Vivan Sundaram

Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, India

Although inspired by Hugo Ball and Alexander McQueen, ‘GAGAWAKA: Making Strange’, at New Delhi’s state-run Lalit Kala Akademi, drew only modestly on Dada’s oddball antics and the late fashion designer’s Saturnine fantasies and edgy theatricality. Its self-restraint – perhaps in deference to the conservative Indian context or the result of the artist’s own inhibitions – resulted in a somewhat earnest and ambiguous statement around art, fashion, and environment.

‘GAGAWAKA: Making Strange’, comprised 45 dresses constructed from waste and ready-mades by the veteran Indian artist Vivan Sundaram, in collaboration with a New Delhi-based fashion designer, Pratima Pandey. Its fluffy title – which invoked Lady Gaga’s outré chic and the folksy globalism of Shakira’s South African World Cup Football anthem Waka Waka (2010) – was a studied, even middle-brow and populist, attempt to funk up an art show by playing down the underlying art-historicity, and the class associations and glamour of fashion shows.

Both professional models and ordinary people drawn from the artist and designer’s circle of friends and colleagues walked the ramp in a series of live performances that took place during the exhibition. The dresses were marvels of design and ingenuity. It took a second glance to realize that the sleeves of the knitted trail gown, Cleopatra (2011), were made from truck tyre-tubes or a wedding outfit for men from sanitary-pads; that a dress complete with a Dervish-like hat had been made from an orthopedic support or a jump suit created from surgical masks; a pair of yellow men’s dungarees made with discarded plastic sheets that revealed the model’s derriere through its transparent back; sleep masks sewed together into a tiered, padded-shoulder short black dress; a toga made from tampons; or a short black dress with a matching Pharaoh hat was styled from bicycle tyre-tubes. Most of these incorporated architectural elements, like Aztec Deity (2011) a sculptural dress made with loofahs. Assemblage was suggested in costumes including one built with iron mesh masking the entire upper body, head included, that recalled Dadaist Marcel Janco’s mask dresses.

During the show, models broke into a wildly expressive dance that alluded to a post-environmental-apocalyptic world like that imagined by Cormac MacCarthy in his book The Road (2006). The mood was intensified by a Constructivist-inspired stage set created from stacks of tin trunks and iron grills and frames that served as props for the performances. However, the Russian avant-garde utopian aesthetic was ironically deployed to create a dystopia where rubbish is the only raw material left – ubiquitous, abundant, yet invaluable. In the accompanying, rather jaunty, text Sundaram’s wife, Geeta Kapur, a noted art critic, describes the exercise as an ‘assault on a commoditized civilization’ and ‘the erotic entangled with death’.

‘Making Strange’ is a natural progression for Sundaram’s practice that seems to have been built around the question: what is worth keeping or throwing away? This investigation into the intrinsic value of things manifests in his art as an affinity with revaluation through recycling thereby questioning the value of the original and authorship. However, the supposed radicalism of ‘Making Strange’ lacked bite. Making clothes made from recycled material is not a new idea and designers such as McQueen, Rei Kawakubo and Martin Margiela – who Sundaram cites as inspirations – relentlessly push fashion in new directions.

The couture of Sundaram’s dresses overwhelm their status as art, making them hardly stranger or any less wearable than high fashion. They had none of the impact of similar examples by other artists who have explored the intersections of fashion and art, such as Atsuko, whose 1956 Electric Dress – an armature covered with tangle of live wires and light bulbs – imperiled the artist’s life every time she put it on. However, Sundaram did manage to create a crossover between the art and fashion worlds: collectors sat in the front row of his show taking notes like well-heeled fashionistas. Yet, these neat correspondences between fashion and art dulled the edge of Sundaram’s Dadaism that seemed to serve the very conventionality it started out to assault.

Hemant Sareen

Yona Friedman

Ludwig Muzeum, Budapest, Hungary

When passing pieces by Yona Friedman in group shows or permanent collections, it can be easy to pay them scant attention. Out of context, set adrift amongst the more immediately polished looking models of other artists and architects, Friedman’s maquettes – often made out of things you or I might think of throwing away: cardboard toilet rolls, random assortments of chicken wire and polystyrene – come across as tremendously unimpressive, like something knocked up by children or Blue Peter presenters. However, when they’re given a whole floor of the Ludwig Muzeum in Budapest (the city where the architect was born, in 1923), one feels a whole world of ideas emerging.

Friedman’s solo exhibition, entitled ‘Architecture Without Building’ in reference to his minimal output of actual built projects, offers a bewildering array of material, from the usual renderings and photo-collages to the aforementioned maquettes. But most striking are the great exposed scaffolds that rise out of the gallery floor into explorable steel frames. This construction, based on Friedman’s drawings and created by Philippe Rizotti Architects for this exhibition, is by way of some small illustration of one of Friedman’s most famous concepts, the ‘Ville Spatiale’: the city as a three-dimensional raised grid, with each cubic void in the lattice an extemporized dwelling space – allowing, that is, for the proper distribution of natural light and green spaces. Here, after first donning hardhats and signing a disclaimer, viewers are allowed to climb the scaffold, which is high enough to afford a peep into the other exhibitions on the upper floors. Another way to look at Friedman’s concept might be to think of its influence on such buildings as Moshe Safdie’s ‘Habitat 67’ for the Montreal Expo, or the ‘in-between’ zones of Bernard Tschumi’s Le Fresnoy Art Center in Tourcoing, France.

The real source of goggle-eyed wonder in this exhibition, however, is to be found amidst the endless display of A4 yellow sheets, practically wallpapering several rooms with cartoons and concepts. These speculative storyboards tend to begin with a seemingly trivial question – what is a house? or a roof? or such like – and proceed apparently innocuously to such baroque notions as bridge cities, Merzbau structures, and continent cities, all cutely illustrated by little smiling stick men. Within these marker pen skits – and again and again in the exhibition wall texts – we encounter a series of buzzwords that have become more and more familiar over the last decade but appear to have been germane to Friedman’s thinking for half a century.

Words like ‘networks’, ‘complexity’ and ‘open source’, along with spotted references to Buckminster Fuller and the Whole Earth Catalog, seem to draw Friedman into the ambit of cyber-Utopian thinkers like Stewart Brand, or the editors of Wired magazine. Indeed, just as Brand found his cybernetic awakening amidst the hippy communes of the early 1970s, Friedman’s architecture seems to have been similarly shaped by his experience of living on an Israeli kibbutz a quarter of a century earlier. But there is a somewhat more macabre conceptual link between the two: Many of Friedman’s Utopian ideas seem to presuppose on the one hand a great deal of open space and detritus, and on the other, an Earth with a temperature several degrees higher. You could call it an architecture for after the apocalypse – just as the Internet itself, since its RAND Corporation origins, is a design for a communication system to survive the nuclear holocaust.

Robert Barry

Nathaniel Mellors

Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Amstelveen, The Netherlands

Traditionally, an object is defined in relation to the subject and is seen as a reflection of what we are not. And yet, ‘The Object’ in Nathaniel Mellors’ absurdist drama series ‘Ourhouse’ (2010–ongoing) appears on the screen as a man in a white tracksuit consuming and excreting books from the library of the somewhat dysfunctional Maddox-Wilson household. To the members of the family, the appearance of The Object is not as straightforward as it may seem to us, and is in fact so puzzling it robs them of their ability to speak coherently. The different parts of the series show the changes in the relationships between the members of the family, influenced by The Object as it eats away at the family’s library.

The latest addition to this still incomplete series, ‘Ourhouse – The Nest’ (2011), is now on view at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art on the occasion of Mellors winning the biennially awarded Cobra Art Prize, which, in the spirit of the post-war avant-garde CoBrA movement, aims to stimulate experimental and innovative art. For this show, Mellors created a wholly new installation including a new entry in the series, already existing material from ‘Ourhouse’, and art works from the collection of the Cobra Museum. Mellors chose works by artists who, much like himself, were interested in and greatly influenced by the ‘primitive’ and the margins of rationality – specifically the relation between sculpture and language.

The installation of ‘The Nest’ displays the artist’s works as if trapped in shapeless nest-like constellations made of wood, chicken wire and newspaper. In an act of cannibalism the sculptures have apparently ‘eaten’ the works from the museum’s collection. The central sculpture, the one most resembling an animal or human-like form, is elevated on a platform and connected to the other parts of the installation by electrical wires hanging from the ceiling. In its ‘belly’ plays the ‘Ourhouse’ episode in which the family makes their acquaintance with The Object.

Although the installation gives the videos a distinctive physical presence, the exhibition as a whole is still sequenced like a movie: its starting point is a painting by Karel Appel with the beautiful title Door een daad aan het daglicht gebracht om zijn schoonheid te tonen (By an Act Brought to Light to Show its Beauty, 1961). The painting was especially made for the filming of a documentary on Appel’s work and has a large square hole in it so that the camera could film the artist while painting. In Mellors’ presentation, the visitor literally looks through this work to see, as if through a lens, a darkened room resembling a magical cave with large, strangely shaped objects and pulsating yellowish lights. The visitor is then guided by a simple floor plan from episode to episode; starting with the central figure, then ‘The Nest’ – which incidentally is the only video not incorporated in a structure but projected outward onto a screen – followed by a seven-minute loop from ‘Ourhouse – The Cure of Folly’ about an amulet resembling the Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest human figurative sculpture ever found, and ending with another loop in which Bobby-Jobby, one of the family members, discovers the mounds of excretion from The Object and wrongly interprets them as sculptures with magical powers.

With his extremely rich and unique visual language, Mellors creates an installation that is so multi-layered it just keeps on giving. Connecting avant-garde art with contemporary and so-called primitive culture, the work objectifies man’s ever-lasting search for meaning, his inability to find it, and the objects’ role within this quest. It lays bare our deepest desire to believe in a higher purpose that we desperately try to understand and give shape to through language and art, but never quite manage successfully.

Irene de Craen

Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea

FRAC Centre, Orléans, France

Concluding a talk in California a few years ago, the architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler issued a warning: in the early 1990s, 80 percent of architects insisted that they’d never need CAD (computer-aided design) software, with the result that the entire industry now uses CAD software it didn’t design, not because it’s good, but because it’s fast. And digital fabrication’s inevitability means this sad history will repeat itself unless architects stop their ostrich-like behaviour and connect with computer-driven construction forthwith.

‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ showcases Gramazio and Kohler’s latest engagement with this concern, which drives their architecture and their research (or, as they prefer, recherché, because it sounds less serious) at Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH). It is also arguably Gramazio and Kohler’s most startling exploration of these issues, even if it remains speculative for now. The idea is that large structures – here, a 600-metre-high vertical village – soon will be built by teams of computer-controlled, four-rotor helicopters called ‘quadrocopters’. Characteristically for Gramazio and Kohler, there’s nothing exotic about this project’s components: the timely delivery of prefabricated units; once-unimaginable computing power; the quadrocopters themselves. (Having first flown in the 1920s, these craft are widely available today as small drones.) What is new, and fascinating, about this exhibition is what happened when Gramazio and Kohler enlisted their colleague, Raffaello D’Andrea, professor of Dynamic Systems at ETH, to combine these components with an automated operating system that controls four quadrocopters at once.

 

On one level, this fascination is of the Popular Mechanics variety. The show focuses on four copters buzzing around the gallery to assemble an 18-metre-high model of the vertical village using ‘bricks’ representing prefab housing units, while a projection shows real-time visualization of how the ‘foreman’ operating programme sees things. As the craft grab the bricks, fly to their drop-off points, and return to their recharging bases, without crashing into either each other or the growing tower, it becomes clear that chaos would ensue if humans were in control. (For demonstrations of this manoeuvrability, see flyingmachinearena.org.)

However, a deeper interest supersedes this ‘gee whiz’ element, because Gramazio and Kohler don’t fetishize digital technology. Rather, their concept of ‘digital materiality’ (elaborated in their 2008 book Digital Materiality in Architecture) interrogates the interaction between construction and computers. For instance, can a computer’s processing power combine with a robot’s precision to make a familiar material do something new? In this way, ‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ develops from less ambitious (but realizable) projects, like brick walls (The Programmed Wall, 2006; Structural Oscillations, 2008) that are innovative not because of the materials – the bricks are just bricks – but because computers and robots helped to configure those walls in arrays that are visually compelling and, until now, structurally impossible.

But this latest innovation goes beyond building fancier walls. Combining recent and emerging technologies (high-efficiency solar panels, small-scale wind power generation, potable rain-water collection, smart materials) with developments that will be commercially available in five to ten years (ever more powerful computers, full-scale quadrocopters), ‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ imagines buildings that are more efficient, human-aware and visually intriguing than ever. But it also cautions that only a considerably amount of direction will ensure that we get there. Otherwise, we’ll just end up with more of the same junk we’ve already got, only cheaper – in every sense of the word.

Charles Reeve

Les Marques Aveugles

Centre d'art contemporain , Geneva, Switzerland

In his essay ‘For a Metahistory of Film’ (1971), Hollis Frampton mocks the received wisdom that cinema merely ‘accelerates still photographs into motion’. On the contrary, Frampton insists, ‘a still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite cinema.’ The various works assembled at the Centre d’art contemporain under the title ‘Les marques aveugles’ (roughly translated as ‘Blind Marks’) seek, as it were, to reconnect these isolated frames to an expanded cinema that would go beyond Hollywood’s narrative pleasures to embrace the discontinuities and lacunae of the apparatus.

A series of Levi’s factory closures in Belgium and northern France provides the absent centre around which the narrative of Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s documentary, Après la reprise, la prise (2009), circles. In this super high definition digital film, Van Oldenborgh extracts a series of stills to dissolve in and out of each other in the manner of a Powerpoint slideshow, with an edited script of the dialogue as voice-over. This mode of presentation, as well as the theme of a return to a traumatic event from the past, recalls the work that formed the starting point for this exhibition, Chris Marker’s groundbreaking film, La Jetée (1962).

Van Oldenborgh was inspired by her own memories of the extensive resistance mounted against these closures by mostly female workers in the late 1990s, to stage a kind of confrontation of her own: this time not between workers and bosses, but between the past and the future, or at least two different responses to the present change in economic circumstances. The setting is a technical school just north of Brussels, at the very moment that its textiles department is being shut down and its banks of sewing machines replaced by computers. This switch is, of course, symptomatic, as is the change in circumstances of the women, who ten years ago were marching and going on hunger strikes to save their jobs. Since then, several have become professional actors – a line of work that is in many respects the model, as the artist points out, for the new, precarious, ‘brand me’ style of labour that has largely replaced the notion of the ‘job for life’ in the West. The story unfolds elliptically at first: the opening shot is of a bare wall; somewhere in the background we hear someone singing. The characters – not just the former Levi’s workers, but a younger generation of students, who will probably never know the kind of steady factory work the older women once looked forward to – are introduced gradually, and often in reflection or partially obscured. But what Van Oldenborgh’s work reveals, alongside the explicit narrative, are two fundamentally different codes of communication: the declarative, storytelling mode of the older women, and the less self-assured, apparently more trivial, chattering of the youth (‘Is my hair alright?’ ‘Is this T-shirt too big?’).

The marks of a very different kind of trauma are the subject of Rosa Barba’s A Private Tableaux (2010). Here, a grainy 16mm film traces the white line drawings of engineers marking points of stress in the tunnels beneath the river Mersey, in a style that recalls the low-grade quality of certain video nasties: with the growling industrial sounds (recorded in situ) competing with the flicker of the projector for soundtrack, we could be entering the cannibals’ home in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). But the artist’s sans serif intertitles reframe this exploration as a mythic encounter with the ancient past. Barba finds in these markings, ‘a dense diffusion of signs […] an eagle with outstretched wings […] riders without horses’ as if these abstract drawings were being interpreted by some future anthropologist as something akin to the cave paintings at Lascaux or Chauvet. The last shot shows a white circle with the number 420 enclosed within it, now imbued with an obscure mystery, reminiscent of certain moments in David Lynch’s films. Barba’s film thus stages the erasure of brute functionality by aesthetics and the interpretive powers of historiography.

In a very different way, this tendency of the work to obliterate its own object is enacted in two drawings by last year’s Northern Art Prize winner, the Czech-born, Manchester resident Pavel Büchler. The two sketches, entitled The Shadow of its Disappearance, 30 September 2011, Sunrise/Sunset (2011), represent the latest in a ongoing series of works in which Büchler uses discarded pencils to trace their own shadows as they lengthen or shorten with the falling or rising of the sun. The continuous redrafting as he tries in vain to keep up with the changing shape of his object – and the need to keep that pencil sharp – ultimately sharpens the instrument down to nothing, and its tiny stub neatly rests upon the bottom right of the picture’s frame.

Introducing his work at the exhibition’s opening in November, Büchler mentioned that Hollis Frampton has acted as a kind of ‘spiritual mentor’ to him since his student days, and one can find in these drawings a kind of repetition of the ideas behind Frampton’s (nostalgia) (1971), which occupies the far corner of the gallery space. This classic 16mm film exhibits a series of Frampton’s photographs from the beginning to the end of his photographic career – a stage in his work that was just then coming to an end – and then watches them burn. This incineration is in itself highly aesthetic, the flames seeming at first merely to dance on the surface of the photograph before, quite suddenly, the corners curl and blacken and the whole soon compounds to something like a rapidly decomposing fruit or the shifting, uneven surface of some soot-blackened planetoid.

In counterpoint to this orgy of creative immolation, we hear a wry voice apparently describing the pictures and their genesis in the first person. However, pretty soon we become aware of a certain disjuncture between what we see and what we hear. In fact, the work is doubly estranged: firstly, the voice we hear is not Frampton’s but that of his friend, the filmmaker Michael Snow, reading Frampton’s text. This creates certain ironies when Snow is forced to address himself in the third person (‘I wish I could apologize to him…’). Secondly, the voice is always one jump ahead of the viewer, describing in fact not the image before us, but its successor, thereby creating a narrative tension that is exploited in the film’s dénouement. Here, we are set up to expect an image of something so dreadful, something which fills the narrator, ‘with such fear, such utter dread and loathing, that I think I shall never dare to take another photograph’. The following image, of course, is the black screen signifying the end of the film, whose obscurity stands in for the literally unrepresentable thing in a manner analogous to the famous black pages inserted into Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767).

These black pages rear their head elsewhere on the gallery walls, in the six photographs that make up Katja Mater’s ‘Density Drawings’ (2011). This series of Polaroids tells an abstract narrative of a constructivist architectonics assembled as much in the camera itself as in the gallery space. Mater painted and assembled geometric shapes on the gallery wall in the very corner where the photographs now stand, gradually filling the frame of the shot through double exposure and successive layering until, in the third image, the frame is entirely black. The following frames then chart the work’s own erasure back to an (almost) empty white image (a small white wooden triangle remains on the floor to commemorate the ephemeral work of which it was once a part).

In an essay from 1988, ‘Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia’, feminist film theorist Constance Penley suggested that it would be impossible to remake La Jetée, as the film is rendered ‘in its very structure’ unrepeatable by the demand of popular cinema for ‘pleasure without (obvious) paradox’. Since Penley’s essay, popular cinema has proved itself more amenable to paradox than might have been suspected, by (almost) remaking La Jetée, not once but twice: in the shape of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995) and Brad Anderson’s Happy Accidents (2000). Both films use Marker’s story of a man haunted by a photograph from the past to explore time-travel paradoxes and the relationship between a man from the future and a woman from the present. What both of these films miss from Marker’s original, however, is the scar of trauma – the ghost of the Second World War that looms so heavily in Marker’s film, and its imaginative transposition in the shape of the future apocalypse. In a sense, the various works collected in ‘Les Marques Aveugles’ also each seek to remake La Jetée, but instead of removing the stain of the trauma, it is precisely this aspect that must be insistently repeated, like so many black frames in the infinite cinema.

Robert Barry

Florian Germann

migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland

Only a privileged few people witnessed Florian Germann take a seat on the brass plate of his rudimentary vehicle, mounted on a 20-metre-long rail running through the migros museum’s gallery, dressed in the uniform of the Boy Scouts of America with his rear-end exposed after some trouser customization. He started the vehicle’s engine, the plate travelled along the rail, and must have deposited artist and machine on the ground at the far end, as the machine was not equipped with a brake. En route, as the oxidized surface of the machine’s seat demonstrates, he deposited sweat and urine, which can be seen with the vehicle mounted on a nearby wall where it continues to leak fluids, thankfully now just motor oil.

The performance and its remnants are not individually titled, but they are elements of ‘The Poltergeist Experiment Group (PEG), Applied Spirituality and Physical Spirit Manifestation’ (2011) a sprawling body of work developed for this, Germann’s first institutional show. It is the artist’s fourth major gathering of work, after ‘Ballungscenter aller Energien I&II’, (2007–8), ‘Werewolf of Vienna’ (2009) and ‘Saint Helena – Riches from the Depths of the Mountains’ in 2010. These titles alone do not do justice to the breadth of ideas that Germann brought together in each development to make unlikely alliances, and with them to write revisionary history.

In the migros exhibition he has used all of the space available as a laboratory for the creation of hybrid concoctions of filmic ghosts, the aforementioned Boy Scouts, church organs, resins, glue, blueprints, masks and small-town institutions. The key is the idea of the poltergeist, particularly as represented in film. An auditory collage of expositional dialogue from Hollywood productions offers visitors a guiding text, explaining the defining features of a poltergeist. Parapsychology links the ‘phenomenon’ to youthful excess energy, particularly male, which ties in nicely with Germann’s ongoing interest in energy and its transformative potential, not to mention his own boundless (if no longer teenage) enthusiasm that seems to bring about his sculptures.

Germann’s machines and sculptures connect unrelated objects with straight-faced earnestness, so the absurd conceptual links thus forged seem matter-of-fact. In previous works, the alchemy of metals has been a significant element, implying as it does natural resources, memes and monetary values. Here, ectoplasm, the manifestation of ghostly energy, is an additional facilitator, with hardened resin acting as an ersatz material. Germann’s assemblies and connections enjoy a flexibility not available within established structures. Collectively, they form a powerful means of malleable, open-ended storytelling. Several ideas emerge from this particular group: a portrait of America, not of its reality, but the myths of American life as presented by Hollywood cinema, where everyone can be a frontiersman and which prizes a petrified fictional idea of the historic. A place, a bit like Edward Said wrote of the Orient, which shows little resistance to the ideas projected upon it; a place with neither the personal nor the physical limitations of the real world. And then there is the portrait of the artist himself, a ringmaster who enjoys the myth-making of Joseph Beuys or the pissing bravado of Andy Warhol but who also, given his hands-on involvement in the fabrication of his works, creates follies and failures and embraces them all. His seat-less trousers, now hanging by the entrance, could as easily be the chaps of a fearless cowboy as the reluctant pilot’s garment of convenience. The artist is not heroic but human, identifying as closely with the scared youth as with the trailblazers of the avant-garde.

Aoife Rosenmeyer

Franz Erhard Walther

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff , Paris, France

‘Sternenstaub, herausgehoben’ (The Dust of Stars, Accentuated) was Franz Erhard Walther’s third solo exhibition based on his sprawling series ‘Sternenstaub’ (The Dust of Stars, 2007–09), which comprises 524 pencils drawings of personal anecdotes and historical events from the artist’s life, chronologically organized from 1942 to 1973. On single sheets of A4 paper, Walther drew one or two images alongside a few brief descriptive sentences, and then assigned a year to each drawn memory sequence. ‘Sternenstaub’ traverses the realms of literature, history, and visual arts, freely borrowing from the styles of the diary, the drawn novel, and the columns or chronicles of newspapers (the poster Sternenstaub 1968, for instance, includes a drawn reproduction of an article titled ‘Duchamp Dies at 81’). This systematic but imperfect recollection process is one of the bases of Walther’s practice, as well as a common interest shared by many conceptual artists and others from the 1950s until now (think of John Baldessari, Dan Graham, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven, Anri Sala, Francis Alÿs, Tacita Dean…).

In the middle of the exhibition space at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Walther placed three tables presenting his drawn plans for hanging the components of ‘Sternenstaub’, which he originally designed for his solo exhibition at MAMCO in Geneva in 2010 (the entire series is on view through February 2012 at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, and compiled in a book, The Dust of Stars: A Drawn Novel). The tiny, meticulously redrawn versions of each page require a reading glass to be examined. On the walls, as a counterpoint to those plans, Walther enlarged and redrew 42 drawings, as well as printing three of the original drawings as large posters. In this sense, the exhibition was a dismantling of the original ‘Sternenstaub’ grid.

Storytelling and anecdotes form the matrix of the legend of any artist, and Walther consciously participates in this process: the poster From Sternenstaub 1947–1949, for instance, depicts himself drawing as a small child. Another poster, the enlargement of a page labeled ‘1957’, illustrates Walther’s fascination for reproducing works such as Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire and Monet’s Rouen Cathedral. Walther also includes his drawn representation of some of his own previous art works, such as the performance of the 1st Work Set (1963/9), consisting of 58 sewn fabric elements, thereby producing new accounts of their production and performance. This open-ended and inclusive strategy (or mise-en-abîme) has been crucial to Walther’s artistic practice. The fact that he uses his own history as fundamental source material also anticipates and emphasizes the mythologizing of his own work and of a wide range of the art of the 1960s and ’70s (which is so important for contemporary artists today).

In ‘Sternenstaub, herausgehoben’ the blown-up or close-up effects drew the viewer’s attention to the medium of drawing itself, from the composition to the texture of the pencil and paper. With these basic gestures, those formal manipulations metaphorically evoked a cosmos whose stars and their dusts had been scattered or spread out. They also revealed themselves as crucial empirical and aesthetic decisions relying on the appropriation of psychological and sociological approaches usually employed by art historians or art critics. This kind of retrospective analyzes the diverse conditions within which Walther’s inspiration came. While his historical research is autobiographical, it confronts the presupposed objectivity provided by the archival document (reports, stories or photographs) with the subjectivity and inevitable partiality of memory or history. Therefore, the nature of ‘Sternenstaub’ remains unsolved: is it an archive, an artwork or an autobiography?

Caroline Soyez-Petithomme

Christian Friedrich

P/////AKT – platform for contemporary art , Amsterdam, Netherlands

How beautiful and calm our planet looks when viewed from outer space. Massive bodies of water dotted with land gently and silently pass through our field of vision. From yet a greater distance, the view is framed by a satellite’s window through which the globe looks even more abstract and otherworldly. But this is only the beginning of the latest film, Untitled (2011), by Christian Friedrich. What follows in the next half an hour is much less peaceful, as the satellite’s view (which the artist borrowed from the German Aerospace Centre), and the homemade footage of a young man playing in the ocean’s shallow waves rapidly alternate with each other as well as with their own negative, creating a strobe-like effect that forces its way into the viewer’s eye.

Friedrich’s slightly disturbing film lays bare the foundation of the moving image as a succession of still images, as well as the physical limitations of our vision. Because the eye is not adapted to seeing each image separately, an image that has already disappeared stays visible on our retina and consequently blurs with the new one being projected. Much like the visuals, the work’s loud and overpowering soundtrack (belonging to the filmed footage and edited simultaneously, creating an unsettling rhythm of computer-generated noise) resonates in your ear when it is no longer there, giving the silences in between the violent waves of sound a somewhat eerie quality. It becomes clear that what is being seen and heard is not actually there in the film at all, but rather is an afterthought of the brain, which is trying to catch up with what it has so forcefully been confronted with.

Still, there are occasional moments that show a captivating play of images, as the clouds that cover the globe seamlessly sync with the foam that floats over the wet sand of the beach. At one point, the setting suddenly changes and the camera moves up in a lift of a building that is reminiscent of an old futuristic movie. The strobe-like effect begins again as the camera moves through the water of an indoor swimming pool, the sound subdued to fit the new underwater setting. For a moment the camera rises above the water and everything seems normal. The view of a tranquil blue sky above rows of conifers makes us briefly forget the hostility of what has come before. The flashing images have stopped, the colours have returned to normal, the soundtrack is silent. The alternating images return in a final burst of visual rhythm before the film turns black.

Whereas in past solo presentations Friedrich flooded the viewer with dramatic and sexually-orientated visuals, often combining sculpture and video to create a total installation, it was a significant change that here he showed ‘just’ one untitled work. Regardless of the simplicity of this show, the artist was still able to ask some fundamental questions about our vision and the role and function of the image. Instead of making the physical world visible, he makes the boundaries of the visual physically present. Because the film cannot be seen properly without the shortcomings of the human eye, the body – and its ability to see – become both subject and object of the work, rendering obsolete one of the most basic distinctions in the history of art.

Irene de Craen

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva

Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy

In his book Naturalis Historia (Natural History, 77–79 AD) Pliny tells the story of a famous contest between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios as to who could paint the more life-like picture. Although Zeuxis’s painting of grapes was so realistic that birds flew down to eat them, he asked Parrhasios to pull aside the veil covering his work, only to discover that the veil was painted – so Parrhasios won. ‘A triumph of the gaze over the eye’, noted Jacques Lacan about this anecdote in essay The Line and Light (1964).

This exhibition by Portuguese duo João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva at the Museo Marini Marini (the first hosted by an Italian institution, following their recent solo shows at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Le Plateau in Paris) revolves around a parallel desire to ‘feed’ the eye, as if it’s possible to somehow feel, touch and ‘eat’ images, instead of simply grasping them with the mind. But, of course, it’s the unsatiable craving for an object of desire that cannot be seized.

Installed in the underground basement of the museum, the exhibition (curated by Nuno Faria and Alberto Salvadori) is plunged into darkness, so that the works emerge like epiphanies. Most are mesmerizing silent 16 mm films (14 in total, all less than three minutes long); many were shot by the artists with a high-speed camera, which can turn a second of live action into slow-mo, calling to mind both Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs and Zeno’s famous paradox of the tortoise that will never be over-taken by Achilles in a race, ‘since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead’, as Aristotle put it. In other words, no matter how many times a movement is isolated, whatever moves will continue to escape us. As a result, Gusmão and Paiva seem happy to apply a good deal of irony to their own hunger for visions.

The theme of edibility resurfaces again and again here. One of my favourites films in the show is Peppeninu and the Enchanted Food (2010), which was produced by the Fondazione Brodbeck in Catania, which co-organized this exhibition and which is currently hosting a sister show by Gusmão and Paiva. Shot in a Sicilian puppet theatre in Catania, the main character – a starving Peppeninu – tries to eat an elusive, magic plate of spaghetti that a sorceress has placed in front of him; an armed chevalier finally rescues him. Spaghetti Tornado (2010), again shot in Catania, is the tongue-in-cheek title of a film about the production of wax candles and the bronze sculpture modelled after it. In Bread, Tea and Bao Game (2011) food and drink are transformed into unidentified flying objects, while in Solar, the Blindman, Eating a Papaya (2011), the protagonist’s inability to see results in such a sensual display of taste and touch that it was almost embarassing to watch. The oddest and uncanniest of all the moving images here was that of a live cowfish on a plate (Cowfish, 2011): with its eyes wide open, it flaps its fins as if it could miraculously fly away. We know it won’t, but we keep on staring and longing for the imposssible to happen.

The exhibition is titled ‘Non c’è più niente da raccontare perché questo è piccolo, come ogni fecondazione’ (There’s nothing more to tell because this is small, as is every fecundation) and the artists are keen not explain what this might mean. Instead, they prefer to quote the favourite motto of Alberto Caeiro – one of the heteronyms used by the great poet Fernando Pessoa: ‘Things have no meaning: they exist. And their existence is their meaning’.

Barbara Casavecchia

MadeIn Company

ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China

MadeIn Company is a ‘cultural production’ company founded by the Chinese conceptual artist Xu Zhen in 2009. By dissolving his identity into a commercial company rather than an artist collective, Xu explores the possibility of a contemporary artist dissolving into China’s larger ideological constructs. MadeIn’s latest show, ‘Action of Consciousness’, is a conceptual sequel to their previous show, ‘Physique of Consciousness’, shown this spring at Long March Space in Beijing. Both titles are a play on the Chinese word for ideology, which translates into English literally as ‘form of consciousness’. MadeIn Company has taken the troubled relationship between art and ideology as its theme and has branched it out in separate formal directions, where each series of works seems deliberately to seek out the troubling aura of ideology in different ways.

‘Action of Consciousness’ takes up both of ShanghART’s Shanghai spaces. Upon entering Space 1 visitors are confronted with Play-1 (all works 2011), a sculpture of a naked African tribeswoman with a massive lip plate and flamboyant headdress hanging from the ceiling in Japanese style rope bondage or kinbaku. The double meaning of ‘bondage’ here is potentially more disturbing than amusing to Western visitors, but to a local Chinese audience who do not suffer from post-colonial slave-trade guilt, this play on cultural motifs is simply an association of fetishistic Asian sexual practice with fetishistic African cultural practice. However, when one considers the powerful role China is currently playing in Africa, the work grows more ideological.

The eponymous work of the show features a large white box with no top, from which dozens of unique works created by MadeIn are thrown into the air and fall back into the box. Works with titles such as Animals’ Conception of History and Sexy Life appear for a fleeting instant above the walls of the enclosure only to fall back into oblivion. This ‘Action of Consciousness’ is possibly the mind of the artist, where ideas form and coalesce or get thrown back into the soup of the unconscious.

Space 2 opens up into a den of overbearing mock-African-style polyurethane foam sculptures, each called Divinity. Works such as Divinity – Human Insect Hybrid, Divinity – Marx, Divinities Community – 01 and many others crowd one’s mind with references both real and fake, in a style that takes the representation of divine form very seriously, threatening viewers with their tongue-in-cheek contemporary voodoo. Next to these fake deities, a series of photo-realistic paintings depicting scenes of decrepit poverty in the Chinese countryside hang on the walls. The paintings are each mounted in gaudy gold frames, created to be hung in the ostentatious mansions of wealthy Chinese collectors.

‘Action of Consciousness’ is an exhibition that is easy to enjoy but hard to grasp. MadeIn have stated their aim to create misunderstandings through a mediation of media. Perhaps this is a good interpretation of ideology – media’s ability to create a multiplicity of misunderstandings; or, what Giorgio Agamben describes as the liturgy of democracy. 

Colin Chinnery

Kostis Velonis

Signal Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden

If ‘The Promise of Happiness’, Kostis Velonis’s exhibition at Signal, seems oddly melancholic, it’s a bit thanks to Greece. The events that took place in the artist’s home country during recent months, along with the nation’s role in the European debt crisis, act as the backdrop for a series of new works that claim, according to the press release, to offer a ‘nuanced analysis of the Swedish welfare state’. With titles such as Proposal for a Monument Ready to Collapse (Welfare State) (all works 2011), the collection of sculptures, posters and slide projections on view point to the impending demise of social democratic models while at the same time alluding to the ways that their ideological underpinnings are expressed in design and architecture.

Velonis’s training as an architect is evident in both the material and scale of the sculptures, which consist mainly of wood, plywood, concrete and stone assemblages approximately the size of architectural models. Rather than supplying direct commentary on Swedish modernity, the works instead show a certain level of spontaneity and playfulness, using primary shapes and colours to form tentative and crude structures that are as allegorical as they are thrown-together. Works such as You Might be Able to Climb but Definitely You will Fall, an unfinished plywood staircase that forms a 90-degree angle as it leads from the floor to a nearby window ledge, hints at the risks of a society organized around competition and profit, while The Monument and its Break (How to Make Other People’s Failure a Part of your Social Advancement), a wood, acrylic and concrete sculpture, gives the impression of children’s building blocks that have been discarded. Other works, such as Untitled (After the Melancholy of Distance), feature crocheted objects as part of an attempt to link domestic and public spheres.

Despite their overwrought titles, Velonis’s sculptures have a sense of naïveté that downplays their significance as objects on the one hand, but which gave me a discomfiting sense of my own mastery on the other. This effect is reinforced by Earth People, a slide projection featuring an image of two cloth marionettes, one male and one female. Framed by this image, the works in the show begin to resemble props for a gloomy puppet show on the decline of Europe.

A more subtle contribution to this mise en scène is made by the gallery space itself: in order to access it, one first has to walk through an upscale restaurant and bar. This environmental dissonance, while effectively hinting at more recent shifts in ‘the Swedish model’, jarred my expectations enough to make me reflect on my own reasons for moving to Sweden from the United States last year (the promise of abundant state funding for the arts included). A diptych combining found posters by the Acceptera group and the Situationist International entitled The Individual and the Mass (ou nous irons jusuq’au bout), presented the problem as one of ‘quality and quantity’, of seeing things through to the end. In Greece, and elsewhere in Europe, the ‘solution’ has come to mean working harder and living with austerity. To put it another way, we’re encouraged to either accept what’s given, or feel the consequences. In this theatre of false alternatives, who’s pulling the strings? For Velonis, the answer seems obvious. We dance like marionettes…

Matthew Rana

Jannis Kounellis

Today Art Museum, Beijing, China

Jannis Kounellis’s solo exhibition at the Today Art Museum, ‘Translating China’, has something of an epic title. Can one Greek artist, even one with the standing of the 75-year-old Kounellis, hope to do so in a single exhibition? Kounellis spent two years preparing the show, much of that time on-site. For a leading exponent of the Arte Povera movement, a fruitful side-effect of China’s over-cranked development is the daily discharge and retrieval of building stuffs, clothing and objects and the continuation of manual methods despite their succession by the new. It is the perfect playground for a practice grounded in the mediums of life itself.

The museum’s main hall is occupied by Untitled (2010–11), a huge installation of iron panels erected in a castellated line; within its indented sections are fragments of Chinese ceramic bowls bound in varied grids with a simple crisscross of wire. The whole is nothing if not monolithic: an exhalation of architectural form in its rawest state. Blocks of coal mounted atop the panels evoke freight carriages, suggesting the installation’s continuation beyond the museum space – also an apt evocation of the repetitive sprawl of production and habitation in contemporary China. The individual sections, however, have a certain lightness. Broken, recovered, held, the traditional ceramic pieces complete the marriage of solidity and specimen that has long featured prominently in Kounellis’ work.

Walking round this great bulk, one comes upon a series of individual iron panels – Kounellis’s designated ‘canvases’. These rehearse the familiar formal language of his practice, but with a Chinese diction voiced through army coats, bowls of tea, weighing scales, tar mimicking a splatter of ink and a red lantern. These iconic works easily assimilate the local context through objects; though arguably too facile a way to ‘translate China’, in a different light they reflect principles central to Arte Povera: the affirmation of found objects and a porous relationship between art and daily life. They demonstrate the artist’s pliant mastery of form through the compulsion to hang, bind, crumple and pin materials down in their exit from function, bringing them to a new aesthetic state.

The second level of the museum is infused with the corrosive aroma of baijiu – Chinese grain liquor – rising from 4,600 full shot glasses laid out in a nine-by-three-metre ‘K’ shape. Sliding into spectacle, this is perhaps the least affective work on show, but on the walls around it hangs the tender series, ‘Watercolour’ (2010–11). In it, womens’ tops, of the tacky kind gleaned from cheap markets, have been placed in individual iron box-frames, pinned to the backing by a thick woven wire at the top and bottom. They make an enigmatic crowd, at once personal and readymade, flimsy yet powerful. Unworn by a human body, these clothes themselves become bodies of meaning. The evocation of ownership and wearing appears as a mine of cultural monologues relating life’s habits and events, almost audibly from inside each box. The rest of this floor is taken up with black and white prints recounting Kounellis’ works over the years, from 1966 until 2005, for a Chinese audience, and three informative video projections about the artist.

Thus ‘Translating China’ brings Kounellis’ mature practice into contact with a different context and its attendant material culture. The direction of the ‘translation’ posited for the exhibition is decidedly unidirectional, for here are fairly standard works by Kounellis that make use of locally-obtained objects and media as fuel for new installations – translating them into the artist’s particular formal language. A more fitting term for the results of this encounter – a likely one for a formal method such as his – might be ‘Kounellis in China’. But regardless of its name, this is a worthwhile show by one of the great figures of 20th-century and contemporary art.

Iona Whittaker

Antic Measures

Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin, Germany

It might once have seemed to matter, in some broader sense than that of personal taste or idle fancy, whether and how a triangle was placed next to a square on a bit of canvas. Now, such moves, except perhaps within a few esoteric practices, will probably be a cue to meditate on the arbitrariness of formal decision-making. Accordingly, ‘Antic Measures’, a group exhibition at Galerija Gregor Podnar in Berlin curated by Chris Sharp, considers the ways art acknowledges the futility of its own strategies. The show distils a particular tone – often histrionic, usually theatrical – in which necessity is reasserted on the other side of this acknowledgment, and purpose, subjectivity, even dignity, are reclaimed out of solipsistic freefall.

B. Wurtz’s The Secret of the Pyramids (1987) is a scattering of the pyramidal packaging from a china tea set across the gallery floor. Wurtz sidesteps the lumpen materiality of the cardboard by offering retrospection (are these ridiculously abject models of the ancient pyramids, as the title, handwritten on one of the objects, suggests?) and imaginative projection (or, alternatively, are they fragments of mysterious debris, fallen from outer space?). Looming in the background, Manfred Pernice’s Aufbau (2010) dispenses with such ambiguities, amounting to no more than its formal and material ingredients: four stacked polyhedrons pierced by a vertical steel rod. The ascension to provisional architecture out of basic carpentry is as pointless as it is purposeful. Details of its construction – bare staples, painting abandoned in mid-stroke, a handle on a facet which offers no pull – generate a language out of a disregard for niceties of finish, in fact making it contingent upon that disregard. And yet there is a perverse tenacity, even desperation, in Pernice’s conversion of formal conjunctions into material construction, the abstraction of a triangle becoming a sheet of bevelled plywood. The transformation recalls Wurtz’s self-imposed rules for assimilating found objects as sculptural components: they should ‘have to do with clothes, food or shelter’. Wurtz’s inverted carrier bags, hung on steel wires (Untitled, 2007), do resemble cartoon ghosts, or pockets emptied of necessary change. There is an echo of Joseph Beuys’s symbolism here – conflating the material and the moral – but Wurtz applies his rules to whimsical configurations that would have fallen well outside Beuys’s functional remit.

The show’s various architectural conceits, all clearly going nowhere as they strive upwards, suggest that sculpture is a temerity that ought to be countered by a measure of its own absurdity. The tapering tower of Wurtz’s Untitled (1993) – plinth to wooden block to tin can to white sock – becomes more abject with each step from minimalism towards the bodily. The gallery is dominated by Ian Kiaer’s Endnote, Pink (Inflatable) (2010), which, like the sock and the plastic bags, is a displacement of space without the fortifying dimension of mass. A balloon made of polythene sheets, roughly taped together and attached to the floor by lengths of sticky tape, is kept inflated by a cheap electric fan heater. The ceiling’s concrete joist squashes down its swelling form. The piece is primitive, like sculpture reinvented from scratch in a parallel universe, as well as a sophisticated take on painting. With one half composed of a slightly browner shade of plastic, the shell suggests an inflating into sculptural form of a Rothko-esque abstraction.

But as wishy-washy aesthetics are firmed up by being shown to derive from materialistic imperatives, so formalism serves up an anthropomorphic symbolism, which, in turn, designates the show’s various architectural metaphors as default modes – another means of implying a figure. Like Michael Andrews’s ‘Lights’ paintings – which adopt the image of a hot air balloon as an emblem of floating subjectivity – Kiaer’s balloon, its fragile skin a tremulous meniscus held in place by air pressure within and without, is rich with psychological suggestiveness. On the wall behind, each of ten A4-sized black and white photographs in Jochen Lempert’s Stadtstrukturen (2004) shows two grounded pigeons against an urban backdrop. This is another humanistic conceit, and a romantic one at that. The prints, fraying a little at the edges, formally reflect what they picture: the faded aspirations of 1960s’ city planning, along with the relinquished flight of the shabby pigeons.

The inclusion of Esther Kläs’s lino prints (3 Solitäre, 2011) – gestural doodles on tall paper hangings – is perhaps intended to add another facet to the theme of formally manifested subjectivity. But Kläs’s effusive handwriting, even as it is once removed of objectivity by the printing process, registers as callow self-affirmation in the context of a show which otherwise manages to transmute such energy into a fiction of itself, or embody it, vicariously, within various unreliable stand-ins. For example, a bendy rubber horse that would fit in the palm of your hand – the protagonist of Lou Hubbard’s video Hack (2006). Attached to a length of string, it is squeezed through loops, or dragged along a ruler that measures its progress, notch by notch. The operatic aria on the soundtrack melodramatizes this Sisyphean narrative, yet Hubbard gets beyond irony to evoke the futility of human striving in general, and of art-making in particular. The various manoeuvrings of the toy are heavy with the sense of art emerging from the other side of extreme boredom, as T.S. Eliot claimed it does. Like the pigeons glimpsed through Kiaer’s sepia-tinged polythene, it seems the horse could really overcome its submission to the string and run, if only through the boozy green lens of a gin bottle through which its image is fitfully refracted. Or are such illusions a sign that the art has maintained its integrity by forcing the viewer to compensate by projecting onto it the purpose it lacks?

Mark Prince

Aleks Danko

Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

In the ink on paper work Point to Point (2011), a mirrored profile portrait of a man loosely resembling the artist Aleks Danko appears like an apparition of Pinocchio mutely staring out at the viewer, as if luring him or her to speculate as to the personality of the man behind the cheaply fashioned mask. Hung across three walls of Sutton Gallery are six more variously distorted and comically simplified renderings of the human face, several so anaemically detailed that, although legible, they deter any sort of emotional response; the mode of recognition is, rather, more akin to the cold registration of a statistical fact. From this perspective – in its strategic complication of the relationship between artist and artwork – ‘Pointless’ might be understood in the context of Danko’s enduring suspicion of the artist-as-oracle, which has remained a feature of his practice since his debut solo exhibition in 1970. In this particular exhibition, the possibility of encoding – while simultaneously withdrawing – subjective qualities into the content of an artwork is given its most provocative expression in the sculptural centrepiece PHHHHHHHIT (2011), a work that might be filed under the category of ‘modified readymade’.

A collaboration with the sound artist Dean Linguey, the work consists of a professional table-tennis table with four holes cut into the table-top; through each of the holes a palpitating speaker-cone protrudes upwards, causing the pile of table-tennis balls accumulated in each to quiver synchronously. The speaker-cones’ palpitations are generated by a looped Linguey composition, which is in itself inaudible to the human ear, and can only be perceived indirectly, through a series of relays: 1) the visual movement of the speaker cones; 2) the corresponding movement and rhythmic clicking of the table-tennis balls as they shift within the cones; 3) the LCD display panel on the CD player deposited below the table-tennis table. Every thirty minutes the speakers’ play back a (silent) crescendo, which triggers an audio amplification as the hollow plastic globes grow increasingly agitated in their nests, with some of these overflowing and bouncing onto the table, and a further few dropping onto the linoleum floor. According to Danko’s instructions, every two hours gallery attendants replenish each speaker-cone with exactly fifty-three table-tennis balls.

Two vacant chairs arranged adjacent to PHHHHHHHIT encourage the viewer to observe the work for longer durations. In the entertainment-parlour atmosphere of the exhibition they are reminiscent of umpire’s seats, functioning to ensure the courtside comfort of the viewer. And indeed, it is in the context of the suggested analogy between art and game – in the recasting of exhibition as tournament – that Danko and Linguey’s contraption triggers its uncanny effect. For despite bearing no immediately striking human resemblance, in the compositional structure of PHHHHHHHIT, complete with its predetermined periodic eruptions, overflows and scatterings, the artists have built a perverse model of a viewer into the artwork itself. Caught in a perpetual state of neuronal unrest, the artwork-as-viewer parodies by mechanical means the ideal spectator’s moment of illumination in front of a great work of art. By laying the blueprint for this endlessly stuttering mechanical mimesis, Danko and Linguey impishly gesture towards the inexhaustibility of interpretation, a game whose rules are constantly re-written and whose outcome is perpetually deferred.

David Homewood

Temporaneo

Various venues, Rome, Italy

The press tour for the ‘Temporaneo’ (temporary) project – comprising five works of art installed on Rome’s periphery – held one Saturday in late October was part magical mystery tour, part pilgrimage. And if hallucinations weren’t induced either by drugs or fatigue, a near delirium was felt by the time we reached the fifth and final art work, signalling that we had come far from the comfort of the Saturday brunch-style gallery openings that have become de rigueur in the Eternal City. Craft beer? Cake? A selection of salamis? Alas, not a sausage. For once the art was left to fend for itself – and with profound results.

Indeed, the aim of ‘Temporaneo’, which was to present site-specific public art in unusual architectural settings with a view to provoking reflection away from Rome’s historical centre, was well conveyed by the five participating artists – drawn from across Europe – and the Italian curatorial team, comprising Ilaria Gianni and Cecilia Canziani of Nomas Foundation, who hosted the entire project in conjunction with the IMF Foundation. Each artist spent a number of days at their location, chosen to reflect the notion of architectural contemporaneity in a city and country that are widely and unjustly believed to be culturally stagnant.

Those locations included the Arts Faculty at Rome’s Sapienza University, where Italian artist Flavio Favelli covered the concave windowed entrance to its courtyard with blown-up titles taken from banned 1970s pornographic film posters (Supervietato, 2011), Roma Tre University where Austrian born Hans Schabus rearranged objects in its courtyard (Appostamento, 2011), and the Ponte Della Musica, a new footbridge connecting two of Rome’s northern boroughs. The latter work – entitled simply Roma – which was viewed at the tour’s end by assembled critics, featured Romani music played through speakers mounted within permanent openings in the floor of the footbridge, which offer a view of Rome’s river Tiber and its banks. The music was performed by Romani violinist Adrian Bilteanu and recorded by Italian born, Holland-based artist Andreotta Calò, who befriended the musician whilst staying in Rome.

The issue of the Romani in Italy attracted close artistic scrutiny that weekend, with Rome-based centoxcentoperiferia (100% Periphery) – a project that aims to display art in places normally deprived of cultural activity – displaying the results of an arts education programme for the child inhabitants of the Campo Nomadi di Via Salone Romani camp on the capital’s outskirts. That project – curated by Donatella Pinocci, Donatella Giordano and Simone Martinelli in collaboration with American artist Lisa Wade – who made two stop-motion videos with the children – is subject to the same unavoidable problems faced by Calò’s work. Namely, the difficulty in squaring the desire for art to contribute to society with the minimal impact that it can actually have in reality. That impact is often inverse to the grand symbolic gestures that the artist evokes. On Saturday 22 October, as the press looked on, Adrian Biltenau walked beneath the Ponte Della Musica, miming (though not obviously so) to the music he had recorded, as it played through discreetly placed speakers. Traditional Romani songs were mixed with musical phrases from the Italian national anthem, inviting the press audience to reflect on the poor living conditions and prejudice that the Romani people – some of whom have set up shelter along the river’s banks – live with daily. Yet such a statement served more than anything to confound rather than solve any of the problems inherent to the integration of the Romani across Europe. For example, the violinist was way out of reach of the audience: a distant, separate being who had been chosen to perform specifically because he wasn’t Italian, whereas all but one of the press were. In this sense the violin, heard across the backdrop of the Tiber, situated close to the Milvian Bridge – where Emperor Constantine won over his rival before putting an end to the persecution of the Christians – mourned after a potential promise perpetually offered by art, but never delivered upon. Upon the Ponte della Musica, and at the Campo Nomadi di Via Salone one day later I experienced the novel sensation of guilt for having dedicated so much time over the years to writing about art in its political capacity – a turn in perception which is yet to be fully played out. But for now it seems clear that if anything positive resides in art, it must be sought not in its political capacity, but perhaps in the gap between what it promises and what it actually offers. In this space art’s true potential might be leveraged, however limited and off-centre its concrete scope might be.

Indeed, ‘Temporaneo’, which translates as ‘temporary’, alludes not only to the one-month duration of the show but to a de-centring tendency bought about by the lack of a concrete central point around which the show might revolve. Navigating its five works in itself presents something of a hunt, for which the reward is the invocation to reflect for a while. Visitors who make it to the Auditorium Parco Della Musica specifically to look at Kosovan-born Petrit Halilaj’s They Are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II (2009) – a chicken coop in the form of a large wooden space rocket, replete with its flightless inhabitants – are encouraged to consider with due seriousness what they might otherwise have passed flippantly in a museum. For it is possible to pass anything more or less flippantly in the generic art-institutional setting, given the crowds, the shops, the cafès and above all, the museum’s obligation not to reflect, meditate or engage but to educate. It’s a word which evokes Tony Blair at his popular zenith posturing as if personal development could be packed into a sound-bite. Education moves neatly via carefully construed steps that aim towards a given end. Reflection is less predictable and more in keeping, arguably, with the nature of artistic creation. In reflecting, new discoveries can be made.

It is in this spirit that the contribution of Claire Fontaine – the Paris-based artist collective – best delivers its message. Consisting of an illuminated tube light sign spelling out its title, Siamo con voi nella notte (We are With you in the Dark, 2011), can be found on the grounds of the Teatro India (Theatre India), in a crumbling former industrial area of Rome. The work, best seen at night, is a demonstration of solidarity for activists and socially engaged people the world over, but was conceived in particular as a show of support for the occupiers of Rome’s Teatro Valle, which continues to push for new legislation to enable the Theatre to become a commonly owned entity, free from State and private intervention. ‘We are with you in the dark’ is perhaps what art ought to be saying to the Romani, the Palestinians, the Libyans, the Afghans, the Iraqi and Iranian people, those camped at Wall Street and at St Paul’s. Though art must not stop there. It must be seen to be there in the dark with them. ‘Temporaneo’, like so many politically motivated art projects, is testament to this fact.

Mike Watson

Rohini Devasher

Nature Morte, New Delhi, India

In India’s postcolonial narrative, science – cast as an agency of modernity – enjoyed a certain cachet as a temporal Nehruvian counterpoint to the spiritual Gandhian idealized rural. However, barring perhaps its nominal presence in the bronzes of the pioneer modernist sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee’s half-imagined flora and Piscean forms, science seems to have failed in finding much currency in modern Indian art. Mithu Sen’s anatomical drawings and the neurosis-laced canvases and mock science-pedagogy of Abhishek Hazra’s ludic video installations are some instances of science providing, however incidentally, content. However one of the most candid, if somewhat nerdish, engagements with science can be found in the works of New Delhi-based artist Rohini Devasher.

Early in her career Devasher – who trained as a printmaker – was inspired by Goethe’s Urpflanze, or the archetypal plants – as much a poetic as it was a quasi-scientific construct that was acknowledged by Charles Darwin. Initially to explore what Goethe described as ‘the essential form with which, as it were, Nature always plays, and from which she produces her great variety’ and later to study any system that could spontaneously organize itself, Devasher found her niche by adopting a counter-intuitive tool – digital technology – or, more specifically, video feedback. She plays with the parameters of ambient light to allow the feedback to throw up shapes and patterns. When layered in the finished video together these parts organize themselves – seemingly of their own volition – into an animated strange-yet-familiar shape-shifting simulacrum of the natural world.

Doppelganger (2011), a seven-minute, two-channel video, is an easy introduction to Devasher’s art and technique. Displayed on a tablet-sized LCD screen, it depicts two nearly identical dragonflies composed of intricate bits of anatomy created using manipulated video feedback stacked in layers which, when run, are rendered into a fictive – albeit cogent and convincing – morphological studies of the evolution of two dragonflies in a dazzling, mercurial metamorphoses. Along with Devasher’s other similar works, Doppelganger spans the chasm between the empirical and the imaginative to claim the fertile ground of the intuitive, to reinstate it as the shared core of the seemingly dichotomous pair of disciplines: art and science. In the process Devasher not just questions dogmas around the Creation and the natural phenomena, but ropes in science to further the debates on originality and authorship.

Equally viscerally conceived is Bloodlines (2009), a video and print installation consisting of a 45-minute-long single channel video projected in loop along side a large digital print of the entire genealogy of parents organisms become superimposed in the video to produce a variety of offspring. Devasher was already into almost-autonomously generated forms when she chanced upon militant evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins’ automatically generated forms called ‘biomorphs’ that visitors to his web site could help generate through a JAVA applet. Devasher cites Dawkins’ proposition as an inspiration for her – that both the variety and the complexity in the natural order are accidental results of inexhaustible combination of genes in different permutations – but gives little impression that she has joined in in Dawkins’ campaign against God. This selective approach to using theories along with often redundant use of jargon makes her depth of engagement with science as an artist suspect at times – given too that she has no grounding in the subject.

Yet, it is in her wide-eyed curiosity that one discerns a Nehruvian secular and sincere equation with science. The levels of abstraction and complexity in Arboreal (2011) – a 15-minute-long video and a series of large prints derived from it – signal a departure for Devasher. The video is constructed by manually layering 700 layers of video to mimic – by repeating a pattern of video feedback inspired by the Lindenmayer system in formal grammar often used to model plant growth – the complexity of a tree’s branching. The large video projection that seems to be a series of dissolving images of ghoulish canopies of leafless trees caught in the glare of car headlights recall scenes from the horror movie, The Blair Witch Project (1991). The series of stills from the video of full-fledged trees share their eeriness with Olympia the automaton doll, a character from 19th-century popular horror fiction cited as one of the instances of the uncanny by Sigmund Freud in his seminal essay ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). ‘The uncanny’, writes Freud, ‘is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ Hovering between the ‘old and long familiar’ real and the unreal, their existence owing to digital and metaphorical narcissistic doubling, and the ambiguity of their status both as the subject and object of both the video cameras and the viewers’ gaze, are some of the many possible Freudian readings Devasher’s ‘trees’ lend themselves to.

Hemant Sareen

David Rosetzky

Australia Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia

David Rosetzky’s video How to Feel (2011) features a group of six distinctly middle-class Australians partaking in an apparently ritualistic activity – equal parts dance rehearsal, group therapy and gymnastics routine – in an inner-suburban warehouse. Staged in the absence of a leader or instructor, the characters’ frank exchanges and peculiar choreographed movements occur as though in an imaginary space, separate from the pressures of everyday life. At the same time, within this space appearances of the everyday – such as sitting quietly in a group, or shielding one’s face when embarrassed – become charged with a special significance.

Developed in collaboration with choreographer Stephanie Lake and writer and theatre director Margaret Cameron, the process of the work’s production mirrors its central theme of social exchange. To write the script, Rosetzky first conducted separate interviews with cast members then combined the transcripts into a pool of collective narrative information. This was continually refined during the rehearsal process, during which every performer learnt each of the six roles. The finished version of the work conveys a palpably humanistic message in which apparently personal problems, (‘I think I’m that sort of person…’, ‘I would like to be…’, ‘I don’t want…’, etc.) are depicted as universal dilemmas; individual experiences and memories dissolve into the film’s collective body.

Using the video’s structure, Rosetzky questions the relationship between subjective experience and self-representation. One of the artist’s most structurally complex works to date, How to Feelcomprises four sections, each containing approximately 14 scenes that are repeated in more or less the same order. Once the same point is reached in the following section, certain characters and texts are rotated; participants then deliver lines previously voiced by someone else in the group. This has the effect of eerily forming and re-forming the characters’ onscreen identities, of separating their visual appearance from the content of their speech.

But there is a further, more interesting disjunction located between the work’s portrayal of a neurotic, pathos-saturated inner world on the one hand, and on the other, the strangely anti-emotional tenor of the mildly boring viewing experience. It could be argued that, with its highly confessional tone, the video’s failure to elicit an equally impassioned response from the viewer undercuts its efforts to problematize the experience and concept of identity. Yet this possible weakness also stands as How to Feel’s ambiguous achievement. Drawing as it does from an eclectic range of moving image vocabularies, from indie cinema to melodrama, Rosetzky’s work is perhaps most indebted to televisual advertising strategies. And indeed, in its awkward attempt to foster a succession of fleeting intimacies between the viewer and its shape-shifting characters, it ultimately operates like a failed advertisement for social difference.

Yet despite its attractive cast, beautiful cinematography and gentle soundtrack by composer J. David Franke, the oneiric vision of cathartic communion presented in How to Feel remains deficiently seductive. The characters’ utter self-absorption – expressed through endlessly monotonous verbal exchanges – produces a fundamentally alienating effect, more dully repellent than remotely alluring. A high-gloss, fragmentary image of social togetherness, How to Feel succeeds in distilling an image of a mode of individualism that insists, above all else, on calling attention to itself in an overtly self-conscious fashion.

David Homewood

Jakkai Siributr

The Art Center at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

Out of 178 countries, Thailand ranked 153rd in a 2010 press freedom index released by Reporters Without Borders. The last few years have seen an increase in lese-majesty cases, a local law that renders insults to the Thai monarchy a criminal offence punishable with up to 15 years in prison. In 2005, 18 cases were prosecuted in court; in 2009, 164; and in 2010, 478. Perhaps consequently, unlike other Southeast Asian cities, Bangkok does not have a coherent underground art scene in the manner we might associate with, say, the Indonesian artist-activist collective Taring Padi, who produce agitprop posters and street theatre; or the preponderance of ephemeral performance art made in Yangon in order to avoid military censure; or the overlapping art, music and graffiti scenes that are conspicuous in Manila. Art that is overtly oppositional to the dominant, conservative and normative understandings of Thai culture and society, or art that solicits such contextualization, is atypical in Bangkok, with only a few exceptions.

In a context where critical debate in public is, at best, discouraged, Thai artists generally take an oblique approach to the very idea of critique. The writer Dennis Lim recently commented perceptively comment about the works of famed filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul in the September 2011 issue of Artforum: ‘[in Thailand] the spiritual is political’. Thailand’s culture is a deeply animistic one, which places a high social premium on the production and maintenance of ‘good’ images. Consequently, superstition and myth-making usually inform the narratives and images of state-sponsored representation. And it’s on these terms that some of the more interesting Thai artists have begun to unsettle received understandings.

Thai artist Jakkai Siributr’s practice is based in stitching, embroidery and other craft methods that engage with the iconography of popular but bastardized versions of Buddhism: from the idols of a current cult of amulet worship to the forms of the Thai yantra, designs that sponsor luck, power or protection. The title of his current solo show is ‘Shroud’, which refers to the animist practice of using dead bodies to ‘bless’ cloth, on which yantras are then often drawn. Shrouding doesn’t exist in Thailand; Siributr is interested in metaphors of concealment, ambiguity and potential revelation to address the hypocrisies, and occasional nonsense, that attend pervasive local versions of Thai culture and politics.

A large installation titled Evening News (all works 2011) hangs embroidered media images of last year’s Thai protests from a type of sacred string used in temple ceremonies to connect one to a higher being. Some of the images possess pathos (a lone woman cleaning up a pool of blood), others are smirk-inducing (soldiers with sexy young women), and others depict the protesters, including a misguided foreigner who publicly declared his intention to take the upheaval as an opportunity to loot. Behind this installation is a remarkable gold-coloured and sequined hanging, Come to Me, which features a central lone figure gesturing to the viewer to come forward, drawing on the generic pattern of the yantra to comment on the seductions of worship and belief.

Other embroidered wall-hangings – such as Realpolitik, Health and Hi-So – also disrupt received forms, or, more accurately, draw out the implications of hysterical worship. Go-go boys, minor celebrities, phalluses and Damien Hirst-style skulls are included amidst mandala-type shapes. At issue, of course, are the contradictions of an officially religious country that remains politically unstable and grotesquely materialistic. However, Siributr’s methods prove as interesting as the details of his concerns. Contemporary understandings of craft, as the academic Julia Bryan-Wilson has pointed out, also in Artforum, refuse a stable ideology. Artists who employ craft, from Grayson Perry to Ghada Amer, are diverse; and the politics and history of craft are skewed by the current contexts of a global labour force that is predominately female and forms of advanced capitalism that can assimilate the so-called alternative of the handmade.

Siributr’s works are clearly situated at the intersections of these understandings because they are endlessly disruptive. The seductions of his surfaces give way to provocative and disconcerting idiosyncrasies; they segue esoteric, personal and media imagery; and shift between the spectacular, materiality and questions of process. Perhaps, following Wilson, contemporary artists working with craft are uniquely positioned in this respect. The highly decorative impact of Siributr’s works should not be dismissed.

Brian Curtin

Linda Fregni Nagler

Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan, Italy

To speak of the disappearance of the subject when reflecting on the state of photography and its relationship to reality could appear to be a contradiction in terms – especially with regard to images from the early days of the medium. In Linda Fregni Nagler’s investigations into photography and the cognitive automatisms that dictate how we perceive the world, the disappearance of reality is explored in works that operate on the boundaries between illusion, the mise-en-scène and Duchampian notions of presence and absence.

In Photographies 1985–1998 (2000) Jean Baudrillard observes: ‘For illusion is not the opposite of reality, but another more subtle reality which enwraps the former kind in the sign of its disappearance.’ The photographic illusion of reality hides another truth: the photographed object does not endure but is able to conceal itself, to ‘disappear’. The visibility of the world – which photography imparts through the spatial–temporal alienation of a fragment of life – betrays its discontinuity, its fragmentation, its artificial temporality. The visible withdraws into invisibility.

Fregni Nagler analyzes the linguistic and anthropological implications of this process. The subjects of her work are anonymous 19th- and early 20th-century amateur or commercial photographs, typically of Japanese or American origin, which she collects in great quantities. The Italian artist’s interest in these images lies in their lack of authorship and their readymade quality, as well as their historical and cultural significance. Ferrotypes, magic lanterns and albumen prints are commonly collected and accumulated and classified according to genre, date, geographical region or, on occasion, other arbitrary criteria. In Fregni Nagler’s case, however, this passion for archiving is focused more on Michel Foucault’s notion of an archaeology of the present – the image of the past reflecting what is to become of the future.

Through a faithful reconstruction of these early photographs, the artist uncovers the archaeology of an era while revealing temporal and aesthetic discrepancies. Confronted with a new vision of the past, the viewer is invited to observe not only the accumulation of time but also the effects that photography has on our awareness of being.

This is a trope that, as emphasized by the title of the exhibition – ‘Shashin no Shashin’ (Japanese for ‘Photography of Photography’) – unites the world’s illusory elements under the banner of their disappearance. Fregni Nagler presented around 20 black and white images of subjects frequently found in Japanese photography of the Meiji period (1868–1912), such as scenes of daily life or representations of Eastern myths and legends. Series including ‘Snow and Rain’ (2009–11), ‘Whispering in Parlor’ (2010) and ‘Life on the Ocean Wave…’ (2010) reference the celebrated works of the so-called ‘Yokohama Shashin’ (Yokohama Photographers), in which the expression of the female is limited to cameos in artificial tableaux vivants.

Fregni Negler doesn’t omit any detail from her painstaking reconstructions. From the furniture and painted backdrops to the costumes, hairstyles and even the perspectives of the original images, everything is reproduced meticulously so as to reveal what the picture is hiding such as the stereotypes that feed our preconceptions of exotic oriental imagery. Emphasis is given to minor details, which are the only real trace of individual creativity in images obliged to conform to a convention.

In a number of images, however, Fregni Nagler has taken the liberty of introducing some variations on the theme, with minimal deviations that invoke new layers of meaning. Such is the case with The Yokohama Photographer (2011) two versions of which are included here: one at the start of the exhibition and one at the end. The first is a precise reproduction of the original while the second is an autobiographical work in which the artist substitutes herself for the protagonist (Self Portrait as Yokohama Photographer, 2011).

The value of the photographic readymade is contemplated in the final work in the show, which was a performance Things that Death Cannot Destroy (2011), which the artist presented on two successive evenings. The work re-creates apparatus of the magic lantern, in the form of a live projection of photographic material dating from the period 1870–1920, accompanied by a commentary. Devised as a two-screen installation of slides projected onto original magic lanterns, the performance offered a continuous stream of images from a bygone era. Fregni Nagler imparted a new lease of life into the photographs through this iconographic free-association and through the reading out of the image captions – dates, places, copyrights or even just the photographer’s personal observations – by a female voice. This dual presentation of photographic image and script (in a practice located between scientific narration and theatrical representation, shown in a ‘non-gallery’ context) created a historical counter-narrative that was suspended somewhere between an anthropology lecture, an interpretation of historical documents and a surreal narrative of the past.

Marinella Paderni

Brian Moran

Kynastonmcshine, London, UK

It is only too fitting that Brian Moran’s exhibition, ‘Engineering Consent 5 – The Soap Carving Contest’, be displayed at Kynastonmcshine. This project space opened in May inside the interview room of an old police station in Deptford; the architecture is detectably at the service of the administration of surveillance (for one thing, the toilets are still inside the cells). The American artist is not directly concerned with the physical conditions of policing, but since the inception of his ongoing project ‘Engineering Consent’, in 2005, he has been preoccupied with that subtle dynamic where coercion is achieved by means of psychological manipulation.

Part five of ‘Engineering Consent’, Moran’s Kynastonmcshine show sets out to investigate the wicked marriage of marketing and psychoanalysis, taking as a case study the soap-carving contests sponsored in the 1920s by Proctor & Gamble. His method is primarily that of an amateur researcher and, as is often the case with contemporary romances between art and the archive, facts are here fated to fiction: the exhibition simulates the aftermath of an imaginary contest, with artefacts and props arranged by the artist-storyteller to recount the tale of P&G’s advertising campaign for Ivory Soap.

On one side of the space, black banners proclaim the key adjectives ‘CLEAN’, ‘FUN’ and ‘GOOD’, while on the opposite wall the word ‘SUBMISSIONS’ looms ambiguously overhead. From the outset, it is clear that darkness is intended to contaminate the voice of a cheerful capitalism – Moran uses a puffy graffiti font, yet another layer of distortion to the ‘clean’ rhetoric of the industry. If the hanging placards provide the scenography, the three vitrines in the centre of the gallery are the stage. Inside, elegantly laid out on black, are dozens of translucent white statuettes that could be held comfortably in the palm of the hand. All of them were carved by Moran, who ‘submitted’ replicas of original entries from the Ivory era, as well as traditional folk carving tropes (the chain for example, an old favourite of wood whittlers), alongside more contemporary icons, such as a figurine of SpongeBob SquarePants. The arrangement mimics some of the original shows staged by P&G across the US, but more generally it refers to the format of educational displays, such as the ethnographic cabinet, with its spellbinding mixture of awe and horror. Not unlike ethnic specimens, Moran’s mini ‘Ivory’ soap totems are scarred by a history where power, subjugation and desire overlap to the advantage of the colonizer. 

In 1923, P&G hired Edward Bernays to devise a strategy for the promotion of Ivory Soap. As many will know from Adam Curtis’s documentary The Century of the Self (2002), Bernays was the nephew of Sigmund Freud (Moran included a miniature bust of the father of psychoanalysis inside one of the vitrines). To his uncle’s dismay, Bernays pioneered the redirection of psychoanalysis to commercial ends and introduced the advertising industry to the idea of an irrational consumer subject, whose unconscious desires could be manipulated to increase profits. P&G approached Bernays, lamenting that children hated soap. ‘And obviously,’ they said to him, ‘if they detest it as children, they’ll detest it when they grow up.’ From there, Bernays developed the idea for a school competition involving Ivory Soap, with the hidden objective of moulding the unconscious of the masses at its infantile crux.

Bernays’ scheme proved so successful that the carving contests became a phenomenon in their own right. Yet, inside the exhibition the participatory element that was part and parcel of the original contests is altogether absent. What we see are only the commodified symbols of folk cheerfulness, with Moran left as the only contestant. Weary of selling participation to the audience, he points to a history of participatory activities in symbiosis with the logic of profit. With this exhibition-exemplum the artist also demonstrates how capitalism is itself ‘creative’ in its relentless assimilation of all spaces, starting with that of fantasy, existing outside it.

It is hard to judge whether ‘Engineering Consent 5 – The Soap Carving Contest’ is noteworthy per se, or whether it is mostly its source material to catalyze the interest. This dilemma is premeditated though and has an alibi, at least insofar as Moran wants Kynastonmcshine to perform a function akin to that of a local museum, where the objects are first of all indexes of the stories of their making. Moran’s dedication to the index is an enduring one – for example, earlier episodes of ‘Engineering Consent’ presented series of pencil rubbings derived from the symbolism of corporate logos – and in its repetition betrays the artist’s commitment to investigative fieldwork. Let’s not forget, however, that the exhibition is a fictional remake and contains no authentic historical evidence. This does not automatically undermine its validity, but leaves us with the question of what it does for (or to) history by aestheticizing its documents and moving them inside an art gallery.

Giulia Smith

Beyond the Frame

The White Rabbit Collection, Sydney, Australia

The White Rabbit Collection was started just over a decade ago by Judith Neilson and her husband Kerr (founder of Platinum Asset Management). It focuses on contemporary Chinese art produced this century and is made visible to the public via the Neilson’s converted warehouse in central Sydney. As well as four floors of exhibition space, White Rabbit, which is non-profit, consists of a small theatre, a library, a teahouse and a very cool glass elevator that forms a kind of spine at the rear of the building. The gallery opened in 2009 and has since hosted five exhibitions, which have revealed only a fraction of the collection. It’s difficult not to be positive about White Rabbit – the Neilsons’ enthusiasm for the project is infectious: ‘We wanted to share with Australians and the world the best of Chinese contemporary art since 2000 – a turning point that I think of as the Big Bang’, states Judith Neilson on the gallery website.

The title of their current exhibition, ‘Beyond the Frame’ – which includes the work of 20 or so artists – promises, or at least hints at, a slight departure from the type of art that to date White Rabbit has previously exhibited – which has tended to be object-based, often monumental, and, even when immersive in nature, has invariably had a well-defined edge or border. So it was with some anticipation that I approached the gallery for this show, hoping to experience something less containable, more discursive, ephemeral, participatory, perhaps extending beyond the confines of the gallery, or works that even challenge their own collectibility.

Shi Zhiying, High Seas (2008)

The ground floor of the gallery is dominated by Shi Zhiying’s colossal oceanscape painting, High Seas (2008). Painted with rudimentary brush strokes it looks surprisingly photographic until you get to within diving distance, where the paint reveals itself. For Shi , who’s informed by Buddhist theory, oceans are as boundless as the mind. This makes the work borderless in an Agnes Martin or colour-field kind of way rather than by breaking through Joseph Kosuth’s ‘first frame’ (that of painting and art tradition) or ‘second frame’ (the institutional frameworks which surround cultural activity).

Upstairs, a section of the gallery has been partitioned off and the walls painted green. The room houses a series of black and white photographs by Lu Nan of prisoners in a Burmese prison on the Chinese border, Prison Camps in N. Myanmar (No.55) (2006). Functioning like an autonomous solo show within the bigger exhibition, Lu Nan’s photographs document the lives of people at the edge of society: opium and amphetamine dealers and addicts who have challenged authority and been strong-armed back in line. The images give a sense of waste, resignation and a desperate loss of both freedom and hope.

One of the most intriguing works in the show was also, in the end, the most convoluted and bemusing. Calm (2009) is a neat rectangular pile of building rubble on the gallery floor. On closer inspection the debris slowly moves up and down as if inhaling and exhaling like a living organism. Originally presented by artist Xu Zhen as a work produced by an unnamed Middle Eastern artist, Xu Zhen now chooses to assign the work to his collective/company ‘Madeln’. By shifting the goal-posts in such a way, Xu Zhen highlights how prejudice can affect interpretation – ‘we often see the things we want to see’, he states – but I’m not entirely sure whether this strategy improves Calm or destroys it. On one level, it adds complexity to the work, on another level though, it undermines a conventional semiotic reading of the work, which is quite disarming for the viewer.

The press release for ‘Beyond the Frame’ (the curator, by the way, is unnamed) points to a loose interpretation of the show’s title stating that the works ‘transcend frames and frameworks of every kind: window and picture frames, national borders, the confines of tradition, conventions about tools and techniques, the line between photography and animation – even the distinction between visual art and comedy.’ It goes on to quote jazz musician Charlie Parker who once declared: ‘Man, there’s no boundary line in art.’ As a counter to this you could add Frank Zappa’s famous quote: ‘The most important thing in art is the frame. For painting, literally; for other arts: figuratively – because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a “box” around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?’ This latter quote highlights a limitation of sorts, because although artworks can break beyond certain frames, they can never be completely frameless.

Although ‘Beyond the Frame’ might make a relevant strap-line for the entire White Rabbit collection – and is in keeping with Judith Neilson’s Big Bang theory – the exhibition felt curatorially under-developed, lacking in both precision and experimentation. The selected works were so varied that they seemed completely disconnected from one another, and it was disappointing that an exhibition which promised to go ‘beyond the frame’ – implying new frontiers and a challenging experience – felt familiar. Rather than identifying any peculiarities within the collection, or a temporary departure from White Rabbit’s tried-and-tested exhibition format (autonomous art objects contained within a conventional gallery setting), ‘Beyond the Frame’ stays well and truly within its own comfort zone.

Ian Geraghty

Paolo W. Tamburella

Caffé Florian , Venice, Italy

It was at the Caffé Florian, Piazza San Marco, in 1893 that Riccardo Selvatico and his friends came up with the idea of hosting an international Art Biennial in Venice, placing this historic venue at the centre of modern art history. It is now host to an ongoing arts programme that has, over the years, included a diverse array of predominantly Italian artists in a setting that – due to a lavish 19th century renovation – requires a bold intervention. For his show ‘Florian Bangla’ – curated by Stefano Stipitivich – Roman artist Paolo W. Tamburella chose to hang traditional Bangladeshi chicken baskets from the ceiling of the café’s interior, above a looped documentary directed by Taredque Masud on the violent secession of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 (Muktir Gaan, The Song of Freedom, 1995). Ballooning at their bases, then tapering at their ends, as if modelled around huge beetroots or turnips, these baskets mimic some of the glasses in which the café’s stiffer drinks are served to its chic international crowd. The baskets’ large, lightweight frames clumsily occupy the delicate interior of Florian’s ‘Seasons’ room, with its elaborately decorated mirrors reflecting their bulbous forms. Yet, an aesthetic sympathy resonates between these foreign objects and their unlikely temporary home, perhaps due to Venice’s close trading ties with the East in the café’s heyday.

The baskets recall an earlier work by Tamburella, Murgi Prasad (Chicken Palace, 2010), for which the artist – who often produces art works and performances resulting from chance encounters – collaborated with a Bangladeshi chicken trader to help improve his sales by hosting a grand opening in the trader’s home city of Panam Nagar. In an adjacent room, a display of traditional Bangladeshi wood-carvings, together with a photograph of their carver – Babu Mia – are evidence of Tamburella’s interest in collaborating with tradespeople and craftsmen in order to bridge the gap between art and life.

For the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Tamburella repaired and transported a traditional wooden cargo boat, replete with several unemployed dockers, from the Comoros Islands. Prior to several of those dockers fleeing to seek asylum in France once the Biennale was over – a crossover of art into the grit of everyday life – they and the boat served as the Cormoros’s first pavilion, docked in front of the entrance to the Giardini. The traditional boat had been used to transport merchandise from container ships to the mainland of the Comoros Islands, and had recently been banned by the country’s President to comply with global standards. Tamburella read of the plight of the dockers and travelled to the Comoros to investigate. The ensuing collaboration saw the boat become to the 53rd Biennale what ‘Florian Bangla’ now is to Venice’s most historic café: both a curio and an intrusion. Whilst the chicken baskets look oddly at home in Florian’s ornate interior, the accompanying documentary presents an intentionally provocative statement.

But far from being antagonistic, the social value of Tamburella’s output resides in its grassroots engagement with a wide variety of workers. The resulting art works – often readymades – are records of relationships struck up and maintained through mutual respect. This ability to work alongside others without undue intrusion has extended to Tamburella’s collaboration with Caffé Florian, where the staff were employed in concocting a new cocktail for the menu, the ‘Bangla Martini’. Like the oddly-at-home chicken baskets such a gesture has served to augment rather than infiltrate the venue. In a tourist centre such as Venice, where Bangladeshi immigrants hawk cheap goods for a living, ‘Florian Bangla’ performs a balancing act. Both the café’s illustrious cosmopolitan past, and the difficulty immigrants have in assimilating into Italian culture are alluded to without being pointed. Yet questions are still raised in a way that allows for reflection on the complex topics of globalization and immigration. Meanwhile, in Piazza San Marco, the ever-present sight of Bangladeshi street hawkers being ignored by tourists speaks for itself.

Mike Watson

Atul Dodiya

Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, India

Atul Dodiya is a painter’s painter. Always has been. Never one to shy away from naming his peers, in Meditation (with open eyes) (2011) – an assemblage of painting and objects in a sequence of wall-mounted cabinets – Dodiya strings together reproductions of iconic art works including the Mona Lisa and The Birth of Venus with a painting from his own 2007 series ‘Saptapadi: Scenes from Marriage (Regardless)’. Never one to shy away from humour and irony either, Dodiya would have no doubt chuckled when he inserted his impish take on marriage (the ‘Saptapadi’ suite highlights marriage and courtship in India) into this roll call of canonical works.

Along with a dozen large paintings, Meditation (with open eyes) is the lone assemblage in the Mumbai-based artist’s exhibition ‘Bako Exists. Imagine’. This sprawling, autobiographical work contains found objects, iconic but visibly morphed portraits of various authorial voices, and paintings and self-referential sculptural works wherein figures and motifs from earlier paintings have transformed into sculptures. It trots out a loose genealogy of artists, poets, filmmakers and thinkers who’ve impacted Dodiya’s painterly practice.

Needless to say, the recursive creative impulses – text, a deep interest in the grammar of painting, self-reflexivity and hyper-referentiality – gathered together in the cabinets are amplified in the paintings. For these text-based paintings, Dodiya extracted 20 episodes from the more than 100 episodes that make up Labhshanker Thaker’s novel Bako Chhe. Kalpo (Bako Exists. Imagine, 2004). Subsequently, playwright and theatre director Naushil Mehta and poet Arundhathi Subramaniam translated the selected sections from Gujarati into English. (Dodiya’s engagement with text goes back three decades. Over the years he has replenished his rich practice with English, Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu language texts.) Eventually Dodiya chose 12 of the 20 episodes and rendered them though they were written in chalk on a blackboard. The canvas took on the monochromatic quality of a blackboard and the artist activated paint to simulate the look of chalk.

In the current show, the text comprises a dialogue between the boy protagonist Bako and Bapu, a.k.a. Mahatma Gandhi. Although Dodiya has been painting Gandhi since he was a young boy, as an artist he has been almost unequivocally invested in posing and resolving aesthetic dilemmas. As a result, Gandhi the towering political figure posed a conundrum for the artist, who otherwise avoids any overt political agenda in his art. However, a chance encounter with Gandhi’s view on being ‘an artist of non-violence’ resulted in sudden resolution and a key exhibition of watercolours simply titled ‘An Artist of Non-Violence’ in Mumbai in 1999.

Be that as it may, this new body of work does not appear to be a direct address to Gandhi. Although Gandhi is the interlocutor, the Gandhi of these paintings is less a political catalyst and more a benevolent grandfatherly figure. The underpinnings of the exhibition get reflected in a painting in Meditation (with open eyes) that contains a quote from Philip Guston: ‘It’s a long, long preparation for a few moments of innocence.’

The text in Dodiya’s works scuttles across the pictorial plane and is not always justified; in fact, it can often be found pushing into and even climbing down margins. Much like students who doodle around the text in their schoolbooks, the artist started doodling and filling in the blanks around the text. While some figures and objects recall earlier works, some are whimsically illustrative, while still others are obliquely whimsical. Layered in marble dust, figures in paintings such as Sucking on a mango and No studies, no keeping count (both 2011) are almost sculptural and in bas-relief. In contrast, the plant motifs in the paintings lurk in the shadows and appear to be all but absorbed by the canvas.

As painterly practices continue to get sandbagged and the art world fetishizes everything that is trendy and off-the-wall, Dodiya steadfastly continues to evolve and maintain ‘a long, long preparation’ towards those decisive moments of painterly melancholy and exuberance.

Gitanjali Dang

Waterworks

ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai, China

Organized by critic and curator Philip Tinari, ‘GENG Jianyi, WU Shanzhuan, YANG Fudong: Waterworks’ features three alumni of Hangzhou’s China Academy of Art, a school known for producing the country’s top conceptually-leaning artists. The show’s modest scale provides a welcome contrast to the concurrent Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair – a glitzy spectacle of mostly oversized, commercially driven paintings. Unfortunately, the exhibition floats its curatorial concept on tenuous links between its art works and the subject of water, or waterworks (as markers of modernization), missing an opportunity to depart philosophically from the fair’s typical mercantile objectives.

Geng’s two-part installation, The Content Is Disturbed By Its Shadow (2011), which functions as a pinhole camera, occupies the gallery entrance. The first half of the installation, a blacked-out room, forces visitors to grope in the dark upon entering. A glimmer of light produces a faint, upside-down projection of the installation’s other half: a stage-set-like space filled with furniture clad in tin foil. A bubble-blowing machine behind the pinhole further obscures the projection. The apparent objective is to demonstrate the disconnection between perception and reality vis-à-vis the installation’s two parts, ultimately providing, according to the wall text, a ‘metaphor for how information and ideas from beyond are transmitted into China’. Yet the installation lacks cultural context. The title ‘Waterworks’, we are told, takes inspiration from one of Geng’s earlier, unrealized works, Tap Water Factory – a panopticon-like maze begun in 1987 during the frenzy of China’s pro-democracy experiments. Connections like these should be elaborated if we are to accept the lofty curatorial claim that Geng’s pinhole camera serves as a metaphor for China’s reception of outside ideas.

Wu, a well-known pioneer of 1980s post-structuralism, is represented by ‘Butterfrog’ (1992–2011), a series of 420 illustrations, each relating to the mythical character the artist created by combining the names of the ‘butterfly’ and ‘breast’ strokes (‘frog swim’ in Chinese). Simultaneously playful and meticulously detailed, these colourful drawings and notations offer parodic takes on anatomical diagrams. Most impressive here is Wu’s dedicated research into various aspects of swimming and his vast quantity of illustrations realized over the past two decades. Individually framed and hung on a curved wall, the display vaguely conjures a body of water, though it is one more still than flowing.

Yang’s film, Yejiang/The Night Man Cometh (2011), comes across as the star of ‘Waterworks’. Executed in the artist’s signature black and white, surrealist style, the film features a cast of ghostly, forlorn characters in a snowy landscape. Yang is increasingly making the kind of art films that are so near feature-length quality that one wishes he were making feature films instead. Fans of Yang’s epic Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–7) will miss the slow pacing, precision and attention to historic detail of that earlier work. The Night Man more closely resembles Yang’s recent slick advertisement for Prada, First Spring (2010), as a highly seductive film that consciously manipulates its audience through old-fashioned special effects, enchanting visual juxtapositions and sweeping references to Chinese fables. The film is presented with related materials, including oil paintings and other inspirational research props. These materials’ strange display in glass casings resembling those of natural history and Chinese state-run museums marks one of the show’s more interesting curatorial decisions.

In ‘Waterworks’, Geng, Wu and Yang provide refreshing alternatives to Shanghai’s mainstream art world, awash in commercialized paintings. But rather than simply linking artistic themes with grandiose cultural claims, the curator might have produced a stronger exhibition by emphasizing the artworks’ breaking points – far more compelling than their coincidental ‘watery’ convergences.

Jenny Lin

Les amis de mes amis sont mes amis, hommage à Ján Mančuška

Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, France

‘Les amis de mes amis sont mes amis’ (The friends of my friends are my friends) is a group show paying tribute to the Czech artist Ján Mančuška, who died prematurely earlier this year. This intimate exhibition presents works especially created or selected for the show by artists with whom Mančuška had close relationships – friendship and/or artistic – offering him a poignant pictorial farewell.

The artists in the show either share a certain sensibility with Mančuška or have crossed his path in one way or another: Vladimir Kokolia was his teacher at the Arts Academy in Prague; Josef Bolf (with Jan Serych, Tomáš Vanek) was a member of the BJ group; Laurent Montaron was in residency in New York at the same time as Mančuška; Boris Ondreička played in the acid jazz duo ‘Les Band’ by his side. The works they exhibited contain echoes of the personal relationships they had with Mančuška himself, as well as revealing their shared interest in language. Roman Ondák’s piece Interview (2005), for example, is presented as a hypothetical conversation ‘coincidentally recorded when Roman and Ján met for the first time at an English course for beginners’ (with each new presentation Ondák changes his interlocutor’s name). In Jan Šerých’s traditional crossword puzzle (Untitled, 2011), the words refer to Mančuška’s personality; Ondreicka’s painted concrete poem Eyes (one winking) (2011) is composed of an upper and lower case ‘i’ while Jiri Skala’s video Foreign Bodies (2011) presents four performances in front of four monuments in Brno, during which people read texts of a story that does not exist, perfectly illustrating Mančuška’s games with narrative and time conventions.

Other works call upon absence, renunciation or melancholia, such as Trevor Lloyd’s pencil drawing Untitled Landscape (2011), which comes from a series of altered found images of planet Earth in which each work is made by simply eliminating the planet from the ‘landscape’, marking-out everything except selected bits of water, land or clouds, which remain as distant stars, thereby camouflaging the planet into a minimal nightscape. In I’m sorry (2005) Oskar Dawicki, dressed in a shiny blue jacket, confesses, ‘First of all, I’d like to apologize for this exhibition not being as good as it could be. It is as it is, though it could have been different. I’m sorry, really but well … It’s too late now. I apologize, I really apologize to everyone.’ Jamie Isenstein’s wall-mounted guitar (Rug Woogie V, 2011) has strings braided with coloured ropes, rendering it an anti-instrument, unable to produce a sound.

Ultimately, Laurent Montaron’s piece could be the moral of the exhibition. Hypothétique page de la fin du cinquiéme chapitre du Mont Analogue de René Daumal (Hypothetical End Page of the Fifth Chapter of Mount Analogue by René Daumal, 2009) is a page added by Montaron himself to Daumal’s unfinished novel, on which one can read that once upon Mount Analogue, a group of people met mountain guides singing in a language ‘where syllables with no meaning where juxtaposed one after another’ – just like the works in this exhibition. To which one could add: singing at the top of their voices, but in a poetic chorus.

Timothée Chaillou

Luke Dowd

Rod Barton, London, UK

In his book Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), Michael Fried draws attention to the use of workplaces in Jeff Wall’s photography: corners of garages and storerooms whose patinas of grease, worn tools and scuffed surfaces imply intricate histories of toil. Indeed Fried goes further and suggests that such spaces signify belonging in a particularly rich and compelling fashion, with whole worlds being implicated in their distressed textures.

Luke Dowd’s approach in his recent work couldn’t be more different. His show at Rod Barton included eight pieces, several of which drew on his own workspace. For example the four paintings which occupied one corner of the small space – Blue 1, Blue 2, Green and Gold (all works 2011) are apparently derived in some way from a tabletop in Dowd’s studio. Yet instead of supplying the evidence of an authentic, organic life-world that Fried sees in Wall, these images have a spectral, evanescent quality, somewhere between an X-ray and a brass-rubbing. The striations, blots, shadows and spillages of which they are composed merge, smear and deliquesce, defying location even as they appear to stem from it. Likewise their internal spaces are folded in dimensions so convoluted and mobile that the eye seems to move through pulverized, molecular vistas rather than anything scaled to the human world.

By contrast, Unfolded Moon supplies a more stable image. The familiar sphere is split into eight sections, as if a paper napkin has been carefully opened out and smoothed down, retaining its creases. As with the aforementioned pictures, figure and ground mesh and merge, the pocked and pitted surface of the satellite bleeding into the bleachings and fadings of the picture plane. However the central image is intact and serenely dominant, and the fact that this moon has been ‘unfolded’ and made available to us suggests an art that still has ambitions to represent the totality.

This was an exception, however, and the tone of the show remained one of displacement and undecidability, considering the precarious nature of artistic production itself. The most telling piece in this respect was a large canvas in lurid red, depicting a studio window. We can see the wrinkled traces of a sheet blocking out the light which nevertheless comes through, starkly outlining the grid of nine panes. As such, Red Window is a powerful and instantly recognizable image. What’s more, given that the piece is life-sized, the viewer experiences a strong sense of a situated spatial relationship. Standing before it one cannot but feel the incipient torsions of the everyday act of looking through such an aperture. It is all the more disorientating then that we cannot grasp the relation in the conventional way: are we outside looking in, or vice versa? Is the light that throws the frame into relief natural or artificial? One lesson of this image, and many of the others in this thought-provoking show, might be that the very idea of a bounded, stable workplace, guarantor of a consistent self or world, is now an untenable one.

Conor Carville

Xu Ruotao

Li Space, Beijing, China

The title of Xu Ruotao’s exhibition, ‘Hostile’, signals adversity, antagonism and aggression, whilst appealing to our darker curiosities. Who or what is hostile? What is the nature of the hostility? And at what is it directed? The show’s substantial wall text introduces Xu’s practice in the context of the discord inherent in cultural production and alongside his personal experiences of upheaval, probing, retreat and progress. Early on in his career, following a move from Shenyang to the Yuanmingyuan artist village in 1991, Xu painted beds as vehicles to express his feelings of detachment and animosity towards the world surrounding him; now, ‘hostility’ is asserted as both an attitude and the method for his work – a force of inspiration and refinement.

The exhibition begins with Rumination (2009), a 104-minute film with a complex narrative involving nominal characters: a teacher, a couple, a vagrant and a group of Red Guards seen through the eyes of a young boy. Whilst the boy matures naturally, their time (in the period 1966–76) travels in reverse: the Red Guards come across an abandoned factory – their ideals are already decaying and the Revolution has apparently passed without them. It is a sophisticated work, but positioned as it is, facing out towards the gallery entrance and with no available seating, its impact is diminished.

Once inside the gallery, viewers are met with a room filled with paintings charting Xu’s jagged abstraction. Collectively they articulate an unyielding, splintered view. Some, such as Yo. Earth (2006), clearly reveal the way Xu gleans pictures from the Internet (in this case an image of an astronaut), transfers them to Photoshop and proceeds to ‘draw’ over them before scanning the combined image onto canvas and painting meticulously over it. These ‘digital paintings’, along with works from 2008–09 that resort to a flat mass of scrawled lines, are variously ‘hostile’.

The densest canvases, like Black Series No. 12 (2008), for example, snarl at the eye through an obfuscating mass of erratic lines; those that retain an image at once assault and affix it in a creative exercise that lies between representation and interference. In the exhibition text, this dichotomy serves as an interpretation of Xu’s attitude as both ‘anti’ his surroundings and ‘pro’ individualistic creation. The physical movements of the computer mouse resonate with a child’s first basic acts of art: colouring books with a picture outline at first partially and carefully filled in, then scribbled over quickly through lack of patience or sporadic aggression with a coloured pencil or felt tip pen.

The paintings convey hostility in an aural sense, too, in that they are reminiscent of sonic fuzz on a TV set or visualizations of static electric crackling, both of which can connote political broadcasts and broken projections of ideology across the airwaves. This dark angle is reflected in the cold, grey sequences of the computer animation Beijing Changping Qiliqun Asylum (2008), which visualizes the ‘Temporary Shelter’, a detention centre which forms part of Xu’s experience with the law – and its hostility toward artists during the final year of the Yuanmingyuan commune’s existence, around 1995, when artists were regularly arrested and sent home; a few of those who resisted were sent to the ‘Temporary Shelter’.

The impact of Xu’s work is unexpected in terms of how its message transcends its medium. Although a description of his method may sound somewhat pedestrian as a series of transferences of images that are painted over in the final stage, it makes an interesting case for an artist’s negative feelings towards the surrounding world and its imagery as conducive to a sustained aesthetic. Complex and rocky though the path to this creative realization has been for the artist, the marks he makes with a modern technological tool seem to return to a primal artistic action; at the same time, over-painting those spontaneous strokes aptly represents, perhaps, the cyclical inertia of the contemporary moment, in which we are dogged by a surfeit of pictures.

Iona Whittaker

Italy Goes on Holiday

MAXXI, Rome, Italy

It’s 40 degrees, summer is at its peak and your thoughts turn to the holidays. MAXXI is celebrating Italy’s reputation as a tourist destination with the exhibition ‘L’Italia va in vacanza’ (Italy Goes on Holiday’), the first in a series of exhibitions showcasing the museum’s vast photography collection.

The 80-plus works in the exhibition are by Alex MacLean, John Davies, Massimo Vitali, Walter Niedermayr, Giancarlo Ceraudo, Bruna Biamino, Nunzio Battaglia, Francesco Radino, Fabio Ponzio and Fulvio Ventura. Curator Francesca Fabiani chose the photographs from a project titled ‘Atlante Italiano’ (Italian Atlas), which was commissioned by the government to document the Italian landscape and its transformations in 2003 and 2007. Mysteriously, this useful piece of information was not mentioned in any of the exhibition’s supporting material.

Nevertheless, the selection of photographs survives this injustice, showing how almost every inch of the country’s landscape has been damaged by human presence. In other words, bell’Italia is not always a holiday oasis. Massimo Vitali’s work is a good example of this. In his 2007 photographs – Palermo, Mondello Beach and Catania, Solarium – both individuality and the details of the landscape are lost in the swarm of beachgoers. Emphasized by Vitali’s masterful use of the high-angle wide shot and rarefied light, people are depersonalized and nature is dematerialized.

Alex MacLean goes one step further by shooting from the air. In 2007, he flew over central Italy during the summer to photograph the beaches of Forte dei Marmi on the west coast and Rimini on the east coast. The images almost mirror one another, which Fabiani emphasizes by displaying them as a diptych. From a bird’s-eye view, myriad sunbathers and umbrellas are specks on the coast, forming colorful arabesques and geographic formations that make the crowds of tourists almost look pretty. Such tension between nature and mass human presence is a key component of Walter Niedermayr’s 2007 diptychs of the Alps. Drei Zinnen (The Three Peaks of Lavaredo), which features the most famous mountain range in the Dolomites, show how places once thought inaccessible have now been colonized. Clusters of people litter the pristine mountaintops, but they’re small, even microscopic in Stilfser Joch (The Stelvio Pass). Taking a page from 19th-century Italian writer Giacomo Leopardi’s worldview, human beings are insignificant creatures when compared to the magnitude of nature. Skiers in the white snow seem lost, like ants in a sugar bowl.

Bruna Biamino concentrated on the off-season. Her photographs of the Tuscan coast in October concentrate on footprints in the sand and the occasional inflatable toy. The desolation of the landscape is underlined by the use of flat, diffused light that blurs the people in the background, making them resemble ghosts.

In stark contrast to Biamino’s bleak subjects are Italy’s cities, which are never without tourists, no matter what the season. Unlike Niedermeyer’s and MacLean’s landscapes, however, Fulvio Ventura’s photographs of tourists in Venice fail to capture the problems of mass tourism in a city that is sinking under its weight. Twenty million tourists visit Venice every year, its residents are leaving and the city has become something of an amusement park.

Such is the focus of Francesco Radino’s eery photos of Gardaland, Italy’s most famous amusement park. In these black and white multiple exposures from 2002, what should be the portrait of a fun day has been turned into a nightmare: images of humans and scenery overlap to become otherworldly and spectral.

Landscapes have held a significant place in Italian photography since 1984’s landmark project ‘Viaggio in Italia’, a visual investigation of the Italian terrain, conceived by Luigi Ghirri and produced by 20 national and international photographers. ‘Italy Goes on Holiday’ is the latest important step in the same tradition, and it has whetted my appetite for the upcoming shows later in the series – once, that is, Italy has returned from its holiday.

Luisa Grigoletto

Dinh Q. Lê

The Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, Australia

At the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) in Sydney, Dinh Q. Lê is exhibiting Erasure (2011), a commissioned installation created in response to the amateur footage broadcast around the world in December last year of the tragedy that took place on the Australian territory of Christmas Island. On the morning of 15 December, residents of Christmas Island – a wildlife-rich dot of land located 360 km south of Indonesia – awoke to the sound of screams drifting in from the ocean. At approximately 7am, a wooden fishing boat, buffeted by huge waves, slammed onto rocks at the northern end of the island. On board were Iraqi and Iranian asylum seekers, or ‘boat people’ as they’re known in Australia (an expression that refers to people who arrive in Australia illegally and by boat). Between 30 and 50 men, women and children died when their vessel broke apart and sank. Some of the passengers had paid as much as AUS$15,000 to make the journey from Indonesia to this tiny island.

On the floor of SCAF are thousands of black and white photographs, a sea of detritus buoying two parts of a clapped-out wooden vessel. Purposefully stripped back to reveal the ship’s bones, the fragments recall the barely intact vessels used for ‘people smuggling’. Projected on the back wall is a single channel video of a miniature, twin-mast sailing ship engulfed in accelerant-fuelled flames on Ham Tan beach in the southeast Vietnamese province of Binh Thuận. The burning colonial-era ship reminds us that most Australians have arrived from elsewhere – that we’re all ‘boat people’ of sorts.
Dinh Q Lê was ten when he fled Vietnam with his family in 1978. Years later in the United States, he started making art exploring his birth-country’s history and culture as told and mythologized by the West. Now living back in Vietnam, the events of last December provoked Lê to turn his attention to Australia: reluctant recipient of a few thousand desperate refugees who try to arrive by boat every year, the lesser-known fighting force in the Vietnam War and home to a large Vietnamese community, many of whom came to Australia as refugees from the war.

Lê has spent over 15 years buying discarded family photo albums from second-hand shops in Ho Chi Minh. In Erasurethese photographs lie face down; the coffee-coloured photographic paper is what we see along with the occasional inscription – a date, a name, a brief anecdote written in Vietnamese. Only when you pick one up do see the faces of history’s boat people.

Lê is inviting visitors to choose a photograph then scan, upload and save it onto a rudimentary online archive. His idea is that members of the Vietnamese diaspora might find a familiar face and contribute details. This simple act of engagement is the crux of Erasure: Lê wants to put faces and a memories to the statistics and media sound-bites. Writing about the representation of World War I, American journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote: ‘Men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities [and] in many cases they help to create the very fictions to which they respond.’ Lê is trying, through his art, to illuminate the reality of what Vietnam’s boat people experienced to reposition the current debate away from the reductive political spin. But this minor political offering tucked away in a gallery in the well-heeled Sydney suburb of Paddington is missing an audience. It does not attract the broad readership of Lippmann’s mass media. This lack, unfortunately, puts Erasureclose to what Adrian Piper one described as Easy Listening Art. Impassioned, heartfelt and politically relevant it’s nonetheless too safe to have any impact on the glib debate about Australia’s boat people ‘problem’.

Nicola Harvey

Thomas Struth

Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK

The differing phases of Thomas Struth’s career, distinct as they might appear here in this retrospective (which tours from Zurich and Düsseldorf, and covers the years 1978 to 2010), are united by a conservative faith in the centrality of art and its enduring values against the depthlessness of spectacle culture, to which photography nevertheless contributes. The series which immediately faces us on entering the Whitechapel’s survey, ‘Audience’ (2004), comprises large-scale photographs of the crowds of tourists at Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia gathered to view Michelangelo’s David. Monumentality and detail is given to the gestures and expressions of people who have come to look at this sculpture, which remains just out of frame. This, like a number of Struth’s museum photographs, could be seen as a variant of street photography – with the museum providing a means to observe aspects of contemporary social life. It is life observed at a potential point of meaningfulness: a number of spectators in the series appear genuinely moved, open-mouthed as they look upwards.

Much of the rest of the lower-floor gallery is taken up by large-scale photographs whose impact is very much caught up with the awe of its subject matter: ranging from the shimmering facades of Times Square to the reverential calm of a Venetian church interior, centred upon Giovanni Bellini’s luminous altarpiece (San Zaccaria, Venice, 1995). The sunlit rock formation of El Capitan in California’s Yosemite National Park is replete with invariable allusions to the central figure of American landscape photography, Ansel Adams, who also turned to this rock formation. Only Struth’s picture is in colour, monumental in scale, and framed by lines of cars and tourists who have also stopped to take in the breath-taking view. In Space Shuttle 1, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canavarel (2008), Struth muses upon a technological sublime, the size of the spacecraft accented by the forest of scaffolding beneath its underbelly in an untypical and unfamiliar view distinct from its more common representations. Photographs taken at the Max-Planck-Institute für Plasmaphysik in Garching and Griefswald (2009), investigating the physical principles underlying a nuclear fusion power plant, offer glimpses into an unimaginable technological complexity, replete with an aura of futurity in contrast to the retrospective looking his museum pictures entail.     

In Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo (1999), the animation of Delacroix’s painting 1830 Liberty Leading the People is set against the formality of the static audience set before it. The unusual public display of the actual painting, illuminated upon a white board within a darkened interior and before stationary viewers, gives the whole presentation a cinematic edge. Struth also offers smaller-scale, subtle meditations on museum pictures. In his photograph of Vermeer’s Woman with a Lute, hung towards a corner in a room at London’s National Gallery, the quietude of the painting’s location corresponds to its subject matter. In his picture of Dürer’s Christ-like self-portrait at Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, from 2000, Struth also includes himself in the picture. One German artist contemplates another, across five centuries and two mediums, only one does not show his face: Struth remains to the side of the frame, with his back to camera, absorbed in Dürer’s face-on portrait. 

Such attachment and a relation to a longstanding pictorial tradition is integral to Struth’s own ongoing project of mostly large-scale family portrait photographs, of friends and acquaintances, taken in natural light, with the sitters all facing the camera and usually set within their homes and among their possessions (1987–2007). The photographs’ intensity is very much to do with the ritualized nature of their production: people are lifted out of their day to day for the formal ceremonial portrait. Picturing families of differing nationalities but from predominantly first-world economic positions – a family in Lima is the notable exception – resurrects the ideal of a benign and civil bourgeois portraiture. The scale and detail of the large-format works allows us to see each sitter’s face, a scrutiny uniquely facilitated by the medium. Because we are so habituated to the smiling faces of commercial photography, they might strike us as initially inexpressive or deadpan. But the series is in fact replete with certain energies, to do with the various attachments and identifications that bind the differing individual family groups. They possess a latent expressivity. Struth’s portraits also avoid the spectacle and exoticism of the portrayal of the abject other so common to photography.   

Photographs of the jungles of Australia, Japan, China and Florida involve the closest engagement with Modernist form. The all-over layers of dense vegetation creates a formlessness that parallels abstract painting; as a reference point for these pictures, Struth cites Brice Marden’s ‘Cold Mountain’ calligraphic paintings (1989–91). The landscape pictorial tradition is disassembled, since these are no longer landscapes in the sense of landscape as a cultural convention of viewing nature. Nature is not framed as a tourist spectacle as it is in the picture of Mount Capitan. Before the dense screens of foliage in his ‘Paradise’ (1998–2007) series we have a loss of perspective and confront the fundamental alterity of nature. Their incommensurability bring them close to his pictures of technology. 

The ‘Paradise’ works resist connotation and put us up against a pure photographic seeing, just the dense accumulation of details of natural phenomena, out of time and bereft of any social or historical information. Without perspective and order they are the opposite of the modest-sized black and white, central perspective views of empty European and American city streets, Struth’s earliest works (dating from 1978), that bring the exhibition to a close. While carrying affinities with the system-based and comparative photography of his Dusseldorf teachers, Bernd and Hilla Becher, they actually originated before he was taught by them and in the class of Gerhard Richter (the artist and his young family are among his group portrait photographs). Nevertheless there is a historical and specific photographic framework for this early work – caught up in an archival and taxonomic documentary style. Mostly empty or with the minimum distraction from people, they bear certain affinities with Eugène Atget’s early-20th-century Parisian street views. Struth’s photographs carry information about the ideals and realities of urban space and city planning, bearing an accumulation of traces of history and social use.

In ‘Audience’ we have a surfeit of details, to do with the information we are given about people’s clothing, age, gestures, expressions. But here everything is put under the spell of art and lifted from the quotidian and somewhat kitschy reality of the summer dress sense of the global art tourist. In many senses ‘Audience’ is a litmus test of art’s continued contemporary impact, we look to these people for signs of art’s continued power and value. Photography matters as contemporary art now, as Michael Fried has recently argued, but it is an art that has of course not yet been able to endure like that of Michelangelo, Dürer or Bellini. In his museum photographs, the detail, colour, lighting and composition of his wall-sized photography can pictorially augment the aesthetic qualities of the art it centres upon. Struth raises the status of his photography through such a relationship and maintains a distinction and separation from the tawdriness of spectacle culture. Such a distinction is integral to all his work, underpinned by faith in the value of the photograph as a lasting picture. 

Mark Durden

4x4 (ii)

L-13, London, UK

This was the long-awaited, perhaps even unexpected, second part of an exhibition series that Harry Pye initiated four years ago. The idea behind it: to get the work of four interesting, but under-exposed artists exhibited in a group show where the ego or over-thought intentions of the curator wouldn’t detract from the work on display. In this installment, put on in L-13 – a ‘gentleman’s workshop’ more than a gallery, as founder Steve Lowe insists – the artists were Tom Pounder, Emma Coleman, Edward Todd and Aleksandra Wojcik. In a further neat conceptual nod, the newspaper-style catalogue accompanying the show – a special edition of Pye’s The Rebel (therebelmagazine.blogspot.com) – included four short texts (each of 444 words) on each artist, each written – some straight-forward criticism, others more fictive stream-of-conscious style – by four writers: Georgia Anderson, boyleANDshaw, Alex Chappel and Sarah Thacker. A simple but effective experiment in quadrigeminal display and discourse.

Did it work? The exhibition had a definite energy, and the combination of writings – some seriously on the money – provided a really effective and tactile textual compliment, instead of the normal thoughtless press release. There wasn’t really anything that obviously united the pieces on display. Coleman produced four surreal Art Cushions (2011) – pasty pink body parts with eyes and orifices. They riff fairly obviously on the textile part-objects of Eva Hesse or Louise Bourgeois, but there is a strange fragility or even amateurism to them. They don’t really work – the acrylic paint seems flakey, the shapes not quite right – but maybe that’s the point. They have an awkward sadness that is vulnerable before it is kitsch.

In total contrast, Wojcik’s four untitled photographs – of nighttime construction sites with space-age coloured skies and theatrical lighting – have a sci-fi slickness. Post-Düsseldorf School, but much more interesting, a kind of moving tribute to the machine in a post-industrial age. And, as Anderson notes in her excellent text, particularly resonant because of the gender politics. These are places never normally associated with the feminine, but Wojcik’s nocturnal meditations cleverly make them so.

The remaining two artists seem to have more in common, an appealing cynicism and an aesthetically pleasing sense of humour. Todd presents a real mixture: an abstract geometric painting in greys, its title, Paralytic Feedback (2011), defying its status as dry homage, and a cheeky cartoon-style deconstruction of a Turner painting with rabbits and ancient idyll. The other two pieces are small mixed-media constructions, New Fantasy Landscape (2011) is exactly that, like a small shrine with a pixilated scene and a tiny fluffy-tailed plasticine dragon a top. But the stand-out work is Pounder’s. His four abstract paintings defy normal conventions or readings. They have a clarity of intent and a real pulse. Gulf War I and II (both 2010) force the issue of how to deal with a political subject via the abstract medium – all lively smudges of purple, blue, orange and grey – and ask how one can ever test the authenticity or authority of such an experiment.

Pounder’s work intervenes in the digital detritus of our internet age, giving the corporate, pornographic flatlands a kind of ‘cultural colonoscopy’, and his other two paintings Balenciaga Bullseye Liquidity Annunciation and Ponzi Scheme Chuckles Carrying The Cross (both 2011) are more suggestive of these nifty and knowing interventions. They have a cleaner, more geometric look, but they also ask hardcore questions about painterly authenticity and sincerity whilst they slyly kick it in the balls. 

Sarah James

Experimental Station. Research and Artistic Phenomena


CA2M (Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo), Madrid, Spain

John Cage’s aphorism ‘art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living’ is the inspiration for ‘Experimental Station’, a group show of 29 international artists. However, it’s not just the idea of trial or error that the curators chose to explore here: the rationale of the exhibition attempts to shed some light on questions such as how new technologies can be applied to art, and what art can do for science.

‘Experimental Station’ is divided into four thematic areas: ‘Artefacts and Mechanisms’; ‘In the Laboratory’; ‘Fieldwork’; and ‘Lost in Space’. This loose taxonomy aims at bringing together a number of works that share a cluster of interests including research, process, methodology, technology, science, sci-fi, phenomenology and mechanics. But the concepts are so broad, and at times even at odds with each other, that their cohabitation often provokes more confusion than clarity.

A good number of the work displayed on the first floor of the CA2M, in the ‘Artefacts and Mechanisms’ and ‘In the Laboratory’ sections are kinetic-inspired. Alberto Tadiello’s EPROM (2008) successfully invokes a fascination with the aesthetics of the machine, both visually (through the intricate cable and component pattern) and sonically (the baffling noise that the machine emits). Conrad Shawcross’ The Limits of Everything (2010) is a perfect fit due to the artist’s ongoing experimentation with science: it’s a kinetic sculpture that creates a spiral of light. Ariel Schelesinger’s absurdist use of everyday materials in Untitled (Gas Loop) (2011), and L’angoisse de la page blanche (The anguish of the blank sheet of paper, 2007) seems to belong more to the worlds of the domestic sublime and magic tricks than to the laboratory, but his sense of humour is engaging.

Julio Adán and the artist duo O Grivo are represented by painstakingly assembled sets of music machines. Although charming and precise exercises in mechanics they both lack the musical expertise of Felix Thorn (aka Felix’s Machines), for whom the machine is a way of producing experimental music and not just an aesthetic end in itself. The installation The Limitations of Logic and the Absence of Absolute Certainty (2010) by Alistair McClymont recreates a mini-tornado with the aid of fans within a metallic structure, so that we can witness the formation and hypnotic appearance of this natural phenomenon without any of the usual havoc.

Upstairs, two works with clear cinematographic references are highlights. Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimarães’ video The Tenant (2010), a tribute to Roman Polanski’s 1976 film, features a soap bubble quietly bouncing about the artist’s studio. A subtle meditation on time and fragility, it’s a work I’m still trying to understand within this exhibition’s context. Karlos Gil’s Taking/Giving Information. Every lasting idea has been made from an unverifiable but verifiable story (2011) is an installation comprising several loosely related parts and a compelling film piece titled The Neverending Story (Chapter 1) (2010). Filmed in 16mm and borrowing some semantic and visual blueprints from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the film continuously reaches a climax but never a resolution.

Faivovich & Goldsberg, Ilana Halperin and Paloma Polo’s works all share a concern with research as artistic methodology. All three present documentation displays of personal research on different subjects. Faivovich & Goldsberg’s En búsqueda del Mesón Fierro (In Search of Mesón del Fierro, 2011) is the result of the artist’s obsessive search for meteorites that fell in Argentina 4000 years ago. Halperin’s Physical Geology (2009) concerns the artist’s interest in volcanic activity, while Paloma Polo’s The Path of Totality (2010) is a slide show of 70-odd images of the precarious eclipse observatories built from the mid-19th to the early 20th century in the USA, France, Germany and Italy, countries that invested in astrophysical research.

There is, of course, nothing particularly contemporary about this linking of art and science. Leonardo da Vinci, obviously, is the most enduring of the Renaissance polymaths, while numerous 20th century artists incorporated the whirlwind of technological innovations in their practices, from Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Rotoreliefs’ (1935) – which the artist chose to launch at an inventors’ fair – to Jean Tinguely’s large-scale, fully automated and self-destructive machines. In the last 15 years, however, it has been the Internet as means of production and distribution that has captured the imagination of many artists – and which is strangely missing from ‘Experimental Station’.

By reducing the varied works in this show to formal commonplaces, both art and science risk presented superficially instead of engaging in what could otherwise be an extremely productive partnership, aimed at unfolding serious questions about both disciplines: how we relate, consume and learn with the advent of these external prostheses. How, in other words, we live and die in the 21st century.

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Art on Lake

Budapest City Park, Budapest, Hungary

An outdoor sculpture exhibition on and in a 20,000-square-metre boating lake, ‘Art on Lake’ features work by 25 artists from a cross-section of EU member states. In a city whose architecture remains a grand celebration of imperial, fin de siècle Austro-Hungary, the exhibition poses itself the challenge of developing appreciation for contemporary public art as a counterpoint to the ubiquity of more conventional statues and monuments.

Echoing the ethos of recent so-called populist group shows at London’s Hayward Gallery – such as 2008’s ‘Psycho Buildings’ and ‘Walking In My Mind’ in 2009 – a key feature of ‘Art on Lake’ is visitor interaction. Rather than staging a complex curatorial concept, the exhibition provides a novel opportunity to engage with contemporary art by allowing visitors to paddle open-topped canoes around the works – even to bump into the installations when their boatmanship lets them down. Beyond this gimmicky attraction, the canoes do allow intimate perspectives on art works that would otherwise suffer from being viewed only from afar.

Romanian Daniel Knorr’s snowman built of stones, Bonhomme (2011), becomes a suitably strange character to meet on a lake when seen up-close. Similarly, Small Theatrical Production on Water (2011), a collection of four sculptures influenced by classical mythology by French duo Anne and Patrick Poirier, offers shifting interpretations as you glide between the evocative figures of a man, woman, horse and lightning bolt.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the context of promoting contemporary art in public spaces, the exhibition’s most successful work is the one that pushes the limits of sculpture the furthest. Consisting of only four white ropes that lead from the lake to the tower of a mock-Transylvanian castle, Mimmo Roselli’s Anchored (2011) neatly links the exhibition site with its wider environment, while adding its own dramatic geometric lines in the air. The effect of Roselli’s intervention is to make the castle – a giant folly built in 1896 – appear as though it is floating on the lake’s surface. In effect, the Italian artist has hijacked the castle, harnessing the visual impact of a structure whose creation would have been beyond the exhibition’s remit and resources. Anchored therefore questions the limits of what outdoor art alone can achieve, while at the same time offering a solution to how it can co-exist with the more dominant forms of the built environment.

A more brazen counterpoint to traditional outdoor sculpture is found in Polish artist Krzysztof M. Bednarski’s K. M. Column-fountain (2011), a totem-pole-like structure of seven large pink-resin busts of Karl Marx mounted one on top of the other, with an ineffectual fountain sprouting from the top. The work challenges conventional statues and the ideologies they venerate, while its glowing pink heads offer a bold addition to the lake. Also subverting convention, the Czech Republic’s Krištof Kintera has added stag-like antlers to conventional metal barriers in Paradise Now (2011). Situated near the lakeshore, the animalistic structures bridge the urban and natural elements of the city park setting, asking us to look again at a mobile piece of street furniture that is regularly employed to mark boundaries and divide space.

Budapest’s Museum of Fine Arts, which commissioned the exhibition, now has plans to make ‘Art on Lake’ a triennial event. The hope is that the unusual format could give the city a memorable brand, with regular installments helping to raise its contemporary profile. Should the plans materialize, the present edition is good enough to suggest it could prove a long-term success – a platform, perhaps, for artists to build on in the future.

Richard Unwin

Snail Fever

The Third Line, Dubai, UAE

The era remembered as the ‘Golden Age’ of Arabic music (and cinema) is synonymous with the remembrance of an Arab heyday. The period encompassing the 1920s through to the 1950s produced some of the region’s biggest stars, and figures such as ‘Abd El-Halim, Um Kulthum and Fayrouz are now deified in popular Middle Eastern culture. ‘Snail Fever’, then, did not solely reflect the sensationalism of this particular period, but also used it as a stepping stone, exploring the viral-like quality of music and its insidious ability to seep into different political, social and familial situations. In fact, it was El-Halim himself who inspired the title for the show, curated by Sara Mameni, for it was the Bilharzia virus, transmitted by snails, which eventually killed the Egyptian singer.

Marking the gallery’s final exhibition before closing for the torrid Gulf summer, there was a sense of space that seemed more prevalent than in previous shows. Perhaps it was the discreet way in which Abbas Akhavan’s Greener Pastures (2011) a large digital print, was propped up against the wall in a corner and surrounded by seemingly discarded glass bottles, or in the visual illusion of Rayyane Tabet’s Sherihan, Sherihan, anzili chaa’raki (Sherihan, Sherihan, Let down your hair, 2011), an artist book comprising 29 pieces of white paper on which Arabic calligraphy has been punched out in small dots, rather like Braille. The whiteness of the work made it seem at first that the wall on which they were hung was in fact empty. All in all, the works felt disjointed.

So, what was it that linked them? Featuring works by Akhavan, Fatima Al-Qadiri and Khalid Al-Gharaballi, Ala Ebtekar, Haris Epaminonda, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Tabet, Slavs and Tatars and Newsha Tavakolian, Mameni began developing ‘Snail Fever’ a year and a half ago. ‘Looking at contemporary works from the region I was struck by how many artists make work about music,’ she explains. ‘I specifically wanted to look at music in the contemporary moment – art and music have always been related. Music in the exhibition is what brings people together, reminds one of home and even marks identities. It was important to me that each of these artists approached these issues with humour in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.’

Humour was certainly present, along with a hefty dose of pain and longing. Hymns of No Resistance (Stuck in Ossetia With You) (2010) by Slavs and Tatars – a piano score of the song of Stuck In The Middle With You (1972) – employs a light touch to talk about the Ossetian-Georgian conflict, rescored for regional instruments such as the ney. Next to it Al-Qadiri and Al-Gharaballi’s Dala3 (in Vegas) and WaWa Complex (both 2011) play on the contemporary stereotype of female Arabic pop stars who, far from being the revered icons of the past, are now treated as dangerously clichéd objects of desire for the mass market. Sobering, however, are four C-type prints by Tavakolian. The ‘Listen Series’ (2010) features Iran’s underground female singers, unable to perform in public due to the country’s strict moral and religious codes. Standing against sequinned backdrops and singing with eyes shut, swaying ever so slightly to the beat, they are mesmerising and emit an aura of serenity tinctured with sadness. In their intimate expressions, much more is conveyed than could ever be said in words.

There was music in the gallery, as two video works provide an ongoing soundtrack, yet in some ways the experience risked being muted. The quirky catalogue, designed to look like an old LP cover, features no information beyond the curator’s statement as to what each work is about and it was challenging to understand the sometimes complex references in each piece. Where Panayioutou’s Slow Dance Marathon (2005) exudes a languid intimacy that is easy to be drawn into, others, like Ebtekar’s Electric Del Roba (2011) need rather more scratching below the surface. ‘The works in the show are all research based and fairly difficult to access at the surface level, but I think there is enough there for everyone to be able to enter each work,’ admits Mameni, pointing out that the works – bar three – were not made specifically for ‘Snail Fever’. ‘The issue of accessibility is a question that haunts contemporary art, as well as museum and gallery displays in general. I chose to eliminate all explanations from the catalogue because I did not want to give just one linear explanation to the works in the show and, by doing so, limit their meanings to the ones given.’ This was certainly not an easy show, but it is an eloquent one, and, with a little work from the viewer, the results were supremely rewarding.

Anna Wallace-Thompson

David Snyder

Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, USA

‘That old defence – an inch-deep smile and a suitcase out the back window.’ It’s a great line, and it comes halfway through David Snyder’s exhibition ‘Face Forward’. To give it a bit of context, we must step away from the CD player from which it emanates, back out through the doorway in the wooden façade that spans the middle of the space, past another CD player and another yammering voice, out the door of the gallery and onto the street.

The exhibition begins at the front of the building, onto which Snyder has fixed a new door and a white stucco wall with two small, high windows. An unusually low (and window-less) window box completes the effect: this is a face. (Apples on each windowsill become the eyes’ cartoony pupils and the window box the mouth.) On the interior of this expressionless frontage is a small CD player from which comes a high-pitched and high-strung monologue concerning the comings and goings on the street outside. The installation’s title, Put Up a Good Front, But There’s Always That Little Voice (all works 2011) tells us all we need to know about the dynamic of doubt and paranoia that it describes. Too much, perhaps.

The piece might risk reductiveness were it not for a further façade a few steps into the gallery. Between Me and You is an architecturally senseless amalgam of clapboards, scalloping, round arches and triangular surrounds. It’s utterly pretentious, and deliberately so. The recording that accompanies it (again, on a CD player plugged in behind) betrays a character devoid of self-awareness or humility. While the voice in Put Up a Good Front…  was engaged only in an internal monologue, this man seems to address his unseen, unheard partner: ‘It’s not you; it’s definitely not me’ … ‘I’m talking about myself again’. He’s unbearable.

These are separate works, but their sequential installation hints that we’re peeling a psychic onion. The third piece in the show, Struggle With the Mess Age, reinforces this impression. Having moved from weatherproof, blank stucco through fancy, thin plywood, we arrive at a wall of household junk covered in torn scraps of painted polythene, which looks unpleasantly like raw meat (think of Lady Gaga’s MTV awards dress). The character whose voice emerges here is a pathetic slob. He wonders what kind of tattoo would represent him best and settles on ‘a pizza … an alien pizza’.

Since the layers of Snyder’s onion become more flimsy as we move closer to its core, it is fitting that the ultimate work in the show is essentially dematerialized. A video, projected in a darkened room, shows a wooden façade (with a door and two windows, the most ‘house-like’ so far) mysteriously trundling down the middle of nocturnal streets. Periodically, the footage cuts to shots of the same house being licked with flames. The voice-over here is all reassurance and encouragement – ‘I can’t see any problems – none whatsoever. Things are looking great’ – but the visuals tell another story.

Night Conversations With None Other is, like all the works in the show, voiced by Snyder himself. (He uses simple software to alter pitch and speed.) Its humour and poignancy, also like the other works, rests on the character’s lack of self-awareness; Snyder seems not to share this fault. The exhibition would not beguile the way it does, however, if there were not a whiff of confession about these portraits, or if they were not so easy to relate to. (Aren’t we all occasionally bewildered by the thoughts that come into our heads?) But more curious is Snyder’s insight into the symbiosis between people’s construction of personae and their construction of spaces or facades to shelter them. This is the ‘old defence’ that Snyder refers to, and which, particularly in Los Angeles, is both a metaphor and an architectural reality.

Jonathan Griffin

Barry Macgregor Johnston

Galerie Micky Schubert, Berlin, Germany

In literature and film, it’s curious how often street carnivals, ostensibly celebratory, reveal a violent undercurrent. Cormac McCarthy’s 1974 novel Child of God opens with a carnivalesque procession that leads the reader to the farmstead of the book’s murderous protagonist. Treme, David Simon’s new television series on HBO, elaborately reconstructs a post-Katrina New Orleans Mardi Gras parade, its Goya-esque grotesqueries brimming with concealed threat. The silence of Barry Macgregor Johnston’s installation Street Light (2011) seems to have been wrested from a clamour that might have been either festive or destructive, one can’t tell. The ambiguity challenges a submissiveness to narrative interpretation. Johnston’s background is in performance art, and he has created an environment haunted by performative process, but of a pitch that remains undefined.

In Street Light, a collection of old broomsticks hang from the gallery ceiling on lengths of coloured string, each unique and individually modified by the artist using dollar bills, beer bottle necks and the handles of baseball bats. One is tacked with metal staples that jut from its black skin like punk jewellery. In the midst of these sticks hangs a piñata – a mass of what might be papier-mâché, roughly the shape of a bear’s head, covered with red and yellow confetti. This is a traditional element in Mexican street carnivals, containing sweets that are released into the crowd when the piñata is beaten with a stick. The cluster of broomsticks is a potential assortment of weapons as well as a collection of vamped-up, turbo-charged witch transporters. On the edge of this arrangement are two columns painted white; one has a grinning mask incised in the wood at around head height, the other an oval aperture (Smoke Mask, 2011). Metal grates extend from their bases, like feet with their toes curling upwards. The columns are surrogate figures, ghosts of absent revelers, with faces mocked up by negative shapes cut into the dark hollows at the core of the cylinders. Their pale verticality, in the midst of the hanging sticks, suggests vulnerability. They might be sculptural realizations of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Pillar of white in a blackout of knives’ – a line from her late poem The Bee Meeting.

Against the back wall, a two-metre-wide disk, mounted on a massive wooden contraption, can be spun from handles attached to the rear (The Wind, 2011). Its front side is densely packed with fragments of azure-green car window glass that sparkles as it rotates. The sculpture looks like a gambling device from the set of a primitive TV game show. Like the broomsticks and the piñata, function is a fugitive quality that barely attaches to it; only enough to tinge its presence with an air of forsakenness. For all their associations with witchery and weaponry, the gallery context makes the multicoloured broomsticks into a decorative mobile. These objects have relinquished their purpose, but not sufficiently to be freed from their aura, like stage props with only a tenuous illustrative relation to what they signify. It is a defeated realism, intimating a violence (the broken glass, the makeshift sluggers) that pollutes the abstraction it might aspire to. As it does in the work of Tom Burr and Félix González-Torres, Minimalism haunts Johnston’s work as a memory of an autonomous formal language that turns out to harbour sexual eccentricities, pop-cultural debris and other impurities. The spinning disk is a pure form – a circle; the broomsticks, all approximately the same width and length, hint at Minimalism’s modulated seriality.

Four rectangular bed sheets in various extravagant materials – primary-coloured stripes, violet satin, a silver/grey melée – are stretched over the walls, each with an oval of contrasting material sewn into the top centre, another sign for a vacated head (Psychic Curfew, 2011). These hangings may suggest Modernist abstraction, but they also resemble the tableaux against which tourists have their photographs taken, head poking through a painted frame of a figure trapped in the stakes, or riding a rodeo bull. The fabrics are formalistic values as well as theatrical costumes viewers can imagine donning – pulling the sheets over their heads – in order to be spirited into the carnival. But the superimposed ovals are impenetrable voids. One is of a fabric depicting branches threading over a night sky; another oval is decorated with a filigree pattern as though fencing off the black material. These bed sheet works are obviously indebted to Mike Kelley’s cut-felt ‘Banners’ from the late 1980s and early ‘90s – an extensive series of fabric collages, of similar dimensions to Johnston’s – originally installed with their sides abutted. The striped piece is so similar to a striped Kelley work that it functions as a quote, whether intentional or not. Here, Johnston is perhaps unwittingly submissive. But whereas Kelley’s banners were a splintering (and broadening) of the artist’s persona into a spectrum of possible voices – ranting, cajoling, seducing, rejecting the viewer – the subjectivity of the artist/protagonist of Johnston’s installation is as absent as the carnival it appears to commemorate.

Mark Prince

Rena Papaspyrou

The National Museum of Contemporary Art , Athens, Greece

‘Photocopies Directly from Matter (1980–81)’ explores the impact of time and human intervention on the urban landscape through the physical evidence of episodes on raw materials collected from the city – from rubbish to building rubble. The exhibition is based on Rena Papaspyrou’s 1982 solo exhibition ‘Samples from the Urban Landscape: Images through Matter’ at Desmos Gallery, where assemblages of material gathered from city walks were presented alongside a catalogue of photocopies that documented and extended the use of materials in the exhibition. The greyscale photocopies render matter, such as shredded paper and scrap wood, into images that appropriate the formal aesthetics of abstraction and realism through sequential and varied states of photographic contrast.
     
Thirty years later, curator Stamatis Schizakis inverts the original 1982 exhibition by placing the emphasis not on the assemblages of materials but on the catalogue photocopies themselves, including only three works from the series ‘Samples from the Urban Landscape’ (1979) in a smaller room preceding the main exhibition space. Three individual groupings of metal, paper, and uniformly shaped fragments of detached wall surface are pasted onto Perspex sheets, resembling enlarged microscope slides or trays of museum fragments, where faded brand logos on decomposing beer cans echo the trace of pigments on ancient marble sculptures and the Parthenon reliefs. The assemblages present the raw documentation for the unframed A4 photocopies pinned in rows of varying heights across three walls in the larger, main exhibition space. Recalling the cross-sectional mapping of an archaeological dig, the photocopies represent a slice of the urban environment in its minutiae, while the technical, compositional and communicative capabilities of the photocopy are explored both as an archival image and as a material in its own right.

       
Within the grouping, renderings of the artist’s face pressed up against the photocopying machine evoke submergence into the black background. Just as corpses from Pompeii remain preserved in the earth, as shadows of nuclear bomb victims are imprinted into the concrete surfaces of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Papaspyrou has noted before that people are as much a material of the city as concrete. This is suggested even more as faces become visible in the juxtaposition of abstract material images against those of the artist’s profile. Playing on associated images from random configurations as what happens when a multitude of forms emerge in a cloudy sky, the group of faces are, like the hands interacting with crumpled paper and plastic shown in another section of photocopies, a reminder that these images are not random. People are usually the conductors that compose – and animate – material into form. Thus, the collective human acts that form the urban landscape beg the same scrutiny as the photocopies themselves, especially considering that in Europe more than 70 percent of the population currently resides in cities and towns.

On that note, it is a timely choice to re-visit ‘Photocopies Directly from Matter (1980–81)’, which was created as Greece joined the European Union in 1981. Thirty years later, the country is embroiled in the current political and economic crisis that threatens the very structure of the European Union and the effects are starting to show. Papaspyrou’s photocopies look like the surfaces of contemporary Athens, with every step an encounter with flash compositions made from the materials and textures of a city facing physical and social decay. On a micro-level, these elements connect to the larger issue of national economic, political, and social changes caused by macro-decisions made on the behalf of an entire population and driven by polices driven by the inter-connected global markets. Looking at the photocopies, there has never been a better time to scrutinize the components that form the urban landscape, including the machinery that makes up the political, social, and economic structures. Look at what happens when you don’t.

Stephanie Bailey

Field of Action: The Moscow Conceptual School in Context

Calvert 22, London, UK

‘Field of Action: The Moscow Conceptual School in Context’ at Calvert 22 contextualizes what was once known as the unofficial art of the former Soviet Union. In so doing, it opens up a complex world of social, political, and creative relationships. The difficulties of presenting this work in a necessarily denuded context form the chief quandary of the exhibition. As Elizaveta Butakova asks in her exhibition notes, ‘How do [these artists] speak, then, to a contemporary viewer, and outside of their circle?’

The exhibition is an adaptation of a show held at the Ekaterina Foundation in 2010. Happily, the incarnation at Calvert 22 retains the depth and ambition of a large-scale museum show. Decade by decade, it charts the context out of which the Moscow Conceptual movement emerged, its heyday in the ‘70s, the so-called New Wave movement of the ‘80s, and the radical transformation of the entire landscape in the years leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The obvious accomplishment of this exhibition – particularly given the relative spatial constraints of Calvert 22 – is the lucid presentation of the movement’s timeline, its origins and key historical moments. But the exhibition also succeeds in capturing the elusive soul of the movement, the particularities of the tension between official ideology and political resistance, the development of a hermetic artistic community and its shifting network of influence and collaboration.

A few works deftly communicate the social conditions and state ideology to which these artists were responding. Vladimir Mironenko’s Protest Room (1987), a trompe l’oeil door painted on the gallery wall, recollects Franz Kafka’s bleak parable of the Door of the Law, in his novel The Trial (1925). Meanwhile, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, founders of the Sots Art movement, appropriate the aesthetic of state sanctioned Socialist Realism in works such as Military Parade (1972).

Appropriation and inversion appear throughout the exhibition, but so do metaphysical ideas of transience and transcendence. The performances of the Collective Actions group involved only a small number of artists and observers, and were often deliberately obscure; the group’s founder, Andrei Monastyrski, referred to these performances as ‘empty actions’ designed to create an ‘empty zone’. Meanwhile, a separate section of the exhibition is dedicated to exploring the notion of spatial fields as locations of possible transcendence, as in Ilya Kabakov’s ‘They Say . . .’ (1989) or Sergei Shablavin’s After Sunset (1988).

The relatively austere tenor of ’70s Conceptualism was followed by the more anarchic art of the ’80s, loosely termed New Wave. But the landmark change took place later, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, with the gradual collapse of the Soviet Union. The removal of creative restrictions, combined with growing interest from the international art market, led to a critical shift in the identity of these artists. In 1988, Sotheby’s held their first sale in Moscow, featuring work by unofficial artists. For the first time, monetary value was set to the work of the Moscow Conceptualists, many of whom had never before sold their work.

But according to Vladimir Yankilevsky, the shift from unofficial to official began as early as 1974, with the so-called Bulldozer exhibition, a showcase of avant-garde work that was broken up by a police force and bulldozed: ‘The situation changed radically, from then on it was no longer dangerous to be an unofficial artist – we had been legalized. It became prestigious, people started to talk about our exhibitions … That is why I think the history of ‘unofficial’ art ends after the Bulldozer exhibition’.

With the advent of intense interest from the art market, that prestige was further ratified. In many ways, the ambiguity of recognition is at the heart of ‘Field of Action’. There is therefore something double edged in the title given to this final section of the exhibition, ‘Happy Days’ – both a phrase describing this post-Glasnost era of creative freedom, international attention and financial success, and a reference to one of the bleakest of Samuel Beckett’s plays.

Katie Kitamura

Speculum Celestiale

Vigna San Martino/Fondazione Morra, Naples, Italy

‘Do you know how many times
the World shouted at me from a distance
and wanted to kill me?
Do you realise how many times
the World shouted at me, close up,
so very close up,
and wanted to love me?
Poetry sustained me.’

These were the opening words of a poem entitled simply ‘Napoli’, with which London-based artist and writer Paul Sakoilsky grabbed and shook listeners part way through an all-night summer solstice event held by Fondazione Morra in conjunction with EM Arts at Vigna San Martino, Naples. It was written following a Hermann Nitsch action held at the same venue a little over one year earlier – Fondazione Morra houses a permanent yet changing installation dedicated to Nitsch’s performances – culminating in a huge feast, the ingredients for which were provided during the earlier ritualistic animal slaughter typical of the Austrian artist’s Dionysian performances.

This year il Banchetto Demoniaco (the Demonic Banquet) was presided over by Nitsch’s former assistant, Paul Renner – food artist, painter and sculptor – and included dishes such as Lucifer Rising (a soup of pig’s ears and tails), Il Cazzo di Antichristo (the ‘dick of the Antichrist’, an eel broth served over mashed potato) and God’s Head Soup (Goat’s Head Soup), amongst others. Held on the expansive grounds of the Vigna San Martino (San Martino Vineyard), as night fell the city of Naples, sprawling out onto the foot of Mount Vesuvius, provided a backdrop for an artistic exploration of the dialectic between humankind and nature through a sensorially layered performance. Involving between 10 and 20 artists performing within and alongside the carefully cultivated grounds, the event aimed at opening up the synesthesic possibilities offered by the combination of feast and the natural environment.

Throughout the event the vino bianco flowed – confirming that the wine god, Bacchus, needs no invitation when two or more artists are gathered – whilst the meal, served in a huge skull-shaped bowl made from pastry by one of Renner’s collaborators, Roland Adlassnigg, bridged the two poles of man and nature. This was a sensually tangible exemplar of the aim of the show, which was outlined in event co-organiser, Raffaella Morra’s accompanying text Dialectics of the Natural. The mercurial Renner, a master of decadent concoctions, became magus-scientist, ‘possessing the secrets of nature, but not becoming their master’. Like an alchemist restricted to the simplest of materials – the fruits of the earth – the artist-chef grinned both maniacally and with childlike glee as he teased, caressed and coerced animal and vegetable matter into compliance with his culinary intentions.

Above all, Speculum Celestiale reminded participants that there still exists an untamed and provocative Dionysian tendency within the arts that remains a vital element in cultural discourse. This was illustrated by, amongst other things, a semi-naked Sakoilsky ending up in the serving dish and inviting the audience to cover him in offal, rice or whatever was to hand. No-one seemed to mind that he was supposed to have dressed as a clown and be covered in custard. But it was that kind of night.

Naples – industrial, wheezing under the strain of traffic, yet situated in a kind of cradle of intensely vibrant human activity thriving against historical odds – forms a crossroads between the advance of technology and the power of nature, via the adherence of its inhabitants to a natural code (the nearby ruins of Pompeii providing, of course, a constant reminder of the danger presented by Mount Vesuvius). That code is expressed in the simplicity of the city’s food, but also in a palpable yet unspoken reverence both for the elements and for the climate, matched and balanced only by an irreverence towards authority. In such an environment the simple presentation of the city, of Vesuvius, of the solstice – a pagan feast – of wine and of food could hardly fail to impress. Yet, in a creative era such as ours – where audience participation, food, politics, gymnastics (for example, Allora and Calzadilla’s entry at this year’s Venice Biennale), or indeed, anything can be considered art – artists and curators need to be attentive lest the art itself is somehow lost within the wider spectacle. For the democratizing process by which anything can become art and anyone become an artist risks art losing its power to shake the viewer into a momentary crystallization of experience wherein the rational world gives way to a realization of a kinship with nature. This is vital to the political capacity of art, because it is at this point that the fallacy of the dualistic human/nature divide – which motivates much that is negative in our behaviour towards the environment and each other – is exposed. Yet too often ‘participation’ gives way to light entertainment; a day out, wherein the audience is encouraged to partake, rather than be moved or shaken beyond comfortable boundaries. One unfortunate side effect is an audience expecting to relate to art as they relate to everyday life. (Witness galleries and museums being gradually taken over by ever-expanding souvenir shops.)

Art, performance, poetry and the feast are ideal mediums for the channeling of the tangible energies present in Naples, particularly when the artists – as with Renner and Sakoilsky – are loathe to let the audience become complacent. On the night Speculum Celestiale was held it was not so much ‘mankind looking for a soul’ as Karl Jung famously had it, but wearied souls, beaten by the consumerist merry-go-round looking for their bodies, and finding them through a sensual engagement admixed with a very real notion of time’s passing as the sun – and its audience – died and were reborn between Mount Vesuvius, the volcanic Phlegraean Fields and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Long live Naples, and art.

Mike Watson

Mike Watson is an art theorist and writer based in Rome. He is currently writing a book entitled Joan of Art; Towards a Conceptual Militancy for Zer0 Books.

Louise Despont, Jutta Koether, Alicja Kwade, Anj Smith, Marianne Vitale, Unica Zürn

Ibid Projects , London, UK

Magnus Edensvard, the co-director of Ibid Projects and curator of their current group show, has long taken an interest in the work of Unica Zürn (1916–70).  Zürn is known for her automatic drawing, her partnership with Hans Bellmer and, most dramatically, for jumping to her death from his apartment. Visiting one of the gallery’s artists, Marianne Vitale, at her New York studio, Edensvard was struck by how the drawings discarded on the floor and paw-marked by cats resembled Zürn’s. Vitale, a straight-talker, had never heard of Zürn, but they decided to put together a show considering unidentified legacy and complimentary practice among several artists working independently of one another.

Six of Zürn’s drawings from the 1950s and ’60s are displayed among five other female artists of different ages: Louise Despont, Jutta Koether, Alicja Kwade, Anj Smith and Marianne Vitale. While Zürn is the ostensible platform you discover that her work effects a series of relationships within the rest of the group. However, viewing Zürn and Vitale side-by-side is to witness the collapse of time and identity. Created 30 years later Vitale’s indeterminate but purposeful and intensely inked marks present a startling continuity to Zürn’s doodles and in particular those salvaged by Hans Bellmer. One such is an intricate map like drawing torn into three parts and reassembled by Bellmer. The perforated lines of these pieced-together fragments are a touching legacy of the artists’ troubled relationship and Zürn’s periodic internments in various mental hospitals.

The theme of time recurs in the meticulous line drawings of Louise Despont, who works on ledger paper used by the British in India. Found in an antiques shop in Delhi, the origins of 12 uniform accounting pages on which Couple with Clock Tower is drawn are more surprising.  Intriguing handwritten records of ‘cattle assessment’ and ‘yak meat’ are barely discernible behind the geometric shapes that delineate man, woman and clock. Despont’s materials, in this instance from Yakima Valley, Washington, subtly contextualise the idea of time and the formal possibilities for creative expression in graphic drawing. 

Nearby Jutta Koether’s figures, hands and faces look like the hasty sketches of unconscious doodling. Childish red felt-tip is a further reminder of Zürn’s freewheeling automatism. But Koether’s agenda is concerned with seeing or illusion. Exhibited in Perspex photo-display boxes placed on eye-level supports, each sheet of paper has drawings on both sides of it. From whichever side you look you see the immediate markings as well as the faint back-to-front outline of the reverse image. The effect is disorientating even irritating as your eyes search to gain perspective.  You sense the curator’s desire to register the potential of line.

Anj Smith’s weird punky worlds punctuate the show’s implicit association with Surrealism. She has crafted a glimpse of two intriguing landscapes where the material of paint is part of the subject. Thick impasto leaf forms spill out over the edge of glistening canvases in which arbitrary emblems of consumer culture – a Nike trainer, a deflated happy face balloon – sit amongst organic matter: flora and fauna, tiny perfect skulls with 3D teeth and fossils from the depths of the sea. Smith grants authenticity to each lovingly crafted world by balancing sculptural modelling with lines scraped carefully into smooth surface areas. 

There is no centrepiece to this show and, rather than propose an overarching theme, Edensvard has simply listed the artists names – a quiet lesson in how to juxtapose different artists so their work assumes both strong individual and collective identities. Vitale is the last trick up his sleeve: her video Patron (2009), a hit at the last Whitney Biennial, provides a sonic counterbalance to the intensity of line studies. Shouting at you viciously Vitale delivers a non-stop diatribe against patrons.  Humorous venom, it feels personal: ‘Two patrons think that everyone owes them the Holy Roman Empire!’ Indeed. A gentler Vitale offers a more fitting summation of the show.  Asked in an interview if her working process was automatic she replied ‘There is, I suppose, an automatism… in letting the work define itself. The drawing instructs me. It dictates its content’. An obvious parallel perhaps but this small group exhibition encourages such a process in its audience and achieves it exceptionally well. 

Kate Marris

Bernardo da Bicci

extraspazio, Rome, Italy

A DayGlo shrine meets the visitor in the UV-lit space which plays host to Bernardo da Bicci’s first solo show, alongside which stands an almost three metre-high self-portrait of the artist lying six feet under (Bernardo Buried, 2011). The work depicts the artist – his face shrouded by the US flag – outstretched beneath stratified layers of soil, bricks and animal bones, whilst receiving a luminous bolt of energy from the crucifix marking his grave. Plastic flowers and butterflies, together with DIY materials – recurring elements within Da Bicci’s work – bring a banal element to an image which equally incorporates the sacred and the profane.

Little is known about Da Bicci, who is a self-proclaimed art-saint and superhero. An attempt to track him down for interview during the course of this exhibition, which is close to the Vatican in Rome, failed when he returned home two days earlier than had been agreed with his gallerist. One wonders whether he flew Alitalia or was teleported by supernatural forces – holy, or otherwise – such is the mythos that the artist creates around works which challenge both conventional religious iconography and the myth of racial harmony in the US.

Within the show, ‘Let This be a Space of Light, Beauty and Truth’ – a line apparently uttered by a passing Franciscan monk as the show was being installed – a thin line is walked between a confrontation with Catholicism and an assimilation of it within a personal spiritual and political lexicon. Bernardo’s Tomb (2011) – a floor piece covered in plastic flowers – melds kitsch imagery with overtly Christian forms. A toy gun, a luminous plastic rat and a crucifix are incorporated within a mock-up of the 27-year-old artist’s own grave. Of course, the tomb is necessary, as is the suggestion of martyrdom – a column displayed in the gallery bears the signs of Da Bicci’s flagellation daubed in an impossibly luminous blood-red – for death is the first requirement of sainthood. That the show had opened by the time John Paul II was beatified at San Pietro’s Basilica, less than a kilometre from the gallery, is significant. For Saint Bernardo Da Bicci signals, wittingly or not – who knows? – the superfluity of the Church to spiritual experience and ritual, something which has the dual effect of making religion appear as ‘mere’ art, and of giving art a spiritual capacity. In this sense, whilst the Catholic Church clearly mounts some of the best art-performances in the world, it comes out a loser, because this is categorically not their intention. The church requires that people believe in its doctrine as fact, even if science flatly contradicts it. Art, on the other hand, has deception at its core, and is therefore free to declare ‘Saints’ – or, indeed, to declare whatever – as and when it wishes, without compromising its foundation. And it is here that the political references in Da Bicci’s work assume a power that goes beyond mere rhetoric.

Behind Bernardo’s Tomb, a polyptych (R.I.P Bernardo, 2011) comprises five large panels, each depicting an American pop-culture figure – Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and Snow White amongst them – wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood. This could come across as a crass generalization, however well-founded the fundamental premise. However, as politicians struggle to maintain any semblance of honesty, and political ideologies (leftist, liberal or otherwise) ring hollow for their demonstrable failure, the ethical mantle is again thrown to art, in its capacity to declare some kind of viable alternative to our failed social system in spite of the difficulty of conjuring one in reality. As disparate as the elements within Da Bicci’s work are, his self-declaration of sainthood, together with his critique of multicultural America, clearly resonates with the need for marginalized individuals to claim an identity for themselves. In this sense, it is via ‘art’ that Saint Da Bicci has found his own persona. Yet to stop at such a pedestrian observation would belittle the further social possibilities that a combined political and spiritual engagement within the arts offers.

Da Bicci presents an interesting constellation between art, politics and mysticism, a feat which can only be all-consuming for the artist himself. Indeed, one cannot be sure quite where the artist – who was born in Chicago to Mexican immigrant parents – is heading, such are the diverse ranges of references within his work and his enigmatic nature. Yet the boldness of the installation at extraspazio heralds the emergence of a talent for whom the resolution of various disparate elements may contribute a social significance which goes far beyond the evident personal psychical development of the artist.

Mike Watson

Small Fires

Sint–Lukasgalerie, Brussels, Belgium

Fire holds a primitive fascination over us. It is as much associated with passion and love – which also might have devastating effects – as it is with revolutions and political turmoil. Besides these symbolic or metaphoric readings, it also offers pure visual allure. Conceived by curator Filip Luyckx, the group show ‘Small Fires’ brings together a number of art works that explicitly reference fire, along with others that function more autonomously.

The starting point for the project was Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk (1964), an artist’s book in which Ruscha photographed various forms of fire, such as a burning cigarette or a fireplace, in a dead-pan, documentary way. In 1969, Bruce Nauman burned the book, photographed it and edited an artist’s book of his own, called Burning Small Fires (1969). That, in turn, inspired Jonathan Monk to burn Nauman’s book and make a 16mm film of it, a poster for which is presented in the show (small fires burning [after Ed Ruscha after Bruce Nauman after], 2003).

Thomas Galler also formulated a response to Ruscha’s work by producing his own book, entitled Various Fires and Four Running Boys (2009), in which he presents not only the sources of fire but also its consequences and casualties. The inclusion of these two last works reveals the limitations of the show’s curatorial stance: such a chain of associations and references only works if each new contribution has something substantial to add to the original. If not, it becomes a predictable form of self-reflexive Spielerei, narrowing down the concept instead of opening it up from various thematic angles.

Luckily, the exhibition is not restricted to this navel-gazing, intertextual practice. Erich Weiss presents the diptych Even Small Fires Can Prove Dangerous (2011), which, through text and image, tells the story of a man falling deeply in love with an ‘angel faced redhead’ – a love that turns out to be fatal. Fire’s associations with political turmoil are addressed in Galler’s Ecstatic Fire (2007), a film in which a compilation of news images from political unrest and violence succeed one another at great speed. Superflex’s film Burning Car (2008) also symbolically refers to political protest by showing a car set aflame. Strangely enough, it evokes the same calmness you’d feel if you were staring into a fireplace. A comparable sense of the uncanny beauty of destruction emanates from Reynold Reynolds’ brilliant video Burn (2002), in which a house burns down while its occupants calmly continue their daily activities.

‘Small Fires’ is an exhibition that is as mesmerizing as staring at a fire. However, by omitting some works – Rosemary Laings’ picture of yet another burning car, for example – it could have avoided the unnecessary repetition from which it sometimes suffers. Nevertheless, these are only minor flaws in what is otherwise a captivating show.

Sam Steverlynck

Stefano Minzi

Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome, Italy

Galleria Lorcan O’Neill’s Lungara Space – which is positioned some 20 metres from Lorcan’s main gallery – has featured the work of Carsten Nicolai, Michael Dean and Eddie Peake, amongst others. The latest young Italian to be shown there is the Berlin-based artist Stefano Minzi, who has produced a subtle and thought-provoking exhibition. A departure from his earlier, more directly political, anti-Berlusconi works – some of which were included in Ugo Ferranti’s group show ‘Bianco e Nero’ earlier this year – the prints which make up ‘Aria’, whilst at first glance coming across as uncharacteristically passive, give way to a sense of unease on closer inspection. Such subtle interplay prevents a slide into political hyperbole, whilst engaging with pressing contemporary concerns.
 

The five works in the show were made using a simple Xerox transfer process whereby hand-mixed ink is offset from printed paper to canvas in four stages, employing the CYMK colour system. The result is a loosely controlled photographic image, subject to random deterioration in form. This incorporation of chance links to layered themes that run throughout Minzi’s recent works, including politics, mysticism and warfare.

Bombardamento aereo (Aerial Bombardment, 2008) marks the departure point for the artist. A four-paneled piece arranged in landscape format and measuring just 40cm in height, its dimensions are that of a scaled-up holiday photo, which effectively it is, although with one crucial modification. The mountain scene, which captures a couple smiling for the camera, features a sinister aerial formation in the background. Based on fears that have manifested for the artist as various nightmares since childhood, the image depicts the terrifying indifference of military machines to human life; even when so-called ‘intelligent bombs’ go astray they might destroy a vacation, a wedding or a funeral. What is evoked in Minzi’s work, beyond a disgust at warfare, is the sense of inevitability that accompanies even the most random disaster. An interest in apocalyptic premonition – which for the artist is more of an obsession than a passing muse – underpins this fascination with fate, as reflected in the other works on display.

The title of the show is taken from the Italian for ‘air’, one of four elements in the Hellenic philosophical tradition and represented astrologically by Gemini, Libra and Aquarius. Another four-paneled piece – Acqua, Aria, Terra, Fuoco (Water, Air, Earth, Fire, 2010) – arranged as four small canvases in a row, each featuring an individual landscape, links the four elements via the ethereality which results from Minzi’s working method. By now, the rich array of influences upon the artist’s work may be apparent, yet Minzi pulls them together in a concise manner. The three works Gemini, Libra and Aquarius (2010–11) depict printed seascapes overlaid with hanging Perspex screens and images of F-16 warplanes flying in the formation of astrological constellations. The largest of these is Aquarius, made up of 12 small canvases; it marks the culmination of Minzi’s preoccupations to date. Influenced by a dream in which the artist awoke and opened his window to be confronted with an ocean, rather than the urban landscape he was used to seeing, the planes recall those he saw flying in formation towards his stranded home, growing bigger and more numerous in number until they finally blotted out the sun. None of this is made apparent by simply looking at the work, yet the pairing of Perspex – manufactured and clinical – and printed canvas, together with the combination of the senselessness of warfare, and the inevitable rotation of the astrological cycle reflects the surgical and detached nature of aerial warfare.

As allied forces embark on another military campaign, the sense of destiny – though not acceptance – which accompanies what could and should be prevented is rendered as both oddly reassuring and terrifying by Minzi. Evoking a hope for something we hope will never take place – Armageddon – Minzi’s work occupies a temporal space somewhere between the apocalypse and its possible delay. Meanwhile, rendering catastrophe in an aesthetically pleasing manner does nothing to dampen the political urgency present in the artist’s earlier works. A risk that has paid off.

Mike Watson

Fredrik Værslev

Circus, Berlin, Germany

The six paintings neatly aligned in one corner of Circus in Berlin are part of the new series of ‘terrazzo’ paintings by Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev. The artist produced the works – all Untitled (2011) – through a process of aging, staining and marking the canvases using a variety of paints in various colours, a solvent and a chemical used to prevent the corrosion of metal. Composed in terms of the dispersion of drips and drops as well as faint stains and wayward strokes, the paintings can be described best by the term ‘all-over’. Displaying little marked variation across each of their compositions, each work’s claim on space thus lies along a binary of indefinite pictorial depth and surface flatness. Any concrete sense of movement in relation to space that the paintings did possess resulted from their installation, their having nearly masked that corner and thus having feigned to be architecture; although a rupture occurred as the viewer turned the corner to face the adjacent painting, one was quickly thrown back onto an even keel, since these canvases exhibit a relatively similar density and quality of marks.

Over the course of six months, from mid-spring until mid-autumn, Værslev left these canvases unstretched and laid along the ground outside, prone to the elements. As such, the sense of time they embody is comparable to their sense of space: it differentiates between long periods of relinquished activity and short bursts of focused work. As the artist recently explained in an interview in Mousse, although the inspiration for the earlier paintings from this body of work was an attempt to mimic the appearance of an exhibition space’s terrazzo floor, with these new works he has moved away from that point of reference in order to focus on the procedure contributing to the works’ appearance. These paintings embody wear, wherein resides the primary and quite profound dichotomy of the works. The wear that the works exhibit looks akin to a painter’s studio drop cloth or a painter’s paint-splattered trousers. Like paint-splattered trousers, which can be worn by professionals, hobbyists and poseurs alike, it is the earnestness of their producer’s intention and the virtue of his or her labour that can lend integrity to such by-products of creation.

To prevent us from falling prey to a romantic or mythologized notion, the exhibition text explicates that an attitude of playfulness motivated the production of these works. The text, reproduced from Roger Caillois’s book Les jeux et les hommes (Man, Play and Games, 1958), consists primarily of a series of imperatives qualified by conditions such as: ‘Soil them. Rub dark tea into the fabric to give them a soiled look […] fun: the activity is chosen for its light-hearted character’. Such terms, which inform – if not actually describe – Værslev’s method, are neither the mechanical processes outlined in Richard Serra’s Verb List Compilation (1967–8), nor do they invoke irrationality in the way of John Cage’s chance operations. However, like Serra’s and Cage’s, Værslev’s efforts are in the pursuit of art, so this is no mere game. And his products are recognizably artworks, so they do not clearly argue for a redefinition of the conditions of life. Rather, they push for the continued redefinition of art to include simply playing at it. The title of the exhibition, ‘The Secrets of Aging Well’, suggests that Værslev believes in the value of lasting recognition while also suggesting that reception, too, can be tricked or played, if one knows how. Itself quite elucidating, the title implies taking the easy way out without sacrificing all that comes from going about something the hard way.

John Beeson

Angela Bulloch

Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany

Behind the title of Angela Bulloch’s exhibition ‘Information, Manifesto, Rules and Other Leaks…’ is a framing principle: ‘Leaks’ are no longer the backroom business of journalists and informants, but an emerging model of the world. For Bulloch, who defines this exhibition as a continuation of her ‘Rules Series’, begun in 1992, the appeal of leaks is as a system of anti-rules – portals to a pulsing mass of ‘true information’ beyond the posited (sanctioned) information distributed as rules.

The exhibition is composed of 12 ‘wall paintings’ – texts neatly stencilled onto the gallery’s white walls and combined with graphic elements based on the agitprop pamphlets of the Novembergruppe, the 1920s German avant-garde movement whose members included George Grosz and Otto Dix. At Bulloch’s concurrent show at Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, visitors’ movements are tracked by wall-mounted drawing machines, like Surrealist surveillance paintings in a house of horrors. In Berlin, Bulloch strips out these signature ‘interactive’ elements – as if technology has disappeared behind its interface to reveal the writing on the wall. The exhibition conceives the leaks phenomenon as a gladiatorial arena constructed by the media out of itself. Bulloch depicts the extraordinary blowout between WikiLeaks and The Guardian by cutting up the ‘rules’ to look like headlines, standfirsts and graphics in Guardian typeface and reassembling them in mural size. It’s a powerful image of traditional media in disarray, while facts and figures are discharged from databases like explosions from a bombshell planted in some future era.

The exhibition opens with a string of injunctions: ‘Please do not run inside the installation’, ‘Please follow instructions issued by the gallery assistants’, ‘Sensible footwear must be worn’. This work, BODYSPACEMOTIONTHINGS (all works 2011), is a votive to the British cult of Health & Safety. The piece, titled after Robert Morris’s show at Tate Modern (first shown in 1971 and restaged in 2009) is composed of the museum’s instructions to visitors. When the exhibition first appeared in 1971 it closed early because over-eager gallery-goers destroyed the art. In 2009, after an inventory of injuries, the art was considered a public danger, and was shut down. The same thing would happen to Ai Weiwei’s installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2010.

Conceived as a companion to the first wall painting, Bulloch’s Anarchy offers stirring responses: ‘I will not kiss your fucking flag. There is some shit I will not eat.’ ‘Do what you will’. WikiLeaks – Kaupthing Claims reveals Julian Assange’s summary of the payout findings cartooned as an exploding bomb – an update on the Danish cartoons with information turned terrorist. The context is the Icelandic banking drama, in which the UK played the injured party. The BigMac Index, by comparing hamburger prices in the form of a distorted swastika, reveals that Pounds Sterling are overvalued by 28 percent.

The final wall painting is hidden at the rear of the exhibition, obscured by an interior wall screened off like a confessional booth that contains several smaller, more intimate works. On the wall are the typewritten rules of Bulloch’s original ‘Rules Series’ (1992), facing the exhibition entrance sealing the preliminary contract with the viewer-buyer. Behind it is 11 Downing Street, the artist’s contract with power – another swastika – a list of dos and don’ts sent by Alastair Darling to the artist when she was invited to join others represented in the British government’s art collection. The reception was hosted, at the height of the financial crisis, by a ‘major art collector and hedge fund manager’, Bulloch explains in the exhibition notes. Elsewhere, there are poetic moments, like the revelation that something called the International Standard (the system that regulates paper sizes – A4, etc.) is based on √2.

Yet another major prize exhibition for Bulloch (this exhibition is a result of her winning the Vattenfall Contemporary prize) finds the artist compelled to reflect on her position within the establishment as a self-styled collaborator and subversive. True to form, but frustratingly, she is evasive on WikiLeaks, often acting out charges already levelled in the mainstream press. What the world of leaks might actually look like turns out to be a promise Bulloch chooses not to deliver on. Perhaps it’s all still to play for. But the possibility is enticing.

Sam Williams

Temporary Stedelijk 2

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

A fluorescent green haze colours the white 19th-century ceiling above the Stedelijk Museum’s majestic staircase. Dan Flavin’s neon light installation Untitled (to Piet Mondriaan Through His Preferred Colours, Red, Yellow and Blue) was produced in 1986 for the main hall and reconstructed for ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’, the current show in the open, yet closed, Stedelijk museum. Due to re-open last year after the museum’s initial closure in 2003, the official re-opening was pushed back to the end of 2011. After a temporary settlement from 2004–08 in the former offices of the Dutch postal service, the museum has moved back to its original building – an opulent, 1895 neo-Renaissance construction in the Amsterdam Museum Quarter. Comprised of several sub-exhibitions ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ follows ‘Temporary Stedelijk’, which opened in August 2010 in an effort to silence the audience’s dismay after facing a sparse cultural environment in Amsterdam with the simultaneous renovation of the Stedelijk, the Rijksmuseum and the contemporary art space De Appel. ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ displays a selection from the permanent collection as well as new acquisitions and ambitious reenactments of two groundbreaking shows from the 1960s. 

Taking place in the only climate-controlled gallery space, ‘Making Histories: Changing Views of the Collection’ presents a strong range of works from the permanent collection that haven’t been on display for over seven years, having been hidden from view during the long renovation. The arrangement of pieces seems effortless, as if they were never taken off the walls in the first place. Central to the show is Henri Matisse’s boldly coloured La Perruche et la Sirène (The Parakeet and the Mermaid, 1952), accompanied by Yves Klein’s L’Accord Blue (re 10) (1969) and Resonances (Mg 16) (1960), forming an attractive triptych in volume and colour (Matisse) and three-dimensionality (Klein). Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Cross (1920) and Piet Mondrian’s series of small abstract paintings (Composition No. IV With Red Blue and Yellow, 1929, and Composition No. XV, 1913) also emphasize the re-visitation of Modern art. Just as in Flavin’s neon beams of circles and lines, here too the line is shown as the ultimate starting point of all that can be created and reproduced. Jo Baer’s Untitled (Korean) (1963) acts as a more contemporary counterpart, celebrating the emptiness of the canvas. In this painting, the white is left to be white and nothing else, merely enclosed by black and blue rims. Brice Marden’s Morada (1976) encompasses this curatorial sequence with the effective simplicity of three simple colours of black, grey and red. 

The show seems to speak of a desire to utilize these canonical pieces as cornerstones for new potentials in contemporary art. Some works manage to very elegantly tap into the main thread: Nairy Baghramian’s painted metal tubes, Beliebte Stellen (Beloved Placements, 2011), seem as light as plastic and are placed seemingly randomly in the room, some on the floor, others attached to the wall but all loosely laid out in open circles. Deceiving the eye in its simplicity while simultaneously representing the openness of the museum’s future ahead, the work is a refreshing sight. However, nearby, Donald Judd’s stack of colourful profiles (Untitled, 1989) could have evoked an interesting curatorial challenge in this context, but here it seems fossilized, standing on its own

‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ offers two other presentations as well: ‘TV as…’ and ‘Recollections’. The latter reconstructs and documents archival material of two innovative shows from the 1960s: ‘Bewogen Beweging’ (Moved Movement, 1961) and ‘Dylaby: Dynamisch Labyrint’ (Dylaby: Dynamic Labyrinth, 1962). Although these are powerful examples of the relation and crossovers between art, television, politics and aesthetics with works by artists such as Nam June Paik and Jan Dibbets, ‘TV as…’ feels a bit outdated in concept. This restaging of the show closes with a stunning recent acquisition of a work by Paul Chan titled 6th Light (2007), in which a window is projected on the floor of a dark, empty room. Amorphous shapes slowly float by in the projection. Between them, some familiar objects (a bicycle, a wheel, a chair) appear, which consequently make you identify the amorphous silhouettes as debris – a world decaying in front of us in a dreamy yet frightening peacefulness.

Although the latter two shows display more singularity of purpose it is still striking that after a long closure, in its second endeavor of curatorial transparency, the museum shows some confusion in direction. ‘Temporary Stedelijk 2’ predominantly gives small but interesting incentives to bigger steps to be taken. One can’t escape the thought that the distribution of elements and range of pieces feels somewhat arbitrary and only hints at what the museum used to be. Though it hopefully suggests what we can look forward to in the near future. 

Judith Vrancken

Collection Mabuse

Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark

For ‘Collection Mabuse’ the artists known as rasmus knud (an unlikely combination of two Danish first names) from the mid 1990s to 2005 – Johannes Christoffersen and Sebastian Schiørring – teamed up with their former partner in art Søren Andreasen to stage a collective show of new works within the metaphorical framework of the fictional villain, Dr. Mabuse. Part of Overgaden’s ongoing interest in staging ‘updates’ by a generation of Danish artists who emerged on the international scene in the 1990s, the show continued the trio’s critical investigations of the objects, structures and processes of the social field in the twilight zone between the given and the possible. As the title’s reference to the infamous master of disguise reveals, the continuation also involved a development towards an aesthetic of ambiguous appearances.

The show demonstrated the three artists’ different stylistic and material approaches. Rather than dividing the exhibition space into separate sections, they presented their works as an integrated conceptual whole or a single collection. Hence, the front space brought together works by each artist: Schiørring’s Overtoning til sort (Fade to Black, 2011) was a sculpturally elaborated film projector, built around one of the museum’s pillars, showing imagery of a foggy panorama of Copenhagen filmed from Overgaden’s roof. Andreasen’s In the World of Appearances 1–5 (2011), a series of small engravings based on simple horizontal lines of varying length and density, was juxtaposed with Christoffersen’s three-part work Autopsy of a Ra-fly (2011). The latter brings together two older works with a newer one, all created around the central theme of Charma (First flying Ra-fly, 1982, Kama [The Sun of Cheap Appearances], 1995, and Coma [Prototype for Tomorrow, 2001], 2011). The final work consists of three empty plinths inviting the audience to visualize models of the famous Italian RA-fighter in various stages of its development.

The show came off as a Postmodern cabinet of curiosities: it combined a Surrealist sensibility for the aura of the unfamiliar object, a Minimalist sense of structural logic oscillating between order and nonsense, cool Conceptualist documentation of ‘the real’, and the expanded reality of literary fiction (particularly in the artists’ texts printed in a folder that accompanied the show). Each of the works contributed to a multifaceted, open-ended narrative that unfolded through suggestion, inversion and abstraction. The narrative circled around the state of the contemporary world in negotiation with its Modernist history of now somewhat anachronistic, failed and obscure – but nonetheless explorable – ideals.

Unlike the traditional cabinet of curiosities, the show’s scope was not encyclopaedic and its mode of address was not educational – far from it. It constituted an idiosyncratic vision that challenged the audience to reflectively navigate subtly strange territory. As a counterpoint to current celebrations of transparency and the frictionless in art and capitalism, the show insisted on the indeterminate as a means to (successfully) disrupt our automatic visual and intellectual responses through activating our curiosity; not only in the sense of simple wonder but as an imaginary practice involving a mode of critical perception and thinking that does not take the world of appearances that Mabuse embodies for granted, but rather one that speculates about the probability of its very existence.

Jacob Lillemose

Motion of a Nation

Galleria V.M. 21 Contemporanea, Rome, Italy

More than 30 international and Italian artists – working in video, installation and photography – contribute to Galleria V.M. 21 Contemporanea’s current exhibition, which ambitiously attempts both a ‘crosscutting view of the artistic scene’ and an examination of national identity, via an appraisal of the ‘flag’. Opening, as it did, within days of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, the show provided a timely opportunity for artists to address the notion of nationhood in a frank manner.

It was curator Antonio Arèvalo’s declared intention to avoid hosting ‘Motion of a Nation’ in a museum, so that the opportunities for resistance allowed by the gallery space could be engaged with freely – the point being that no museum in Rome, or indeed Italy, would permit the levels of subversion appropriate to the subject in hand. Whilst this is doubtless true in light of the closed nature of the Italian museum scene, such an explicit reference to the choice of ‘gallery’ over ‘museum’ surely necessitates that the subsequent gallery-held exhibition manifest precisely the kind of radical political message that the museum prohibits. Given the concrete political limitations of art as such this was always going to be a thankless task, but one that at least keeps questions as to art’s political capacity – or lack thereof – at the fore, whilst allowing for one or two important opinions to be aired along the way.

Italian artist Costa Vece’s Made in Romania (2005) – a Romanian flag composed of three appropriately coloured garments held together with pins – highlights Italy’s failure to assimilate its legal and illegal immigrants, whilst relying on cheap imports and labour to prop up its ailing economy. Similarly, Alejandro Vidal’s photographic triptych, A Song Before Sunset (2010), shows an Italian flag being hand washed in a plastic tub, mimicking a protest ritual common lately in South America. The implied message here is that Italy needs to clean up its act, rather than merely wash its hands of its duties regarding financial corruption, neglect of international and internal obligations, women’s rights, and so on. Similarly Marco Bernardi’s Black Flag, 2010, which waves back and forth atop a motorized armature in the centre of the largest of three rooms, implies that what is needed is a genuine, perhaps even anarchist, overthrow of the powers that be. That these things are implied rather than blatant is no fault as such. Art, after all, hints at, flirts with and generally skirts around the social and political sphere. One might ask whether a genuinely combustible art might even be desirable. Not because we shouldn’t aim for a better world, but because art ceases to maintain its detached critical distance when it results in genuine political confrontation.

All of this begs the question whether there is much point in political art at all, or if it is merely an elaborate distraction from more pressing realities. Yet although I often despair at political exhibitions, ‘Motion of a Nation’ could well have that despair backfire upon the gallery, due to its failure to capitalise on moments where individual talent shines through. Aside from the works mentioned above, these moments include works by mixed-nationality collective Alterazioni Video (Slovenia: Proposal for a New National Flag, 2011, comprising painted designs) and the photographic series, ‘Made in Italy: Sfoglie di Garibaldi’ (Petals of Garibaldi, 2010), by Stefano Scheda. Whilst the former work attempts a direct political intervention via a redesign of Slovenia’s flag in order to better differentiate it from those of other nations, the latter pictures a woman tearing through an Italian flag made of fresh Italian pastry, to reveal herself naked, yet in a pose so unassuming it deflects any eroticization. Garibaldi, from whom the work derives its title, like many other male national heroes and/or heads of State (Mussolini and Berlusconi among them), took the role of ‘Father of the Nation’ perhaps too seriously, having spent his life post-Italian unification secreted away with various mistresses on a private Sardinian island. The idea that political power, which is generally in the hands of men, should be a licence to cavort endlessly with (inevitably) less powerful women is still subscribed to in Italy today, to comic and tragic effect. Where art can be of use, it is surely in communicating what the mass media – controlled by the head of State – cannot. Though how that message is conveyed beyond a cultural clique is yet another perennial question.

Where this show otherwise seems raw and unresolved in places, one could cite the extent of its ambition as cause for failure. However, just as a white flag is waved to symbolise surrender, one wonders if Bernardi’s Black Flag, waving perpetually yet automatically and lifelessly, might symbolise a cul-de-sac for political art in general; a point at which artists must either choose between art and politics, or seek an entirely new working method which somehow incorporates both. If this fact has been demonstrated unwittingly it is nonetheless highly significant.

Mike Watson

Between Two Worlds

Edel Assanti Project Space, London, UK

Edel Assanti Project Space is a short walk from the bustle of Victoria station. The neighbourhood is fitting for their latest exhibition, a showcase of the work of nine contemporary photographers from Latin America. The gallery looks onto streets jostling with tourists, while the noise of the Vauxhall Bridge Road bleeds into the space as a reminder of the pace of 21st-century global traffic.

Curated by photography critic and broadcaster Sue Steward, ‘Between Two Worlds’ is carefully balanced, featuring five male and four female artists, who collectively represent six different Central and South American countries. The title is a play on the compositional formula used by Mexican photographer Oscar Fernando Gómez Rodríguez, who began taking photographs framed by the window of his taxicab in Monterrey in 1998. The untitled series of everyday scenes (2009) is tinged with sadness, as the album was intended for his daughter who died at birth. Recording on a cheap camera (first a Kodak and then a 35mm Canon), the artist has stressed that ‘for me, the important thing is not technique’. Appropriately then, they are hung here in a grid format that makes them read like CCTV cameras capturing the grit and humour demanded by Mexican street life.

Human suffering is documented most poignantly by the Argentinean Adriana Lestido, who began taking photographs after her husband was ‘disappeared’, going on to receive a Guggenheim Grant in 1995. Her silver gelatin prints (the only analogue inclusions in the display) tenderly document mother daughter relationships: in Alma y Maura (1995–8), a bare-breasted girl is sat at the kitchen table, gazing across at her mother who has hidden her face against her knee in a gesture relating to some untold despair. The product of three years of intimate work with her subjects, Lestido’s black-and-white photographs have the seeming patina of family snapshots.

They contrast well with the visceral colour of the two c-type prints hung opposite, by fellow Argentinean Alessandra Sanguinetti. In one a skinned hare has been lashed to a wire fence; in the other, a man washes his bloodied hands, while a Doberman dog watches on. In 1996 the artist returned to her father’s rural farm armed with a Hasselblad, where she spent six years working on the series ‘On the Sixth Day’. The raw imagery has a gothic, cinematic appeal that runs through much of the exhibition, most notably in Carnicera (2005) by Marco Lopez. The choreographed portrait is of a woman – with beads of sweat on her brow and neck, a bloodied knife in one hand and a bone in the other – standing against hanging carcasses, with two flanks of meat flaring out like wings on either side of her. She stares intently at the viewer.   

A more sardonic performance takes place in the work of Dulze Pinzón, whose series ‘The Real Story of the Superheroes’ (2005–10) features genuine Mexican workers dressed as comic book characters and photographed in their usual workplace, with their names, jobs and earnings listed on a label below. The homage to their daily heroism is brilliantly slight, railing against the brassiness of American television dramas such as Heroes. Although modest in scale and with some works inevitably less accomplished than others (such as Byron Marmol’s portraits of Guatemalan youths dressed as their manga alter egos) the exhibition offers fascinating insights into the state of contemporary photography in Latin America today. As Diego Rivera wrote of the great photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, this is an exhibition in which ‘anguish is omnipresent and the atmosphere is supersaturated with irony’.

Eleanor Nairne

Chantal Joffe

Victoria Miro , London, UK

The subjects in Chantal Joffe’s current exhibition at Victoria Miro may not be strictly conventional beauties, but they do adhere to a certain archetypal allure, both doe-eyed and complex. Comprising seven large oil paintings downstairs, and 11 various-sized paintings upstairs in airy one-room spaces, all of the works feature women, mostly solitary portraits.

Given that the paintings are so large (almost all are well over a metre squared) the brushstrokes are effortlessly slick, the figures’ limbs statuesque and vigorously depicted. Joffe does not specifically state who the portraits are of, aiming instead to create hybrid representatives of feminine identity; although all the paintings are untitled it is obvious that she has drawn deep from the well of female iconography. By posing the women in generic positions – a furtive glance over an exposed shoulder, a kneeling sex-kitten with bare legs and a far-away look – she creates portraits that make the viewer both want to devour but yet feel excluded from.

In one untitled work from 2010, a woman distractedly touches her neck as if seeking comfort. Her high collared, dark dress and severely fastened hair render her whimsically bookish. Her shadowy profile denies us an exact personality, yet her image surmises the definitive Victorian female writer, perhaps Emily Dickinson or one of the Brontë sisters.

Joffe uses a very specific palette: for flesh-tones she uses the palest of peaches combined with tawny off-greys, smudgy denim blues and liver-coloured mauves serving to accentuate their contours. In contrast her backgrounds are dramatic coal blacks and rich dove-greys. Although a great deal can be said about the conceptual reading of her work, in particular her exploration of the male gaze and the idea of femininity being a social construct, Joffe is essentially a painter’s painter. Her succulent swathes of paint and splashy, glorious lines suggest the sheer pleasure she must surely take in making work. She artfully balances her compositions, taking full advantage of the horizontal lines provided by a bra-strap or the V-shape point of a shirt-collar. She is particularly strong at employing the use of pattern via the fabrics and wallpapers that the figures wear/ interact with.

Joffe’s references vary widely from the great canon of European painting; Picasso for his bold lines, Ingres and Vermeer for their composition, it is Joffe’s extraordinary ability to describe character that makes her work highly reminiscent of another of Victoria Miro’s represented artists Alice Neel. However, Joffe’s practice can be firmly positioned in the contemporary, emitting a similar vivacity to Stella Vine’s and sharing a fresh and highly stylised composition strategy to that of Alex Katz.

Another untitled work from 2010 is quite literally a poster girl for Joffe’s oeuvre. In it a rheumy-eyed young woman gazes balefully out at an angle. The thoughts, emotions and even sexual orientation of the woman remain ambiguous. Her exposed fleshy thigh transmits a throb luscious, carnal power, only to be confused by her closed, vulnerable posture. Simultaneously a frightened girl and filmic seductress she epitomizes the fact that the depiction of women in 2011 remains as undefined and complex as it did 200 years ago.

E.M. Nicholls

Ren Zhitian

Art Labor 2.0, Shanghai, China

Beijing-based artist Ren Zhitian has been working with ink since the early 1990s. In recent years, these kinds of painted works – executed using techniques connected to traditional Chinese ink painting, shuǐmòhuà – have been receiving increasing interest. Following the saturated oils of movements such as Cynical Realism, ink offers both relief and a closer connection to national identity. Titled ‘ānyú wúliáo’ (Elegant and Empty), these ten works are the second edition in what will form a suite of 100 pieces upon its completion.

Ren sourced machine-embroidered silk, and followed the surface relief using ink made from fuel ash residue collected by a willing team from garages across Beijing. The issue of carbon emissions is certainly present here, but it is perhaps the most two-dimensional aspect of the work. The fluidity of the ink can’t be entirely contained; the untreated silk carries the delicate strokes through its grain, and the original design is blurred. Brush marks and ink weight add a second pattern, utilizing the flexibility of ink in its application, and further demonstrating the artist’s long-standing affinity with his medium.

The effect is certainly pleasing, but Ren is resolute when saying that his brush, dipped in ink, results in something that merely ‘appears to the eye like shuǐmò’, explaining that ‘the works just present a form, a composition, that supports a concept […] I wanted by means of something that looks very much like a painting, to oppose painting’. His prior works, entitled ‘hànzì tóngkǒng’ (‘Script and View’, 2008), appear for example to take much from the Southern School of shuǐmò and its dexterity with monochrome ink tones. He inverts this tradition, dipping his brush in solvent to etch his strokes into a prepared inkjet surface.

It seems however that a deep connection, perhaps even a kind of sentimentality, towards China’s artistic heritage, especially silk, comes to the forefront. ‘To invent weaving technology capable of something so delicate and exquisite, they really sought to express beauty; this moves me greatly,’ says Ren. ‘When painting with these patterns, I am continually able to experience something pure and happy, something originating from a pre-industrial age.’

In this show, the fantastical scale and significant presence of domestic manufacturing seems to rise over and above the issue of carbon emissions. Ren continues by saying that in parallel with silk, ‘the car is equally important. Through the usefulness of this object we can live our daily lives in a more civilized and refined way.’ Something similar could be said of the contribution made by China’s exports. The process enacted in these pieces brought the artist closer to the spirit and the innovation of his predecessors. However, he implies that the feeling delivered by our widespread adoption of today’s innovations is convenience in excess, resulting in wúliáo, or, merely nothing.

Lucy Minyo

Captain Pamphile

Sammlung Falckenberg / Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany

An exhibition uncompromisingly based on a novel, for which nearly 60 artists were asked to respond the narrative passages of the book, might appear manneristic. If the 100-odd resulting works are solely paintings or other two-dimensional, narrative media, one could imagine the project collapsing into the ‘harmless’ terrain of the illustrative. Not so ‘Captain Pamphile: Ein Bildroman in Stücken’ (Captain Pamphile: A Pictorial Novel in Pieces), currently on view at the Sammlung Falckenberg, curated by Gunter Reski and Marcus Weber. By over-stretching the motto – or, as the curators put it ‘turning the narrative screw one twists too many’ – the result is a playful form of visual storytelling. The show flirts with the straightforward but goes beyond any homogeneity. A dark, burlesque and aloof visuality is created as painting meets drawing, printmaking or stitching on paper, card, canvas, foil or fabric.

The ‘Captain Pamphile’ theme is taken from a largely unknown 19th-century serialized novel by Alexandre Dumas, which follows the adventures of a voracious and greedy captain during the age of colonialism. Both the topic of slavery and more comedic episodes between the crew and various associated animals are the subjects of his satirical stories. For the two curators – artists themselves – Dumas’ theme might reflect the equally ruthless global financial situation today. The author’s characteristic illustrations and connections between various narrative strands serve as starting point for this visual adaptation of the novelistic.

If this provides the curators with a curatorial methodology reminiscent of a Petersburg hanging – the prominent historical model for showing a large number of artists – the careful introduction of the narration’s chronology prevents this endeavour from becoming overloaded or confusing. Short textual excerpts from the book – mounted discreetly on the walls or as massive printouts competing for attention with the artistic works – are literally woven into the show’s visuals. A variety of works also explores this translation of the textual into the visual using collage as a sequential model. Nadira Husain’s exquisite and vibrantly coloured allusions to miniature painting in Capitain Pamphile, Kapitel 12/Chapter 12 [Collage] (2009) stand out in their attempt to build various narrative scenarios into a formalistic whole. Detailed patterns and figurines are embedded in larger monochrome areas. The fascinating tensions between individuals, close-ups or spatial overviews result in comical seriality with a kaleidoscopic impact. Isa Melsheimer’s patchwork flag, Gazelle (2010), also introduces various sequences in a combination of fabric, drawing and stitching into its own delightful perspective on storytelling. Here characters and words come forth and disappear in an ornate, literally interwoven background.

Proceeding through the galleries, Wawrzyniec Tokarski’s painted canvas sign reading Sorry, we’re out of fair trade. Sorry (2009) comments on a scene from the book about slavery by appearing as commercial signage, as if completely undisturbed by its theme. In contrast, Sophie von Hellermann portrays the interior of a ship’s storeroom in Encore une! (2010), a visual exclamation of that oppressive episode. Her technique of painting with pigments creates a cloudy visuality evoking the inherent claustrophobic atmosphere. Christoph Prasch’s Der Handel und sein Kapitän Pamphile ziehen weiter (The Trade and Its Captain Move On, 2010) introduces painting itself as a trade, with a stack of canvases on the floor. Lyrical evocation powerfully comes to the fore in Markus Vater’s acrylic painting Silbermondnacht (Silver Moon Night, 2009). The dreamy atmosphere in this depiction of a journey through a dark forest invokes some of the fairylike associations of its destination – a masquerade ball. Attempting to find one’s way into Andraes Seltzer’s exquisite mazelike ink drawings of Paris (2010) means getting lost in the details. These eclipse any sense of overview in a continuous back and forth, hence also portraying Captain Pamphile’s narrative intertextualities and flashbacks.

Ultimately, the paintings here seem to be chosen as specific responses to narrative scenes. This combination is the main protagonist in a masquerade between pop, romanticism, expressionism, new realism or hyperrealism and objectivity. Naturally, the reductive danger inherent in this approach lingers, in particular when the works appear repetitive rather than evocative. In general, however, the show evades such a literal reduction. Instead, referring to the embedded storyline here calls forth the changing atmospheres of the narration. In turn, the works’ specific media and their inherent possibilities step forth and, surprisingly – if one lets oneself in for this – this is where one really starts to see the works. Rarely does one witness the deconstruction of painting’s meta-narrative, or as the curators say ‘fixed’ genre through the juxtapositions of its own variations without resulting in formalistic exercises. Let’s hope that the new cooperation between Sammlung Falckenberg and Deichtorhallen Hamburg inspires further such uncompromising artistic and curatorial statements.

Ann-Cathrin Drews

Pan Honggang and Hu Youchen

Magician Space, 798 Art District, Beijing, China

In an art district replete with giant galleries and accustomed to large-scale works capaciously arranged, ‘Them or Us?’ feels unusually intimate. Magician Space is an up-and-coming gallery quietly but assuredly staging strong exhibitions by emerging artists at its modest 798 location. This scale is refreshing – it cultivates a feeling of closeness to the work that has become diluted in many of the area’s larger venues. In ‘Them or Us?’, a collection of works by Pan Honggang and Hu Youchen, a young couple from Sichuan, this atmosphere is particularly potent. Together they have created a group of anthropomorphic sculptures, their bodily forms and features in some ways human, in others animal; they are objects with which the first encounter is intriguing and uncanny.

In the first room, a group of figures is arranged in a rough arc, with sand dusted on the floor around their supports. At the apex is a naked, child-like male figure entitled If There is if No.1 (2009). His painted resin skin is greyer than that of the others but similarly translucent. His head is half-covered in a cat-eared hood as if from a costume, yet its colour is the same as his skin. His eyes are big, their downward gaze seemingly removed from the gesture shaped by his hands and arms – something like a shrug, bent from the elbow, palms facing up. It is this figure alone that enacts a human-like expressive gesture; the rest are unanimated or odd: crouched, mounted (there are two busts) or standing on dried, rough-skinned tree trunks of varying heights – natural perches from which they cannot move.

Here we find ourselves amidst a cultish community of beings – milky in tone, greyish or white as if having germinated in a lightless place. Their eyes, when not large and anaemic, are disarming for their likeness to those of tired children; the skin around them is puffy and pink-tinged like their other extremities – nipples, fingertips, snouts and knees. These are not robust creatures but restricted and flightless ones. A common feature is pointed protrusions like tiny horns, ear flaps, antennae or stunted tusks that create an aura of inertness and restriction. One notices seams in their skin that detract from the norms of organic growth – joins at the neck and wrists, or a line between the chest and back on a particularly weird figure, If There Is If No. 3 (2009), its lips fused together beneath its drooping, pointed ‘beak’.

The artists use form as a baseline from which to convey their emotional state. It is likely that these sculptures are borne of the isolation felt by the one-child generation in China; although they depict physically different creatures, they share enough in common – negative features that are products more of nurture than nature – to suggest a silent cohesion among them. They seem to occupy a fragile space between cuteness and darkness, vulnerability and horror, their pink tips suggestive of hurt, their eyes shrunken by tears or enlarged by paranoia.

If humans are selfish beings inclined to conform, then this exhibition becomes more about the emotional state of the viewer. To enter the exhibition at Magician Space alone is unnerving, as it thrusts you into a group of beings you recognize in part but cannot penetrate. Their partial likeness to people clashes with our innate compulsion to categorize and understand, sparking the kind of silent judgments we intuitively make upon meeting someone for the first time. Quickly, however, their alien features intercept our path to ‘knowing’ them. Coupled with a sense of emotional awkwardness from which humans naturally disassociate themselves, these sculptures perhaps capture, in physical form, the unease we keep inside. Emanating through pallid skin, theirs is a power that strikes remarkably close to the bone.

Iona Whittaker

Hans Schabus

Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, France

If chains are usually associated with restriction and confinement, in architecture they represent one of the conditions for a structure’s vertical and technical expansion. Austrian artist Hans Schabus’s installation Meterriss (Level Line, 2011) works in an opposite fashion. A 75-metre-long chain encircling the heart of the exhibition space was gradually tightened until it tore into the sheetrock walls and bent the metal rods supporting them. Exercizing this pressure has revealed the innards of the décor, the structure of the construction housing the show, the way an archaeological site is sometimes uncovered when a motorway is being built. Suspended at a height of one metre above the ground, the stretched chain limits viewers’ movements, creating their route while keeping them on the threshold of the venue’s interior. The authoritarian dimension of this powerful sculptural gesture exposes the white cube – usually regarded as the natural habitat of the work of art – as a cultural construct.

This piece might have been sufficient as an exhibition in itself, in a kind of sculptural and Brutalist appropriation of the teachings of Daniel Buren and Michael Asher, but it also offers an opportunity to develop and link the complex, overlapping aspects that inform all of Schabus’s work in this solo exhibition, ‘Nichts geht mehr’. In addition to critiquing the ideological and structural framework of the space, Schabus introduces a private, biographical dimension focused on the theme of the studio as a metaphor for the mental space where creative processes are tried and tested. This space is the pre-condition for the art institution, where thought is frozen and observed for a while. Whether one thinks of Marcel Broodthaers accommodating his fictitious museum in his apartment, or Urs Fischer re-creating his studio in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the to-and-fro introduced by Schabus between his workplace and the Institut d’art contemporain is developed in a more fragmentary way. With République (Republic, 2010), he presents his studio staircase by placing it parallel to the floor, once again hampering the viewer’s body by hijacking the staircase’s functions of elevation and passage. Like a spatial and sculptural marker, the metal structure rests on plaster discs drilled out of a nearby wall, whose hollowed out imprints called the outside world to mind. The less spectacular Der Letzter Dreck (The Last Dirt, 2007), a small mound of dust, bits of wood and cigarette butts brought together when the artist cleaned his old studio prior to handing it over, functioned like the traces of the work done on the spot, with one space giving way to another. Placed in the gallery cordoned off by the chain of Meterriss, this work also invites the spectator to cross that physical barrier in order to get a proper look at it.

By applying a principle of de-territorialization, which encourages a shift of context, Schabus extends the Duchampian appropriation of the standardized object to a place containing a personal or collective history, and raises the issue of individual action in a world marked by the ebb-and-flow of globalization. His work Welt (World, 2008) is devised on the basis of the artist’s own stamp collection as a teenager, which he reorganized not by country or year, in accordance with traditional philatelic classification, but by colour. The chromatic range overlays the illustrations of political figures, animals and places, thereby questioning conventional hierarchies. Schabus plays on the title’s ambiguity, referring as much to a personal and private world as to an abstract global entity, with its established rules for determining ways in which goods and leisure pursuits appear and disappear.

It would be a mistake to imagine Schabus as a stay-at-home hermit, despondent in his studio. From his journey through the sewers of Vienna in a collapsible sailboat called Forlorn – a nod to Bas Jan Ader – to the project of discovering the western United States in a mobile home, following a plan defined by the shape of an unfolded pack of beer, Schabus’s desire to undergo the physical experience of the world is expressed through derisory and poetic procedures, where conceptual projections and romantic aspirations intersect.

Raphaël Brunel

I Promise to Love You: Caldic Collection

Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands

The relationship between art as a form of expression and the commercial practice that drives much of the art world is a recurring point of contention. If art is something in which everyone should have a share, then the idea of rich collectors having sole ownership of seminal works of art that may never have a chance to be displayed in public, could be a cause for concern. Alongside the question of ownership is the issue of whether such collections can add something constructive to the way we assemble, coordinate and display artworks, beyond the point of their initial public exhibition.

Staged in the museum-like, white-walled surroundings of Kusnthal Rotterdam, ‘I Promise to Love You’, is a selection of more than 80 works from the Caldic Collection, a personal collection built up over 40 years by the Dutch chemical industry mogul Joop van Caldenborgh. In curating this selection of Caldenborgh’s contemporary acquisitions of work made in the last ten years, the Kunsthal effectively seeks to answer the issues raised above by showing that such enormous, private collections can, in fact, act as auxiliary, mobile ‘museum’ collections, enabling the public to see assemblies of work they otherwise wouldn’t be able to.

On a basic level, by bringing together a swathe of works by big names like Damien Hirst, Anslem Kiefer, Ernesto Neto and Ai Weiwei, among others, ‘I Promise to Love You’ certainly succeeds in displaying a large quantity of recent international art rarely seen in public institutions that have remit to focus on local art. The problem, however, is that once you move beyond the works as singular pieces, there is little chance for a dialogue to emerge among them. Essentially the result of a lack of context and concept, this criticism can be seen as a point of caution for displays of private collections in general.

Using Tracy Emin’s neon sculpture I promise to love you (2007) – her handwritten words re-cast in red light – as a starting point, what concept there is here focuses on the idea of a love for art and the dedication of the collector. There is little attempt, though, to explore the potential ambiguities of Emin’s statement. In the absence of such enquiry, the overall feeling of the exhibition is actually one of escapism. Many of the works seem to sit in a different dimension to our own. Either we find an Alice in Wonderland/Gulliver’s Travels aesthetic – as in Hans Op de Beek’s giant party cake, After the Gathering (2007) – or there is an indexing of real life, which has the effect of freezing objects and removing them from the time-frame of our moving lives – like Damien Hirst’s anaemic, translucent fish in formaldehyde, With You (2008) or Annette Messager’s photographic mobile of dangling body parts and orifices, Mes Voeux (1988–90). Where things do touch on the real world, it is shown in a staged, cinematic vein – Rodney Graham’s photographic self-portrait as a 1950’s lighthouse keeper in a clinically clean kitchen, Lighthouse Keeper with Lighthouse Model 1955 (2010), or Tom Hunter transplanting Millais’ Ophelia (1851–2) to contemporary East London, The Way Home from ‘Life and Death in Hackney’ (2000).

It should be noted that ‘I Promise to Love You’ remains open in its intentions. The exhibition’s introductory text directs visitors to the fact that its curation has been reduced to matching the colour and tone of works. So among various other examples, we get a corner where red works are grouped together, the abstract prints of Daan van Golden and Silvia B’s taxidermied monkey with red nail varnish, Blanche LeBlanc (2008), contrasted by a grey corner, where Hans Op de Beek’s monotone, miniature installation, Still Life (2) (2010), sits alongside Levi van Veluw’s grey photographic self-portrait Carpet (2008). Beyond the fact that the side-by-side repetition of colours in some cases detracts from each work’s individual qualities, the bigger problem here is that the more conceptual works lose their context and purpose, becoming mere visual statements and suffering as a result. Such problems are not unique to ‘I Promise to Love You’ or private contemporary collections, and are often equally apparent in the display of museum collections, but more could surely be done to draw out the concepts and ideas with which the artists originally sought to engage. It is that retention of concept and context that is needed for contemporary works to maintain long-term significance, irrespective of the particular collections they happen to belong to.

Richard Unwin

Danai Anesiadou

Elisa Platteau & Cie Galerie, Brussels, Belgium

Stepping into Greco-Belgian artist Danai Anesiadou’s debut solo show at Elisa Platteau & Cie Galerie is like entering a low-end Greece-themed restaurant or, better yet, a clandestine low-rent strip-club. Accentuated by the brashly hand-painted, Greek-style letters spelling out the artist’s name on the façade, this effect is largely due to a coat of gold, mirrored film applied to the windows of the gallery’s storefront. From the inside, intensifying what is displayed or suppressed to the outside, like a negative, the mirror film ricochets the depth of field of the room, thrusting the exhibition into a full-scale visual reverb.

However, such decoys, layers and deposits are just part of Anesiadou’s strategy of disclosure and exposé. In fact, most of her work revels in deliberate provocation. In this show, the artist displays six large-scale, partly three-dimensional collages of 1970s and ‘80s found film posters flanked by plastic fluted Doric half-columns, one of many Greek overtones predominant in the show (Anesiadou is known to play up her Greek heritage in her work). The collages are encrusted with gaudy, shimmery faux-crystals, photocopies and clippings (one is a self-portrait), as well as criss-crossed decorative friezes, grills, and cornices most likely acquired from a film prop agency. The unifying element is that each of the posters depicts women. In Les Fruits de la passion (all works 2011) one is clad in suggestive clothing, chained up in an Oedipal fantasy, while others, elusive and tame, show young girls gossiping and giggling in heated conversation, such as L’ami de mon ami (2011), the 1987 film by Eric Rohmer, one of the more recognizable posters from Anesiadou’s collection.

Something of a garish, mythological aura pervades the rest of the space, which is complemented by a set of overtly fetishistic found sculptures, Anasyrma I and Untitled. A plump pair of succulent lips hangs vertically on the wall (female organs?), a pair of high-heeled legs haphazardly lies on the floor; a cast of the artist’s own contorted hands rests on a ceramic plinth (another cast of her hands is replicated in one of the poster works, La Retape). Interestingly, the term ‘anasyrma’ implies ‘the gesture of lifting up the skirt or kilt’; in Greek antiquity it referred to ritual jesting and obscenity in the cults of Demeter and Dionysus. In this context, probably because of their material support, the sculptures resemble disembodied limbs, and Anesiadou’s own ritual jesting and discrete perversion seems at work here. The show is obfuscated, though, by a film made by the artist, which is not on display in the exhibition (it was said to have been passed around the night of the opening on an iPad). As if shrouded in secrecy, the film is only mentioned in the press release as the crux around which everything we see is built. In this act of suspense, Anesiadou’s disjointed narrative thickens and comes alive, leaving one to speculate about what really happened that night: according to the artist, the film features a beautiful girl at a Greek restaurant, ‘eating like a beast’. Then, ‘the camera zooms into the hole of a Thanksgiving turkey; after, there is a father carving the turkey and me sitting on my knees while being fed. Yes, there is a turkey. And a lot of other things…’

Jennifer Teets

Viktor Pivovarov

Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia

Viktor Pivovarov effectively wrote himself into the collective subconscious of several generations of Russian readers by working as a freelance illustrator for children’s books and magazines in the 1970s. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the Moscow Conceptualism movement, he took this work – which financed him in the absence of shows and an art market – seriously, and today his books are highly sought after by collectors. Many critics have noted that it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between his ‘grown-up’ paintings and albums (he created the form parallel to and in conversation with Ilya Kabakov), and his interpretations of kids’ classics like Hans-Christian Andersen’s fairytales. Pivovarov is like a rat catcher, luring viewers from all social strata with his highly personal, graphic style, which owes more to European Surrealism than to Conceptual art or Pop Art, which inspired his peers.

One might call his approach to Surrealism – on view in his newest retrospective, ‘ONI’ (They) – naive, but a more apt word would be ‘direct’. He doesn’t attempt to create an overblown version of Surrealist classics. Instead, Pivovarov starts with a personal revelation and then rewrites it with a dream-like logic, simultaneously obscuring and nearly revealing his inner urges with an openness that is unparalleled in Russian Postmodern painting. The centrepiece of his series ‘The Handsomes’ depicts a Hasidic Jew whose lower half is the body of a rat and whose upper half is a person in a suit with a cat’s paw protruding from the sleeve. This scene is also juxtaposed with what seems to be a fragment of an adolescent girl’s nether regions. His tribute to Balthus is clear, though this countering of a religious figure and an animalistic dreamer with sexual imagery represents a meeting of a basic instinct with repressive behavioural codes, not necessarily a ‘dirty old man’s fantasy’ (though some viewers may have had this reaction).

Pivarov’s show features several recent paintings on this subject, showing that the artist, even in his early seventies, is fearless to explore sexuality, even while being more and more removed from its source. This is, in part, what sets Pivovarov apart from his Conceptualist friends. Ilya Kabakov, Eric Bulatov, Komar & Melamid and many others explored the world of shared symbols and images, the ideological lingua franca of the regime. Since making his most celebrated tableaux, A Project For A Lonely Man in the 1970s, Pivovarov, who was born and raised in a communal flat, like Kabakov, set out to depict a mainly neutral, introspective existence. People matter more than ideas to Pivovarov, and in his oeuvre one senses his desire to overcome the obstacles of politics and economy to place memory over matter.

Valentin Diaconov

JAPANCONGO

Le Magasin, Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble, France

Carsten Höller’s avid interest in duality harks back to his exhibition ‘One Day One Day’ (2003) at the Färgfabriken in Stockholm, where two works were shown opposite each other and changed every day without the public’s knowledge. His latest exploration, the curated project ‘JAPANCONGO’, juxtaposes works by artists from Japan and from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pieces are all sourced from the Geneva-based private collection of Italian businessman Jean Pigozzi, who has long been one of Europe’s leading collections of contemporary African art, and who has recently added works by young Japanese artists. Pigozzi and Höller first met in London while the artist was working on The Double Club, a bar-restaurant-disco bisected into Congolese and Western sections. When Pigozzi asked him to curate a show from his collection, Höller saw it as an opportunity to make another artistic statement about doubling. The fact that the exhibition is an artwork as well as a curatorial take on Pigozzi’s collection creates yet another double situation.

Here, Höller presents art works by 16 Congolese artists opposite a diversity of works by 47 Japanese artists, though he has tried to make the exact volume of each group equal. To find an architectural solution for displaying them, Höller created a curved wall on the left-hand side of the gallery to hang the vibrant, richly coloured paintings by the Congolese artists, referencing the way art is sometimes hung on curved walls in African homes. Some of the paintings, largely representational in style, depict vernacular street scenes; others evoke a desire for post-colonial democracy. By contrast, the drawings, paintings and photographs by the Japanese artists, including Erina Matsui, Mayu Daigen, Miho Gorai, Kaori Kobayashi and Tomoko Nagai, are hung on a 40-metre-long straight wall. Their works brim with diversity; some of the paintings are fantastical and executed with a fine, meticulous attention to detail, others reveal the inspirations of popular culture such as manga and animé.

The corridor-like space between the two sides is wider at its entrance and the exit, requiring the visitor to look from left to right to view the works. But it narrows in the middle like a funnel, to enhance the visitor’s sense of the physical space and allowing both sides to be seen simultaneously. Here, Yuko Akasu’s acrylic-on-wood triptych of a red-and-white hot air balloon floating over a landscape where a steam engine rumbles past trees, mushrooms and flowers (Pui Pui Pui, 2004) faces Pathy Tshindele’s acrylic portraits with multiple eyes. Both are bright, vivid and imaginative; the proximity between them enhances the precision and complexity of one versus the art brut style of the other. At the narrowest point, the visitor becomes the missing link between the two walls, with the cultural personalities of Japan and Congo drawing closer but never touching.

The curved wall opens into two circular rooms: The first houses Bodys Isek Kingelez’s cardboard, maquette-like sculptures of cities and Ambroise Ngaimoko (Studio 3Z)’s black-and-white images from the 1970s – a group of women in traditional dress, suited men in a meeting, and young, fashionable people – showing the evolution of Congolese society. The second room contains Jean Depara’s black-and-white photographs, also from the 1970s, of hip couples, stylish women and smart men on a night out, as well as Rigobert Nimi’s sculptures of machinery made from recycled materials. The straight wall leads into a rectangular space showcasing a range of Japanese art, including Nobuyoshi Araki’s erotic photographs, videos by Hirotoshi Iwasaki and Naoyuki Tsuji, and mixed media sculptures by Akiyoshi Mishima and Teppei Kaneuji.

Höller’s deliberate exhibition design emphasizes the tension, and the obvious formal differences, between the two centres of cultural expression. It would be easy to draw conclusions about the reasons for this contrast, but, as Höller says, ‘At the end of the day, it’s not about cultural differences any more but what remains when you subtract one from the other. Hopefully what comes is an understanding about the pure language of contemporary art that is not influenced by where we come from.’

Anna Sansom

Lucia Nogueira

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, UK

Russell Baker famously quipped that ‘The goal of inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately defeat him.’ While this remains true, ‘Mischief’, an exhibition of Lucia Nogueira’s sculpture and works on paper at Kettle’s Yard, shows a tender side of our often wilfull inanimate adversaries. The array of found objects and everyday materials firmly plant themselves in a grounding of dadaist assemblages and combinations of textures and sensations. Several of the pieces in the exhibition insistently interfere with the viewer’s personal space – either by getting underfoot and refusing to be relegated to a set region of the gallery.  On some levels this seems mostly an aesthetic choice, as in a work from 1992 simply titled ‘…’ in which a red ribbon, like a musical leitmotif, connects a pail, a metal frame, and a burlap sack of sand, but also cordons off it’s own sphere of influence in the gallery. Others, such as Needle (1995), challenge the human viewer for primacy: it’s not just that one is afraid to step on the neon pink plastic cord that is stitched into the wooden flooring, it’s that by the time you notice Needle you probably already have. But without stanchions or even a marking on the floor, you never had a chance to avoid it, leaving open the question of who has invaded whose space.

Guilt and alienation are recurring themes in the work. Nogueira’s objects inhabit a world of mistakes, of closed or darkened spaces, and of practical objects which cannot, or refuse to, fulfill their intended function – there are shelves that do not ‘shelve’, wheels that cannot roll. One-time useful pieces of furniture are rendered useless or possibly even dangerous. For example, Hide and Seek (1997) greets the visitor entering of the gallery, an unplugged refrigerator still framed by its packing material, its door facing the wall. Seemingly engaged in a game, the stocky appliance is cutely anthropomorphic, the odd sweetness of the appliance is amplified by the framed photograph of rabbits perched on top. Now that the fridge has a personality though, there is psychosis as well, not only is play evoked, but the troubling gesture of an upset being facing the wall, hiding from us as well. This emotion is repeated in Untitled (1992), in which a wooden silver-painted cupboard is bedecked with a chain and topped with two nondescript aluminium cans faces in towards the wall, rendering itself useless and leaving the viewer with the sensation that it has something to hide. Full-stop (1993), a large cable drum is succinctly, almost cruelly hedged into a corner, palpably bursting with potential energy. Mischief (1995), on the other hand, seems fraught with one-liners and practical jokes: a wooden chair with its seat missing presents a painful and unfortunate eventuality, while the bin liners dragged across the floor are reminiscent of toilet paper stuck to the shoe, or a randy child or a pet who has decided to be destructive for their own entertainment.

The works on paper in the exhibition, all untitled and mostly undated, are loosely and dreamily painted. They inhabit a zone somewhere in between amorphous and humanoid, but frequently have a dark, vaguely threatening edge. Helicopters could also be yellow jackets, rockets might be flowers – occasionally a figure emerges. There is a play of symbols – some organic, some manmade – with a sensuous rhythmic repetition. Nogueira’s only foray into filmmaking, Smoke (1996), black and white and shot on 16mm, is also included, as it is at her concurrent exhibition at Tate Modern, and it too posits a strange parity between objects and their makers. It is a record of a one-time installation created at Berwick-on-Tweed in which visitors were supplied with umbrellas or kites. Kites and flags wave in the wind, and the spectators disjointedly look on, with little concern given to cause or effect. A stepladder placed on a dune waits for a person to climb up and admire the view, but perhaps the ladder is already doing that.

William Corwin

Aurélien Froment

Centre Culturel Francais, Milan, Italy

‘How much information can one image contain? What differences (or relationship) exist between seeing, understanding and imagining?’ asks Andrea Viliani, curator of Aurélien Froment’s first solo show in Italy, entitled ‘Forms of Nature, Forms of Knowledge and Forms of Beauty’. Is it possible to describe the space that separates a word from an object? Verbal narratives and visual language proceed in parallel in the four chapters of the French artist’s exhibition, yet the material he investigates seems to be precisely the undecipherable void that separates these two narrative processes. Two recent video installations and two works specially made for this show constituted a small voyage of comprehension and exploration of forms.

It begins with the seductive images of the film Pulmo Marina (2010). A single tracking shot frames the movements of a jellyfish in the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, in an altered condition: the vat of water is backlit by a fluorescent tube, while a transparent acrylic film modifies the blue colour of the water, creating an apparently infinite chromatic field. The movements of the creature are accompanied by the voice of an actor offering a detailed account of every physiological, historical, etymological and geographic aspect of the jellyfish and its environment. Words and images, in their attempt to cling as closely as possible to each other, paradoxically separate, plunging the viewer into a state of near-hypnosis: the condition that exists prior to the deciphering or comprehension of a language, prior to comprehension.

The epistemological plot thickened with the sound of If I Were a Bell (2010), seven ceramic bells with wind-vane clappers, hung from the high ceiling of the space in front of the blue screen of Pulmo Marina. The bells were produced at Arcosanti, the Utopian community in the Arizona desert designed by Paolo Soleri in the 1970s. Froment collected them while they were still incomplete and undecorated. The construction of these small terracotta objects reflects, on a much smaller scale, the architectural precepts Soleri used in the creation of the large, shell-like habitats of the community. Again, the elements involved – the sound of the bells and their elementary geometric forms – have been separated and left in a pure state of parallel proximity, ready to assume a possible new order, another combination.

On the back wall of the space the projection of The Fourdrinier Machine Interlude (2010) slowly tracks the processes and movements of an enormous piece of machinery for the production of paper, while a voice painstakingly narrates its function, history, origins and technique. In a symmetrical, complementary arrangement, the final chapter of the exhibition (and perhaps the metaphor for the show itself) is Un paysage de dominos (A Domino Landscape, 2010), a wall decorated with wallpaper of a two-dimensional grid. Within the grid is a sequence of the drawings of Friedrich Fröbel’s ‘Gifts’; these objects, volumes, geometries and mathematical formulas formed the basis of the pedagogues’ interpretive lessons on the natural harmony of the world’s forms. Froment’s work has often referenced the theorist, from whom he seems to have inherited some of his analytical capacities.

Precisely as in Fröbel’s theories, reality (including objects, machines, animals and sounds) is arrayed like a table of multiple primary elements, separated and compartmentalized, while the space between the parts is revealed to the viewer as a place of potential, of misunderstanding, of infinite possible combinations and interpretations.

Francesco Garutti

Manuel Ocampo

West Gallery, Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines

Billed as a solo show, Manuel Ocampo’s exhibition featured five of his large canvases and smaller works, a haphazard installation of graffiti on cardboard, as well as works by 11 other artists, neatly divided between West Gallery’s three spaces. At a glance, the installation appeared to summarize the themes of Ocampo’s long-standing practice; at least, for those of us who have followed his career with interest. It consisted of a glut of grand guignol imagery – crucifixes, skulls and humanoid grotesqueries – while the title of the exhibition, ‘Boycotter of Beauty and the Theoretical Steroid Defiled Modernist Chicken’, supported a sense of overload, implosion or pure spectacle.

Ocampo, who was born in the Philippines, established an international reputation in the early 1990s while living in California. At the time, his paintings were derived from religious and devotional imagery. For the past five years, he has been living in Manila, and while his work continues in a comparable vein, drawing on a range of sensational references, it is now more bombastic, with little of the intrigue of his earlier concern with manipulating surfaces. The paintings here are mostly monochromatic, appear rapidly produced, and many of the motifs (testicles, teeth, beads, bones, et al) merely hang against a blank background. The titles are patently ludicrous, or just piss-taking: for example, a painting of what looks like a vagina filled with floating teeth is entitled A Failed Attempt to Summon up ‘L’Origin du monde after Courbet’ from a Contrary Perspective Post-War Abstract Expressionist Style by Simone de Beauvoir circa 1943 (2011).

However, to dismiss the works on these grounds would be to misunderstand Ocampo’s output. His early reputation was facilitated by the interest in so-called non-western art generated by the rise of identity politics and exhibitions such as ‘Magicians de la Terre’ in 1989. In spite of the fact that critic Robert Hughes described Ocampo’s paintings at that time as sincere, his current works are merely another version of his central interest: the more-or-less cynical manipulation of signs. That is, Ocampo has never sustained an exploration of the deeper resonances of the imagery and references he uses. Again, they merely hang in space.

While much could be made of this insight in terms of how an Asian artist negotiates his professional place in the world, ultimately, we could just look at the paintings themselves; and here the accompanying installation serves not to dissipate but highlight the quality of Ocampo’s works. He handles his medium deftly and his drawing is assured and comparatively exemplary. Further, the large works thematize rather than indulge aimless referencing. He paints apertures (a mouth, vagina, beads) that open onto objects of seemingly little significance (beer bottles, teeth, a closed door). The most striking painting is Door to UP Fine Arts Glee Club, circa 1985–2000 (2011); the acronym refers to the University of the Philippines and its famous fine art department; in the work, a closed door floats above peaked mountains. Of course, we could read ideas of exclusion or a sense of distance into the fact that ultimately nothing is revealed in paintings such as these. But if, for Ocampo, painting remains an ostensibly mute activity, thankfully he has yet to successfully render it entirely insignificant.

Brian Curtin

Bob Dylan

Danish National Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark

The Danish National Gallery is currently showing a series of nearly 50 paintings (plus a handful of sketches) by Bob Dylan. Maybe you didn’t know that the great troubadour was also a painter, but he has in fact been painting since 1961, or as he himself states, ‘I have always painted.’ The paintings in Dylan’s ‘Brazil Series’, however, were produced during a period of only one year (2009–10), during which time Dylan was also on tour with his album Together Through Life. The works have never been shown before, and were painted especially for this exhibition. Their overall theme, as the title implies, is Dylan’s interpretation of Brazil – women and men, rural scenarios and urban streets. The paintings themselves are painted in dark tones, with a palette that ranges from browns and reds to earthy greens. Dylan’s style borrows freely from Chagall, Munch, Goya, Matisse and a tad of Picasso – all artists who had their heydays more than a hundred years ago.

There is no doubt that the name Bob Dylan – printed in large, bold letters on a huge sign hanging outside the National Gallery – is enough to pique the interest of a large audience, and it is undoubtedly a coup for the museum to be able to show 50 brand new works by one of the world’s most well-renowned singer-songwriters. The question is whether the exhibition is interesting because of the actual artworks or because of the artist who created them. Is Bob Dylan a multi-talented writer/singer/musician/artist like H.C. Andersen, August Strindberg or Holger Drachmann, who were all writers as well as visual artists? What holds true of Andersen, Strindberg and Drachmann is that they reflected on their time and created works that related to a current reality: Strindberg painted melancholic images that related to his writing, and Andersen’s paper-cuttings and collages were as imaginative as his stories. But does that hold true for Dylan, too?

At first glance, Dylan’s ‘Brazil Series’ seems rather uninteresting – there is no real narrative, nor a discernable personality behind the works. It is also obvious that the paintings were done over a very short period of time: In several places the white canvas can be seen through the layers of paint, and the frames unfortunately don’t cover up the canvases’ white edges. I’m not sure if this is a stylistic choice or just sloppiness, but it adds to the feeling that the pieces were produced very hastily.

It’s difficult to look at Dylan’s paintings without considering his music, and when asked if the National Gallery would have exhibited the works if they were not made by Bob Dylan, curator Kasper Monrad answered with the obvious ‘No’. So is this exhibition interesting to anyone other than the fans who worship everything that Dylan does? No, not really. The motifs, style and theme of the paintings seems old-fashioned and Dylan’s version of Brazil did not manage to capture my interest in more than a few glimpses, which seemed to be based on luck rather than artistic talent.

Matilde Digmann

Nicoline van Harskamp

D+T Project, Brussels, Belgium

When Dutch anarchist Karl Max Kreuger died in 1999, he left behind an archive of thousands of letters from like-minded people all over the world. His international correspondence, now stored in the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, offers an interesting insight into various strands of anarchist thinking. Dutch artist Nicoline van Harskamp – whose work has displayed her interest in the relation between politics and language – became fascinated by Kreuger’s archive. Because the material can’t be copied or borrowed from the Institute, she spent hours going through the thousands of letters and copying extracts by hand. Her selections form the basis of ‘Yours in Solidarity’, an ongoing project through which Van Harskamp investigates anarchism as an ideology and the idiosyncratic ways it is interpreted by its followers. Though the notion of ‘reanimating the archive’ is all too often a hollowed-out cliché in contemporary art, Van Harskamp manages to use this archival material to create a convincing portrait of anarchy’s proponents. She even studied the correspondents’ handwriting in order to gain insight into their psyches.

At D+T Project in Brussels, she presented the first chapter from this larger work-in-progress, focusing specifically on Belgian correspondents. (Other presentations will follow later in London, New York, Berlin, Zagreb and Amsterdam.) One of the gallery’s walls is covered with copied letters from the archive, offering a first encounter with the different protagonists, whose observations range from revolutionary theories to banal statements. While going through these notes, one stumbles upon certain phrases that recur in an accompanying video projection in which one can hear – and read – Van Harksamp discussing the letters with actors she asked to portray the various characters. In a joint process of interpretation and speculation, Van Harskamp asks the actors to imagine how these characters would have developed in our present society, posing questions like, ‘Do you think he had problems with the law?’ The result of this interpretative process is presented in a related two-channel video (Yours in Solidarity, Episode 1, 2010), in which one recognizes echoes of phrases from ‘Bojan’, who complained in his letters that his Marxist activities are restricted to organizing meetings. In the video, an actor portraying Bojan pronounces his revolutionary theories from behind the counter of an electrical shop. A certain ‘Robert’ is trying to fight the system while at the same time working for the government. He realizes this might sound contradictory, but it offers him the possibility to make real changes every now and then.

Deliberately operating through the bias of speculation and fiction, Van Harskamp does manage to convincingly resurrect the various anarchists, their political views and personal doubts. Though working with decades-old archival documents could potentially yield dry results, her project does not lack humour: Van Harskamp is not afraid to highlight the way lofty ideals and banal daily reality are closely intertwined. The previously mentioned Robert, for instance, concludes his report on a failed 1st of May action with the words: ‘But the food was good.’

Sam Steverlynck

Christian Andersson

Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden

Christian Andersson’s exhibition, ‘From Lucy with Love’ deals with the discipline of museology – of both contemporary art and ancient artefacts. The installation From Lucy with Love (2011) is essentially a display case, containing diverse historical and contemporary objects arranged according to some cryptic order. Included in this collection are items of questionable historical significance – such as postcards, comic strips and mirrors – as well as possibly inauthentic objects, such as the renowned skull of the ancient hominid, Lucy, alongside other skulls labelled ‘Piltdown man (fraud) (1912)’ and ‘Homo Neandethalensis 50000 YA’. Mirrors and the case itself cut into and reflect the surrounding objects, so that as the viewer moves, objects are displaced, adjoining themselves to items elsewhere, opening up new juxtapositions. Consequently, one can indulge in the visual weaving and reweaving of history, as one notices the strikingly similar silhouette of an antique urn overlaid on a lava lamp, or the transformation of an ink-blot drawing of a wing into a virtual pair, with the simple addition of a mirror. Like the optical trickery at play elsewhere in the exhibition, these reflections destabilize our confidence in our senses and problematize the differentiation between fact and fiction. As if attempting to liberate these objects from their encasement within the discipline of history, a film projector inside the vitrine projects a film through the glass onto a facing wall of the gallery. In this found footage, a man in a biohazard suit enters a room (perhaps a laboratory of some sort), and discovers that what sounded like a Morse code signal was in fact the random tapping on a telegraph of a Coca-Cola bottle caught on a window blind. Random acts do not easily conform to a lineage of causality, just as unexplainable occurrences do not easily fit into the fabric of history.

The strange, imposing sculpture, To R.M. for EVER (2011), is a replica of a gigantic, Stonehenge-like structure first painted by René Magritte in L’art de la conversation (The Art of Conversation, 1950), in which the arrangement of massive blocks spells out the word ‘rêve’ (‘dream’). If history begins with writing, this construction could be seen as its inaugural gesture – a gesture that attempts to synthesize history and pre-history in some impossible moment, outside of time. In Andersson’s three-dimensional version we find that ‘rêve’ reads as ‘ever’ from behind. Even though his version is evidently made after the ‘original’, the relationship between his reproduction and the original structure is not constrained by historical lineage: one appears to be the backside of the other. As if in a dream, their coexistence in time seems to become possible. 

Andersson’s work seems to suggest that the concept of the ‘original’ is not some irreducible singularity; it too can change or disappear with time. His sculpture Angel of the Hearth (2011), based on Mies van der Rohe’s ‘Barcelona chair’, barely replicates the original. Its cushions are torn as though from some dramatic accident, but the awkward bends in the frame appear deliberate, as if some aspects of the original design have been corrupted and reconstituted. The chair originally resided inside the German Pavilion of the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, which is partially recreated here as a reference to both its original incarnation, which was torn down before it was finished, and the curious fact of its reconstruction in the 1980s. Similarly, Paper Clip (The Baghdad Batteries) (2009), was created in reference to a theory rather than an existing object. As one theory goes, the battery was invented in Baghdad, centuries before Alessandro Volta’s modern version. The disputed original battery was supposedly composed of a clay vessel filled with vinegar. Andersson’s numerous copies of the ‘original battery’, which he connects here with wires, appear to produce enough electricity to uphold a paper clip on a metal rod.

‘From Lucy with Love’ attempts to continue the trajectories of history, to follow its unfolding stories, rather than just documenting or displaying them. Andersson’s retracing of certain past events usually excluded from official records because of controversy or speculation – like the invention of the Baghdad battery – gives new possibilities to history. But his retracing also relies on the individual viewer’s faith or belief. Andersson’s exhibition allows the viewer to feel as if we are taking part in a reconfiguration of the practice of history – a practice that in this exhibition is consistently reengaging with the same events, but always from a slightly different angle. 

Wojciech Olejnik

Andrei Monastyrski

Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, Russia

The first solo museum show from Andrei Monastyrski, a central figure to Moscow Conceptualism who was recently announced as Russia’s representative at Venice this year, was greatly anticipated. The exhibition, which comprised 30 years of work, was curated by Teresa Mavica and was accompanied by a catalogue with contributions from Robert Storr, Klaus Biesenbach and Ilya Kabakov. Born in 1949 near Murmansk in the north-west of Russia, Monastyrski lives and works in Moscow, which should not constitute a reason for his lack of visibility in his native country. Perhaps an answer for this is that, rather than behaving like a starry artist, Monastyrski’s life is very much in keeping with his thoughtful work. This retrospective – co-produced by two institutions, the Moscow-based Victoria — The Art of Being Contemporary foundation, and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art – presented two parts of his broad practice: the individual work and the works realized within the famous ‘Collective Actions’ group.

Since 1976, ‘Collective Actions’ has carried out more than 120 actions (which the group refers to as ‘Trips out of Town’) around the outskirts of Moscow. Those actions were (and still are) unfinished, insofar as the role of the protagonists was limited neither to accomplishing an action nor to being witnesses of an action. It was (and still is) an ongoing series of meetings punctuated by trips to different places, seemingly senseless actions, observations, discussions and talks on what happened, and overall by a greater sense of emptiness.

For example, for Rope (1978) 20 participants pulled a seven-kilometre-long rope out of a forest in the middle of nowhere for hours without any clear reason. The ‘Trips out of Town’ were produced to be discussed and interpreted by the protagonists themselves (who were both viewers and organizers), and a large part of their documentation was published between 1976 and ’89. It’s worth noting that many artists and actors central to Moscow Conceptualism passed through this group: Eric Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, Boris Groys and Joseph Backstein, amongst others. The retrospective reenacted this history through documentation, discussions and archives consisting of videos, texts and recordings.

The second part of the retrospective presented a single work that comprises a series of paradoxical objects. Close to philosophical studies, these almost Socratic exercises of doubt are mostly empty, precarious objects: Finger (1978) is a black box with a hole in the centre under which reads ‘Finger, or the Designation of Oneself as an Object External in Relation to Oneself,’ as you can point at yourself with your forefinger passing the arm into the box. Nothing here is shown for the mere pleasure of showing and, as Monastyrski says, ‘it is precisely consciousness (and not the artistic object) [...] that is the site of artistic occasion.’ Monastyrski’s work thus escapes the trap of a fetish object. During the viewer’s interaction with another non-object, Cannon (1975), a change of perceptual paradigm occurs when – while peering into a hole and expecting a visual effect – we hear the sound of a doorbell. Monastyrski adds: ‘If you think that you understand something, there are all the reasons to doubt.’ To produce such non-objects in a country where, from the Soviet era on, being an artist still mostly means a non-professional and sub-rosa practice is, if not heroic, then at least honest.

Nicolas Audureau

Beijing Voice: Together or Isolated

Pace Beijing, Beijing, China

According to curator Leng Li, Chinese galleries have become ‘a kind of animal greedy for culture’ in a quickly developing country. In this increasingly compressed context, Leng suggests, art spaces in China are moving away from the pursuit of profit towards a more academic bent. Curating has become somewhat of a fidgety concept, one that ‘Beijing Voice: Together or Isolated’ is one of several recent exhibitions to take on. Like Taikang Space’s engaging ‘51m2’ series, in which artists occupied a designated area with works of their choosing, and Platform China’s ‘Jungle’, which entitled artists to their own ‘system’ and avoided an overriding narrative, ‘Beijing Voice’ purports to eliminate an explicit curatorial theme. Instead, it attempts to question how art works can be defined either ‘together’ – as part of a wider artistic environment – or as individual, ‘self-sufficient’ objects. In other words, the premise seems to be: relax, put some art works into a space and see how they speak for themselves.

Pace’s expansive, white interior has a dual effect here: on one hand, its size might leave one seeking more thematic guidance. On the other, it allows each work to have its own discrete space. The latter benefits some pieces in particular. Hu Xiaoyuan’s incredibly subtle Wood/Wood (2010) perfectly suits the furthest corner of the room; the converging walls draw one into the surface – not whitewashed planks as first thought, but wood covered with white silk, the grain painstakingly repainted on top.

Regardless of the space, the works that best express the context of their making are Shi Jinsong’s Beigao Village (2010) and Song Dong’s Hutong (2010), in which the materials – fragments of brick molded into freestanding sculptures and a three-wheeled bicycle wedged between hutong-style walls, respectively – are enough to interpret them in terms of Beijing’s urban fabric.

Although the curatorial risk has been minimized here by the choice of strong, prominent artists, the conceptual works are comparatively inaccessible beyond the visual level. Perhaps unusually, it is the videos that seem most ‘open’. Huang Ran’s Fake Action Truth (2009), in which costumed men square up in a spot-lit space accompanied by sexual gasps before kissing deeply to the strains of a retro-romantic track, is at once visual, aural and erotic.

Implicit in its deliberate removal from ‘Beijing Voice’ is the assumption that a curatorial theme influences how people approach art works in an exhibition, which is arguably a moot point. It is impossible to decide whether this hands-off approach benefits the artists; its effect on viewers is subjective. A curatorial voice does remain, but at a distance. ‘Self-sufficient’ is also quite an unstable claim relative to a work of art. One might say that Qiu Xiaofei’s depopulated painting, Utopia (2010), is ‘sufficient’ in itself to resonate emotionally with a post-ideological mood. But it is difficult to imagine a firm judgement either way. Despite these reservations – which in fact raise useful questions – the project is an engaging one, and it will be interesting to see how each annual installment unfolds.

Iona Whittaker

Nathan Mabry

Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles, USA

The unresolved debate around the work of Nathan Mabry seems to hinge on a question of belief: to what extent does Mabry mean what he says? Is the cynical humour and teenage innuendo in his work an expression of a mind deeply concerned with the unstable meanings and values of cultural artefacts, or is the artist just playing wilfully, provocatively dumb?

As if in a gesture of sarcastic contrition, a sculpture in Mabry’s exhibition at Cherry and Martin cries real tears. Weeping Figure (Déjà vu) (all works 2011) is in fact a faithful copy of Jacques Lipchitz’s Figure (1926–30), only with the addition of a hidden (but audible) water pump and a gravel base to catch the drips. What might the semi-abstract, primitivist figure be crying about? Perhaps it has something to do with the barrenness of the cultural landscape she sees before her. Lipchitz drew inspiration from African talismans of fertility; he himself was from a generation for whom the onward progression of artistic development was fecund with promise. Today such faith seems like a bad joke.

Weeping Figure (Déjà vu) does indeed look out onto a vista of cruel debasement. Three female figures sit on black, Donald Judd-style plinths, their bodies formed from African D’mba masks (also symbols of fertility and motherhood) smeared in clay, and their faces fashioned from assorted plastic sausages. They are saddled with the demeaning titles Tête de Femme (Spicy), Tête de Femme (Juicy) and Tête de Femme (Plump). Between them, painted white in contrast, teetered The Week of Kindness: an upside-down sculpture of Romulus and Remus suckling the teats of a she-wolf, herself stuck inside a car tyre á la the goat in Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–9), and holding up a large white metal box with some wicker baskets on top. It is a confounding sculptural proposition, and far harder to dismiss as a knowing art-historical gag than were the three sculptures nearby.

Although Mabry’s appropriated sculptural elements are no less pedestrian than Rauschenberg’s (if one can call a stuffed goat pedestrian), here they are somehow sadder, devoid of Monogram’s anger and abjection. Patches of off-white applied to the metal box could be Sherwin-Williams paint samples, or careless attempts to erase graffiti – further invoking Rauschenberg, via a conflation of his collaged Odalisk (1955–8) and Erased De Kooning Drawing (1953).

If The Week of Kindness can be understood as a kind of inverted sculpture – the plinth on top, the founders of classical Roman civilization upside-down, below – it also seems to invert its own presence in the gallery. As a negative, it almost disappeared next to the positives around it – the heavy-bottomed, black female figures on Judd-ite plinths. Next door, Amulet (Mano Figa), a rusted steel block that brought to mind a hacked up version of Tony Smith’s Die (1962), was another positive – an incontrovertible, scowling mass of matter in the middle of the room. A mano figa (or fico, or fica, depending on who you’re speaking to) is an ancient obscene hand gesture (fico is the Italian word for fig, a fruit thought by the Romans to resemble a vulva and so associated, you guessed it, with fertility and procreation). It is also, in many cultures, replicated as an amulet, for good luck. The sculpture in the gallery was, I eventually recognized, a cuboid hand poking its thumb between first and second fingers. At me, I can only assume. Whether it was telling me to fuck off, or wishing me good fucking, I do not know. Perhaps it was simply a case of a naughty boy scrawling ‘SEX’ in crayon on the museum wall. I hope not, but I don’t expect Mabry to provide reassurance any time soon.

Jonathan Griffin

Jason Rhoades

Hauser & Wirth, London, UK

Visiting exhibitions about exhibitions can be disconcerting. You can be caught between two contexts, flitting between a reading of what’s in front of you to an imagined – even recycled – response to the original. When the show in question centres on a 1:12 model of what has been described as ‘the world’s largest sculpture’, the experience becomes harder still. You are forced, reluctantly, to appreciate scale from the position of gallery-going giant, peering on but unable to step inside. And then, when said exhibition is the first posthumous European show of an artist whose practice and persona was as conceptually complex as that of the late Jason Rhoades, you could be forgiven for being left in a disjointed state of simultaneous wonder and sad reflection.

How, then, to react to ‘1:12 Perfect World’ at Hauser and Wirth’s Piccadilly space? The first point to make is the obvious one: this is not the 15,000 square-foot Deichtorhallen in Hamburg, where the original was installed; the immersive quality of the 1999 installation is mostly, if not entirely, lost. That landmark is physically (if not conceptually) reduced to a model that, though meticulously constructed, invariably loses some of Rhoades’ beguiling, West Coast punch. You are restricted to looking at – rather than walking through – the forest of stainless steel poles that comprises the work.

The photographs of Rhoades’ father’s garden that cover a giant canopy (or ‘next level’ as the artist referred to it), which were viewed two at a time via a hydraulic lift in the Frankfurt installation, are here shown as near-standard photo size. The vast Eden of photographs (the ‘Perfect World’) was originally printed on a 1:1 scale and is here reduced to a table-top of scattered snaps. The drawings, which lined the walls of the converted German market, are reproduced in a vast notepad and placed on plinths with visitors encouraged to flick through. The video, playing in the gallery’s basement vault, shows the process of erecting the gigantic structure of poles, brackets and triangular wooden platforms; in the upstairs gallery, an installation which draws on noises of the steel pipes being polished and a printer churning out images, aims to recreate the aural environment of the 1999 exhibition. All in all then, we have the original show reduced, re-packaged and re-evaluated, allowing the uninitiated an introduction to this extraordinary feat of exhibition-making and for those lucky enough to visit Frankfurt, a second look, of sorts.
Yet, a reading of ‘1:12 Perfect World’ as a mere reduction of the original would be, well, reductive. In fact, it is through the re-sizing that we can get to grips with the scope of Rhoades’ ideas as one is forced to treat ‘Perfect World’ as concept rather than experience – and Rhoades’ concepts were big.  What the artist was attempting was nothing short of a manifestation of his ‘Perfect World’, an elevated Eden from which he could situate himself and his art work and others could enter. He saw the raised the canopy, constructed out of wooden triangles whose forms were based on the golden mean, as a giant picture plane. Visitors who wandered through the bamboo-like forest (apparently inspired by Duchamp’s 1942 exhibition ‘Sixteen Miles of String’), viewed this picture from below, or behind, and could rise through it via the lift. By treating the art work as a place one had to physically get to, Rhoades successfully negotiates the cliché of art and artists as operating at one level removed. What’s more, by drawing upon Eden, the personal, paradisiacal and mythological become inextricably entwined within the work of art itself.

In Frankfurt this ‘next level’ would see Rhoades, or his assistants, feeding vast sheets of paper in and out of the printer and laying them on the floor to recreate his father’s garden. However, the wooden triangles were interspersed with holes where you could potentially fall through, plunging you back down from mythologized Utopia to terra firma.  It was Romantic landscape painting gone turbo, forcing you to re-evaluate your relationship to art, space and nature in one fell swoop.

Returning to the exhibition at hand, though, one senses the 1:12 model afforded Rhoades the opportunity to come to terms with his ideas and strands of inspiration. The Mephisto boxes (the name of Rhoades’ preferred brand of trainers, as well as a reference to Goethe’s literary demon) that house the model seem like a nod to Duchamp’s Boîte-en-Valise (1934–41). This sense of playful trickster runs throughout this version, from the box itself to the mini televisions scattered throughout the model, showing visitors walking through the original work. As with Duchamp, by reducing his work to a portable(ish) container, Rhoades condenses his practice to a more physically manageable scale; the scale of his ideas, however, remains vast and it is these ideas to which ‘1:12’ provides a fitting memento. 

Nick Aikens

Liz Cohen

Salon 94 Bowery, New York, USA

The newly refurbished Salon 94 space on Bowery – just a few doors up from the New Museum and a few down from the new Sperone Westwater space – recently doubled as a car showroom for a meticulously constructed automobile, courtesy of Detroit-based artist Liz Cohen. Combining an East German Trabant with an American Chevy El Camino, Cohen’s Trabantimino (2002–ongoing) is an East-meets-West mash-up, a juxtaposition of Eastern utilitarian qualities and pure American hubris. 

The hybrid is a sophisticated relic of the warring ideologies of the Cold War. But it’s also a fantasy object, a kind of fairground automobile ride. Trabantimino stretches from the modest dimensions of the Trabant to the ostentatious lengths of the El Camino, jolting outward and upward as it does so. It effortlessly taps into the collective fantasy of low rides and wide-open spaces.  And despite the use of the Trabant, Cohen’s project is one of immersion into the distinctly American culture of the car.

In order to produce the work, Cohen spent eight years training as a mechanic, in garages in Oakland, Scottsdale and Detroit, working alongside ‘mechanic mentors’ and documenting her immersion into the culture in a series of pin-up-inspired self-portraits, as well as a more sombre black-and-white work titled ‘5 P’s (Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance)’ (2005), a series of Walker Evans-inspired photographs documenting the tools of Bill Cherry, one of Cohen’s mentor.

The performance and immersion element of Trabantimino is reminiscent of the works of Nikki S. Lee, who in Projects (1997–2001) infiltrated multiple social groups and subcultures, photographing herself in situ and in character. Cohen’s bikini-clad poses have a similar multiplicity, albeit confined to a single milieu, and put her in the position of mechanic, model and customer. The literal split in the car – as well as its beautifully executed representation of the pull and tug between two cultures – loosely echoes Cohen’s schizoid fulfillment of multiple roles within the ecology of the car shop.

But the car itself is unified by its elegiac quality – it references a kind of car culture that is, at least in America, on the decline, and recollects fantasies that were part of the libidinal excess and excitement of that culture (not to mention the more modest, but no less poignant, current fantasy of employment). Trabantimino is also about the dream of escaping yourself, of acting out another alternative self – maybe as a car mechanic, or maybe as a bikini-clad superhero, settling in to ride in a sleek car of your own dreaming.

Katie Kitamura

Robert Breer

CAPC Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France

The situation is at once magic, hilarious and inexplicably subversive – a kind of sculptural comedy. In the middle of the CAPC Bordeaux’s majestic nave, around 20 coloured, abstract volumes made of polystyrene, plywood, foam or fibreglass (‘tanks’, ‘rugs’; a trapezium-like red block, a green pedestal, a large white double wall) crawl slowly and almost imperceptibly along the floor, bumping into one another here and there. These taciturn bodies (among which there is also an abstract painting, creeping on the wall) move in magical suspension a few centimetres away from the floor on what might be tiny motorized wheels – although the near-illusionistic device also suggests minuscule paws hiding somewhere underneath their shells.

It is not surprising that Robert Breer, the American artist who created the ‘Floats’ in the mid-1960s and who took up making them again in the ‘90s, defined his moving sculptures once as ‘motorized molluscs’, shifting away from the indefinite solemnity behind which concrete sculpture was starting to disappear at that time. The zoological comparison is apt to these works, whose behaviour (rather than their form) brings about a somewhat figurative halo. In fact, the exhibition lends itself to all sorts of similes, provoking (as abstract sculpture rarely does) the visitor’s spasmodic laughter: sometimes the nave of CAPC appears as an esplanade colonized by erratic snails; sometimes the visitor feels surrounded by a bunch of sedated characters in an asylum. Or maybe the slowness of the figures (a yellow hedgehog that bumps against a fat tablet, for instance) could evoke an underwater quarrel between dense gastropods. None of this is caricature or interpretive excess: after creating the first set of ‘Floats’, Breer declared that he felt a sort of euphoria for ‘liberating’ his sculptures from their pedestals, as if they were living beings that would now be free to ‘leave the studio’. (There is actually a photograph, taken in 1965 by Frances Breer, in which we can see a group of Floats plodding on a country road.)
The value of Breer’s work in terms of what we know historically as minimalist sculpture has been widely discussed over the years, without any definite conclusion about the artist’s position within the movement. It seems quite plausible that Breer, initially very influenced by Jean Tinguely and the kinetic sculptural tradition (and also attached to concrete art), produced his early ‘Floats’ disregarding the production of artists such as Robert Morris or Carl Andre. Beyond the anxiety of chronology, Breer’s production of his ‘Floats’ has continued until the last decade, and the variety of his works (animation pieces, optical devices, sculptures) still stands as the best token of his independence. However, it is interesting to observe how his work can function as a powerful ironic comment (if not a perfect joke) about both minimalism and the formalist criticism of this movement. In fact, it is tempting to interpret the ‘Floats’ as a parody of Michael Fried’s anti-literalist doctrine, overwhelmed by concepts such as ‘absorption’, ‘facingness’ or ‘to-be-seenness’, which Breer’s moving molluscs seem to furtively mimic.

Manuel Cirauqui

Ohm Phanphiroj

H Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand

Ohm Phanphiroj’s series of photographs of pubescent male sex workers in Bangkok filters the conventions of ethnographic photography through the rhetoric of the fashion spread. The lush photos depict the mostly topless kids posed impassively against chiaroscuro backdrops of artfully illuminated streets. As ethnographic documents, the images in ‘Underage’ (2010) lack a pronounced sense of realism or transparency; as glossy photographs of young sex workers, they complicate mere aesthetic delectation.

Phanphiroj’s images emerge as highly provocative insofar as the artist encourages us to look at these kids as we imagine their clients might – as available objects of desire. Our consequent sense of unease cannot be displaced as it could be by more ‘straight’ reportage or by staged magazine pulp. In the first instance, the photographs don’t appear to have a specific political or social context. Phanphiroj doesn’t explicitly link these kids’ lives to, say, the social conditions that might have forced this choice of work. However, the photographic series is accompanied by a film (also titled Underage) in which the artist interviews the kids about their experiences and dreams. The film is so depressing as to be nearly unwatchable: from brief descriptions of the youths’ sexual practices to a scene in which one of the children cries while talking about being abandoned by his mother. In both the film and the photographs, the kids themselves remain the objects of interest, not the fact of sex work per se, but their effect is altogether different. While the film aims to evoke sympathy or empathy – its soundtrack is a Thai folk ballad sung by one of the subjects – the photographs are far more ambiguous in this regard. This begs the question of why the photographs don’t attempt what the film is explicitly concerned with. Does the film function to mitigate the unease, if not guilt, that the photos produce? If we think we look at these kids as a paedophile might, they also stare back at us. Many appear resigned, some defiant. There is even the occasional smile.

The photographs inevitably prompt questions about the artist’s intentions and the conditions under which they were taken. To what extent was the series stage-managed? Did Phanphiroj pay his subjects? Ultimately, we are left with no choice but to see these kids and consider their circumstances. One cannot concede that this exhibition is ‘merely’ voyeuristic; something more complex is at work. Susan Sontag argued that not naming the subjects of documentary photographs is a condition of their objectification, and here, Phanphiroj titles the works with numbers (Underage No. 1, 2, etc.). While it would be difficult to imagine how publicizing the names of these kids wouldn’t be controversial, Phanphiroj’s nomenclature does point to his rehearsal of major critiques of photography. Because the photographs have no context or narrative as such, they risk stereotyping and stigmatization: ‘prostitute’ can only be signified by their appearance as young Thai men of a certain class. Further, the raison d’être of ‘Underage’ is the suggestion that child sex work in Thailand should be highlighted and exposed. But this reinforces the fact that these children are typically defined by someone else’s vision; hence, in this particular context, much unease.

Faced with the provocation of the images, one could choose to look away. Sontag’s widely quoted statement in Regarding the Pain of Others (2004), ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us’ might be adapted here to ‘Let the images fascinate us’. Sontag seems to imply that the contextual and the analytical risks distract from the impact of the image itself and, by extension, considerations of what an image is and does. Phanphiroj’s photographs get under your skin, so that the issue of sexual exploitation and abuse of children is no longer somewhere ‘out there’. Here, it becomes a question of our personal relationship or culpability to the ways a child’s life can become commodified and sold – both on the street and as art.

Brian Curtin

Ben Cottrell

Galerie Warhus Rittershaus, Cologne, Germany

On entering the gallery, you rub your eyes and perform multiple double takes: what did I just see? Didn’t that look totally different just now? Ben Cottrell is showing new work in Cologne and, to put it briefly, it’s like an entertaining and intense acid trip where everything which – only moments before – appeared clear and simple suddenly disperses into shapes and colours, blowing up in your face.

Superwoman meets Where the Wild Things Are, Dionysus meets Russ Meyer, with added echoes of bizarre 1960s sci-fi films. With their vacant white eyes, Cottrell’s heroines (for example Portrait of M., all works 2010) look like aliens who take on the form of sirens just to mock those who behold them. But if your attention strays for a second, their facial features scatter into the idyllic landscape: an arm becomes the course of a river, cloud-hung mountains grow out of a forehead, an eye flies through the air. From here, the painter also pursues his chimeras into other media: in his neo-expressionist woodcuts, the coherence of the real takes a plank in the eye; in his loosely wrought pen and ink drawings, he explodes the world into its component parts and puts them through the particle accelerator of art history. The Berlin-based British artist prevents this from becoming mere pastiche: he plays the god of trash who knows exactly what he’s doing – where to put the dynamite, and how to keep the pieces under control as they blow apart. He’s an epic romantic with a far-reaching memory: he moves somewhere between Francis Picabia and Pulp, Francis Bacon and Bernard Buffet, Sturm und Drang.

Even in his painting, he remains far from predictable: at times with a thick patinations and driven by powerful brushstrokes, at others elegant, refined and transparent, applied with precision. These pictures, some presented in old, chipped frames, look as if they hung for many years a sailor’s pub in a port somewhere, and then someone found them and now they’re hanging here. As if they couldn’t care less what the audience does with them. That’s part of the pleasure: they juggle with components that we know; they work with colours that we remember; they pass close to forms that resound in the unconscious.

Whereas a few years ago, it was more likely to be rather undifferentiated portrayals of hobgoblins whose eerie faces briefly emerged from swampy green, now Cottrell has sharpened his weapons: he has recruited the most attractive cast, found the brightest colours, the weirdest angles. And in addition to all this, a huge black sun made of sawn plywood (Rotten Sun), mounted on two freestanding wooden supports running from floor to ceiling, glows and burns, hot and dark, into the gallery space.

Magdalena Kröner

Another Point of View

La Galerie, Paris, France

Seeing photographs in an exhibition that picture the exhibition venue itself can arouse a feeling of the uncanny, even more so when the space is a 19th-century mansion. (Sigmund Freud’s term, unheimlich, which was developed in his 1919 essay on ‘The Uncanny’, stems from the root heim or ‘home’). Curated by Carolina Grau, ‘Another Point of View’ comprises images taken from former archives as well as recent photographs that simulate archival documents. As a guest curator, Grau spent a few weeks in residency in the Paris suburb of Noisy-le-Sec, a former Communist stronghold, where La Galerie sits amid high-rise housing blocks. This setting of housing and functional units suffuses the exhibition.

At first sight, Marcelline Delbecq’s photographic display, Des Alentours (Hereabouts, 2010), reveals two images lain on a shelf. The first image is a view of the mansion that houses La Galerie, taken from the 16th-storey of a nearby tower block. The second image zooms in on the duckboard surrounding the house. Its bottom right corner reads: ‘Surprising though it may seem, no one hereabouts had noticed anything at all. So much so that the day after…’ Look more carefully, and you discover that another image is printed on the back of each photograph, though it remains unseen. The place within the place yields a possible fiction – perhaps a murder scene, or a mental space where one thing becomes its opposite. Although the location is recognizable or even familiar to the visitor, Delbecq’s pictures of the building from an unexpected point of view create a dissonance within the work and the exhibition space itself.

Delbecq’s bird’s-eye view echoes that of Józef Robakowski’s film, From My Window (1978–99), shot from his apartment in a Łódź housing block. A voice-over narrates the movements of the filmmaker’s neighbours: the director of the meat factory before and after being fired, or the forlorn car parked in the same place for two years become pretexts to allude to shortages, black markets and internment, as well as the history of Poland from Communist times through the transition era. Although the voice-over – which is spoken in the present tense seems – simultaneous with the action, the track is actually a single recording, narrated afterwards. Robakowski’s personal archive is exists ambiguously in both past and present.

Historical archives are also manipulated in Amie Siegel’s video installation Berlin Remake (2005). Working with the film archives of the former GDR state cinema, Siegel discovered sequences from a number of films set in pre-reunification East Berlin. Through a dual-channel installation, the artist returns to the places depicted in the films to shoot them again, adopting a similar point of view. She juxtaposes past and present images and puts archives stemming from fiction beside restaged sequences. As fictitious and documentary images collide, the locations remain deserted.

In this exhibition, Noisy-le-Sec, Łódź and Berlin are never seen from a straight documentary point of view. The manipulation of documents through fictionalization, voice-over and juxtaposition makes their status highly ambiguous. As Freud wrote in ‘The Uncanny’, the feeling of the uncanny ‘cannot arise unless there is a conflict of judgment as to whether things which have been “surmounted” and are regarded as incredible may not, after all, be possible.’

Audrey Illouz

Kerstin Kartscher

Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg, Germany

‘Still Point’, the title of Kerstin Kartscher’s current exhibition at Galerie Karin Guenther, may be a coded reference to the fact that the exhibition is focused almost entirely on the act of drawing. Kartscher’s work has always been graphic, if not ink-obsessed, but the three-dimensional assemblages that have been the focal point of many of her previous shows have receded into the background here, both literally and figuratively. Even without the encompassing installations, Kartscher’s paintings inhabit the space of the wall differently from framed works. Her pieces are often simply lengths of canvas or textile tacked to the wall or hung from recycled wooden molding, drawn, painted or sprayed on, yielding a raw and immediate aesthetic.

Saint Jerome Garden (2010)

The centrepiece of ‘Still Point’, a large assemblage entitled Saint Jerome Garden (all works 2010), is still predominantly a painting. Planting itself firmly in the realm of nostalgia, the installation consists of a painted wall-hanging beside a chain-link fence precariously propped up by a pole topped by a ratty lampshade. The painting’s imagery reaffirms the ‘old curiosity shop’ quality of the piece: an appropriated image of a woman gardening in Victorian garb is framed by various architectural elements. In Saint Jerome Garden the mixture of pseudo-Millet with rough urban elements, both painted and physically present, reinforce the subtext of loss – a fitting theme for a city that is currently fighting its own battles with the forces of gentrification.

Kartscher returns again and again in her drawings/paintings to the play between interior and exterior and the tension between soft and hard – played out most often between organic and architectural forms. She chooses particular materials and compositions to emphasize the ambivalence of the works in this show. Her riskiest choice is her signature gesture to consistently recast the paintings on canvas as wall-hangings. At times they enter the domain of window shades, curtains and tapestries, becoming a part of a domestic vocabulary. Unfortunately, sometimes the works are more reminiscent of wall calendars and this gesture distracts from the precise and engaging imagery.

Kartscher manipulates both precise and arbitrary imagery so that her works resemble philosophical diagrams rather than surrealistic landscapes. In The House Fits Her Like a Glove, she draws teleological connections between disparate elements to lend a careful rationale to the imagery. In the foreground, gloves on a pair of hands unravel into a set of power lines on which birds are perched, lending a visual intuit to the Brutalist architecture, streetlamp and trees in the background. These connections are repeated often and to great effect throughout the show, and the seemingly random overlapping of forms weaves an almost legible narrative of signs and symbols relating to domestic interiors, organic forms, and bleak exterior details from gardens and cityscapes. In Being an End in Itself, foil appliqués become pulleys that circulate the symbolism within the piece, while in The Pools are Fed, the typical accoutrements of a boudoir table – flowers, vases and perfume bottles – dissolve into similarly shaped chandeliers and traffic stauncheons, which then coalesce into a fountain and pool in the distance.

Consistent with Kartscher’s previous work, the most salient aspect of ‘Still Point’ is the irreconcilable panoply of borrowed images and patterns superficially reminiscent of 19th-century etchings. They are inky and busy, arcane and authoritative – yet profoundly unhinged. Both through the novel accumulations of disparate objects and the framing of the works themselves as semi-tattered wall-hangings and assemblages, Kartscher achieves a gentle bridging of seemingly harmless domestic settings and the nostalgic pastoral with the tortured interior monologue of a necromancer’s prophetic chart.

William Corwin

Sturtevant

Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, UK

An inverted pyramid of nine synchronized monitors occupies the scarlet-carpeted gallery. ‘Real-life money’ yells a voice as a fan of dollar bills is shoved towards the camera, before the video cuts to an inverted Hellmann’s ‘Real Mayonnaise’ label. Animatronic toy bulldogs hum what seems to be ‘What a Wonderful World’, atomic bombs explode, the laughter of Beavis and Butthead blends with an aria, before finally colliding with an image of a carnival dancer.

Structured as a three-act play, Sturtevant’s Elastic Tango (2010) may, like much of the artists’ oeuvre, submit itself to enthusiastic misinterpretation that usually sees the work fixed to an exhausted, usually appropriationist context. Yet it’s as tempting to consider this boisterous work as addressing the visual excess of a YouTube generation as it is to speak of its merits solely in dated terms of ‘bricolage’ or ‘sampling’. Devoid of narrative, Elastic Tango presents an astonishingly bland, stupid and ultimately, numbing visual terrain. The effect is one broadly characteristic of Sturtevant’s practice, where conspicuous attention is paid to the moment of a thought as it emerges.

Much of Sturtevant’s work has occupied itself with what the artist calls the ‘interior power of art’, or the displacement of concept over image. Her repetitions of Warhol, Duchamp and Stella leap from the exterior, visual surface of the art work towards its conceptual interior, unyielding in questioning structures of legitimation and aura. Elastic Tango steps further, towards the second movement in Sturtevant’s conceptual trio – a move forward to ‘image over image’ (the last being ‘object over object’). This shift, symptomatic of her move into video in the late 1990s, extends the question of art’s pervasiveness into the contemporary realm of digital and cybernetic imposition, a move the artist outlined so succinctly in her 2007 paper ‘Inherent Vice or Vice Versa’ . In essence, underlying the displacement of image over image is a return to surface (albeit one that is both digital and moving). Rubbing the vile, mundane and humorous against each other, the cacophonic spree of Elastic Tango strives to flesh out new spaces for reflection in an ‘anti-intellect world’. The governing logic is of the lowest common denominator, Sturtevant warns, and we are drowned in a blaring and glaring excess of dematerialized sex, violence, brutal idiocy and complacency; Elastic Tango does not tame, but instead folds the incessant override of image over image upon itself, to flesh language out of sound and thought out of movement.

This push to ‘thrust articulation against visibilities’  virtually begs the question of where, then, is man? Unsurprisingly, Sturtevant offers no immediate reprieve. Much like her earlier video The Dark Threat of Absence/Fragmented and Sliced (2002), a seven-screen installation that fuses images of mutilation, sex, consumption and hysteria, Elastic Tango irritates, annoys and almost assaults its viewer, demanding that we look towards man’s ‘vast, barren interior’.

As dictated by its classical three-act structure, the first section of Elastic Tango presents a problem, while the second adds conflict and change. A short intermission of a tango being performed follows, before the final and resolving act begins. Markedly different, this third act is composed of nature sequences and Olympic water sport footage, all superimposed with a large ‘iStockphoto’ logo. Water cascades in slow motion and a frog lunges towards its prey, as what sounds like a ’90s keyboard demo track acts as the backdrop music. Elastic Tango is interspersed with fragments of Sturtevant’s previous video works – The Greening of America (2000), The Dark Threat of Absence/Fragmented and Sliced (2002) and Vertical Monad (2007) – suggesting that no art can withstand scrutiny, without turning upon or repeating even itself.

In her writings, Sturtevant often returns to Stéphane Mallarmé, whose notion of a ‘wild throw of the dice’ is crucial here. The thrust of her practice lies in replay – re-making, re-doing and re-producing as a means to subvert the governed comfort we are lulled into. Her art is one of disrupting and reinforcing moments in which thought can emerge anew.

Pavel S. Pyś

Hu Xiaoyuan

Beijing Commune, Beijing, China

Visitors to Hu Xiaoyuan’s solo exhibition are met with the four large vertical screens, side by side, of the video installation I Don’t Know How Long You’ve Been Walking On, and I Don’t Know Where You’re Going (2010). It is an arresting sight; each shows a moving expanse: three of fabric – emerald green, white and pink – and one of dark brown fur. Their surfaces swing, fold, stretch and crumple with the gait of their wearers (or ‘predecessors’), who have been filmed from behind and whose footsteps can be heard. Although the degree of movement varies, the steps maintain a rhythm. In the second room, a light-box shows a wrapped, grub-like body squirming on a white surface to the point of exhaustion before becoming still. Other screens suspended at eye level show videos of blurred and melting lights; one unwavering follows the beams of a car’s tail lights moving along the road. A trace of the artist is present in the four-channel video A Seamless Distance (2010), half of which shows a close-up of her eye reflecting shifting scenes; these are recorded directly in the second two videos playing opposite.

Hu Xiaoyuan is a prominent female artist whose work, A Keepsake I Cannot Give Away (2005), was featured in documenta 12. The work consisted of embroideries on silk using her own hair as thread. Traditional Chinese imagery, metaphors for happiness in love and sexual parts of her own body thus evoked loneliness and ties of significance. To date, Hu’s personal and sometimes organic objects and materials – thread, compacted clothes, old furniture – have provided media for installations in which intimate feelings surface. The videos in this show depart from impressions of sentiments held and objects imbued with meaning. Here instead are patterns, beams, movement and reflections set in non-specific time. Speaking about these works, Hu describes ‘diluted temporality’, ‘optical illusion’ and ‘seamlessness’. The language leaves behind concrete motifs of feminine sensibility – the artist’s gender indeed seems irrelevant – moving towards abstraction and possibly detachment. The titles testify to this: the wriggling body is called No Reason Why (2010), the proceeding car lights, Where is There (2010).

The physical encounter with these pieces is different, too. Five years after A Keepsake… was exhibited in glass cases, the staging of these videos transforms the gallery almost entirely – visually at least – from white cube to black box. One is inclined to stand far back from the first four screens, each of which measure nearly ten square metres, in order to grasp the combined visual and aural effect. The smaller works, though more approachable, are equally absorbing. Hu says she gradually sorts through the questions she accumulates until she finds a new perspective. I Don’t Know How Long You’ve Been Walking… might be interpreted as a study of the abstract beauty present in the everyday, but is in fact a probing of the ridiculous ‘not only […] as a “predecessor”, but even more […] the “purposelessness and absurdity” of the follower.’ There is something compelling about this juxtaposition of amplified, near-sensual imagery and an apparently absurdist notion. Perhaps Hu’s own reflections on her environment are helpful here: ‘Beijing changes every day, and I float aimlessly along with the city’. Perhaps these videos simply trail the sensations, lapses and sightings of contemporary urban drift that are repeated every 24 hours in metropolitan cities – and which do not matter. Hu Xiaoyuan’s passage of contemplation continues, this time woven through visions of the exterior, spatial and temporal world, rather than what is held within.

Iona Whittaker

Giovanni Oberti

Careof, Milan, Italy

Currently one of the most interesting and active contemporary art spaces in Italy, and home to a significant video art archive, Careof is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of artistic research, by younger artists in particular. In his latest solo show at Careof, Giovanni Oberti has set out to address the challenge of giving visible form to the diurnal passage of time, and to show through its multiple physical manifestations how it is a palpable ‘living’ matter. Invited by curator Chiara Agnello to devise a project that considers the concept of space, Oberti has created a ‘time production’ device based on simple atmospheric phenomena in the gallery and which can convey the appearance of time – its physical composition, its manifold material forms. The artist has traced these temporal processes in the dust, humidity and light of the space, creating works that become expressions of the phenomenology of time.

The title of Oberti’s installation, ‘8’ (all works 2010), is a reference to the infinity symbol and to the cyclical nature of time. It also serves as the impetus for one of the works in the exhibition – a small neon light that recalls an hourglass or a Möbius strip (Untitled (8)). Placed high on the wall at the far end of the gallery, the neon emits a flickering yellow light denoting the incessant flux of the material from one state to another. The references to numerology – the number eight is a magic number – and to science are extended by the almost mystical chronology that is written into the natural order of things: the solar system is composed of eight planets; eight is the atomic number for oxygen; and, in Christian symbolism, the transfiguration took place on the eighth day after the crucifixion.

If light constitutes the fixed visual element of the exhibition, the other works in the show are subject to the effects of time, altering their physical form on a daily basis and leaving traces of this transformative process behind. On entering the space, viewers are confronted by an expanse of water on the concrete floor (Untitled). During the course of the day, the liquid gradually diminishes as it is evaporated by dehumidifying units. The puddle is then re-created every evening when the water that has collected in the units is poured back onto the floor in exactly the same spot. Internal humidity – which we cannot see but must perceive, in the same way we can sense time – is momentarily rendered material before being returned to its original state, leaving only the faintest trace of itself in the limescale deposits formed on the concrete floor.

Oberti offers viewers the opportunity to observe the process of accumulation, stratification and entropy of the particles of existence, which are then reintegrated at the boundary of the real, the ephemeral and the metaphysical. In Untitled (Pedestal for Dust), the subject and medium of the work is the dust generated from the general use of the space over time, as well as from various substances the artist has placed around the gallery. Allowed to accumulate on the top of a two-metre-high pedestal, the dust will remain unseen until the end of the exhibition, when Oberti will dismantle the pedestal and display the dust-covered stone inside a glass vitrine.

Marinella Paderni

Rosalind Nashashibi

Tulips & Roses, Brussels, Belgium

Rosalind Nashashibi’s exhibition, ‘Woman Behind a Cushion’, inaugurates Tulips & Roses’ new gallery in Brussels (it has moved from Vilnius) and is an uncharacteristic show for the British artist. Nashashibi, known for her almost exclusive use of photography and film, instead presents objects alongside films in this ensemble. The outcome is relatively inconspicuous: a few screen prints, a photograph, a found image, and a small sculpture, while the films – observational, intuitive and anthropological – are closer to her earlier work.

The choice to present such a sparse installation could relate to Nashashibi’s current investigations into things that remain unseen. Just as her films evoke the lives of human and anthropomorphic subjects devoid of productive activity, these works hint at hidden bodies and the act of seeing them from inside out. In the gallery’s main room, a deep grey velvet stage curtain disguises the street front window (itself a sheath encasing an exhibition based on sheaths) and an A4 black and white photocopy of David Hockney’s etching Rapunzel Rapunzel, Let Down Your Hair (1969) is pinned to the entry wall. Suspended next to it is a horse’s hood draped over a wooden plinth. Titled The World Cracked Open (2010), the dual piece crystallizes the scene in the fairy tale of Rapunzel, in which her Prince gallops up on his horse beneath the tower where her braided hair hangs. Narrative aside, Nashashibi seems to be interested in the Hockney print for its formal qualities and encapsulation of a moment, alongside the horse hood, which reverberates against other poetic reiterations of covers, dresses and enveloped bones on view in this show.

Such is the case of the c-print, Sunspot 2 (2010), hanging on the facing wall. It depicts a clunker car adorned in a garment typical of vehicles stationed in and around Cairo (which we learn from an accompanying film in the basement). The ink splattered onto the print creates the impression of phantom limbs sprouting out of the car, as if it were about to elevate and scurry off on its freshly birthed appendages. Adjacent abstract grey-ochre and lilac unframed screen prints, titled Thought Shape: Grey and Ochre and Thought Shape: Lilac (both 2004), complement the gallery’s refurbished mosaic floor, and again suggest other dressings. Their contorted shapes formally echo the contours of the horse hood sculpture, though they also portray what could happen if one were to sculpt the inner lining of a thought, and render its sleek curvature as it bubbles in the brain.

Nashashibi is at her best when making films, such as the two displayed here. The first, an early work titled Stone and Table (1995), shows alternating black and white close-ups of an ordinary stone and table, whose function or purpose is obscured. By filming them, she attains a sort of bleak abstraction in which the eerie shadows lurking on the stone and table’s periphery create an ethereal otherworldliness. Viewing them, one is drawn to the sense of animate life that Nashashibi attaches to them. The second film, This Quality (2010), is the most subdued and elegant of the two. It depicts an Egyptian woman staring into the camera, her gaze occasionally drifting away. Looking closer, her eyes don’t seem to belong to her, but emit a glamour which is more fitting if we view them, as the artist remarks, as ‘a word or diagram indicating eyes, rather than eyes themselves’. Her portrait is followed by long still individual takes of automobiles sheathed by striped, earth-tinted car covers. The cars sit amidst a clamour of beeping horns, their robes drooping and swaying in the dusty wind. Before Nashashibi’s camera, recondite subjects, inanimate and animate, hidden and unveiled, appear as if they’ve been poetically assembled for our view.

Jennifer Teets

Zündkerze

Matthew Bown Galerie, Berlin, Germany

‘Zündkerze’ (Sparkplug) includes work by three British artists – Damien Roach, Helen Marten and S Mark Gubb – and is presented by the curator David Thorp as a cross-section of the post-young British artist (YBA) generation. If the YBAs were the ‘me’ generation, and current socially-engaged art represents the ‘us’ generation, Thorp argues that the artists of ‘Zündkerze’ are somewhere in between: analyzing social norms via the imagery and paraphernalia of popular culture.

Helen Marten’s logos like candy, type like bread (2010) is a highly pictorial floor-based sculpture, in which a concrete-filled shoe supports the silhouette of a man in a fedora made out of patterned fabric stretched on a steel frame, rather like a beach chair. This noir imagery is literally inserted into a second structure, made of powder-coated welded steel, which seems to reference the popular post-Picasso style of 1950s design. This second item could conceivably be a fragment of a garden gate, or a bedstead. There is a great density of reference here, not merely in the imagery but in the forms in which the imagery is cast. The whole work is supported on suede-covered cushions and hovers a few inches off the floor, parallel to it. Could the work’s explicit pictoriality be yet another cultural reference – to the ’60s obsession with the picture plane and painting’s relationship to the wall?

Several works by S Mark Gubb take up the largest room in the gallery and comprise a kind of installation exploring the furniture of the street: illuminated signage, posters, bus-shelters. We’ve Been Waiting Now For Much Too Long (2010) is a light box that bears a Russian slogan from the 19th-century Russian nihilist, Dmitri Pisarev: ‘What can be smashed, should be smashed’. You Suffer… (2008), a multi-sheet poster glued casually to the wall so that its surface is articulated by wrinkles, displays the enigmatic phrase, ‘You suffer … but why?’ It seems like a slogan from a proselytizing church, although in fact it derives from a rock song. Differences Instead of Sameness (2010) is a bus-shelter built from oriented strand board panels. These are the sheets usually used to replace panes of smashed glass: here the entire structure is built from them. All these familiar elements of the urban landscape are tweaked into the sphere of art, while still referencing vandalism and urban decay.

Damien Roach has filled a room with a variety of objects, including Untitled (2010), a large two-way Perspex mirror that hangs from the ceiling; Untitled open structure (2010), a bookcase from IKEA; Untitled (light refracting mirror strips) (2010), strips of rough-cut mirror propped against a wall; the projection Fig. 15 (2010); the sound recording In the air (2010); and Peppered moth (2007), the cut-out image of a moth. These works seemingly reference a multiplicity of spaces, from living rooms to public bathrooms, airport lounges to furniture stores. Each item retains a kind of autonomy while helping to create spatial perspectives that are fluid and seductive. What links Roach to the other two artists is not only an interest in the imagery and technology of popular and mass-produced culture; it is also a sort of belief in the inherent eloquence of objects: a belief that ordinary things in the multiplicity of their references, are as articulate as images. In this sense, the new generation proposed by Thorp probably traces its descent from Marcel Duchamp.

The curator’s premise, that these three artists are emblematic of a new generation, is polemical and debatable; but the show on its visual merits is successful, particularly as installed here – in separate rooms interlinked by large doorways, which allows a conversation to emerge among the work of the three artists.

Laura K. Jones

Anonymes: Unnamed America in Photography and Film

Le Bal, Paris, France

Le Bal (‘the dance hall’ in French) is Paris’ new venue for visual culture or, in the words of the photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon (co-founder and chairman of Le Bal), a space for ‘the exploration of documentary practice in its most thought-provoking forms’. This wide-ranging claim lends an openness to the programme, even though we all know that agoraphobia is one of the most pervasive neuroses in the arts environment, especially when it comes to relativizing historical categories such as ‘photojournalism’, ‘experimental cinema’ or ‘conceptualism’.

Le Bal’s inaugural show, ‘Anonymes. Unnamed America in Photography and Film’, brings together a number of photographers, filmmakers and visual artists (as far-flung as Walker Evans, Jeff Wall, Sharon Lockhart and Bruce Gilden) who are usually attached to quasi-isolated spheres of reception – among them, photojournalists rarely or never seen in contemporary art exhibitions – reiterating, to some extent, the aforementioned declaration of principles. The openness of the exhibition’s title is, however, a bit misleading: isn’t anonymity consubstantial to visual culture as a whole? In other words, don’t we see images of hundreds of nameless faces every day of our lives? Le Bal director Diane Dufour (who co-curated the show with the author and academic David Campany) explains that this project’s aim is less to lay down an anthology or an inventory of the vast ‘anonymous genre’ (if there were one) than to present a set of examples where, in Dufour’s words, the ‘confection’ (or the ‘writing’) of a document becomes the key to understanding its social, institutional and linguistic function.

The project’s keystone is Walker Evans’ series of subway and street portraits, including ‘Many Are Called’ (1966) or, more significantly, ‘Labour Anonymous’ (1946), which are presented in their original magazine or book formats. Explicit or not – but anyway, less obsolete than some might think – the reference to the working class in most of the works on show is far from being fortuitous; anonymity is historically related to the working masses as individualism is to a specialized minority. (It would be interesting to emphasize, in the words of Enrique Vila-Matas, that ‘individualism has produced little individuals’, even though we could just as well claim that individualism is, already, ‘a thing of the past’). Evans’s series of ‘unposed portraits’ could be considered as seminal in their form as they are in their technical dimension. Without the constraint of having to shoot from a coat-hidden camera or from a predetermined corner in the street, the series would lose consistency, if not disappear. Chauncey Hare’s series ‘Interior America’ (1978), Anthony Hernandez’ bus stop portraits from the same year or Lewis Baltz’ ‘New Industrial Parks’ project (1974) are also ‘protocol-informed’ documents; they occupy the territory where documentary photography, despite its somewhat naïve or literal relation to content, verges on a sort of proto-Conceptualism.

Other works such as Arianna Arcara and Luca Santese’s breathtaking Detroit: A Self Portrait (2009–10) or Sharon Lockhart’s Lunch Break (2008) – a tribute to the Lumière brothers that is as much an ultra-slow moving image as a photograph in motion – contribute to unfolding the document-image’s inner mechanisms, increasing the enigma of its validity. This is a question for which Jeff Wall’s photographic tableau Searching for Premises (2008), in which a forensic examination of a home is meticulously staged, might stand as an abyssal, impassive allegory.

Manuel Cirauqui

Ulla Von Brandenburg

Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö, Sweden

There is something specifically European and old-fashioned about Ulla von Brandenburg’s stage settings, themes and sound. Her latest performance Chorspiel (2010) could have been taken from a Thomas Mann novel. The Buddenbrook family came to mind when you saw the four performers on stage: the old grandfather, the chubby grandmother, the mother and the young daughter, all passing their time in the same living room – playing matches, resting on the couch, disputing or trying to untie a large knot. Everything is at once structured yet loaded with the heavy burden of being part of a family. As the play progress however, the family’s life is interrupted by a young man – the Wanderer – who comes to play a central role in the play as the potentially dangerous and unknown element, but also the one who could grant the family a new life.

Chorspiel was shown four times over three days at Malmö’s Lilith Performance Studio, the first combined production studio and arena in Europe for visual art performances. Here performance art can explore its full potential rather than being relegated to comic relief at a vernissage or the painful scene of some art party. The venue is dedicated solely to this particular genre of visual art and is completely transformed for each performance. In this case, Von Brandenburg realized a 70-metre wall painting depicting black and white natural scenery populated by shadowy figures, creating a structured wilderness that engulfed the audience. This backdrop seemed to mimic the rather dark tone of the play and the strange symbolism of the dialogue, which had more in common with the lyrics of an opera than with the speeches of a play.

As in Singplay, her 2007 performance at Tate Modern, the characters mimicked a song that was being performed live on stage. But in Singplayit was Von Brandenburg herself who sang all the lyrics, which created a disjuncture between the character of the young man who seemed to speak with the female voice of the artist. In Chorspiel – as the title suggests – the lyrics were sung by a choir consisting of both men and women. The music, also written by Von Brandenburg, was arranged as a classical canon, which also underlined the sense of something archaic, and it filled the whole studio with the beautiful sound of something that came close to an elegy.

The faces of the actors trying to follow the sung lyrics created a strange heterogeneous effect, as the words of the choir and the facial expressions of the actors rarely managed to correspond. It is these little displacements that seem to be of essential importance in Von Brandenburg’s work, as is the concept of time. In this performance, it is nearly as if time is a physical presence, showed very specifically by the strangely slow gestures of the actors – the three-generations of the family continuously trying to untie a knot, which became almost an illustration of their individual lifelines and mutual interconnectedness. And, as the choir intoned, ‘We have not chosen it ourselves, life is done to us … now we are here, but for how long?’ 

Maria Kjær Themsen

Anna Malagrida

Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen, Denmark

Anna Malagrida’s ‘Vistas Veladas/Fogged Views’ is the Spanish photographer’s first exhibition in Scandinavia, and one of two exhibitions currently on view at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard in the centre of Copenhagen’s Meatpacking District.

The series ‘Untitled (Refugios)’ (2007) consists of nine photographs that are installed in a grid at the beginning of the show. Straightforward prints of small brick huts in the Jordanian desert, they recall David Goldblatt’s photographs of architectural vestiges and simple dwellings in the South African landscape, and also undoubtedly echo the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. There are no people in the frames; they depict only rudimentary structures and the barren land surrounding them. The colours are bleak but clear: the dust of the desert mixes with the grey concrete and the sky adds only a touch of blue to the overall pallor.

The main focus of the show is works from the series ‘Vistas Veladas’ (2007), comprising large, overexposed photographs of the city of Amman taken from different hotel room windows. The overexposed effect wasn’t initially intentional; Malagrida’s negatives were damaged going through the security checks in the lobbies of luxury hotels. The bleached, washed-out surface of the urban views of architecture, traffic and pedestrians could serve as a barrier, a filter to keep the viewer at bay and accentuate a feeling of alienation. Conversely, while Amman is fading and we cannot seem to seize it, hints of colour on cars, roofs and billboards slowly emerge and ask for a second glance.

Danza de mujer (2007) is the only video work in the show, consisting of one long shot of a black curtain fluttering in the breeze in front of a small window looking out on the sky; it is as if the viewer now inhabits one of those huts in the desert. Whenever the cloth blows to the side, the brightness of the exterior eradicates the window pains and creates a dazzling flare in the centre of the frame. The process repeats itself: the curtain dancing in the draft occasionally exposes what is on the other side of the wall, almost tantalizing, as if every burst of light may be an epiphany. The dark room, the single view and the illuminating flashes also allude to photography itself, which is fundamentally the subject of Malagrida’s exhibition. The legacy of the Bechers and their students’ large-scale photography looms candidly here, but Malagrida is developing her own aesthetic, following on from her predecessors, not merely replicating.

The dichotomies of interior and exterior; seeing and not seeing; belonging and not belonging, are certainly at play here. Peering through windows draws to mind voyeurism, and the bleached quality of the photographs in ‘Vistas Veladas’ also emphasizes the act of looking; that Malagrida shows us Amman from a distance, as if through a fog and obscured by a whitewashed film, begs a closer look.

Christine Antaya

Swagger, Drag, Fit Together

Wallspace, New York, USA

The thematic strands of ‘Swagger, Drag, Fit Together’ are subtle but pervasive, linking disparate works from the 1970s and to today into a coherent, but never dogmatic, meditation on the body in space. The artists in this adroitly curated show explore the physics of tension – and, by extension, pressure and containment – in relation to the body. In doing so, they engage in the politics of how we occupy a space.

This is made most clear in one of the few works featuring a human figure, Jiří Kovanda’s XXX, Pressing myself as close as I can to the wall, I make my way around the whole room; there are people in the middle of the room, watching … (1977). Kovanda’s action – documentation of which is presented in the gallery, and which performs precisely what the title describes – maps the coordinates of performance, surveillance, and the body.

XXX . . . provides a context and thesis for understanding for the sculpture and photography that is presented elsewhere in the exhibition; namely, that the way we physically occupy a space has a direct relationship to social power, position, and recognition. But Kovanda’s work also nicely signals some of the other formal concerns of the exhibition: the physical signatures of pressure and tension.

Take, for example, Judith Scott’s sculpture (Untitled, undated) which evokes a human torso, banded and bound (Untitled, undated), an image echoed in Erika Vogt’s Traveler (2010). The containment of the body is one of the dominant visual motifs at work in the exhibition, which also includes video work by Adam Putnam, who has previously staged performance works constraining his body.

Here, he shows three videos, including Cracked Infinity Chest (2010), in which Putnam holds a pane of glass in front of his torso, violently punctured by bullet holes. The video operates in tandem with John Divola’s black and white photographic series on vandalism.  The rubble of Divola’s images operate in an anthropomorphic way – as do the assorted fragments that pervade the gallery, from chicken legs to ropes and balls.

These representations of the body are granted their anthropomorphic quality through the use of physical tension – best captured in Ryan Kitson’s beautiful Floor, Wall, Plank, Ball (2006). In places, this tension gives way to ruptures of violence, as in Divola’s photographs and Putnam’s video, and most graphically in Daniel Gordon’s collage style photograph July 6, 2009 (2009), an image consisting of a severed head and collected body parts.

Elsewhere the act of collecting and collating expresses an interest in language. Divola’s photographs almost form a lexicon of symbols, while Mark Wyse’s Bruce Nauman/Barbara Kruger (2008) features the appropriation of Kruger’s text based work and both artists’ visual vocabulary. Christopher Williams’ Untitled (Study in Brown), Dirk Schaper Studio, Berlin, April 30, 2009 (2009) prominently features the Falke logo, a small study in brands, words and meaning.

This is all fitting in an exhibition that is preoccupied with the process of abstraction, and the cascade of associations that results, whether it is through art historical association or brand connotation. Visual humour is integral to numerous works in the show (including the titular animated video by Laura Riboli), and that humour is often generated through the simple act of juxtaposition.  Placing one object alongside another object – the strange alchemy of this process is one of multiple artistic manipulations explored in ‘Swagger, Drag, Fit Together’.

Katie Kitamura

Sylvia Sleigh

Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland

A blonde woman in a striped shirt looks out from the canvas at visitors as they enter the gallery. In the background, a man sits at a desk. Orderly bookshelves, classic designer furniture and the smart casual attire of the figures create a formal, slightly tense atmosphere. As the opening work in Sylvia Sleigh’s first solo show in Europe since 1962, Working at Home (1969) takes on a programmatic quality, as the artist often situates the subjects of her portraits in interiors, back gardens or their own homes.

Born in Wales in 1916 and a naturalized New Yorker since the early 1960s, Sleigh has always worked with figurative painting, in which she trained in the 1930s. Unfazed by the changing tides of style and the many declarations of the death of her preferred medium, she has focused primarily on making paintings of critics, curators and artists in a male-dominated art scene. The fact that her subjects are often naked is not the only inversion of Modernist visual conventions here, as artistic abstraction and functional design feature in her pictures like decorative museum pieces. Sleigh’s portraits of a melancholy educated middle class come across as a peopled version of Louise Lawler’s photographs of art behind-the-scenes in museums, which in the 1980s were perceived as institutional critique.

In spite of a realistic style that takes it lead from art-historical icons including Giorgione, Botticelli and Ingres, Sleigh’s representations of rooms and figures often depart from this line. Towards the edges, foreshortened or overstretched perspectives flow into two-dimensional ornaments, as in the opening picture where the outlines of the female figure become lost in the pattern on her stockings and the bright red leaves of an indoor plant. The vines of a green-leaved plant wind in peculiar transparency around the foot of the adjacent Egg chair designed by Arne Jacobsen.

In Max Warsh Seated Nude (2006), a naked man leans back into the black leather of an Eames Lounge Chair from 1956. In the painting hung next to it, an unclad woman sits on the corresponding ottoman. Although these items of furniture are renowned for their comfort, neither sitter appears particularly relaxed. On the contrary, the male figure grips the armrests, while the left hand of his female counterpart is tightly clasped around her upper right arm. Both direct their concentrated gazes out past the viewer. On the tidy bookshelf behind Max, we can read some of the titles: ‘Jackson Pollock’, ‘Juan Gris’, ‘Gorky’, ‘Sylvia Sleigh’. On these insignia of the educated middle-class home, the artist quite literally inscribes herself into the ancestral line of male artists.

Although perceived as a feminist in her artistic practice and as co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery (whose 21 members also included Nancy Spero) and SOHO20 Gallery, Sleigh’s position within this context is not uncontroversial. Charges of naïve painting and of implicitly perpetuating conventional power structures are often levelled against her. In their book, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981), for example, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock argue that simply inverting the status quo is not enough to break male dominance. Not least her recent participation in the survey show ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’ at MoCA, Los Angeles in 2007 confirms the historical significance of her work. But Sleigh has never limited herself purely to a feminist context, instead pursuing a more general questioning of representation in art. As such, her work is also an important point of reference for institutional critique and for contemporary painters such as Elizabeth Peyton and Raffi Kalenderian.

Burkhard Meltzer

Translated by Nicholas Grindell

The Youth Sale Store

Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing, China

‘The Youth Sale Store’ is a prosaic title, but deliberately so. The global language of exhibition culture is often esoteric: currently on view in Beijing, for example, are ‘The Constructed Dimension’, ‘Garden of Autumn Vapours’ and ‘Relation of Relocations’, to name but a few. In contrast, ‘The Youth Sale Store’ is straightforward: here are some works for sale by young artists. Subtitled ‘Alternative Thinking in Alternative Situations’, this show marks an artist-led effort to transcend curatorial prescriptions and market pressures to forge new places and practices for themselves.

Against a deep-rooted landscape of art funding, education and appreciation in other countries, the situation of Chinese artists is by definition ‘alternative’. China lacks a support system for emerging artists who, not yet established in the commercial realm, have difficulty finding venues and support for their work. The spotlight of the international art market has also dimmed on China’s art scene, revealing a dearth of local infrastructure. Although few non-profit spaces exist, they are small-scale and can be short-lived. ‘The Youth Sale Store’ began as an experiment by a group of young artists in Shanghai who collected works from artists they knew and put these on show for a month. The works were exhibited without any curatorial intervention and with the idea of this becoming a perpetual project – an ever-open ‘store space’ where artists could put their work as soon as it is finished. The project evolved into an itinerant store seeking new venues to inhabit, of which Pékin Fine Arts is the second.

On view are works by 15 young artists. The larger portion are 2D – a series of photographs by Li Mu (‘My Dream in Vilnius’, 2009), along with paintings and drawings, but there are also a number of small-scale sculptures and an animation piece by Ye Linghan. The close-knit display feels refreshing in contrast with exhibitions that present a few works in acres of reverent white space. Hu Yun’s series of quiet, mildly surreal watercolours (including a red piano, a saddle and two feathers side by side) and Liao Fei’s illustrations from a novel in the same medium seem to speak to each other on a level of precise drawing and gentle colouration. Enlivening amongst the works on paper are cartoons by Zhang Fang. Worth a close look are Su Chang’s four mixed media sculptures, of which a miniature version of an old public toilet with rust-run walls is strikingly realistic. Also recreating in miniature is Lu Jiawei, whose ‘Manufacture World’ series (2009) might represent a reflection on contemporary society and its productions, a sensibility particular to the 1980s generation. Prices range from 999 – 20,000RMB, and the poppy flyer proclaims, ‘…Great sale!!! Don’t miss it! ...What are you waiting for…join us RIGHT NOW!’

First and foremost, ‘The Youth Sale Store’ testifies to Shanghai’s enduring experimental art scene, long active but until recently heavily overshadowed by Beijing’s famous painters. Perhaps ironic given the deliberate absence of curatorial criteria is the fact that the pieces convey a distinct unity, not necessarily in form but in feel. Collectively they are very attentive; the works on paper, for example, are conscientious and detailed rather than demonstrative; the scale of the work is not overbearing but personable and ‘local’. Looking at the bigger picture, this could be symptomatic of the present moment. As the dominant figures from the advent of contemporary Chinese art pass their peak and the buzz surrounding the scene lessens to a hum on the international radar, the younger generation must find their feet. What is at stake in this fledgling idea for an exhibition? Far less, perhaps, than if these artists were to shy away from the challenges they face.

Iona Whittaker

Unrealised Potential

Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK

Self-conscious curatorial impetuses are increasingly at the forefront of exhibition programming, a kind of self-awareness that is brought to new light in ‘Unrealised Potential’, a summer show curated by Mike Chavez-Dawson at Manchester’s Cornerhouse. The entry point for visitors is the collaboration between Chavez-Dawson and artists Sam Ely and Lynn Harris, co-founders of Unrealised Projects (2003–ongoing) – a group who investigate unfulfilled creative ideas. Together they revisit Chavez-Dawson’s own Potential Hits (2003) to present an expansive collection of proposals from a breadth of contemporary artists, writers, musicians and curators. The unproduced ideas are lined up in the first gallery, alongside a set of terms and conditions, whereby visitors are invited to purchase the artist proposals for ‘realisation’. The setting adopts a similar structure to an auction space, where a red sticker is placed on each idea sold, with the purchasing ‘producer’ being offered two years to realize the project, before it returns to the marketplace.

The scope of suggestion on offer stretches between the political and the absurd. For example, Tim Etchells, in What Your Right Hand is For, puts the audience to the task of producing a show that unearths the masturbatory fantasies of some of the world’s most famous visual artists (including Steve McQueen, Jenny Holzer and Chris Ofili). While, Doug Fishbone, in There Once Was a Man from Iraq, proposes that a monumental sculpture of Saddam Hussein be re-erected onto the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square.

By unbuckling the cloistered bounds of artistic production, and offering them freely to members of the public, Dawson and company have managed to espouse critical and, at times, contradictory commentary about the commercialization of the arts. Indeed, the very act of potentially encouraging complete ‘amateurs’ to consider the delivery parameters of such creative output offers audiences an insight into the graft and expertise required to produce a successful creative project, while simultaneously reminding them of the risk involved. On the flip side, by allowing the proposals to exist at random within the open market, the exhibition is at a loose end – perpetually shifting and responding to meet the desires of the public, and as such, exists as an example of democracy in action – whether the results will be interesting, is another matter altogether. Certainly, one can argue that some of these proposals were left ‘unrealised’ for a reason. Yet, what is worthy here is this notion of process: audiences are granted the privilege of witnessing the multifarious facets of an artist’s psyche – spanning a breadth that is both lamentable and sublime.

In the second part, Liam Gillick’s PLANTA DE ANODIZADO (Anodizing Plant, 2010) becomes the first realised project from ‘Unrealised Potential’. Gillick’s original pitch, which suggested that the products and services of the industrial Mexican company LGD LUCK SA be exhibited in a gallery, is here reinterpreted by artists Brian Reed and Len Horsey. The duo have transformed the space into a mock business fair-style pavilion, presenting the products of the aforementioned company, alongside newly produced advertising videos, and kitsch and colourful modular wall paintings. With a nuanced attention to detail, the artists’ interpretation serves as a luscious geographical warp into the economic and social culture of Mexico – a nation where the corporate veneer masks great social inequality. Of course, both Reed and Horsey are practicing artists, and by choosing them to produce the first of these unrealised projects, Chavez-Dawson is encouraging a political imperative – one that informs visitors that the greatest of all producers, are practicing artists themselves.

Although thematically connected, the third and final gallery space exists as an exhibition in and of itself. Here, one is introduced to the first UK display of Strategic Questions (2002–10) by Gavin Wade; with a new commission from Zurich-based artist group RELAX (chiarenza & hauser & co). This work features a cage depository of strategic questions and answers, while also inviting gallery goers to participate in a process of exchange in response to the question: what is wealth?  This query is manifested by RELAX, who imaginatively capture ‘waste as wealth’ through their custom produced waste room, where visitors can physically experience time and space slipping away from them.

‘Unrealised Potential’ is pertinently timed, in that it considers the shifting value of creative capital in a milieu where intellectual property is increasingly challenged by the abundance of digital platforms. Moreover, with recent concerns regarding the public funding of the arts in the UK, it is worth considering the role of the producer in the creative process, now more than ever. Still, this exhibition is only the beginning of an exploration, which will continue to evolve and surprise, whether it will pioneer a shift in the modes of artistic production and dissemination is still to be seen.

Omar Kholeif

Omar Kholeif is a writer and film curator. 

Summer Camp

Exile, Berlin, Germany

Over the courtyard of the Exile gallery hangs a patchwork awning of umbrella skins. Designed for single use by commuters caught in the rain, Billy Miller – a New York-based artist, writer and independent publisher, and curator of Exile’s second annual ‘Summer Camp’ – gathered them off the sidewalks of New York.

The show’s exhibition programme is printed like an independent movie poster, listing the names of 68 contributing artists on the reverse side, like closing credits. Billed as a ‘Blockbuster Double Feature’ of ‘Headshop’ and ‘Lost Horizons’, with an ‘underground cinema’ in the gallery basement, the commentary is provided by artist Lucio Fontana: ‘In 500 years time people will not talk of art, they will talk of their problems and art will be like going to see a curiosity… What were they up to? Why did they cover walls with pictures?’ Good questions.

‘Headshop’ is not so much an installation as a print magazine detonated in the gallery space. An open wooden cabinet at the entrance provides the contents page: vintage magazines with one-off covers, a realist oil painting of a monk, cowboy boots hand-stitched with Uncle Sam sequins and spikes sewn into the lining. Plinths wrapped with Marvel comics and magazine images hold a pair of used shoes, a clay figurine in each, and artist Desi Santiago’s Addams Family-style box with a bronze finger poking out – Michael Jackson reaching up from the grave and a temptation to theft.

A video installation on a small TV in the corner shows Genesis P-Orridge performing Eva Adolph Braun Hitler (1998). In a blonde wig, full make-up and toothbrush moustache, white blouse and Lederhosen, P-Orridge screams/flirts into the camera from a darkened New York basement – a conversation performed by the several personae of a Braun-Hitler composite. Formerly of Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge recently completed a surgical transformation so he could resemble his deceased wife, Lady Jaye.

The headshop began life as a one-stop store for freaks or ‘heads’, selling the books, drug paraphernalia, records and magazines not available from mainstream vendors in the mid-1960s. In the 70s, the hemispheres split and while one bled downstream, irrigating downtown with mass-produced bongs, buttons and T-shirts, the other was given a permanent home in art galleries. Several galleries in Berlin and London now sell fashion items alongside their art exhibits, and some handmade books.

‘Lost Horizons’ opens with a growling sound installation, fixing the backing track in the present: the source is a BP oil refinery near the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, recorded shortly before the accident occurred. A video installation shows the fallout of Hurricane Katrina and an enormous photograph of a severed tree stump is draped on the wall. In an open wooden cabinet at the back of the room, beside a jarred specimen of vegetable matter like a mutant parasite, a series of identical sunset photographs are printed at different exposures to imitate the effect of seasonal changes – as if art is wondering whether it can step into the role nature threatens to abdicate.

The many works here are presented without context or even artists’ names. They ‘point outwards’, Miller explains, at historical events or other art works. Like the 1970s novels of Thomas Pynchon or Georges Perec’s Life: A Users Manual (1973), the pieces spell out histories across the gallery walls through the references they assume. The show reverses the usual gallery installation logic in which each piece is a carefully placed structural element locked into discourse with the next, toward conceptual completion.

This throws some light on a new species of art show in Berlin. In several recent short-run exhibitions at The Forgotten Bar and Autocenter, emerging artists jostled with dead and established ones. Autocenter’s recent show included Robert Rauschenberg, Martin Kippenberger, Anselm Reyle and Marc Bijl. Shows at the Forgotten Bar often last only a few days, bracketed by openings and finissages: art gallery as instant archive of the moment.

Questions about the role of art in a changing world are circling all of this. One possible interpretation is offered by J.G. Ballard: ‘After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised’ (Ambit # 36, 1968). So what is art doing when it presents itself in curiosity cabinets of its own design? The lost horizons are not the ideals of the swinging seventies; what’s lost is the horizon itself, disappearing in the sonic boom of a present which is overtaking the future.

Sam Williams

Ciprian Mureşan

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and Galeria Plan B, Berlin, Germany

In the midst of an unseasonably hot Berlin summer, Patriarch Teoctist, former head of the Romanian Orthodox church, found himself pinned between a stray meteorite and the floor of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. This blasphemous tableau, The End of the Five-Year Plan (2004), is Romanian artist Ciprian Mureşan’s interpretation of Maurizio Catellan’s La Nona Orta (The Ninth Hour, 1999), in which Pope John Paul II is felled by a meteorite. Teoctist’s inert body lay opposite Incorrigible Believers (2009), an arrangement of eight black pews and an altar, topped with an open copy of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle (1926).

These installations formed the weighty epicentre of Mureşan’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, coinciding with the smaller show, ‘How I Wonder What You Are’, at the Berlin outpost of Cluj-based Galeria Plan B. While re-purposing a plethora of appropriated images, Mureşan maintains resolute faith in the ability of his own hand to conduct expression and experience.

Pioneer (2010), an animation comprised of loose graphite drawings, presents the flickering visage of a boy blowing into and sucking the air out of a plastic bag, a handkerchief around his neck signifying membership in the Pioneers, a ‘value-building’ youth group initiated by the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Is this youngster huffing glue, as photographs of Romanian children recognizable from post-1989 revolution media reports might suggest, or mischievously anticipating the bag’s inevitable explosion? Without missing a beat, the child glances up to meet the viewer’s perplexed gaze. In this fleeting moment, a fissure appears in the persistent attempts of a state to compose its own image.

From multiple historical channels, Mureşan has located and extracted instances of disagreement between official cultural ontologies and conflicted human situations. 3D Rubliov (2004) is a digital re-creation of scenes from Andrei Rublev (1966), a film by Andrei Tarkovsky that is loosely based on the life of the canonical Russian icon painter from whom the film takes its name. In a scene borrowed from the film’s prologue, a character named Yefim escapes his earthbound existence to float in a hot air balloon over surreal visions of the Russian countryside which, in Mureşan’s work, take on the simple quality of the three-dimensional computer games of the late 1990s. As the animation’s eerie minimal soundtrack hastens towards an anxious crescendo, Yefim and his balloon follow the same path as the cosmic rock that made short work of Teoctist, tumbling violently towards the earth. 

Mureşan, and the rest of the ‘Cluj Generation’ with which he is loosely affiliated, came of age in post-communist Romania. It was in the revolutionary climate of 1989 that our prone Patriarch resigned under accusations of collaboration with Nicolai Ceauşescu’s brutal regime. But it was in the murky circumstances that followed that he was reinstated by the Holy Synod of the Church, which refused to accept his resignation. Comprehensions of reality have the troubling tendency of dissolving into fogs of confusion and cliché. Against this predicament, Mureşan offers a diverse selection of works that behave as so many awry lenses, providing refractory visions of the collusion between urges to simultaneously emulate and interrogate the figures and systems that give our lives form.

Mitch Speed

Support Group

Cottage Home, Los Angeles, USA

‘It’s all about …’ trilled the perky, lower-case script, ‘gaylen gerber!’. The text ran across two billboards affixed to the exterior of Cottage Home, the former cinema that has served as a project space for three commercial galleries: Kathryn Brennan Gallery, China Art Objects and Thomas Solomon Gallery. For what it’s worth, ‘Support Group’ took place at the instigation of the latter, although Solomon’s contribution seems to have been limited to inviting critic Michael Ned Holte to curate the show, which featured none of Solomon’s gallery artists. This was just the first sequence in a complicated game of authorial ‘pass the parcel’, in which no one, it seemed, knew who would be the one with the package in their hands when the music stopped.

Of the three artists selected by Holte to contribute to the show – Gaylen Gerber, Kathryn Andrews and Matteo Tannatt – one invited 15 additional artists to join in, one used two other artists as content for her work and one almost refused to show up at all. This last, Gerber, was the subject (or at least the content) of the two-part billboard on the front of the building, itself an art work by Andrews simply titled Gaylen Gerber (2010). Andrews laid her script over a pattern resembling a chain-link fence, fleecing its devil-may-care, retro decorativeness with an oppressive sense of urban restriction.

The work came into new focus once inside the main gallery. Andrews had sectioned off the lion’s share of the space with an actual chain-link fence; it offered no entrance, so visitors were forced to move only around the edge of the room. Inside the sealed compound (titled Friends and Lovers, 2010), two white-painted, breezeblock walls faced each other, with identical cartoon animal heads painted on their inner aspects. The animals (chipmunks? bears?) are apparently the trademark of a downtown graffiti artist; the practice of anonymously inscribing a more or less arbitrary signature across the public realm for an involuntary audience chimes discordantly with Andrews’ aggressive modes of occupation and ownership.

Gerber, meanwhile, seemed nowhere to be seen. Those familiar with his practice, which often includes backgrounds against which he displays his own or other artists’ work, might have noticed that three of the gallery’s walls were painted a pale shade of grey. This, coupled with the alteration of the gallery’s strip lights to a particularly cold and sickly wattage, was the extent of Gerber’s contribution. No entry for the artist was given in the list of works. In his introduction to the show, Holte states that he deliberately placed it within the power of the artists to negotiate the form of the exhibition and their collaboration (or lack of it). In the light of Andrews’ provocative use of Gerber’s name on the exterior of the space, it is tempting to imagine that a frisson of antagonism had sparked between the artists in the run up to the show. Alternatively, owing to Gerber’s sensitivity to the subtle shifts capable of subverting obvious attributions of authorship, it is highly possible that he realised that an ostensibly neutral grey background was all that was needed to unbalance Andrews’ boisterous graphic signage and chain-link barrier.

‘Support Group’ was dramatically up-ended in other respects too. While Andrews and Gerber’s work demonstrated a paradoxical aesthetic restraint in its (almost total) occupation of the space, on the far side of the room Tannatt had pitched a dense encampment that was more or less contained within three sheets of chipboard. The boards – standing proud of the gallery wall on a metal armature – were a piece by Tannatt titled Monster Model: Blue Screen Version (2010). On, beneath, beside and behind this temporary wall were installed works by a host of other artists at Tannatt’s invitation, as well as examples of his own solo and collaborative work, in reference to the programme of Pauline, the idiosyncratic gallery he runs in his flat (its name a tribute to a local prostitute).

While aesthetic coincidences bounced between this selection – as with Lisa Williamson’s untitled photograph of dangling avocados and Alex Klein’s photograph (The Brick and the Balloon, 2010) – it delivered no obviously legible message, but rather seemed to reflect the subjectivity of private conversations, social allegiances and personal taste. Tannatt’s application of blue-screen paint over Monster Model … – or at least the parts that he could reach without using a ladder – drolly illustrated the absurdity of his pretending to be absent.

In actual fact, for much of the show, the artist was very much present, using the gallery’s upstairs room as an office for Pauline Film Production Co. which, we were told, was ‘planning and possibl[y] making’ a ‘video and/or film to be completed or in progress by the end of the exhibition’ that engaged with or borrowed from the other works in the show. There was no way of knowing whether the artist kept to his word; the office was out of bounds to visitors. In contrast to the phony generosity of much current collaborative practice, Tannatt, as with Andrews and Gerber, kept his cards refreshingly – and honestly – close to his chest.

Jonathan Griffin

Jack Pierson

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France

For his fifth solo show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Jack Pierson presents new word sculptures, drawings and photographs. Intermixing imagery from previous works such as drawings of word pieces with depictions of a former movie star and a dead Roman beauty, he creates a coherent show in which his works resonate thematically, conceptually and formally, establishing a contemplative, highly wistful meditation on work, creation and the perils of time.

One of Pierson’s trademark word sculptures spells out ‘Golden Years’ (Golden Years, 2010). Often a reference to the glory days of the past or the later years in one’s life, ‘golden years’ might also allude to David Bowie’s 1975 song of the same title about someone whose career has waned and whom Bowie exhorts to ‘get up’. The song, redolent of the glitter and late parties of the disco era, relates to another word piece by Pierson, which reads ‘The Night’ (The Night, 2010). Or perhaps the sign warns that as the sun sets on our golden years, darkness waits on the horizon.

Bowie’s song could particularly apply to the career of the silent film actress Pola Negri, who, because of the invention of talking pictures and the Great Depression, lost her popularity and fortune. In a series of photographs, Pierson uses a slide projector (rather than a computer) to superimpose imagery taken from his previous work onto Negri’s portrait. In Pola Negri-Dope (2010), for instance, the silhouette of Pierson’s word piece ‘Dope’ haunts Negri’s face. In such works, he literally projects his own history, and possibly his own emotional responses, onto the femme fatale. The vintage silver printing technique heightens the nostalgic quality of the image as it evokes lost time.

Negri is also the subject of a detailed drawing executed in an art deco style. This work belongs to a series whose swirling celestial movement directly corresponds to the compositional elements of Negri’s portrait. In these works, forms fold, twist and spiral while merging into patterns evoking universal harmony. Their titles, such as A mirror between the ancient world and the Great Beyond (2010), support this interpretation of a periodic flow suspended in timeless stability.

In another collection of drawings, Pierson expands on the subject of Antinous, Roman emperor Hadrian’s young lover, whose name the artist spelled out in gold letters in 2008 in the work Antinous. After Antinous drowned in the Nile, the devastated emperor officially deified his beloved handsome youth and attempted to immortalize him by erecting temples, statues and even a whole city, Antinopolis, in his honour. Antinous’ image subsequently became one of the most prevalent in the art of the ancient world. Pierson has made progressively abstract drawings from photographs of a sculpture of Antinous, and, in so doing, has placed himself within the tradition of classical art while perpetuating the dimming remembrance of a beauty past and the enlightened emperor who loved him.

In this show, Pierson creates a time to reflect upon past work, and as drawings such as Glory (2010) or My sin (2010) point out, upon personal triumphs and failures. Bringing to the present figures like Pola Negri and Antinous, he reveals the redemptive power of imagery to keep alive that which once soared but now has been lost or forgotten. This is a time at the edge of night, where memories, like nearly faded stars, still glisten. For Pierson, these are the golden years.

Zoe Stillpass

Ink: One Day in June

Studio X, Beijing, China

Two words sum up the premise of ‘Ink: One Day in June’: spontaneity and dialogue. As such, this exhibition is in tune with its venue; Studio X Beijing is part of a plan by
Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture to create spaces of exchange, communication and research in key cities throughout the world. Central to the Global
Studio X Network Initiative is the idea that ‘future thinking must be collaborative’. ‘Ink: One Day in June’ featured in a series of three panel discussions and exhibits in New York
and Beijing, which explored ink’s potential as an ineffable medium capable of reflection on elusive aspects of creative expression and artistic interaction.

The show features work by four contemporary artists. Most arresting are Qin Feng’s large untitled paintings, dominated by a thick black central ring and marked by motion with splatters, blots and rapid circular strokes. These dynamic, gestural compositions contrast strongly with Liang Quan’s ‘Tea Diary Series’ (2008) on the opposite wall. Accumulated and presented together as if on a grid, the round stains left by daily cups of tea convey a feeling of the passage of time and of muted personal moments. The comparison created an engaging dialogue between two artists’ use of a circular form, and the harnessing of that to such divergent methods and moods: one outwardly physical and instantaneous, the other habitual and meditative – a kind of domestic abstraction. Small, surreal images like Moon Digger (2008), taken from ‘Series: works with no series’ by George Chang, are spontaneous – though using gouache, not ink – in that they begin from a random line or colour that the artist then builds into a highly- finished depiction; this is left unanchored in white space, as if suspended in the mind’s eye.

Chang’s works claim a degree of similitude with Michelle Fornabai’s painting One Day in June (2010). Fornabai’s method of ‘developing the chance mark through material transpositions and conceptual associations’ to create paintings ‘constituted between intention and improvisation’ might be more simply put in Chang’s words: ‘I let the work bring me in’. Both employ ‘automatic’ means to make art. One Day in June is part of the ‘Synesthesia Series’, which investigates the relationship between different stimuli, in this case a song, and their associations for the artist. Hearing the song precipitates, informs and sustains an unwilled action: painting.

The show’s second theme, dialogue, was enacted in short films made to accompany the exhibition that recorded the artists literally ‘conversing’ through the medium, wordlessly painting in turns on the same sheet of paper and in direct response to each other. Unfortunately, however, these were shown only at the opening, a significant loss for subsequent visitors to the exhibition. This multifaceted exhibition and the lines of communication it purports to open suggest positive new approaches. Fornabai’s vision and highly complex diction loomed large in the accompanying texts, and physically too because her work, laid on the floor, made greater demands on the viewer to perceive it whilst the others hung obediently on the surrounding walls. Some might also find problematic that two out of the four artists’ works used not ink, but tea and gouache; Fornabai’s work, it seems, was the only one created specifically for the show, which arguably compromises the aim for direct dialogue. Ultimately however, ‘Ink: One Day in June’ was indicative of a timely shift of attention towards new paths of expression and experimentation in ink, and the compelling rejuvenation of a medium so particular and essential to Chinese culture.

Iona Whittaker

Ted Partin

Museum Haus Lange & Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany

At first, it all looks like something we’ve seen many times before: young people hanging around, not doing much, many of them look seriously into the camera and appear to be waiting for something. Nothing about them seems special or glamorous, and they don’t seem to have much in common. The photographs of the American artist Ted Partin feel effortless, like brief notes taken in passing: a woman looks through the windscreen into the car, another gets a tattoo, two guys climb over a garden wall, a woman dries her hair in the bathroom. But with a knowledge of how these pictures were made, their contrived character is manifest.

Partin travels the country, with an unwieldy 8x10 inch camera, photographing friends or people he happens to see on the street. Every time, he has to set up the camera, install it on its stand, drape the black cloth over his head, and press the shutter release. This is a lengthy process, and his models have to keep still for quite a time. Most of them look fixedly and naturally in the photographer’s direction: they play the game, receiving his gaze and returning it.

Bushwick II (2007)

Each subject of these seemingly documentary portraits becomes an active co-creator of their own staged scene. The tension between formal composition, self-presentation and the viewer’s curiosity gives these photographs an ambivalent intimacy in which the contrived and the authentic can no longer be told apart.

Bushwick I (2009)

Partin’s work is part of a long tradition, and he is young enough not to have to break with it yet. Instead, he takes a long walk through the history of photography: his works resonate with the adolescent anger of Larry Clark, but also the gentle gaze Nan Goldin cast on her outlaw and transsexual friends. They recall the people of the Midwest as Richard Avedon saw them, but also the flash-lit streets scenes of Philip-Lorca diCorcia. In Partin’s masterful contextual play on diverse aspects of art history and clichés from the media and pop culture, one thing is very striking: his insistence on the body.

Almost everyone in Partin’s pictures is either naked or semi-naked, and their openly displayed tattoos, scars and brandings are an assertion of existence and uniqueness. The things we see may be staged, but the bodies in these staged scenes are real. The aggressively modified body becomes the universal signifier and common code of these often many-layered photographs. Surface becomes essence – this applies both to Partin’s models and to his photography.

Magdalena Kröner

At Lesson with Carlo Scarpa

Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, Venice, Italy

‘The contemporary school teaches us to love but one: ourselves,’ wrote Tuscan priest, pedagogue and social progressive Don Lorenzo Milani in the early 1960s. Meanwhile, north-east of Florence, the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa had begun teaching his first lessons in architectural composition at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV). Praised by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Don Milani’s legendary Letters to a Schoolmistress (1967), a fierce critique of individualism and social discrimination in the Italian education system, was surely in the hands of student activists when sit-ins and demonstrations finally compelled the government to reform: in 1969, the Italian Senate passed Law 910, extending the possibility of university enrollment to all secondary-school graduates regardless of the course of study previously completed. With consequent overcrowding, the treasured drawing tables in Scarpa’s classroom at IUAV were deconsecrated, serving as stools to accommodate over one hundred ill-prepared freshmen in a university without enough chairs.

In the years following Law 910, Scarpa served as the director of IUAV for two years, during which time he energetically defied what he referred to as the ‘little traps of sociologists’ advanced by students politicized to ideological nihilism. With a playful wink, Scarpa would certainly have defined his most important position of political resistance to this moral decrepitude as the emphasis he placed on the importance of drawing, advocating quality paper and hand-sharpened pencil points.  As a result, a few years before Scarpa’s death in Japan, his assistant, architect Franca Semi, astutely recorded 21 of the professor’s lessons, organizing the provision of his favorite drawing materials – oversized pads and soft charcoal – for use during lectures to document this religious respect for drawing as a method of thinking.  The result of Semi’s diligence more than 30 years later is a catalogue and exhibition, at Fondazione Querini-Stampalia, that offer precious documentation of an approach that is increasingly alien to contemporary sensibilities with the continued dismantling of traditional university education and the dominance of computer-aided drafting software.

Drawings from the series of recorded lessons testify to what Semi refers to as Scarpa’s ‘graphic fever’: the rapidity and fluidity of mark characteristic of an apt and agile thinker. Skipping through a spiral of associations – from seagulls sunbathing on decorative Venetian crenellation to the beauty of reading Alexandre Dumas – the derailment and distractibility typical of Scarpa’s tangentiality are never digressive and irrelevant, always proving essential to a profound understanding of his assertions.  In the interplay between lecture and drawing, charcoal sketches prioritize elements of discourse in cloudy layers. Previous drawings retreat in a fog under more relevant points that emerge into the foreground while, in other moments, a zooming in and out from reference to reference mysteriously floats a small ditty of a building plan over a large section drawing of a seemingly insignificant architectural detail. 
During lessons, Scarpa often criticized his students for what he saw as the contemporary tendency to vandalism, as though all youth were complicit, and enjoyed recounting discoveries in the graffiti-proof materials he was researching. Since the 1970s, drawing at the university persists in its tragic devaluation, remaining perhaps most prevalent in the tags and cartoons scribbled and carved on walls and worktables: mental training, indeed, for a new generation of un-skilled professionals drowning in melancholic apathy and sentimental selfishness.

Emily Verla Bovino

Beat Takeshi Kitano

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, France

Beat Takeshi Kitano is known internationally as a film director, particularly for Hani-bi, which won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival in 1997. Yet for those attuned to the bleak, minimalist atmosphere of his films, his exhibition at Fondation Cartier will come as something of a surprise – there are no gangsters here. Instead, the space is stuffed full of childish delights: giant mechanical sculptures compete for room alongside a huge Tyrannosaurus Rex, a traditional Japanese puppet theatre, and a display case containing animal-fish-weapon hybrids. The mood is more theme park than gallery – there is even a waffle stand in the garden.

This is the first time Kitano has exhibited his art extensively in a gallery, and the collaboration with Fondation Cartier was unusual from the outset. Having previously resisted overtures from museums to exhibit his work, Kitano was apparently won over by an offer by Hervé Chandès (Fondation Cartier’s director) to create a site-specific installation for the Jean Nouvel-designed space. Kitano describes the show as ‘a series of dreams’, and explains that it is specifically designed for children: ‘With this exhibition, I was attempting to expand the definition of ‘art’, to make it less conventional, less snobby, more casual and accessible to everyone.’

Kitano attempts to pierce this perceived pomposity in a number of the pieces shown here. A giant mechanical sewing machine-cum-steam engine that fills the ground-floor space is described by Kitano as ‘an ironic metaphor for contemporary art’, because of its inefficiency. Another work, titled Monsieur Pollock [2010] is a machine that creates drip paintings, while Kitano encourages lucky visitors – those with a special stamp on their ticket – to take literal pot shots at another T-Rex sculpture downstairs with a paint gun.

Scientific progress also comes under scrutiny. The hybrid sculptures are Kitano’s imagining of supposed plans by the Imperial Japanese Army to turn animals into weapons, while ceramic fish sculptures are depicted stuffed with pre-packaged sushi, in a critique of the world’s obsession with the foodstuff. These muddled criticisms risk getting lost amongst the overwhelming amount of imagery, however.

Downstairs the focus is more personal, with a selection of Kitano’s paintings from 2008–9. Brightly coloured and naïve in tone, they fit in well with the exuberant tone of the exhibition. More intriguing is a series of vases of animal-flower hybrids. Created following the trauma of a motorcycle accident, they also appeared in Hana-bi.

Hidden behind luxurious red drapes is ‘Beat Takeshi’s Real Work’, a number of TV screens showing clips from Kitano’s Japanese television shows. The title riffs on the complexity of Kitano’s multi-faceted career, for he is far better known as a TV host in Japan. The excerpts featured are wacky, with daredevil challenges and crazy costumes aplenty.

In a new film created for the show, Human Hanging Calligraphy (2010), Kitano appears to send up this aspect of his work, as well as the demands made upon creative people by their patrons. The artist is shown rigged up as a form of giant paintbrush, brutally manipulated by others to create an artwork. In another context, such scenes might be poignant or even upsetting, but in the brash, comedic setting of Kitano’s installation, it all seems like perfectly normal behaviour.

Eliza Williams

Chris Watson

The Palm House, The Royal Botanic Gardens, London, UK

On entering and walking around the Palm House at Kew Gardens, the visitor becomes gradually surrounded by an array of unusual yet captivating sounds. Birdsongs, primate calls, insects buzzing, amphibians croaking – all echo and seep at hourly intervals through the plants and the trees of the 19th-century glasshouse. Spread between 80 speakers, the recordings were selected by sound recordist Chris Watson from his personal archive. Titled Whispering in the Leaves, the installation was originally produced in 2008 by the AV Festival in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, and it now reaches London thanks to the joint production of music agencies Forma, and Sound and Music.
According to the official press release, the piece ‘will transport visitors to the dense rainforests of South and Central America through the recorded sounds of their native wildlife’. One could argue, though, that Whispering in the Leaves does not have a lot to do with being transported elsewhere; it is, instead, very much about being there – in the Palm House, at Kew, surrounded by unfamiliar sounds among unfamiliar plants, that act as bearers of a different perceptual dimension that is, in turn, is disclosed through listening.
Removed from their original settings, and placed in another location – just like the exotic plants in the glasshouse – Watson’s sounds were mostly gathered in almost inaccessible places and conditions. What happens then, when it is not objects or plants being collected, but sounds? There is sense underneath discourse, carried by these birdsongs and these insect buzzes, which eludes categorizations and opens up to a more haunting complexity. They do not create a fixed aural image, but a mutable surface that allows the listener to slide into the space of fiction: the time of the day, and the spatial distribution of sound, favour the emergence of an eventful auditory narrative, as you move around the foliage, at ground level in the blazing light of a summer day, or up in the canopy catching feeble rays of sun across the clouds.
As realistic as they may seem, a symbolic matrix necessarily mediates these field recordings. Watson often draws a parallel between Ansel Adams (whose photographs, Watson has commented are so ‘exquisitely composed and framed’ despite looking so ‘natural’) and his own approach, that relies too on framing a soundscape – not only spatially, deciding where to place the microphones, but also temporally, choosing to record at specific hours and seasons, with a specific idea of time rendition and compression. In addressing the issue of scientific representation in Pandora’s Hope (1999), Bruno Latour showed how it constantly pushes the world away and brings it closer: ‘In losing the forest, we win knowledge of it.’ Likewise, Watson’s aural re-presentations take shape across a combined sense of not belonging to those sounds, yet getting closer to them and to their texture across the experience of listening.
Watson invites the listener to pay attention to an uncanny sense of wonder: the exotic dimension in Whispering in the Leaves does not stand for an idyllic paradise, but calls for a closer scrutiny of what is unfamiliar. Across the interchanges between culture and nature, collection and recollection, Watson’s piece presents the rainforest as a place that is driven by non-human rhythms – its dark, threatening nature resonates, and although it does not belong to us, we are drawn to it. Watson calls it ‘an alien empire of insects and amphibians’, and he captures this alien dimension at the edge: in moments of transition, not only between night and day, as in the two sections of the installation, ‘Dawn’ and ‘Dusk’, but also from a habitual listening mode into a more peculiar one. By doing so, his sounds point – to quote the title of his first record, released by Touch in 1996 – at yet another way of ‘stepping into the dark’.

Daniela Cascella

Carsten Nicolai

Pace Gallery, New York, USA

‘Carsten is very mathematical,’ remarked the Japanese legend Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of Carsten Nicolai’s musical collaborators, when I interviewed him a few years ago. He meant it as a compliment. Nicolai’s work is, indeed, mathematical. His music, much of it released under the alias Alva Noto, reveals a systematic approach, a conceptual rigor. But his work also has a strong emotional undercurrent, with a laser-like focus that can be almost blinding in its intensity.

His exhibition ‘Moiré’ explores the so-called moiré effect – the visual interference patterns created when two patterns are overlaid on top of each other. The exhibition is a sea of black lines; it all seems stark and severe at first, but if you look closely, the lines soften and become mesmerizing. Spend another few minutes staring at the rigid black and white structures, and they become kaleidoscopic, curved, sensual. A thick companion volume, Moiré Index (2010), takes the show a step further, displaying countless variations of moiré patterns varying by different mathematical parameters. (The tome is the sequel to Grid Index – a book of grid systems and geometric patterns that Nicolai published in 2009.)

Musicians have been fascinated with moiré patterns for decades. The Minimalist composer Steve Reich’s 1965 tape-loop piece ‘It’s Gonna Rain’ could be thought of as a moiré pattern inscribed in audio. In the piece, two identical loops, played on two identical tape recorders, slowly slip out of sync due to a slight variation in motor speed – generating an intriguingly complex result. The work was an early influence on Brian Eno, whose concept of ‘generative music’ – music that ‘grows’ itself from small, simple inputs – was deeply inspired by Reich’s early ‘phasing’ pieces.

While Nicolai is not a generative musician per se, his deep interest in moiré patterns, as a visual artist, follows the same logic as his music. In the digital era, moiré patterns share a common language in both sound and vision. When we talk about reducing moiré effects in an image – they’re generally considered a cool optical effect at best, and an unwanted artifact at worst – we may talk about reducing ‘noise,’ using filters, or anti-aliasing. These are the same terms used in audio, and digital signal processing.

Nicolai’s visual work is so well integrated with his work in sound that while there’s no music to be heard here – unless the hum of an air compressor counts – you can see music in everything. One wall displays a series of painstaking, hand-drawn moiré patterns – a fine black mesh of lines, arranged in undulating shapes that resemble sections of sine waves. In Moiré rota (2010), two rotating columns edged with super-bright white LED lights spin rapidly, creating glittering trails of moirés in the air by principles of visual superimposition. In Moiré schatten (Moiré shadows, 2010) – ‘schatten’ means ‘shadows’ in German – a sharply lit array of black strings is spun in front of a box that is filled with air, so that the strings and their shadows generate complex whorls that vary dramatically depending on slight gusts of air, and your own point of view.

Geeta Dayal

Pascale Marthine Tayou

Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden

Nomadism is central to the work of Pascale Marthine Tayou. Tayou’s notion of the artist as nomad is reminiscent of the Postmodernist sampler: he sees himself as a rolling stone, constantly in motion but, unlike the proverbial boulder, always accumulating parts of the places he passes through; never standing still yet productively gathering moss.

For Tayou, installing an exhibition is an opportunity for collaboration. Here he has worked with local students, likening the process to working in a laboratory: chance amalgamation and the use of whatever is at hand are at the core. Titled ‘Always All Ways. Omnes Viae Malmö Ducunt’ (All Roads Lead to Malmö), the exhibition seemingly wants to convey that wherever you are – even a small town in southern Sweden – is the centre of the world. Yet the show is also firmly anchored in Tayou’s native Cameroon: the tri-coloured flag is prominently featured and the wall mounted with ‘Afros’ – instead of Euros – bearing the motto ‘In Pascale Marthine Tayou we trust’.

There is no clearly charted path through the show at first; the vast, airy space of the Konsthall is filled with a carnival of compositions including La cercle de la vie (2009), a round enclosure of hanging red textile; Poupées Pascale (2010), glass figurines on tree stumps; and Chalk and Pins (2010), pieces of chalk neatly arranged in a frame. Towering in the middle of the room is The Umbrella City (2010), a bouquet of hanging umbrellas that envelopes the most striking work in the exhibition – Plastic Bags (2010), an installation of scaffolding and steps leading up to a large, colourful hanging net made up of perhaps the most common indicator of global waste culture: plastic bags. Tayou’s installations – most of them vertical assemblages conjuring human shapes, dwellings or shantytowns, and many made out of recycled materials – dominate the space, but are balanced with short films of sequences of water (filmed in Africa and Asia) and a number of wall-based works: photographs, mixed media works and neon signs.

The works do not necessarily form a coherent narrative nor do they play off each other in surprising ways; I can’t help but wonder what this show would have been like if it had been displayed in a gallery of many, smaller rooms, thus allowing for more comprehensive discernment. But presumably this cacophony of individual pieces was intentional, and the multifarious exhibition does serve to convey a sort of global jumble: highlighting issues of borders, cultural stereotypes and environmental concerns.

If the nomad-collaborator’s village of installations serves mainly to emphasize a cultural remix of sorts, potentially more sinister is Kids Mascarade (2009), a photograph of children posing for the camera in colourful masks. At first glance humorous, the portrait is undercut by the uncanny cloaks and the sense of being looked at, without being able to return the gaze.

In a short film made on the occasion of the exhibition, Tayou compares humans to the plastic bags he uses in his installations, calling them ‘useful and dangerous’. A similar analogy can conceivably be stretched to describe migration and globalization as well. The contradictions and inherit inequalities of global migration reach far beyond the playful artist as nomad on display here.

Christine Antaya

Rosa Barba. A Curated Conference

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain

Manuel Borja-Villel’s latest strategy to reinvent the Museo Reina Sofía sounds just as crisis-friendly as it is promising: inviting a roster of noteworthy artists to curate a series of shows using the permanent collection –18,000 pieces and counting – in what looks like a remake of MoMA’s successful ‘Artist’s Choice’ programme, which began in 1989. Accepting the invitation of Reina Sofía’s chief curator, Lynne Cooke, the Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba has recently inaugurated the first instalment of this new scheme. The resulting exhibition, ‘A Curated Conference’, revolves around the metaphor of the exhibition as a conference, the gallery being the stage and the artists the ‘speakers’.

The idea of the speaker turns out to be quite relevant in this two-room display, as the works communicate in true conversational style. The first room has a big indexical diagram that Barba – who has chosen not to show any of her own work despite being part of the collection – designed as a declaration of intent. Alongside this diagram, subtle and restrained works by Lili Dujourie, Mira Schendel, Francis Alÿs and Joëlle Tuerlinckx fill the small opening room, which feels somehow silent and preparatory.

It’s in the second, main room, where the ‘chatter’ begins: the clatter of 16mm projectors interacts with the muffled soundtracks of video works shown on TV monitors and large screens. Here, the individual legibility of the works is not a priority. All the voices are meant to be experienced as a multiple, uneven clamour. Even the black-screen pauses, the silence between the pieces, have been technically programmed. Nothing is left at random: that David Lamelas’ everyday experiments in To Pour Milk into a Glass (1972) clatter exactly opposite Paul Sharits’ Word Movie (1966), or that Gordon Matta-Clark’s burlesque acrobatics in Clockshower (1973) take place to the relentless hammering soundtrack of Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll (1972) is no coincidence. Two pairs of monitors are scattered in the room, each of them dramatizing their own male-female conversation. In one pair we find Yvonne Rainer versus Guy Debord. On the other set, Valie Export’s Syntagma (1983), a meditation on female representation, cinema and subjectivity is coupled with a selection of Nam June Paik’s videos of early performances.

Tacita Dean, Ice Rink (2000)

Out of forty pieces that made the final selection, twenty belong to the moving image format, split between three big screens with DVD projections, four TV monitors and three 16mm projectors right in the middle of the room, each of them placed beside Carl Andre’s Magnesium Copper Plain (1969), a self-reflexive token of Barba’s own use of celluloid projectors as sculptural devices in her practice, highlighted here by its pairing with such an iconic minimalist work. Highly choreographed in phenomenological terms, ‘A Curated Conference’ oozes the nuances and plastic concerns typical of an artist. Barba’s first experience as a curator shows an obvious fondness for the seminal figures of film and video practice from the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as for the ideals of the Fluxus movement. What is not so evident in its first reading is that most of the pieces on display share a humorous or ironic look at both life and art.

Barba has confessed she seized this opportunity to explore works relevant to her practice, so it’s easy to understand why so many works here are in 16mm (some of them transferred to video). But there is more to it than personal delight, as one can sense a sincere engagement in bringing together the collection and its audience, resulting in this subjective and exhilarating lesson in 20th-century art history.

Photography is present through works by Cindy Sherman, Tacita Dean and David Wojnarowicz’s poignant Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Duchamp) (1978–9/2004). And, bearing in mind the institutional context, there is also a selection of Spanish artists, from Picasso and fellow cubist María Blanchard to Antoni Muntadas and the sculptor Cristina Iglesias. We can even witness a silent drama taking place between two works: Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (The Green Box) (1934), a compilation of the preparatory sketches and notes for his Large Glass, is displayed in a cabinet underneath Louise Bourgeois’ Spider (1994) – the menacing arachnid becoming an ingenious embodiment of Duchamp’s dominant and dangerously erotic ‘bride’.

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Massimo Grimaldi

Zero..., Milan, Italy

In this age of ‘image culture’, what are the strengths and limitations of aesthetic conjecture? Can art still create ethical Utopias that do not privilege aesthetics and formalism? Exploring the political value of images through the process of their conception, realization and consumption, Massimo Grimaldi engages his own ethics of artistic practice in projects and images that do not constitute a social critique but, instead, provide a unique perspective and a fresh awareness of the events depicted, as well as of the role of the artist.

In his latest solo show, entitled ‘Surfaces’, a previously unseen and diverse body of work prompts viewers to reflect on the reasoning behind an image, a title, or, in one instance, a list of 20 schmaltzy tracks in February 1990 Playlist (all works 2010), which – paradoxically – defines a tragic period in the Italian artist’s life. In the first room, two monitors installed on the floor display a series of photographic portraits of young children taken in paediatric centres in Bangui, in the Central African Republic, and in Mayo, Sudan. The work is part of an ongoing project in which the artist supports the humanitarian medical-aid association, Emergency, by donating any award money he wins as an artist to developing healthcare facilities in the poorest and most war-torn regions of the world. The photographic records Grimaldi takes as documentation of these projects bear the traces of an emotive experience that transcends the dimensions of art; the spectator’s gaze finds itself resting on the vulnerability of the children, on their smiles and their marked faces. The elegant design of the monitors on which they are shown neutralizes the textbook clichés and emphasizes the impact of the photographs, arousing feelings of melancholy and discomfort in the viewer.

Of a completely different ilk are the two life-size images that Grimaldi has positioned on the facing wall of the same room. Devoid of any basis in reality, these computer-generated geometric forms are almost hyper-decorative and assured in their visual impact. During the opening, the artist invited two children, Mariem and Daba, to stand in front of these images; the youngsters were intently focused on observing the gallery-goers as they, in turn, contemplated the art work. Although the children were only in the gallery for that first evening, their presence persists in the titles of the works, which evoke their names: Mariem before the Image ‘Rubine’ and Daba before the Image ‘Magnesia’.

Another conceptual transference lies at the heart of They Were Mostly Women and Children, They Were Defenceless and They Were Unprotected, They Died without Knowing Why or How: a work composed of two images – also graphic, apparently arbitrary and overtly iconic – installed flanking one another on the wall. Grimaldi took the title of the piece from a news item in a blog detailing the recent massacre at Jos Plateau, Nigeria; the visual intensity of the images is destabilized by the title, which resonates in all its ethical significance.

Grimaldi’s concept of ‘image surfaces’ is perhaps best communicated in the pair of works, both entitled Bill Kaulitz Surface, obtained by amalgamating the face of the singer Bill Kaulitz, from the band Tokio Hotel, with that of a young fan. The two images do not reflect the identity of the subject, which is asserted by the title; instead, Kaulitz ‘disappears’ until he is nothing more than surface, image.

Marinella Paderni

I Could Live in Africa

Witte de With Center for Contemporary Arts, Rotterdam, Netherlands

In 1983, two years after martial law was enforced in Poland in reaction to growing social un-rest, Jacques de Koning, then a student, soon to become a recognized Dutch filmmaker, shot his first documentary – a tongue-in-cheek report on the Polish state seen through the eyes of the post-punk and reggae group, Izrael. This austere yet superbly directed clash of east and west, entitled ‘I Could Live in Africa’, lends its name to a group exhibition in Rotterdam’s Witte de With. Curated by Michał Wolinski, in collaboration with Nicolaus Schafhausen and Anne-Claire Schmitz, the exhibition which will travel to Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw in July, offers a compelling image of the Polish art scene of the 1980s as a constellation of collectives and practices that emerged throughout the decade, propelled by the ever stronger grip of the authorities on publishing, recording and information circulation. With some twenty works scattered around, the show seems modest, perhaps even slapdash (one might search in vain for wall texts or extra information other than that featured in the press release), but it soon becomes evident that this medley of photographs, sculptures, paintings and archival material form a tale of thriving subcultures, related, above all, through sound and images.

The exhibition opens with documentation of performances by Zbigniew Libera, among them For Art (1982), showing the artist having his head voluntarily shaven at a time when it was commonly read as evidence of recent imprisonment. In fact, the piece proved prophetic; Libera was sentenced to prison for clandestine activity soon after the photos were taken.

Music was the binding element for much of the cultural activity of the ‘80s, with sanctioned but progressive festivals serving as a safety-valve for youth, under the watchful eye of the secret police. On occasion these micro-celebrations of freedom triggered forms of tribal be-haviour, as captured by Jozef Robakowski’s More Air! (1986), footage of a frantic pogo dance shot from amidst the raging crowd. ‘Music, Which Tattooed by Brain’ on the other hand, is an accumulation of self-made cassette covers assembled by Miroslaw Balka during the 1980s – evidence of a range of DIY formats, from bootlegging to cassette-swapping which served as collective-forging phenomena.
Art-zines simultaneously proliferated throughout the country and circumvented governmental control of publishing. Wroclaw’s ‘Luxus’, a mixture of hand-made drawing, stencil and collage, and featuring acerbic humour targeting the country’s economic situation, is available in facsimile for visitors to flick through in an interior setting that riffs on local cultural centres of the period, jazzed up with a hint of exoticism.

The only two paintings in the show hang on opposing walls. Both Marek Sobczyk’s Ganja (1981), depicting the leading figure of martial law, General Jaruzelski, against the backdrop of a Rastafarian flag, a thick joint-cum-tank barrel protruding from his mouth, and Wlodzimi-erz Pawlak’s Adolf Hitler (1986), showing the Nazi leader relaxing amidst tropical scenery, conjure up a perverse air of otherness, further heightened by Miroslaw Filonik’s Honolulu Baboon (1986), a life-size papier-mâché baboon sculpture set in a beach-like environment.

A similar aura accompanies the remake of collective Neue Bieriemiennost’s 1987 installation Jean Bedel Bokassa: here, an enormous headless black figure with a sixteen-metre-long phallus hoisted in the air serves as biting commentary on the thin line between celebration and downfall – Bokassa being the self-appointed president of the Central African Republic who led his country to bankruptcy through megalomaniac ceremonies. This shimmering metaphorical shift, even blurring, between the mundane and the exotic, reads against the grain of the popular punk slogan ‘no future’, pointing instead towards the actual as a site for the emergence of the possible. The social turbulence that triggered the political transformation of the late 1980s also marked the end of life in a state of limbo. ‘Living in Africa’ suddenly came within reach, as proven by Libera, a symbolical closure to the exhibition, who set out for Egypt and Sudan soon after the first democratic elections of 1989.

Krzysztof Kosciuczuk