrance to the space, answers in direct terms, in his case by conducting his own elegant and entrancing lecture-come-magic show in which he moves disparate found images around on a glass screen.

Clout’s most effective contribution was a grey screen, only about a foot high but as wide as the entrance to the gallery, which hung on a pulley at exactly face-height, obscuring the most crucial part of the view into and out of the space. It neatly kicked off a sequence of meditations on looking and not seeing, and seeing without looking, that passed between the works on show. Even though Gander assures us in the accompanying literature that the work of these five artists ‘has nothing in common’, his own fondness for obfuscation and emergent associations is evident in Carol Bove and David Renggli’s collages, or Clout’s unsettling assemblage of found material (rolls of tape, potatoes and a newspaper feature on giant pigs). Nathaniel Mellors gets the last laugh with Thinking Rock Speaks (2008), a lump of alabaster spouting an empty steel speech bubble. Sometimes there really is just nothing to say. 

Jonathan Griffin

The Title of This Show…

Galerie Jan Mot, Brussels, Belgium

Jan Mot’s current exhibition is called ‘The title of this show is a list that includes the dates in which each of the exhibited works were first made, the dates in which some of them were remade by the artists and the dates in which they were last shown’. There’s no hope now: if you have finished reading, you are already hurtling headlong into the conceptual loop established by artist-curator Mario Garcia Torres and the four artists – William Anastasi, Eduardo Costa, Dan Graham, and Stephen Kaltenbach – that he has gathered for this show.

Works include Lee Lozano’s Time (classified as ‘date to be completed’) – comprising two strings stretched between four nails and strung through a small metallic disk (owned by Stephen Kaltenbach and listed under his name in the press release). Elsewhere is Kaltenbach’s Modern Drapery (1968), an oval piece of felt the folds of which are reconfigured by each new installer, and William Anastasi’s Subway Drawings (undated), seismographic scribbles for which the artist put pencil to paper and let the movement of the train guide his hand.

Despite their visual understatement, it would be wrong to take these works as exercises in aesthetic or conceptual reductionism. Where reduction implies the pursuit of a ‘zero point’ – prohibiting the extension of a work’s meaning beyond its self-stated limits – the pieces on display are united by their conscious accommodation of outside interference. Ceding control of his work’s presentation, Kaltenbach hands over his auctorial authority to an unknown individual, while Anastasi’s drawings are equally as much an index of the train’s movement as the artist’s own autographic mark.

Demanding an altered understanding of the role of the author and the status of the works themselves, Kaltenbach and Anastasi question the same terms which are taken up by the exhibition’s title, and which Eduardo Costa’s corresponding work, A Piece That Is... (1969-2008), throws even more drastically into crisis. Costa’s contribution is an enlarged, framed typewritten sentence that reads: ‘A piece that is essentially the same as a piece made by any of the first conceptual artists, dated two years earlier than the original and signed by somebody else. Eduardo Costa 1970’.

In the exhibition title, the compulsive practice of specifying dates to establish an artistic genealogy takes on a slightly ridiculous edge as well as underscoring the slippery status of the events being chronologically pinpointed. Costa, too, tangles us up in time in order to cast doubt on the status of the art object itself, establishing a cycle of uncertainty that continues ad infinitum: is the typewritten sentence of A Piece That Is... an example of the endeavour it describes, that is, a later ‘copycat’ work falsely dated two years early? Or does it represent precisely the opposite, the paradigm of conceptual originality – an initial, original move designed to engender follow-up works whose very form would serve as Costa’s authorial stamp in perpetuity? I’d go with the latter. If the display of these artists side-by-side shows one thing, it is how they revel in the convoluted system into which they have been born. Costa and the others are trapped in a maze of someone else’s making, but they respond with gleeful high jinks, driven more by the prankster’s faith in the ongoing perpetuation of mischief than the reformer’s impulse to destroy.

Sarah-Neel Smith

Unrelated

Wilkinson Gallery, London, UK

Two sets of grubby digits grip a sheet of plywood, lifting it off the ground just high enough to reveal the cuffs of a pair of workman’s trousers. The ply-carrier’s body is almost entirely concealed by the panel, but there’s enough visual data to leave the impression of virile, glamorous muscularity hidden behind it. Judy Linn’s coy-but-posturing black-and-white photograph Untitled (2006) seems like a good place to begin unpicking ‘Unrelated’, a wonderfully thoughtful summer show curated by Matthew Higgs, whose title seems both a provocation and a warning against making unwarranted connections between the five exhibited artists’ works. Yet this reticence is a sort of theme despite itself – there’s a general concern here with bodies hidden and revealed, of identities arrived at by gesture and oblique display.

Higgs, who is both a practicing artist and the director of White Columns in New York, has taken over both floors of Wilkinson’s cavernous Vyner Street space. The ground floor is given over to Higgs’s own work, a series of rather tasteful appropriation works pilfered from second-hand art books, whilst the upstairs space houses ‘Unrelated’. Unfortunately, Higgs’s own offering seems rather perfunctory, like an addendum to the real work going on upstairs. His modest, framed images are often chapter pages, blank but for their brief hackneyed titles: ‘Genius’, ‘Nobody Lives For Ever’ and ‘How Much is Enough?’ How much indeed. Where the artists in ‘Unrelated’ utilize image-making to assert their own identities, often in the first-person even when quoting others, Higgs’s own magpie-like display seems somewhat disconnected – appropriation art bottomed-out to just ‘stuff I like’.

By way of contrast, the five artists that make up ‘Unrelated’ are strikingly impassioned, punkish in their visceral posturing. Paul Bloodgood’s England 1819 (2006) is a typographic arrangement of Shelley’s eponymous sonnet of desolation and hope that has obvious contemporary resonance: ‘rulers who neither feel or know […] are graves from which a glorious phantom may burst, to illuminate this tempestuous day.’ His Cezanne-like paintings, such as Study for “Thoreau’s Table” (2008), rendered in sea-blues, leaf-greens, and expansive whites, are equally insistent, unabashed in their quoted self-expression. Likewise, Dan Asher’s gestural oil stick-on-paper visages – seemingly created in under a minute and all dating to 1983 – gawp and gaze with the impudence of a Black Flag two-minute rant about beer and TV and having nothing better to do.

Polished and poised, but equally of its era, Linn’s photograph Laundrobag (Patti as Bob Dylan), taken at some unspecified date in the 1970s, shows Patti Smith slumped rakishly beside a laundry bag whilst masking herself behind a publicity shot of the freewheelin’ one. Janice Guy’s series of impressively atmospheric hand-tinted photographs from 1979 is a meditation on the artist’s own naked body, filtered and masked by mirrors, glass panes, and noirish sheets of rain. Today Guy is better known as one half of New York’s Murray Guy gallery, but these works put her firmly alongside Mark Morrisroe, Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman. Sam Gordon’s video 24 Hours in London (The Lost Kinetic World, Volumes 1-12) (2005-07) – a vast archive of art events, openings, performances and street life – is a hyperactive dematerialization of the self: the I-am-you-and-you-are-we of culture. Higgs’s intuition seems the right one: art works remain active only insofar as these connections remain untethered, obstinately unrelated. 

Colin Perry

Jaki Irvine

Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland

Jaki Irvine’s large single-screen projection at Kerlin Gallery, Room Acoustics Revisited (2008), initially appears to be a visually bland documentary film: a woman potters about an office, chatting to a man about composition, how a room can be organized like a piece of music, and various other sound-related topics. Subtitles, however, distract you from the fact the Caucasian woman is speaking English and the Chinese man is speaking Mandarin. At one point, the female character opines that ‘reconstructing something so vast is like looking at the world through a straw’, and the oblique film shows her viewpoint doing just that. While the press release offered some help, it lacked context and was difficult to fit with the documentary-style footage: ‘In the face of an almost total elimination of non-organised sounds from the acoustic field and the absence of adequate descriptions of most sounds in visual/written form, a young researcher at the [Institute for Sonic Research and Reconstruction] slowly comes to terms with the enormity of the task which the retrieval and reconstruction of a sonic landscape entails.’

The non-linear narrative took in shots of taxidermy in progress, a digitized image of a field of birds, a momentary black screen and spotlighted musical scores. Once the sense of verisimilitude disappeared, the documentary feel segued into a more sculptural experience of installation – that is, one became aware of oneself looking. Room Acoustics Revisited is perhaps concerned with the nature of communication itself, from the staging of a conversation in two languages through to signifiers of communication, but this characterization ultimately seems too broad.

Repeated viewings bring the press release into focus, in that the woman seems to be attempting to reconstruct sounds that have, for whatever reason, disappeared from the world. Meanwhile, the Chinese man assists with discussions of different theories of sound and its representation. However, the outcome of the woman’s project was ultimately irrelevant as one’s attention was caught by Irvine’s use of various filmic conventions. The pretentiousness of some of these was unintentionally funny: the ‘cinematic’ pensive look that crosses the male character’s face at one point was so pronounced that he might have been a character from Flash Gordon. Likewise, the shift from realism to digitized effects suggested a strained artfulness. Maybe this was intentional, but a deconstruction of filmic language was hardly the point given the supposed interest of the narrative. Because the impression of these details lingered, the work emerged as less than the sum of its parts. While it might be an easy criticism to claim that one art work is best understood in terms of an artist’s oeuvre, this artist appears to deserve this criticism more than others given both the lack and opacity of contextualizing information. The ‘revisited’ of the title is undoubtedly a key: I emailed Irvine about this and she told me she was interested in examining the consequences of one or two ideas from a 1973 book by Dr. Heinrich Kuttruff titled Room Acoustics. Aha!  But, at this juncture of my analysis, I could only think ‘So what?’ – though ‘revisited’ could perhaps be conflated with ‘return’ in terms of the demands Irvine made on the viewer to watch and re-watch. To what end, however, I remain unsure.

Brian Curtin

Reto Pulfer

BaliceHertling, Paris, France

Reto Pulfer’s first solo show at Balice Hertling is impressive, though it is hard to say why – there is something genuinely elusive at work here.

The four pieces in the show are not easy to describe: in part because they are unconventional; in part because they are rich in handmade irregularities. Nevertheless: Chlopf-Täfu-Liecht-Schacht (2008) consists of two microphone stands, one of which supports a telescope which ostensibly channels sunlight towards a wooden handle that protrudes from a second mic-stand, in a slightly sinister mating dance. Ofaz 1442 (2007-08) is a sofa whose cushions have been removed, leaving six reversible and interchangeable panels. On some of these are drawings of various kinds, photographs under glass, illegible scrawls. One of the panels is also a musical instrument.

The stretches of fabric zippered together in ZR Potzwaus (2008) correspond to syllables in a language of Pulfer’s own invention, the key to which is framed next to the wall-piece. The fabric elements are designed so as to be re-arranged, forming different configurations much the way letters are re-arranged to form words. Most succinct is Floorpiece # 4A and 4B (2008), a Plexiglas-covered photocopy diptych of the Abydos temple in Egypt.

To make matters more complicated, the works shown at Balice Hertling are interactive. Ofaz 1442 can be sat on, its panels can be flipped or re-arranged, and there are hundreds of combinations, before the complexity of the drawings and the often illegible scrawls are considered. It is also a musical instrument, which the artist utilized during a performance at the opening of the exhibition. Even static, however – looked at instead of utilized – each piece is spectacularly detailed: note, for instance, the coloured chalk on ZR Potzwaus, or the distortions in the photocopy in Floorpiece # 4A and 4B, which make circular globs ‘above’ the temple, almost like stars. And yet, despite this obvious abundance of signifiers, it is hard to feel any sense of what these works mean.  This seems to be because of their wealth of meaning, not in spite of it.

Nevertheless, there is a structure to Pulfer’s evasiveness. Like so many artists before him, he is a fan of Bataille’s brief pornographic masterpiece Story of the Eye (1928). Yet Pulfer is also enamored of Barthes’ 1963 essay, ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’, in which Barthes argues that Story of the Eye is about the structure of language, specifically the distinction between metaphor and metonymy. Metaphors, he claims, are structured vertically, so that a second, superior meaning stands above the literal one and determines its meaning from above. Metonymy, on the other hand, takes place on a flat, frictionless plain: one meaning turns into another, without hierarchy, without authority, and without end. For Barthes, in Story of the Eye the eye is not a metaphor for the sun, or the sun a metaphor for the egg: instead there is only the metonymic chain: eye—sun—testicle—egg—etc. Therefore there is no conclusive or overarching significance to the novella – except, of course, for that lack of finality itself: that leveling, or liquification.

The same is true of Pulfer’s exhibition. Do the made-up words in ZR Potzwaus dictate the fabric forms which then represent them? Or does the arrangement of forms create new words, which then describe them? The game seems to operate in both directions: there is no transcendent meaning, only permanent transformation. That is why Pulfer’s works are so hard to pin down. They only look like closed systems; what they propose is a limitless symbolic drift. 

David Lewis

A Life of Their Own

Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland

The Castle Arts space is unusually well-appointed: housed in a renovated wing of Lismore Castle (an hour’s drive from Cork), it was built by King John in 1185 and sits high above the Blackwater river. Residents have included Sir Walter Raleigh, physicist Robert Boyle, and – brilliantly – Fred Astaire’s sister. Curated by the critic and art historian Richard Cork, ‘A Life of Their Own’ comprises works by nine emerging British sculptors – though ‘emerging’ is a wide brief here: the exhibition ranges from the relatively little known Kate Atkins and Kate Terry to the more established Eva Rothschild and Conrad Shawcross. The exhibition’s high Modernist formal concerns are hinted at by the title, which holds an echo of a well-known line from Michael Fried’s: ‘the apparent hollowness of most literalist work – the quality of having an inside – is almost blatantly anthropomorphic. It is […] as though the work in question has an inner, even secret life.’

Many of the works that Cork has selected are, in some way, more precarious than they initially appear. Matt Calderwood’s Projections Unfinished structure (numbers 3 and 6, 2007) look solid but would topple were it not for the industrial containers of water that counterbalance the hollow plasterboard structures. Kate Terry’s Thread Installation 8 (2008) bisects a high-ceilinged smaller gallery, comprising long lengths of green and pink cotton tacked in carefully plotted lines to create barely visible vectors. The classically minimalist effect of these slight means is rather like an Anthony McCall projection done by Fred Sandback, though the brashly DayGlo threads avoid straightforward homage. Spare crosshatching is echoed in another peripheral room by the looming shadows cast by Shawcross’s Slow Arc Inside a Cube (2007) in which a cruel-looking motorised mechanism circles silently within a black cage, a bright bulb at its tip describing a diagonal line between two corners. The light throws a looming shadow onto every surface of the room, projecting the cage’s grid onto every surface.

Nashashibi/Skaer’s collaboration – their second, from 2006 – gets very different results from dramatic lighting and objects. Their 16mm film Flash in the Metropolitan (2006) lights up various artefacts at the Met with a strobic light, the camera roaming around the displays anti-chronologically, resisting traditional taxonomies of presentation. Like their collaborative work at the Berlin Biennial, Pygmalion, the film animates the sculptures without fully vivifying them.

A crowded room of MDF plinths presents a startling array of expressions and finishes carved in black springstone and green soapstone. The rough forms in Daniel Silver’s ‘Heads’ (2006) series work from jpegs of Texan inmates on death row. Like Silver’s recent work – nascent statues, found in quarries in Italy and reshaped to some degree – the attenuated busts are all frozen at different stages of representation. While a little bruised, in their formal echoes of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Henry Moore they retain an unblinking memory of Modernist portraiture. Roger Hiorns’ two untitled sculptures (from 2007 and 2008) are similarly fetishistic. A BMW motor encrusted with blue copper-sulphate crystals is imperceptibly self-producing, with a keen sense of quiet performance, while the other, a large rusted structure, is covered with urine. Along with Calderwood’s unstable Brutalist obelisks, this piss-stained sheet metal is the closest that the exhibition gets to monumental sculpture. Given the recent trend for placing large-scale sculptures and glittering baubles in the grounds of country homes, all of this is admirably restrained. 

Sam Thorne

From One O to the Other

Orchard, New York, USA

Once the most densely populated immigrant neighborhood in the US, the Lower East Side remains a symbol of working-class diversity despite dramatic changes. Until recently it was also home to Orchard, housed in a modest storefront that belied the ambitiousness of the space’s three-year project. With a cooperative framework, Orchard was run by 12 partners with an array of practices and viewpoints, engaged in art-making, art history, filmmaking, criticism and curating. Privileging group exhibitions, once rarely reviewed in major US art magazines and a modus operandi starkly different from strategies favoured by most commercial galleries, it strove for constant discussion and self-reflection. Among its notable achievements were ‘Around the Corner,’ an examination of the transforming area including a walking-tour by organizer Christian Philipp Müller, photographs by Zoe Leonard and a film presentation by Ken Jacobs, and ‘September 11, 1973,’ a group of works responding to the 1973 coup in Chile and its aftermath shown alongside works addressing 9/11. Orchard’s penultimate show, ‘From One O to the Other,’ organized by director R. H. Quaytman with artist Amy Sillman and art historian Rhea Anastas, was typically cerebral yet accessible from various points of entry. Borrowed from Louis Marin’s reading of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, the evocative title alludes to the text’s intersection with concerns Quaytman has pursued in her series ‘Chapter 10: Ark.’

In keeping with Orchard’s taste for reflection and self-reflection, ‘From One O to the Other’ comprised a series of resonant archives. Anastas contributed Pull Quotes (2008), a sampling of excerpts from print and web coverage that had been published over the previous three years, typed out and displayed alongside the articles in vitrines. Some of the quotes emphasized or seemed bemused by the braininess or difficulty of Orchard projects; one – lifted from Bidoun – dryly observed, ‘Clearly we are due for some homework.’ Writing in Artforum, David Rimanelli praised various Orchard shows (and an inspiration for the project, Colin de Land’s much-missed, habitually rule-breaking exhibition space American Fine Arts, a bastion of institutional critique with which several Orchard members were associated) but also commented, ‘This ‘scene’ reminds me unpleasantly of the original black-and-white Night of the Living Dead, suffused with necrophilia and necrophagy.’ When asked about the remark, highlighted in one of Anastas’s ‘pull quotes,’ Quaytman gamely stuck to Orchard’s policy of frank self-examination, chuckling that there was truth to the charge that they cannibalized the dead.

Orchard certainly took pleasure in reanimating works that had fallen by the wayside, whether by restaging older projects or producing unrealized pieces by artists including Dan Graham, Lawrence Weiner, Michael Asher and Andrea Fraser with Allan McCollum (in 2005 Fraser re-presented her epochal 1991 monologue-cum-installation May I Help You, in the context of a different group show), or by exhibiting historical works. At the same time, it meticulously documented its own history, as in another archive on view in ‘From One O to the Other,’ a large editioned poster Quaytman made in collaboration with Geoff Kaplan, Orchard Spreadsheet Proof (2008), an update of an earlier work detailing the gallery’s exhibition program and financial data.

Sillman’s Representations (2008) brought a more performative element to the show’s retrospective stance: begi