Sculpture inhabits a precarious position in the genre-bending inclusiveness of contemporary art, which, encouraged by the digital turn of culture at large, lately prizes ephemerality at the expense of monumentality and a cartoonish or kitsch grotesque in lieu of ‘process’: Carsten Höller’s groovy tube slides descending from Richard Serra’s massive rolls of steel via Dan Graham’s playfully reflexive pavilions. The need for statuary or commemoration in the 21st century feels equally superfluous amongst artists of the younger generation, after Jeff Koons, so sculpture slips into a liminal space somewhere between image and environment, drifting far from figurative aesthetic notions of representation and beauty toward the anti-humanist installation, complete with a post-Duchampian fetish for the consumer object despite any art historian’s theories of dematerialization.
The young French artist Chloé Quenum’s recent work addresses a less sensational, still somewhat tongue-in-cheek legacy of Modernism; that of post-Minimalism. On a relatively intimate scale, which stretches or contracts according to the space of the gallery, Quenum installs her arrangements of folding furniture and other moderately functional props: a collapsible chair, plywood, mirror plates, cord, poster tube and paper rolls change entropically over the duration of their exhibition, as if engaged in a fantastical after-office-hours dance. The result is a quasi-theatrical time-based mise en scene with only notionally perceptible actors – the viewer not necessarily amongst them. One could imagine the familiar figure of the artist-lecturer as crazed agent armed with Quenum’s readymade and other ‘professional’ materials, perhaps spinning slowly in a circle and reciting isolated lines from Jacques Derrida; or rather conceive of her collection of equipment as the contents of a menacing Ikea flatpack crate filled with all the wrong parts and no instructions for assembly – a middle-class creative nightmare.
Despite the punchy, machine-made origin of her constituent materials, the balletic gesture of Quenum’s compositions escaped the expressionism of any Utopian desire in a manner both casual and direct; producing a heightened awareness of our bodily alienation from manufacturing processes and indeed, manual labor. Through repositioning, there was a loose feeling of molecular chaos despite sharp edges and matte surface finishes. Yet Quenum’s treatment of the object is ultimately unspecific – one could perhaps describe it as de-skilled – motivated by an indifferent if spontaneous rationale for spatial organization, despite the best subordinating efforts of ‘universal’ design.
In comparison, choreographer Simone Forti wrote about the interchangeability of objects when describing communal life in upstate New York, from Handbook in Motion (1974): ‘Objects, though moved by people, seemed to follow their own paths, to be part of the flow. Coats would come and go, there always seemed to be one when you needed it. But if you set down a book or a tool and just wanted to leave it there for a while, you’d place it in a manner expressive of your intentions. I always enjoyed straightening up. Each decision of what to move and just where to put it refined the discourse of how we were to live. If I was uncertain about a certain object, I would move it into an ambiguous alignment and go back the next day to find my answer.’
Forti’s stripped-down relationship to things draws more attention to the action or performance of the task than the particularity of any object. Yet for the similarity – one might read Quenum’s choreography as a delayed pantomime of Forti’s endlessly optimistic ‘ambiguous alignment’ – the tools of trade are somewhat changed today. If Quenum’s sculpture makes no bald allusions to global-technological society, the material nature of her everyday assembled objects embodies the fact regardless; momentary incursions of disorder disturb the liquid flow of inkjet plotters and air-transit carriers and homogeneity, perhaps more sinister than the communitarian effects of LSD.
By continuously foregrounding the item of repurposed furniture as art object, Quenum reinforces the primacy of the language of sculpture, even more than any mode of installation, within her practice. Her solo exhibition ‘Intervalle’ at Galerie Joseph Tang consisted of three structurally stabilized components: an upholstered wooden-panel screen, a series of five wall-mounted A1 metal frames and a double-wide aquarium filled with a standard selection of tropical fish. The narrow confines of the gallery limited the motion of these somewhat arcane fittings; yet here Quenum perpetuated rearrangement on a molecular level, a mild material destruction, through the application of chlorine-bleach. Jet-black fabric aged prematurely to a shade of cement dust and her empty frames embraced probable abstract oils bleeding through with aquamarine. The formalism of the pieces resisted the immediate recognition of their denatured state, rather presenting a scene of domestic neo-romanticism, a sensuous mistake of over-exuberance. The scale of her performance reduced to chemical agents, the fish in Quenum’s continuously pumping aquarium system were as unconscious of the hygienic treatments to their environment as the viewer was to the objects in the gallery, and by extension, the perceived comforts of the sitting room. Turning endlessly round and peering every so often through the glass tank display, we rest easily thinking we have seen the world. If there are objects – sculptures – to hold onto, they are also always slipping away.
Kari Rittenbach
Gonzalo Lebrija
Travesía Cuatro , Madrid, Spain
A hypnotizing sound overwhelmed the gallery, as if heralding an ominous event that never occurred. The source of the noise was a record player, looping in the final grooves of an old vinyl record by the famous Mexican folk singer José Alfredo Jiménez. With the Nietzchean title The Eternal Return (16 éxitos) (The Eternal Return, 16 Hits, 2012), this small, tight show by the Mexican artist Gonzalo Lebrija comprised four works that appeared so intricately linked they could have been read as a single installation.
The title of the exhibition, ‘La vida no vale nada’ (Life Isn’t Worth a Thing), was borrowed from one of the most memorable folk songs (or ‘rancheras’) that Jiménez wrote and sang in the 1950s. The song combines a nihilistic message (‘life isn’t worth a thing. It always begins with crying, and with crying it ends’) with an uplifting melody. In recent years, Lebrija has been concerned with the passing of time and the futility of life, but he examines them with a mixture of melancholy and humour that echoes the self-effacing and occasionally demotic tone of Jiménez’s song.
In front of the record player was a large black and white photograph of Mexican cowboy on a magnificent white horse, encircled by his lasso. As is usual in Lebrija’s work, the image, despite its depiction of action, is static, airless even. Although a moment is frozen in time you can somehow feel the dizzying movement of the lasso, its force surrounding both the human and the animal. The title of the work, Trou Noir (Black Hole, 2012), alludes to this sense of vertigo. The ghostly background of the scene – the ruins of a stone arcade – contributes to the detachment of the image from any particular moment in time.
The image of the entropic lasso was transubstantiated into a real rope next to the photograph (Lazo, 2012). It loomed ominously, and appeared to be mysteriously unsupported. At first I wondered how this thin rope could stand on its own but a closer look revealed it to be cast in iron.
At the far end of the gallery was a minimal wall clock, its hands like spider legs, so impossibly long and thin that they seemed to be on the brink of dematerialization. The clock – which was only visible thanks to a bright spotlight – again references Lebrija’s preoccupation with the slippage of time. With its Nietzschean chimes and anxiety over the inevitability of death, his treatment of the subject is rooted in the kind of bathos exemplified by Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). In the film, the hypochondriac genius roams the streets of New York wondering about the meaning of life: ‘Millions of books written by all these great minds and, in the end, none of them know anything more about the big questions of life than I do… […] And then Nietzsche and his theory of eternal recurrence… He said that the life we live, we’re going to live over and over again the exact same way for eternity. Great… That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again. It’s not worth it.’
It’s not worth it, says Allen. And it might not be worth for Lebrija either, whose dark Mexican humour and metaphysical bent continues a great tradition of artists and writers. Bittersweet and lucid nihilists, who, despite the impending shadow of failure, never cease in their quest to find the answers to those questions.
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
Johannes Wohnseifer
Linn Lühn, Düsseldorf, Germany
Some people say that extraordinary names can influence the course of a life. A common name like Peter is less likely to be predetermining. The material Johannes Wohnseifer presents at Linn Lühn in his solo show, ‘More in Common Than a Given Name’, suggests a curious tie between two men with no obvious connection except for their first names – English racecar driver Peter Revson and German artist Peter Brüning. Though Wohnseifer is known for his paintings that deal with mass media, none of his painting can be found in the show. Instead, the material in the exhibition stems from Wohnseifer’s personal archive: a series of press photographs recounting the short but glamorous biography of racecar driver and ladies man Peter Revson, paired with graphic works, ephemera and books by artist Peter Brüning.
Personal collections often reveal more about their collector than about the collected objects, which seems to be true here. Wohnseifer’s selection, acquired mainly through eBay, shows how the act of image browsing, searching, purchasing and collecting is not merely research but part of the process of making. As with any worthwhile collection, the search is as important as the final acquisition. Wohnseifer’s pursuit is fuelled by an ongoing fascination with Revson. Displayed here are two editions of the sportsman’s biography, Speed with Style, published in 1974, which has also featured in Wohnseifer’s earlier works. In archival images, we see that Revson, the charismatic heir to the Revlon cosmetic dynasty, is not shy in assuming the well-tread iconography of the racecar driver. We can observe him concentrating before the race, in the race stall with his mechanics, or on the way to a party with his Miss America girlfriend, Marjorie Wallace. Delivering every pose in the handbook, his life is traced in paparazzi shots until his premature death in a practice run for the 1974 South African Grand Prix in Kyalami. Many of the photographs bear the markings of the red pen of the picture editor, spotting crop lines and notes added during the publishing process.
A similar pattern of lines and edits can be found in the works of Peter Brüning. Especially the late work of the artist, dedicated to the grammar of modern traffic, is satiated with such markings. Brüning’s work embarked on a concentrated engagement with the vocabulary of traffic and its ramifications on the German landscape in the 1960s, a genre that he coined as the ‘trafficscape’. By stripping traffic down to the fundamental outlines of its signage, cartography and pictograms, he discovered a language that complied with his desire to rise above the dialectic between the abstract and the concrete. In the years before his early death in 1970, he translated this ‘semantic art’ into spatial arrangements, most famously in his memorial for the motorway from 1967 at the A1 in Wuppertal. One of his iconic images, Kölner Schule des 20.Jahrhunderts (1969), is an edited motorway sign in which the lanes on the sign have been crossed out with red markings to inform the passing driver about the revisions to the system road. They reveal traffic as an organism in constant flux, a language that continuously reformulates itself alongside the rapid expansion of modern transport infrastructure as we know it.
Wohnseifer’s show presents less a cohesive argument about why these two men should be considered in comparison and more of a glimpse into the artist’s own head and the pattern of his interests and inspirations. It is a study that relies on free association and the seemingly random connections that emerge from it. Wohnseifer’s own work is the missing link: in works like Kapelle (2004), Peter and Peter’s influence becomes patent. The poster for ‘More in Common Than a Given Name’ is a digitally altered screen grab from Wohnseifer’s desktop that depicts him on eBay, searching for the name Peter. The search engine’s suggestive memory prompts two Peters, Revson and Brüning, confirming that the link is not in the Peters but in the determined focus of Wohnseifer’s universe.
Anna Gritz
Boy: A Contemporary Portrait
Leo Xu Projects , Shanghai, China
In the streets of Shanghai, the evolution of male identity is apparent. Tapered jeans and asymmetric haircuts, smart shades and toned biceps: the possibilities of body image and fashion, once denied under the uniformed rules of Mao, are opened into the space of capital.
Curator Leo Xu has spent several years collecting and commissioning works that interrogate the development of male identity according to local, but also global, contexts. The recent group exhibition ‘Boy: A Contemporary Portrait’ represented versions of what it is to be a young man, through a series of purposefully single-sexed works. Female self-image, Xu felt, has received attention, while the male identity – in his home country at least – is taken as a silent given. Inside an old lane house, now converted into a white-walled gallery, one found an array of represented identities, as heterogeneous as the styles on the streets outside.
But it is the contemplative nature of the male inner world that was studied by three major video works. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Faith (2006) places man within the whirring chambers of a space vessel. Protected by the environment of his spacesuit, an astronaut exists in a bubble of oxygen and thought, while the viewer is drawn into the airlocked space of the film. French dancer and choreographer Jérome Bel’s Cédric Andrieux (2009) narrates the process of dance to consider the fine relationship between the cerebral and the physical. Cheng Ran’s Prospect Cottage (2012), an homage to the life, work and garden of Derek Jarman, features Taiwanese artist Michael Lin driving through a Shanghai blurred at the edges by nighttime. Excerpts from Jarman’s journals Modern Nature (1992), read by Xu, enumerate ‘alyssum, ageratum, cornflowers, candy tuft’; a florid catalogue that contrasts with the concrete views through the windscreen. We see a romantic version of the city space and its inhabitants, who long for ‘lobelia, love-in-the-mist’.
Wolfgang Tillmans’s wall montage of photographs (2002–10), whose portions of lithe limbs bask in libidinal glow, were typical of the sentiments of the show. Never was the male shown in relation to the female; he stands alone, an aestheticized Narcissus or wandering misanthrope. We meet signs of metro-sexuality and homosexuality, but bisexual reference points remain absent – again perhaps because this would require the portrayal of female form. ‘Boy…’ necessarily wore this limitation on its shirtsleeves.
Another bias of focus was that of the city dweller: these are representations that keep up with the pace of the art scene and the metropolis, and thus do not engage with more sensitive depictions of those who still need more than want. The impact of consumerism on self-representation is thus evident in Liu Chang’s Buying Everything On You (2007), a taxonomical spread of a the possessions of passersby. The brands, form and typography of these objects offered an itemized layout of modern Chinese culture, and its desire to emulate the stuff of the West.
Elsewhere in the street, the body appears as a weapon of propaganda. A documentary photograph of a 1950 governmental parade showed the Shanghai youth baring chests for a celebration of post-war liberation. The government’s use of athletic physiques to convey national strength – a corporal ideology that spells sinister power – concerned the curator. Beijing-based artist Guo Hongwei playfully depicted Xu’s anxieties in Upper Body (2012), a collage that pastes a cutout of his head over a mass of buff, disembodied limbs.
If the theme of ‘Boy: A Contemporary Portrait’ held personal import for the curator, it was not to the detriment of a broader politics. The critique provided by this collection of works chimed with clarity in the Asian context, to expose a conflicted cosmopolitanism at the core of the city in which ‘Boy…’ resided.
Hannah Gregory
John Wynne
Angus-Hughes Gallery, London, UK
On entering the large space taken up by John Wynne’s new installation, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer physical impact of low frequencies as they make the windows rattle and the floor tremble, and by the elusiveness of high frequencies that flutter around the ears and intermittently create an odd sense of aural déjà vu. Swarming filaments of sounds turn my hearing inside out; changing patterns of sharp tones nail me to the room until I don’t know how long I’ve been listening. As I move around, I begin to single out a barely there but lucid shuffling, a slightly familiar yet hard-to-categorize rhythm. Are these sounds seeping into the room from the outside, or are they generated by these very frequencies? Are they vaguely echoing something I’ve just heard, or am I aware of this intricate sonic tapestry for the first time?
Eight tweeters are scattered around the floor, while two subwoofers face each other from both ends of the longitudinal axis of the room. Over the course of a looped 20-minute cycle, they emanate high and low frequencies that act on the acoustic properties of the room, and let sound be perceived as a physical entity rather than a solely aural one – on the boundary between what is heard by the ears and what is perceived as vibration by the body. Technical explanations of the acoustic laws employed by Wynne would not be enough to encompass the effect of the perceptual phenomena at play: this installation is not about pure frequencies as such, but about the way they bounce off and through the walls, ceiling, floor, windows – inextricably tied to the fabric of this building – and encircle and engross whoever enters the room.
In his installations Wynne never displays any elements beyond what is necessary to propagate sounds. Nevertheless, the sparse arrangement of speakers does not imply this piece is just functional: it touches instead on something fundamental. This work appears as the physical projection of an otherwise concealed, yet primary force that underlies the activity of listening – not only spatially but also culturally and temporally. Sound waves propagate and bounce around this room according to the same laws that make them bounce and propagate anywhere else in the world, at any time. Sounds exist in this installation ‘as they are’. Or do they? Frequencies are perceived here as a hidden yet founding element of everyday life: like the change of light during the day, the flow of water, the shifts in the weather. And yet this is not a demonstration of acoustic laws: it puts each listener in a heightened relationship with the aural phenomena and inevitably – like all the forms of sound-making focused on the environment, on the passing and reverberations of time – it prompts deep considerations on how we relate to what moves us and in spite of us; to the shape of what we hear, to how this shape changes and melts with the everyday, how it anchors each listener to the here and now of their listening. Rooted in timeless physical laws, this work nonetheless gains resonance in the contingent, changing laws of individual perception.
As I listen to the uncanny high-pitched tones in the room, other high-pitched tones echo in my mind: those which radiate across an interview that Robert Ashley did with Alvin Lucier, for his seminal TV series Music with Roots in the Aether (1976). At some point Lucier says that instead of supplying feelings, he makes pieces about natural acoustical phenomena, embracing feelings that are already there. Likewise, Wynne does not consider eliciting any specific emotional responses from the listener and prefers to leave his works open, not prescriptive. And yet, rather than only employing tones acting on the resonant frequencies of the room, Wynne also mixed in newly-synthesised frequencies reflecting specific sounds from the outside, that he heard while preparing the piece. ‘The effect is to make the walls of the space seem acoustically translucent’, he says. The critical shift in this installation is from apparent mimesis to a subtly unfolded artifice: permeable and open, prompting hesitation, the space created by Wynne does not display the purity of acoustic phenomena but points to the singular, changing engagement with sound that occurs at different times for different listeners. And so does Installation no. 2 for High and Low Frequencies appear: a complex block of raw vibrational forces, slowly eroded by a sfumato of elusive reverberations, on the frayed edge between abstraction and contingency, between knowledge and experience.
Daniela Cascella
Nadia Kaabi-Linke
Lawrie Shabibi , Dubai, UAE
‘Black is the New White’ features six new works by Nadia Kaabi-Linke; it’s her first solo show since winning the Abraaj Capital Art Prize in 2011. The idea of the ‘trap’ is the artist’s main point of inspiration in these new works, focusing on how society can become entrapped by social, cultural, political and economic ideologies; in all of these pieces, a distinct regional context abounds.
The most literal reflection of entrapment is apparent in Smooth Criminal (2012) a sculpture made from a white, spherical lobster trap, which is commonly found in the UAE. The pattern of the Star of David develops naturally in the wire weavings of the trap; the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an obvious reference here, suggesting deception and perpetual entrapment by historical patterns and political policies.
The show also includes a light-box photograph, Black is the New White (2012) of a handsome man in a black kandoura and ghutra (traditional Gulf Arab male attire), set in front of the Dubai skyline; it’s an ‘advertisement’ for a fictitious, Western fashion house. Touching upon both the power of glossy advertisements and dress and gender relations (black, an uncomfortable colour in the Arab sun, is commonly worn by women, whereas men wear white), the flamboyance and subject matter of this piece feels out of place amongst Kaabi-Linke’s more subtle work which is unified through its sensitivity to the momentous events taking place in the Arab world.
Incorporating everyday elements and objects, Kaabi-Linke’s Ministry of Tourism (2011) and Bara’a yadawiya(Arts and Crafts) (2009–12) evoke walls in Tunis through a process using silk and wax impressions which have been stretched onto canvas and covered in varnish. The former is a large image of a wall from the Tunisian Tourism Ministry, located where most protests occurred in Tunis, which lead to the fall of Ben Ali’s regime. It’s also a reflection on the economic aftermath of the revolution: Tunisia has seen an enormous drop in tourism, a vital livelihood in the country. The latter is an ode to Tunisia’s youth, with impressions taken from the graffiti found on a wall from a high school. Displayed as a single piece, yet comprised from 15 canvases of different sizes, it celebrates youth’s potential for creativity.
Highlighting the impact of political and social developments in the Arab world, Kaabi-Linke avoids sensationalized or tired imagery. With its minimalist aesthetic ‘Black is the New White’ is a bold show that represents a stark contrast to the usual fare of many Dubai galleries, which tend to show easily digestible images and ideas. Recently there has been much discussion about how the lack of non-profit structures in Dubai has led to commercial galleries and Art Dubai stepping in to fill the space. Lawrie Shabibi does just that with this show.
Isabella Ellaheh Hughes
Ariel Orozco
Federica Schiavo , Rome, Italy
Ariel Orozco’s second solo show at Rome’s Federica Schiavo gallery, ‘Detra Del Cristal’ (Behind the Glass), dealt with issues of plenitude and scarcity, pre-emption and impotence, evoking both desire and lack in a consumer driven world.
Playing on these elements the show expressed – via the presentation of a Champagne bottle, over 3000 glasses filled with sand, an unlit firework, a pencil and tens of plug holes bored into the floor – the eerie sensation that whilst all may be well, there is always the potential for things to change quickly and in ways we might not have possibly forecast.
On the opening night viewers were met with a cautious curator – Chris Sharp, a writer and editor at Kaleidoscope magazine – warning people not to knock the grey pencil, Gris (Grey, 2012), which was precariously balanced on corner of a desk. Across the same room – one of four – an unopened Champagne bottle, so full of cracks as to make it hazardous to drink – Untitled (2012) – mocked visitors accustomed to Italian hospitality. In the second room Untitled (Sed) (Thirst, 2012), comprised thousands of sand-filled tall drinking glasses placed on the floor in formations arranged to evoke puddles, lakes, or even countries. The viewer was left to negotiate the thin paths left between these formations, trying to avoid knocking over a glass and spreading sand across a spotless floor. This created a vertiginous effect as much for the unusual congruence of materials – drinking glasses and sand, which seem as if they ought not to be conjoined, although the former are made of the latter – as for the dizzying task of negotiating one’s way to rooms three and four.
By this point, the effect of the show was to weave a sort of disjointed narrative with no plot or end – a whodunnit, for which the crime, let alone the perpetrator, was unknown. Indeed, Sharp sees the curator as a kind of editor, highlighting a recent tendency in Rome towards a literary treatment of the exhibition. This was evident at Gallery Frutta’s inaugural show, curated by Chris Fitzpatrick, and with ‘D’Apres Giorgio’ at the Casa Di Chirico (ongoing until January 2013), which was curated by Luca Lo Pinto, editor of Nero magazine. All of these shows lead the viewer on a meandering mental path. This tendency is the obverse of, for example, the conceptual works of Paris-based duo, Claire Fontaine, who are showing at T293 and the Fondazione Pastificio Cerere in Rome; they communicate a clear message with little room for interpretation.
The third room in ‘Detra Del Cristal’ featured a spotlit firework rocket placed on the floor, facing the door (Untitled, 2012). The rocket might have exploded or caused injury, but, unlit, it merely lay there, in the limelight but with no part to play. In room four around 50 plugholes were bored into the floor – Untitled (Problema) (Problem 2012) – through which only darkness could be seen, suggesting the possibility of a boundless void, but also, again, a lack. Between these rooms a partially deflated beach ball appeared to be a prop for what might have been a perfect day out, were it not for the lack of water, the impossibility of opening the champagne, and the glasses being filled with sand – one of the endless narratives offered by Orozco. The invitation to such imaginative whimsy could be criticized for falling short of the kind of penetrating critique the world might arguably need from art right now. One could even see the show as a parlour game or lateral thinking exercise, in which people are invited to piece together a number of scenarios – a room, some glasses, an impossibly balanced pencil – to solve a puzzle. Can we afford such mirth? Why not? After all, if a narrative can be about anything, anything is possible.
Mike Watson
The Piano Lesson
Vilma Gold, London, UK
Taking as its point of departure the eponymous 1919 painting by Matisse, ‘The Piano Lesson’ comprised a delicate selection of 12 works, including several newly commissioned pieces. This provided a context in which to reflect on Matisse’s absent work, which depicts his youngest son, seated in front of a piano. Afternoon light traverses the right side, brightening his forehead. On the back wall of the room in this painting hangs Matisse’s own Woman on a High Stool (1914), a female presence who stands above the boy, supervising his lesson. Also visible in The Piano Lesson is a small bronze by Matisse, Decorative Figure (1908).
As a response to this sculpture-within-a-painting, Markus Seig and Habima Fuch presented two new works, Carpet (2011) and Bench (2012). Seig’s Stehende Figur/Standing Figure (2011) completed this trio, which established the authoritative tone of Matisse’s painting. Josef Strau’s 2010 installation, One calls watchman, what will be of the night? Watchman what is left of the night?, comprising a lamp beside an iron railing, framed the other works in the first space and acted as a crucial starting point. One the opposite wall, forming part of the same installation, was a poster that included several biographical narratives that comment on the artists’ day-to-day habits vagaries and concealed truths. ‘Still yesterday’s morning I wasted away, as with so many mornings in pure procrastination as if still wearing the old essential pancake on my head and still waiting for the big story to come out of it’, comes from Strau’s text, Backyard Voices; is one of several texts in the poster. A second installation by Strau, My Soul is Filthy But Your World To Me is Like the Lamp for the Thief on Your Heart (2010), was installed opposite and they function together as one work, in that the poster includes the same texts I refereed to earlier, with alternative paint punctuations that provide small smudges on the surface. In the installation, an iron railing is overcast by a shadow that, in this context, recalls the shadows in the Matisse painting. As there was no reproduction of the Matisse painting in the exhibition I was forced to recollect elements through hints in the press release and consider these elements in relation to each work. It felt as though this was a stage set and the viewers attention should be placed on the works on display and not the painting. As a reference point in the exhibition, a small reproduction would have been advantageous.
In Will Benedict’s mixed media work Bonjour Tourist (David and Manuel) (2012), the layering and playful nature of his work combining several images as well as a map of the United States seemed too much of a deviation from the other works on display. Capturing the contingencies of modern cities and evoke the drifting of the flaneur, Luigi Ghirri’s photographs of archetypal Italian scenes, Ravenna (1986) and Capri (1981), refer subtly and simultaneously to the musical elements in the painting: a treble clef and stave. This reminds us of Pierre seated in front of the piano anxious at the prospect of further practice.
Formally, Guy Sherwin’s three-minute 16mm film Metronome (c.1978) marked the passage of time as we watched the hypnotic shadows appear across the metronome. This was one of two projections that provided moments of contemplation. The other, Charles Atlas’s Lengths #1 (1970/2012), uses Super-8 footage of a dove fluttering around outside the Foundation Maeght. (which, coincidentally is close to Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in the South of France). The bird is dancer-like and evokes the passage of time and movement within the framework of the painting; the progression of Pieree from childhood into adolescence.
Matisse’s painting ‘The Piano Lesson’ referred to the passing of time and this is reiterated with the metronome and burning candle. At the time of its completion Matisse was contending with modernism, in art and the world around him; this painting it is not a glorified modern society but rather a somber one. The extrapolation of this into a group show context provided us with many possibilities to consider – such as time and vulnerability – and relies on our willingness to re-interpret these elements. Taking Matisse’s The Piano Lesson as a starting point felt brave and a little bit daring.
Michael Birchall
Matthew Day Jackson
GEM. Museum of Contemporary Art , The Hague, The Netherlands
LIFE Magazine, astronauts and moon landings; these stereotypical American subjects set Matthew Day Jackson on the road to success in his homeland, and in ‘Matthew Day Jackson. In Search of…’, they are the subjects of the artist’s first institutional solo show in Europe (travelling from MAMbo in Bolgona, Italy and Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland in 2011). Although his symbolism stems predominantly from recent American history, the core questions Jackson addresses in his works are universal.
‘In Search of…’ is also the title of a series of videos that the artist began in 2010. Inconveniently placed at the end of the route through the exhibition at GEM, they are in fact the best introduction to his work. The first film in the series, In Search of Eidolon (2010), speaks of anthropomorphism and Wanderlust. The search for truth and reason, through spirituality and science, as well as the investigation of the present by the leftovers of the past, is at the heart of all of Jackson’s works.
The largest room in the exhibition is just big enough to display the impressive 12-metre-long triptych Reflections of the Sky (2010). Reminiscent of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (1920) with its reflections of clouds caught in the water’s surface, Jackson’s version is equally mesmerizing. Reflecting the ideal of the sublime in Modernist monochrome painting, the work is ironically made from drywall, usually considered a ubiquitous, mundane household construction material. Nonetheless, its surface looks remarkably lifelike; one stares at it as visionaries like Jules Verne might have done at the surface of the moon in the night sky, long before this final frontier was actually conquered. The amalgamation of fiction and fact continues if you consider that the work spans about the same length as a theatre stage, and could, perhaps, be the setting of one of America’s most well known conspiracy theories, which posits that the moon landing was staged in a Hollywood film studio in order to make it seem as if the country had surpassed the Russians in the arms race.
The Cold War, another recurrent theme in Jackson’s oeuvre, symbolizes the ironic paradox of man’s progress and its ultimate decline, epitomized in the invention of the atomic bomb: created to keep people safe, it is also that which possibly causes the destruction of all living things. The contradictory state of man’s major conquests and failures is also addressed in several of Jackson’s works referencing death and decay and his frequent use of skulls and skeletons. For instance, Food Golem (Sweet) and Food Golem (Savory) (both 2011) are two replicas of the artist’s own body made out of food. The ‘sweet’ version was eaten at an opening in London, the ‘savoury’ one was left to rot in a warehouse. The deterioration of both Golems was filmed with time-lapse and shown at GEM on two separate life-size screens in the darkened basement of the museum. In The Tomb (2010) a skeleton, also fashioned after the artist’s own body, is held aloft by eight astronaut sculptures made of compressed wood and plastic and fashioned after Antoine Le Moiturier’s Tomb of Philippe Pot (1428–94). The sculpture is large enough to walk under, and its placement in the middle of one of the larger rooms makes it even more daunting.
Different as they appear aesthetically, in all these works Jackson deals with death matter-of-factly. Death is not end of one thing, but the beginning of another; nothing ever really dies, it merely changes form. In the ‘Me Dead at…’ series (2009–ongoing), Jackson plans to photograph himself each year of his life as being dead while (so far) laying in a coffin, on a funeral pyre, or in a sackcloth bag, until the year of his actual death. Such a confrontation with the artist’s own demise seems like a macabre self-portrait. According to Jackson, however, this metaphorical suicide is ‘essential in the process of growth’: the shedding of the old to create something new and better is an answer to the supposition that artists must constantly reinvent themselves.
In his already significant oeuvre, Jackson skilfully compresses a wide range of elements, combining future and past to create the sensation of one big ‘now’. From the remnants of society, from Ikea furniture, carpets and car wrecks, Jackson creates a world in which fiction equals fact, trauma equals victory, and moments of absolute horror are simultaneously moments of profound beauty.
Irene de Craen
I Am Not There
Townhouse Gallery , Cairo, Egypt
‘I Am Not There’ was an exhibition with no art works. The centrepiece and hub of the inaugural Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival (D-CAF) in Cairo, it was a bold exhibition choice for the starting point of an initiative that supposedly aimed to highlight the city’s wealth of artistic activity. To describe the exhibition as empty, however, would not be accurate: on display were elements, fragments or hints of what were once envisioned as complete art works, and for various reasons, never came to be.
Shown at Townhouse Gallery’s Factory space and curated by Mia Jankowicz (a contributor to frieze), the Artistic Director of Contemporary Image Collective (CIC) Cairo, ‘I Am Not There’ displayed transcripts, email exchanges, artists’ statements and narratives of six unrealized or obstructed works with a direct connection to Egypt and the region at large. Ostensibly, the exhibition considered how culture is controlled, obstructed or given free reign by institutions purporting to protect the interests of the artists, the institution itself, or the audience from legal and/or moral ramifications. The documentation relating to each work disclosed and exposed different aspects of censorship – be it religious, governmental or logistical. These presentations collectively revealed not only the climate of artistic production in Egypt, but also the ‘hidden’ role of the curator in negotiating, shaping and realizing the work.
At Townhouse Gallery in 2003, Egyptian artist Huda Lutfi exhibited Remembrance (or The Secret of Repetition), an installation of several shoe moulds garnered from shoemakers and cast in silver, adorned with Sufi texts and positioned in rows in front of a mirror. A highly symbolic work, it was a delicate and poetic meditation on the overlooked craftsmanship of shoemakers and the visually evocative language of Sufi writings. When a new iteration of the work was being prepared for shipment to Bahrain to be shown at Al Riwaq Art Space the following year, it was confiscated by customs. The officials misread the classical Arabic texts as Quranic, which, inscribed onto ‘shoes’ (although only moulds) equated to a serious religious offence, for which the artist was charged, and soon acquitted, of ‘exploitation of the religion of Islam’. To this day, the work remains in a warehouse in Cairo where the artist is assured she’ll never be able to see it again, let alone exhibit it. In ‘I Am Not There’ an Arabic text describing the work’s sequestration was displayed in front of a mirror, emphasizing the absence of the work and endlessly repeating its tale, backwards and forwards, an emulation of this significant act of misreading.
Ayman Ramadan’s Missing Dog (2009) was a response to the strategic and sadistic poisoning of street dogs by the police in the mechanics district of downtown Cairo, where Townhouse Gallery is situated. The artist sculpted a dog from rubbish collected from the same streets and installed it outside the gallery. Under the cover of darkness, police removed and disposed of the sculpture, and in response Ramadan printed a missing dog poster offering a reward, which he plastered around the neighbourhood. In anticipation of ‘I Am Not There’, Ramadan again disseminated the posters, and was deluged with callers claiming to know the whereabouts of this lost rubbish-dog. Recordings of the telephone exchanges have since become a continuation of the work. Shown next to a series of the posters was a wall-sized text that told the story of the work in the artist’s voice.
The most recent work included, which most likely generated the most attention since its censorship, is Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s Nation Estate (2012). Her ejection from the shortlist for the Lacoste Elysée Prize in December 2011, for being ‘too pro-Palestinian’, sparked a public outcry centred on the notion of artistic freedom and corporate agendas disguised behind cultural philanthropy. Exhibited at ‘I Am Not There’ were three un-mounted aluminium plates, standing in for the proposed photographs, adjacent to a chronology of the events and discussions among the artist, institution, funders and press. The correspondence demonstrates the attempted coercion of the artist and ultimate suspension of ties between The Musée de l’Elysée and Lacoste.
In the aftermath of the events of January 2011, absence is a timely metaphor in Egypt. Many artists have spoken about their inability to produce work after the end of the protests that ousted Hosni Mubarak, arguing that the oppressive hands of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) have been just as brutal for artists. Positioned in the centre of the exhibition space was a stage, empty at the time of visiting, which stood as a stark emblem of anticipation, yet was the promised site of daily talks and performances to contemplate issues in conversation with the works. The empty exhibition and the unrealized artist’s project have an established tradition throughout contemporary art history, from Yves Klein’s 1958 ‘The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void’ to the more recent ‘Unbuilt Roads’ in 2009 at e-flux project space (and a book project of the same name from 1997 edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Guy Tortosa), to ‘Unrealised Potential’ at Manchester’s Cornerhouse in 2010; all of which take emptiness or incompletion as an allegory for protest, experience, generosity or radicality.
‘I Am Not There’ encouraged more consideration of the particular context within which the artist operates, positioning itself somewhere between an exhibition and an essay. The format for the show alone was especially essayistic ¬– with enlarged texts in English and Arabic filling the walls and little visual allusion to the works they portrayed. Yet with state control still rife in Egypt, it is encouraging that an exhibition and the artists involved emerge from their censorship to defiantly put forth the need for a critically aware and engaged culture to change the tide of control and continue to develop an open and truly independent landscape for the production of art.
Daniella Rose King
Gyan Panchal
Amrita Jhaveri Projects , Mumbai, India
A wide, white wall confronted visitors to Gyan Panchal’s exhibition at Amrita Jhaveri Projects. On its pristine surface were two pieces of granite – one slender and grey, the other curved, and the colour of dried blood (prai, all works 2012). Panchal chose Proto-Indo-European words as titles for his work, but was adamant no translations be offered. He wanted viewers to appreciate and respond to the sculptural installations without the help of context or associations.
However, if you look up your handy Proto-Indo-European dictionary, you’ll discover that ‘prai’ translates as ‘before’, and Mrmrajo – sheets of sea-green recycled plastic that were pinned to the wall and fluttered delicately – as ‘murmur’. Other titles in the show included cicami (go away), and wedhneumi (link or relation). Panchal, who has Franco-Indian parentage, chose words from a language that is the root of the two linguistic traditions (Latin-derived French and Sanskrit-derived Gujarati) that he inherited. What emerged from his titles is a sense of shifting distances, as though one had to come close and then step away from the material and the work to truly see it.
Paris-based sculptor Panchal’s first solo show in India was created from objects he chanced upon in Mumbai. In the past, he has transformed throwaway materials such as Styrofoam into sculptural pieces that barely betray their humble origins. His interventions are usually subtle. Panchal prefers to reveal what he sees as the essence or potential of the raw material he uses. The process of creating a work is more akin to an excavation than actual sculpting.
For his Mumbai show, Panchal collected commonplace items: pieces of granite (the kind used as worktops in kitchens), paper, khadi (homespun cotton), tree bark, recycled plastic and marble (often seen as flooring in affluent Indian homes). They’re all connected to the frenzy of construction that has been a feature of Mumbai in the last decade in its attempt to look like a modern world city. Panchal’s sculptures and installations abstrusely question the cogency of this city-wide project; he explores the idea of what is natural, and the artifice and effort that goes into making something seem so.
Prai and pelom 2 (The Surface 2) reveal the processes that were applied to make them look the way they do. Both are slabs of granite that have been painted over by the granite sellers who supply construction and interior decoration firms. In prai, the original grey colour is evident in the lower part of the sculpture. It looks dully lifeless under the rich, warm artificial colour of the piece that sits on top. Pelom 2 is a gleaming, artificial green on top but the base of the sculpture fades to white. Here, the circular stains left by the piece of cloth that was used to apply the paint, as well as faint, green fingerprints of the labourer who worked on the slab are visible. Process was also emphasized in cicami: Panchal rubbed chalk over some parts of the marble to show the grooves left on the stone by the machine that cut it.
The work of the artisan was the focus of qotred (whiter). A rectangular piece of pale, weathered-orange khadi that is commonly worn by labourers – like the one responsible for the colour of pelom 1 and <2
– quotred was hung so that its soft, wrinkling folds highlighted the fall and weave of the material. The colour contrasted sharply with the pallour of wedhneumi, a sculptural installation comprising the curling bark of a palm tree and crumpled handmade paper. The panel of creased paper and the bark were installed to mimic the angle of a wilting body. Panchal treated the de-husked bark – which he had smuggled out of the compounds of Sir JJ School of Art, alma mater to some of India’s finest artists – with thinned white paint, which made it look like ageing skin; an illusion that was heightened by the dark patches on its grooved surface, which recalled age spots.
The work that encapsulated all of Panchal’s concerns was cicami. It comprised four pieces of marble – three long panels and one squatter piece. The first three were installed so that they ran like a strip from wall to floor. The fourth rested against another wall, some distance away. Following the path suggested by the gallery’s layout, cicami initially looked like a disjointed arrangement of marble slabs. However, if you faced the four pieces and moved away from the work, the logic of the placement was revealed. The three panels created a frame for the fourth piece of unvarnished marble, giving it pride of place and drawing attention to its texture and the delicate palette of greys and white. It also looked like a partially-built skyscraper, with its jagged edges and natural surface emphasizing how much work would be needed to fashion it into glossy smoothness.
There was, of course, a conceit at play in Panchal’s show. While the artist would have us believe that he was revealing the essence of the material he used, it was also evident that items that seem mundane to the average Mumbaikar – such as painted granite – were exotic to the Paris-based sculptor. After a Panchal makeover, quotidian granite, bark and khadi became silent, mysterious monoliths, crafted by the artist’s imagination.
Deepanjana Pal
Ann-Sofi Siden
Barbara Thumm, Berlin, Germany
The term ‘documentary’ suggests everything that is not artifice, so it can seem a salutary quality in an art context committed to self-reflexivity and self-reference. This might explain the current prevalence of documentary film as an object for artists to exploit and deconstruct, in works in which neutrally functional form becomes both critical target and content provider. Ann-Sofi Siden’s five-channel video installation, Curtain Callers (Entracte) (2011) is typical. An elaborate filmic collage, it draws on a wealth of footage shot at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden over the course of several months, showing every aspect of a theatrical pre-production, from seamstresses preparing costumes to actors practising their lines.
Siden has edited her footage into a panorama that streams from right to left across five large monitors, so it seems we are viewing multiple facets of theatrical preparation in a single, all-encompassing pan. The spectrum of simultaneous activity resists cohering into real-time sequence. Towards the end of the half-hour film, there is a limited sense of resolution. A musical piece (or, perhaps, a rehearsal of it) is performed by a choir distributed throughout the otherwise empty seating area – the places an audience would normally occupy. This choral work, and its theatrical manifestation, was devised by the American composer Jonathan Bepler, who is responsible for the film’s intricately woven surround-sound ‘score’, and is named as Siden’s co-collaborator. Does documentary here cede to the artifice of performance, or should we see this passage as a documentary of a performance, even one staged especially for Siden’s camera?
The film’s editing creates a fictive space out of a string of miscellaneous fragments connected only by the umbrella of their location. A sequence showing a performer practising scales gives way to footage of a cleaner vacuuming between seats. The abrupt recession from a dressing table in the foreground to the cavernous reaches of the theatre corresponds to a vertical cut between two streams of film, rendering the seam perspectivally functional. Similarly, Bepler’s superimposition of audio tracks creates a dramatic melée, by turns explosive and cacophonous, which conveys the suspense leading up to a performance. And yet, Siden and Bepler’s consummate editing of their raw material is not an end in itself. It is asked to assume a self-reflexive remit. The awkward transformation of the chaotic labour of pre-production into an act of intricately structured theatre (apparently several plays were being prepared during the period of filming) metaphorically comprehends the sublimation of contingent documentary film into an artificial form and an artistic context that awkwardly accommodates it. For Siden, documentary representation, however effectively achieved, is not enough; she can only countenance the facility and labour of her own act of reportage if it is justified by a result that functions as a critique of the form she is deploying. In effect, she is conforming to current art fashion, which accepts empirical representation only as fodder for self-reflexive critique, or as a backdrop to an act of cultural reference. Otherwise, it is seen as vulnerably naive and undigested.
The difficulty with this metaphorical pretext is that it tends to treat the richly varied human activity the film witnesses as being of insufficient interest without its assuming an emblematic role. As soon as specifics have to double as signs for the art process they furnish, it begins to seem that they may as well ultimately be replaced by them. This demand might explain the sense the installation leaves one with of having been shown a great deal without having the opportunity to properly perceive it. Documentary information is cast as not quite belonging within an art context, and therefore forced to resolve itself as a ‘foreign’ sign for the objectivity that art usually precludes. Siden structurally embodies this incompatibility by refusing her documentary material its narrative fulfilment. The curtain never rises, and the choir’s performance is restricted to the territory that the audience, rather than the players, usually occupy. Instead of a performative culmination we are left with another self-reflexive image – audience perceiving audience – with Bepler’s choir taking our place as performative surrogates.
Notably, none of the performers appear to register the camera that witnesses them. This would be expected of fictional drama, but less so of documentary, in which the filmmaker will often declare an observing role in the proceedings. That we watch actors whose job it is to perform for a viewer, makes the invisibility of Siden’s camera a dramatic element, playing up to the differing assumptions we bring to fiction and reportage, and making us question whether what appears to be documentary is not, if fact, staged. In one passage, a young woman in a formal black dress – probably an actor – stands in the wings, poised between a sense of her utter obliviousness to the camera, and the possibility that she is striking a pose. This is not merely documentary footage, but a rhetorical version of it, which doubles as a metaphor for the form’s omniscience. It is the inverse of Heisenberg’s dictum that the observer of an experiment always impacts what he or she observes. Siden’s camera is the symbolically non-interfering observer, so markedly objective that the performers it views are not only unconscious of its presence; they renounce the ingrained habit of performing. The camera’s invisibility becomes a theatrical element, a set of inverted commas placed around the footage it provides, subverting its documentary claims.
Mark Prince
Simon Dybbroe Møller
Fondazione Giuliani , Rome, Italy
A disembodied, anonymous voice welcomed you at the entrance of Simon Dybbroe Møller ‘s solo exhibition at the Fondazione Giuliani in Rome. ‘Hello’ is the first word you heard and read – as the title of the show and of the eponymous audio installation. It was also the first recorded word, as the artist explained, quoting the author Pablo Henrik Llambias: ‘When Thomas Edison discovered the principle of recorded sound, the first word he yelled into the machine was “halloo”.’ Several motion sensors were displayed in the gallery so that the generic, disembodied and digital-sounding ‘hello’ reacted to the moving bodies of the viewers. Like the single note of an imaginary and invisible score for an improvised composition, the random rhythm of this repeated word punctuated the visual experience of the other works.
Dybbroe Møller’s exhibition consisted of manifold superimpositions of fragmentary layers. Produce (2011) is a series of store-bought printers hung on the walls. The printer replaces the canvas or the frame of the image, shifted from a means of production to a display device, then turned into a structural and inherent part of the artistic medium. The machines don’t function yet; still wrapped in their protective plastic sheets, they presents the test-image provided with the original packaging. The colourful representation of fruit arrangements accompanying each printer stood as generic and default visual compositions – a proof or promise of the working image technology. Should we consider those assisted ready-mades to be venerable fetishes of technology, or as the confrontation of what Jean Baudrillard, in The System of Objects (1968), described as ‘a contradiction between the rationality of the objects and the irrationality of our needs?’
Dybbroe Møller plays with the quasi-magical aspect resulting from our abstract use of objects without understanding their inherent technological processes. He explores abstraction through the complex system of functional, ornamental and semantic relationships between design –or purely aesthetic potential – and the technological functions of objects. Abstraction, in its broadest sense, also had to be experienced beyond the visual puzzle of the deconstructed lines and zones that he created in O and No (2011) – a hardwood gym floor installed on the floor of the gallery, and beyond the curved forms of the series of prints, ‘O’ (2011), whose incomplete representation of the vowel ‘o’ sounded like a faraway echo of ‘hello’.
On all sides of Dybbroe Møller’s show, communication was shortcut and interrupted through a strategy that staged information as ‘in-formation’. Time and space were compressed: the means of production and the means of display and consumption shared the same location. This idea of compression also emerged from the storage-like display of the series ‘Things Thinking Things’ (2011). On the walls, bundles of framed images, as vertical stacks, conveyed frustration: only the first image was entirely visible. Did those partly inaccessible sets of prints rely on a critical discourse about the status of the image as a contemporary generic object? About the dilution of the image in décor or ambiance? Using the space as a structure of distribution, Dybbroe Møller’s manipulations controlled the objects’ roles and their reciprocal relations, highlighting the system of objects as an inexhaustible model of abstraction.
Caroline Soyez-Petithomme
Richard Prince
Museo Picasso Málaga , Málaga, Spain
‘Good artists borrow, great artists steal’ is a quote often ascribed to Pablo Picasso. It could also be the motto of Richard Prince, who is known for appropriating existing photographs, and hence taking the Picasso quote almost literarly, something that has caused him copyright lawsuits in the past. After having previously dedicated a series to William De Kooning, tackling the Spanish master seemed the next logical step. The Museo Picasso Málaga shows the resulting outcome in an ambitious exhibition of 116 never-before-seen works, including paintings, collages and photo-collages – the majority realized over the last two years.
In the middle of one of the rooms, a vitrine displays a group of collages made of torn-out reproductions from Picasso catalogues, to which Prince has added his own elements. The way he reworks those reproductions is sometimes hardly noticeable, sometimes very dominant. Some of the pieces could almost be subtle counterfeits, others clearly show a cut out piece of paper the artist painted over and glued to the reproduction. These collages are revisited Picassos, illustrating Prince’s desire to deconstruct the work of his artistic forefather.
In his paintings and drawings, Prince operates – like he did in his De Kooning series – according to the opposite principle. He does not use reproductions of Picasso’s paintings but rather works with existing photographs, to which he adds elements in a style that evokes the famed artist. These are pictures of naked women from a painter’s instruction manual mounted on paper or canvas as ink jet prints. The backgrounds of the works are deliberately left raw, showing wild brushstrokes and other messy elements. Colours are almost absent but the combination of various techniques including ink, acrylic, oil crayon, charcoal and graphite transforms the found photographs into multi-layered works. In these drawings and paintings, Prince clearly adheres to the principle of variety through repetition. Though the subject matter is deliberately restricted – nude female models, sometimes alone, mostly in groups – Prince’s graphic treatment keeps it exciting.
Prince has deformed the models, turning their faces into a grin – in some cases into the head of a faun, their hands into claws and their legs into paws, expressing the same uncanny mix of eroticism and cruelty as Picasso once did. Rather than copying Picasso’s style, he manages to translate the raw sexual energy into a language of his own. Prince clearly captures Picasso’s spirit while not effacing his own signature either. Hence, he does not only ‘quote’ Picasso but also himself. In several paintings he covers one of the women’s faces with small dots, as he did for example in his series ‘Untitled (oh)’ (2009–11), making the found photographs less readable.
In addition to this impressive group of new works, the show also includes watercolours that Prince made in his early twenties, a kind of study of the human figure in the spirit of Picasso. Though this series makes a dull and academic impression, it is interesting to see how Prince evolved from a young painter ‘copying’ an example, to a mature and self-conscious artist who is clearly no longer castrated by the overwhelming talent of his idol, but confident enough to confront him. Bearing in mind the tricky task of revisiting an artist that has been the subject of quotations, parody and pastiche ad infinitum – not just in the art world but also in advertisements and popular culture – Prince can leave the arena with his head up.
Sam Steverlynck
L’Institut des archives sauvages
Villa Arson , Nice, France
In a 2004 essay in October entitled ‘An Archival Impulse’, Hal Foster drew attention to the resurgence of the archive in contemporary art, and in particular the gathering and presentation of historical information that has been forgotten or put aside. ‘L’Institut des archives sauvages’ jettisons such obsessive memorializing of the past, eschewing what has become an all too common, even overworked, trope. Exploring systems of selection, classification and display, this thought-provoking show brings together works by more than 30 international artists whose focus is on the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the archival process itself.
The most obvious paradox resides in the exhibition’s title, which loosely translates as ‘The Institute of Unscientific Archives’; for while these works are patently unscientific, constituted as they are by artists in reaction to the norm, they nonetheless generate an archival logic of their own, albeit an unconventional one. They likewise provide information – in the form of data that cannot be classified or used – while employing methods of collection and presentation that are in many cases singular and unique. Procedures such as these unify the show’s diverse content, reinforcing its anti-archival stance.
Christoph Keller’s Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (2001) is a series of black and white videos taken from a vast scientific film archive studying the movement of animals. Made by isolating and looping the smallest possible sequence of movement of each animal, Keller positions the videos at different angles, so that the viewer has to walk around the space in order to be able to see them, his movements making him an unwitting participant in the piece. Depicting an ostrich gliding, a snake slithering or a porcupine lumbering along, these repeating images undermine the archive’s value by continually reiterating information that it has already made known. Likewise subverting existing archival material, Daphné Navarre’s INN (2012) encodes it into geometric shapes. The artist has fixed, placed or drawn lines or rectangles on the floor or walls, plotting the shapes of all the works shown in the space since March 2006, the launch date of the current cycle of exhibitions at Villa Arson. Inhabited by these works’ ghostly presences, Navarre’s installation suggests that the archive’s attempts to account for reality are necessarily imperfect and incomplete.
Less convincing in this context, however, are the works of artists such as Christoph Fink and Anna Oppermann, whose alternative, homegrown taxonomies – based on systems of measurement and word association respectively – come closer to perpetuating archival logic rather than upending it. In his article ‘Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique’ (1998), Gary P. Radford commends Michel Foucault’s reconciliation of the rationality of the library experience with the irrational. Such a strategy can also be applied to the archive, and indeed, the exhibition is best served by those works that espouse irrationality more whole-heartedly. Ryan Gander’s four Alchemy Boxes, for example, unsettle the organizational principles on which the archive is based: a list displayed next to each work describes the contents of each box in detail, but fails to give any inkling of the selection criteria involved. Like Gander’s ‘Loose Associations’ lectures, these works seem to point to the contingency of relational criteria, while contesting the very idea that their content should constitute a totality.
No less disturbing, Mike Kelley’s installation A Fax Transmission from: Oct. 21, 1986, 1:07 p.m. (1986–2004) transcends classification systems altogether. An allusion to the tensions between high art and popular culture that prevailed in the American art scene between the 1950s and the 1980s, it features a mock-up of the office Kelley occupied while teaching at the prestigious art school Cal Arts. A printer installed in the space spews out hundreds of photocopies of the artist’s projects – which lie unread and unclassified on the floor. Drawing extensively on popular culture, they have been stripped of their cultural, historic and archival value. Here, the archive, or rather the absence of one, enacts tension and conflict, becoming a site of unreasoned denial.
Rahma Khazam
Chiara Camoni
SpazioA gallery, Pistoia, Italy
Although the shape of an object can alter with the passing of time or a chance event, the changes often remain ‘hidden’ beneath the form’s external appearance. Italian artist Chiara Camoni has always sought to expose this intermediary state that lies between core and surface. Her latest solo show, ‘Certe cose’ (Certain Things), explores this transitional stage which so frequently becomes obscured in the making and unmaking of things – in the pivotal moment between the ‘not yet’ and the ‘no longer’ of an object, when its form is in a state of flux.
In the text that accompanies the exhibition, Camoni speaks of the potential of objects to lose definition, to disappear: ‘Usually, we are interested in the way forms are created: how they materialize and move through the world; too infrequently do we concern ourselves with their disappearance. Yet, there are moments in which a visible object essentially consists only of absence, and others in which forms vanish in order to rematerialize in another state.’
Camoni seeks to define this transitional state in three apparently provisional, ephemeral sculptural installations in the gallery’s central space. Hung alongside is a series of small-scale abstract drawings, while a fourth work, located in a secondary gallery space off the main room, offers an apt conclusion to exhibition’s thematic. All the works on display are new and all bear the prefix ‘untitled’.
The installation Senza titolo, l’esercito di terracotta (Untitled, Terracotta Army, 2011–12) is composed of a multitude of tiny clay sculptures, the result of a collaborative effort between the artist, her friends and neighbours, and even some passers-by, who became involved by chance after seeing her working on the project in her garden. The minute figures take the form of animals, stars, spheres and various other shapes: some are loosely modelled outlines; others are indecipherable forms or even broken fragments of clay. Senza titolo, l’esercito di terracotta reveals the creative process behind the finished work, from inception to completion, and recalls the way children learn to make things, often destroying or entirely reconfiguring their first attempts to end up with something quite different. Camoni explores this dislocation between creation and destruction in a series of works that offer multiple possibilities but which, by never being fully resolved, express the mortality that exists in all things – and which is exactly what gives it its significance.
In Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (What We See Looks Back At Us, 1992), Georges Didi-Huberman maintains that ‘seeing is losing’: in other words, we only truly become aware of what we’re seeing in the moment it disappears from view. Camoni’s second installation, Senza titolo, mosaico (Untitled, Mosaic, 2011–12), reflects on this premise. The work comprises an expanse of marble fragments laid out on the gallery floor, which the artist collected from the rivers that pass by the quarries near her house in the Apuan Alps, Italy. Dumped there as factory rejects, the stones have been weathered over time by the river and the elements. Camoni reclaims them by creating a new mosaic that emphasizes the processes of entropy and metamorphosis that exist in the natural world.
The third installation – Senza titolo, icosaedro (Untitled, Icosahedron, 2012), the wooden frame of an icosahedron (a shape with 20 triangular faces) – sits ambiguously in the centre of the room. Is the work complete? Or does it still need to be finished? The artist explains that the object’s destiny lies ‘in its uncompromised potentiality’ – the possibilities of which are further extended by a paper garment/skin, painted with triangles and placed next to the structure, that could transform the work into something else.
In drawing, Camoni locates the medium that perhaps best communicates the dynamic potential of this state of perpetual evolution. Two of the four works on paper included in the show – Senza titolo #01, Bramante and Senza titolo #02, Bramante (Untitled No. 1, Bramante and Untitled No. 2, Bramante, both 2012) – are details of Christ’s shoulder and torso, copied from Donato Bramante’s painting Cristo alla Colonna (Christ on the Cross, c.1480–90), which is part of the Brera Art Gallery’s collection in Milan. In these works, Camoni illustrates the importance of the fragment and its potential for hidden meaning. Isolated from its narrative and descriptive context, the drawn detail manifests a complete autonomy from the original work and a previously imperceptible abstract quality: figuration and abstraction become the opposing borders of a transitional state between representation and presentation, between seeing and believing, that frequently eludes definition.
This dislocation is felt even more keenly in the other two drawings on display – Senza titolo, cerchi (Untitled, Circles, 2012) and Senza titolo, quadrati (Untitled, Squares, 2012) – in which Camoni envisions in the geometric forms of the title a continuity that extends beyond the spatial and conceptual limits of the frame, as though this were just the prelude to something far greater.
Translated by Rosalind Furness
Marinella Paderni
Daniel Blaufuks
Ffotogallery, Cardiff, UK
Daniel Blaufuks’ Works on Memory is centred upon the projection of slowed-down fragments of a 1944 ‘Staged Nazi Film’ (the words are stamped throughout the film in its top-right corner) of Theresienstadt, a concentration camp that had been cleaned up and completely transformed in order to deceive a visiting consortium from the Red Cross. This treatment of the film is in response to W.G.Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz, with its description of Jacques Austerlitz’s attempts to find a picture of his mother who he discovers was sent to the camp. He slows down a video copy of the film in order to linger over the recorded faces that appeared too fleeting when the film was played at normal speed. This has the effect of creating a different film, one in which the men and women in workshops look as if they were toiling in their sleep or seem to be hovering when they walk.
Blaufuks not only slows the film down but also saturates it red. The treatment or adaption of emotively charged archival material associated with the Holocaust has a precedent in Christian Boltanski’s memorial-like installations with enlarged photographic portraits taken from grammar-school group photographs and high-school yearbooks of Jewish children from the 1930s, for example, his Altar to Lycees Chases (1986–88) and The Festival of Purim (1988). Boltanski’s response to such found photography was based on the assumption that many of those pictured would not have survived the Holocaust. Blaufuks also displays portraits, photographic stills showing women’s faces from the Nazi film, again all coloured red. One still shows children and adults gathered around a table, the iconography redolent of the normalcy and familiarity of a family snapshot, an allusion intended to disguise the very abnormality, inhumanity and horrors of the camp.
Theresienstadt, now called Terezín, was a former military garrison used by the Nazis not as an extermination camp – though 30,000 people died there of starvation and disease – but as a holding station, where Jews were housed until being sent to other camps to be murdered. Blaufuks went to Terezín as a result of an obsession with one of the photographs used in Sebald’s Austerlitz, which shows what appears to be an office space, its walls filled from floor to ceiling with shelves bearing files. He found the room in the former jail of Terezín, now a museum. The colour picture he took of it, as close as it could be to the picture in Sebald’s book, is displayed in relation to the red stills from the film as well as spare, dark but beautiful photographs of the interior spaces of the prison. Blaufuks also exhibits and pairs two blown-up details from the Austerlitz image: one shows a wooden table and chairs, the other, a desk and chair. The emphasis is on the ordinary and everyday, of things we can relate to in the face of an unthinkable evil. Black and white photographs of primary or rudimentary still lifes of foodstuff – two unpeeled potatoes, two slices of handmade bread – continue the emphasis on the banal and the ordinary, but also serve as a reminder of the hunger and starvation in the camp. The picture of potatoes is paired with a still from the Nazi film showing an outdoors scene with a smiling woman in shorts in a garden, proffering something to camera.
Blaufuks’ photograph of the control room is in effect a picture of an archive and is in this respect integral to the mode and use of photography that characterizes a number of other pictures in this show. Such photographs adopt the neutrality and dry formality of a forensic and classifying mode of depiction, a simple gathering of evidence. Only there is a recurrent emphasis on absences, of things missing or not being disclosed – four unmarked plastic cassette tapes, presented in a plastic tray, bearing no outward signs of what information might be stored there, the florally decorated back page of a diary, the back of a photograph bearing only the stamped message, ‘PORST KÖNIGSBILD August 1986’, a 35mm colour negative strip that maintains the privacy of its four snapshot images, locked in the negative like fossils in amber. Blaufuks concentrates on old forms and formats of memory storage.
The screening room of the Nazi film is preceded and cued by the display of three graphically striking pictures of, in turn, a plastic casing, a spool and a film canister (the latter bearing a place and date, ‘Paris, 1958’.) We look at the containers and carriers of recordings and information. Of course, we look at them aware of their obsolescence in the face of the digital circulation of images – they are archaic, history, outdated. As are the colour slide transparencies set out on a lightbox on a white plinth. These miniature views are entitled ‘Memory Landscapes (Shoa)’ (2008), the reference an indication that they are taken from the landscapes in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film about the Holocaust. Such a reference cuts against the format’s association with the holiday snap, the souvenir or memento. But this association is nevertheless important in that it accords with the desired look of a happy detention centre within the staged Theresienstadt film.
Two paired black and white photographs show a clock face at six o’clock and a quarter past six (Fifteen Minutes I and Fifteen Minutes II, from the Business 0f Living, 2010). The clock links with administration, bureaucracy and the Geschäftszimmer at Terezín: the clock in the image in Sebald’s book is also at 6pm. The gap between the photographs and the times they show is important and like much of the work, puts emphasis on something that is absent or escapes representation. What happened in the fifteen minutes that elapsed? One might see an allusion here to Andy Warhol, with his prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, a democratic vision of a shared but momentary fame in our image-obsessed culture. But the two clock photographs also recall Félix Gonzáles-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991), a pairing of battery-operated clocks that, while initially set at the same time, inevitably will fall out of synch. The work served as a metaphor for both the closeness and intimacy of a human relationship, of two so close they were, at least for a while, in perfect rhythm, as well as the inevitable counting down of time, of both the lovers’ and our own inevitable mortality.
Gonzáles-Torres’s art involved a lyrical and affective response to the everyday and banal, a poetics and romance from out of the commonplace. Blaufuks’ art is lyrical and transformative too, things are more than they are or simply appear. But his work has a darker cast. The two pictures of the clock are terrifying, a stark reminder of what happened happened, that the clock cannot be turned back, that nothing can change what took place. In this respect it is a brutal and ruthless counterpoint to the fixation and obsession with the faces of those in the Theresienstadt film, the need to restore and prolong their presence, however ghostly, in the wake of their brutal and total erasure and vanishing. We may well look at the appearance of a family seated around a dining table, but we see this fully knowing that the Final Solution wiped out whole families and that there was no-one left to remember them.
Mark Durden
The Museum Problem
Frutta, Rome, Italy
Whilst being the first gallery show of the new season undoubtedly contributed to the success of Frutta’s inaugural opening on 15 January, the quality of work and ambition of the gallerist far exceeded anything expected in a city where bold entrances are rarely seen, or welcomed. A newcomer both to Rome and to running a gallery, 25-year-old James Gardner, from Glasgow, may well have succeeded in part because of his ignorance about what is and isn’t possible in the Eternal City. How he fares in the months ahead will depend on whether he can combine the role of being the Glaswegian upstart with the subtle manoeuvring which Rome will demand of him. Though with this first show – ‘The Museum Problem’, curated by Chris Fitzpatrick – to build upon, there is every reason to be hopeful.
The title took its name from an ‘exercise wherein computational geometry is used to determine the least amount of security guards needed to keep watch over the largest area of a gallery’. In a gallery space as small as Frutta – the larger of its two floors measures just 20 square metres, the basement just 12 – the museum problem is crucial, though the issue is less one of how few attendants may be needed to keep watch over a large space, and more of how to avoid visitors bumping into works, walls and each other.
The resulting show, featuring more than 20 artists (the collective France Fiction have five members) and 31 art works, tackled this problem without shirking conceptual or aesthetic rigour. Indeed, the exhibition’s presentation – works were displayed on the floor, in the corner, on the front door, by the stairs and propped against walls – communicated a playful and efficient use of space. This was partly thanks to its strong conceptual leaning, which signalled that art does not necessarily reside in the work or accumulation of works, and as such cannot be reduced to mathematical problems or formulae. For example, Suzanne Treister assumes the alter ego of Rosalind Brodsky, ‘a delusional time traveller’, and documents her travels in a series of watercolours entitled ‘Rosalind Brodsky’s Delusional Time Travelling Watecolours’ (2000). One of the four watercolours displayed in Frutta’s basement depicts the memorial resting place of Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery, referencing a bygone ideology or concept that is as transient and intangible as conceptual art itself. That, and other works, were presented by the artist as paraphernalia left by Brodsky to the imaginary 21st Century Institute of Militronics and Advanced Time Interventionality (IMATI) in 2058. In this way art is taken outside the gallery and beyond the realms of physicality and temporality. No amount of gallery attendants can keep an eye on art conceived in this way, for even the artist here is fictional.
Similarly, a plaque on the door made by France Fiction read: ‘The portable Drawing Museum: A Collection of Imaginary Drawings. Open everyday, awake or asleep. The collections are stored in memory’s lapse. Only copies of original Drawings can be exhibited’ (Musèe de dessin portative, 2012). The same text was distributed on a postcard given out with the catalogue. This kind of relocating of the site of art so as to evade the ‘museum problem’ could be felt tangibly throughout the show. In the basement, Juozas Laivys’s Scarecrow (2011) comprised three upturned plastic bottles and mounted on wooden poles. Described as ‘mole fear maniuplators’, the artist says they send signals underground to frighten subterranean rodents. Elsewhere a work by Laivys, Painting (2011), was displayed under the pseudonym Valdas Simutis. Depicting a man picking mushrooms in a faux-naïve style, the painting was hung above the gallery’s stairwell, at a 90-degree angle from the wall. It was thus possible to see both the front and back of the wall, where a canvas panel apparently hid a book of mushroom recipes. Again, these works pointed to something that is not only hidden, but which we must take on trust as existing. The artists in this sense became conjurers, evoking a non-material reality to which the museum problem, as geometrical exercise, is hopelessly inadequate.
Stephen Lichty’s Wand (2009) directly referenced the magical, albeit a magic that is thwarted, as a magical wand was presented cut into eight uneven segments of wood and brass, perhaps signalling the incommensurable chasm between measurement and magic – a chasm which art occupies perhaps uncomfortably. Similarly the exhibition squared the facts of physical space with the desire to transcend it. Nina Beier’s Afrika (The Exhibition Poster) (2011) offered a pragmatic solution to Frutta’s diminutive space. The artist propped several framed found posters – all of which advertised African holidays, exhibitions of African artefacts and movies based on Africa, superimposed with information for her recent Berlin exhibition, entitled ‘Afrika’ – against the wall at the bottom of the stairwell. Each day a new poster was selected for display on the wall upstairs. In this way, an outside (Africa) was referred to, whilst the problem of space (or lack of it) was tackled practically from within. This mix of practicality and wish making – as some other space was imagined and evoked – could be seen throughout the show and came across almost as an effort to escape Rome, which rarely hosts such a conceptual and ironic display. It felt much like Kreuzberg or Shoreditch had arrived in the Eternal City. Though the success of such a venture long term may depend on how well this aesthetic and approach is assimilated with the local culture.
Glaswegians are clearly not new to the peninsula. In the mid-19th century, Garibaldi, the soldier of Italy’s unification, was such a polarizing figure that people flocked to join his army from as far afield as Scotland. One makeshift and unruly group of Glaswegian soldiers nearly accidentally shot Italy’s first King and Garibaldi’s ally, Vittorio Emanuele II, whilst he inspected the troops, so keen were they to see action. It is with a similar gung-ho spirit that Frutta emerged this January. Rome will watch it come to maturity with interest.
Mike Watson
LE SILENCE Une Fiction
Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Villa Paloma, Monaco
If some degree of narrativity is always implied by the curatorial act, rarely is it rendered so explicitly as in the latest show at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, which comes accompanied by its own specially commissioned science-fiction short story. On the very first page of the exhibition’s catalogue, Chris Sharp’s post-apocalyptic fable, ‘Certain Fathoms in the Earth’, finds a world similar to the wrecked Earth of Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), albeit replacing the monks painstakingly illuminating the fragmented notes of a long dead nuclear physicist with the secret archive of a traumatized survivor, persecuted for his heretical nostalgia for the image.
Thus co-curators Cristiano Raimondi and Simone Menegoi, a confessed sci-fi fan who comes to Monaco via La Galérie in the Parisian suburb of Noisy-le-Sec, finds himself in the curious position of playing proxy to Babbo, the fictional future ‘iconophile’, assembling his ‘contraband of icons, objects and images’ in – if not the haunted underground bunker of Sharp’s tale – the rather more salubrious confines of this distinguished early-20th-century mansion, the Villa Paloma.
This framing device both explains and coheres the otherwise bewildering diversity of material on display, ranging from kitsch to cutting edge. So a room full of the frankly culinary heliographic flower prints by Lourdes Castro from the early 1970s are just a stone’s throw from the rather more disturbing suspended ‘hypertransforms’ of Viennese artist Rudolf Polanszky – bleached and bulky sculptures in Perspex and fibreglass, one of which (from 2005) at first glance resembles a dream-like image of a boat, only to seem more like a septic tank on closer examination. Such curatorial juxtapositions radically alter the way we perceive individual works. Thus architect Walter Pichler’s 1971 sketch, Silo (pipeline), and a simple black and white photograph of a cardboard box on a pebble beach by Geert Goiris (Black Box, 2000), by virtue of their sharing wall space with a photo of the famous gold disc from the NASA Voyager missions, become respectively a launch pad for a space rocket and a lonely lunar outpost.
If some works have the apocalyptic narrative thrust upon them, others are clearly borne to it. Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s already legendary photos of the ‘Ruins of Detroit’ – perhaps in particularly the one entitled Ballroom, Lee Plaza Hotel Detroit (2006), with its exposed piano keys slumped on a sheet of dust under graffitied, mildewed arches – speak of a ravaged rococo glamour that could be straight out of the end of Logan’s Run (1976). Meanwhile, Arman’s Poubelle (1962) fossilizes everyday junk in a welded polyester casting. This work was only Arman’s third ‘accumulation’ and the unintentional cracking of the cast from the imperfections of the process adds to its resemblance to dinosaur remains trapped in amber, à la Jurassic Park.
Curator Menegoi cites the two principle inspirations for the exhibition as, firstly, Werner Herzog’s feature film The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), starring Brad Dourif as an extraterrestrial ex-CIA agent narrating the end of the world; and secondly, the commission for French artist Adrien Missika’s film, Darvaza (2011), included as part of the show. In Turkmenistan in 1971, Soviet geologists accidentally exposed a cavern of natural gas when a mining platform collapsed. Loathe to release the toxic emissions to the atmosphere, they set it aflame; and there it has burned ever since, nicknamed by locals ‘the door to hell’. Missika’s film explores this infernal portal through a series of long, slow takes, each around a minute in length, in reverse progression from a close-up of sulphurous clouds to a final shot of the barren surroundings – the pit a thick, red scar on a dead world. For Menegoi, these images recalled the apocalyptic sublime of early-19th-century painter John Martin (recently celebrated with an exhibition at Tate Britain). Inverting the usual trend of Missika’s work (for example his 2009 photomontage series, ‘Tueur du Monde’, also exhibited, which are mock-ups that seem to show construction workers aboard a space station, a flying saucer taking off over a forest, etc.), the film presents something so Biblical in its horror that we assume it must somehow be a fake, a miniature, a mock-up or some other special effect, but in fact it is terrifyingly real: an everyday, man-made Armageddon.
Robert Barry
Christoph Schlingensief
BAK, Utrecht, Netherlands
When entering Christoph Schlingensief’s installation Animatograph – Iceland-edition. (House of Parliament/House of Obsession) Destroy Thingvellir (2005) by crawling on hands and knees through a hole in the wall, one cannot help but feeling, quite literally, like Alice going down the rabbit hole. The installation is Schlingensief to the max: chaotic, subversive and overwhelming, combining elements of theatre, opera, film and activism. The highlight of the work, the ‘animatograph’, consists of a revolving stage on which visitors can stand and thus become part of the work. The title refers to one of the earliest cameras for cinema, which was used to both capture and show images; and so Schlingensief’s animatograph both projects and reflects video images based on German and Nordic myths and religion as well as other sources, creating its own anarchic universe.
In comparison to the installation on the first floor of BAK, the documentation of Schlingensief’s performance Ausländer raus – Bitte liebt Österreich (Foreigners Out – Please Love Austria, 2000) seems somewhat out of place by being overly clean, orderly and arranged according to ‘curatorial rules’. This live theatre play, originally staged during the 2000 Vienna International Festival, was set up like the popular reality TV show Big Brother. However, in Schlingensief’s version, the participants are asylum-seekers and the ultimate prize is an Austrian passport, while the losers who get voted off by the general public are deported back to their country of origin. This painful reflection of reality caused huge commotion among audiences. The fact that Schlingensief played on the very edge of the fictional world of art and the real world he was commenting on, made it even more painful to watch and prompted the media to actively participate in the discussion surrounding ‘the show’.
These two works were brought together for ‘Fear at the Core of Things’, a research exhibition of Schlingensief’s work within the framework of ‘Former West’, BAK’s long-term research project (2008–14), which takes the year 1989 as its starting point and investigates the artistic, cultural, economic and political shifts that have occurred as the world moves from a three-world partitioning towards a new world order. Within this framework, Schlingensief’s constant search for the creation of a Lebenskunstwerk, the ultimate merger of art with life and politics, seems exemplary of how art can address the urgent issues the world faces today. As with his film Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker (The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990), also on show at BAK, these works lay bare the shortcomings of the West by rubbing against the grain of human sentiment and showing the underlying mechanisms of a failing democratic ideology.
Notwithstanding the ages of the works in this show (between seven and 22 years), they are all still exceptionally pertinent in light of today’s world issues. With revolutionary changes occurring throughout the Middle East, and an active global movement against capitalism – in other words, with extreme shifts taking place today that are comparable with those of 1989 – there is a need for direct communication as well as confrontation. Without sugarcoating the facts, Schlingensief’s works demonstrated that art can have a function in addressing the most uncomfortable issues head-on. And perhaps most importantly, they point to the fact that every person is not just a spectator, but also an active agent in creating the world we inhabit together.
Irene de Craen
Song Yuanyuan
Platform China, Beijing, China
Platform China’s exhibitions during 2011 were biased toward large-scale painting. ‘19 Solo Shows About Painting’ in the Spring gave each artist a ‘solo slot’ of his or her own, inviting them to provide a brief statement to accompany their selected works. Entitled ‘Negative Room’, Song Yuanyuan’s was one of the more engaging facets of the show. Part of his statement read, ‘Most spaces have only marks of human presence. These marks really interest me, I insert them into the painting as traces and some odd brushworks.’ This reference to the residue of habitation made sense against the paintings, which as a group evoked a strange melancholy resting on disjointed scenes of furniture or architecture.
Now, Song returns to Platform with a solo exhibition declaring its focus on objects. The larger canvases in ‘Examining Objects’ are even better executed and more intriguing than his previous works. His leitmotifs include 19th-century-style chairs and sofas – perhaps real, perhaps reproductions – but any narrative that their provenance or taste might impart is displaced by a distinct sense of unreality. Its degree varies: in Basic Conversations (all works 2011), a group of olive green velvet-covered chairs is crowded together on a brown floor. The unreal here manifests itself in a strange pinkish form on the floor at their feet, unexplained and initially unnoticed. But in Polyhedron in Blue and Orange, a garish virtual shape hovers over an assembly of chairs and a coffee table, around which the background elements dissolve and split into fragmentary lines, tangible splatters of paint and patches of negative space. In Examining Objects I and II, bourgeois Victorian-style drawing rooms – realistically depicted but with an odd central bright light, which also features in other works – play mute hosts to uninvited guests: a section of metal staircase and two wooden sawhorses, respectively. Elsewhere, single scrawled words or luminous musical notes might flit across the canvas, and in one painting, inexplicably entitled Good, a pair of legs morphs into the back of the chair on which it sits in place of a torso.
Aside from this single bodily inclusion, across the show hangs an absence of the human being. Only objects exist here, a certainty itself confounded by the oddness of their positioning (which is strangely depthless, even awkward), the unnaturalness of the light reflecting harshly off polished arms and legs, and the intrusion of unrelated objects. Whilst looking at them, one senses an air of personification at times, as if the subconscious were seeking to alight on some empathetic figure in the composition.
Given these strange auras, it is perhaps unsurprising to learn that Song (whose background is in photography) creates these paintings form deliberately uninteresting photographs, spliced and re-presented on canvas. The method is effective, allowing the artist to dispense with the direct representation of actual space, negate subjective aesthetic quality and integrate readymade visual elements. This sets the paintings in an odd tension: they are more physically concrete and visually stimulating than the original photos – more ‘theatrical’ – yet are dependent on them and on having been transferred from them for their particular uncanny qualities – a certain ‘flatness’ and peculiar lack of depth. Having first been photographed, the objects seen are doubly removed in time and space from the pictorial realm of the painting itself – these paintings avoid ‘art’ in the sense of illusory representation. Thus appraised, the ‘objects’ of the exhibition’s title need not refer, perhaps, to the items depicted on the canvas, but might apply to the ‘objecthood’ of the paintings themselves.
Iona Whittaker
In Perceptions
104–Centquatre, Paris, France
In one of those little nooks among the corridors of an upmarket hotel: scarcely more than a square metre of beige walls, a black tuffet and a gold-framed mirror. The red drapes, pulled to the side by a matching cord, suggest the mysterious Lodge from David Lynch’s television series Twin Peaks (1990–91). When first approaching Argentine artist Leandro Erlich’s Changing Rooms installed in the atelier of the Centquatre in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, one sees at first little more than the familiar trompe-l’oeil of two mirrors facing each other in parallel, producing an effect of infinite reflections. But, like Alice, we soon realize we might step through the looking glass and enter a labyrinth of identical nooks, drapes and tuffets; with each new chamber presenting four gold-framed mirrors each seemingly reflecting into infinity, while only some will admit our passage through to the other side. The only way to find out is to reach out and attempt to pass.
Leandro Erlich, Changing Rooms
Erlich has always been forthright about the influence of cinema on his installations, and in this particular work we find ourselves transported fully into the nightmares of Stanley Kubrick –blindly navigating the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980) or lost in the maze of unquenchable desire in Eyes Wide Shut (1999). But what confounds us in this ricercar, equal parts movie set and carnival hall of mirrors, is the sudden, vertiginous arrival of the edge of the frame. Having pursued one’s own reflection through mirror after mirror, the abrupt sight of the dull wall of the sound stage through the next frame is curiously traumatic, possessive of all the terror of a dream suddenly awakened from, and recalling certain moments in another work of Lynch’s – the 2006 film Inland Empire.
Leandro Erlich, Bâtiment
Erlich has found a curious kind of web celebrity over the last few years thanks to the compulsive sharing of images of his illusionistic installation Swimming Pool (1999) on blogs and social networks. Bâtiment, a work first created for the 2004 ‘Nuit Blanche’ in Paris and specially reconstructed here, is in many ways even more inviting to the casual camera-phone operator. Presenting a flat recreation of an ordinary Parisian terraced house in the Haussmannien architectural style, complete with a blue-tiled house number and wrought iron window guards, visitors are invited to drape themselves upon the surface of the work and see themselves reflected by a mirror at a 45-degree angle, giving the appearance that they are hanging from a window ledge, or perching precariously on the tiled roof. Like Changing Rooms, Bâtiment is equal parts cinematic trick and carnival fun house – appropriate for the site, in as much as it replaces the rather gothic merry-go-round that normally takes centre stage here in the Halle Aubervilliers.
‘In Perceptions’ also features 104.0.2 (2012), a new installation by Ann Veronica Janssens. As much as Erlich invites the amateur photographer, this latest ‘intervention’ by Janssens positively repels any attempt to make a visible document. Like Antony Gormley’s highly successful Blind Light (2007) at the Hayward Gallery, 104.0.2 presents a room full of dry ice, one’s visibility reduced to a few feet in either direction. But while Gormley effectively displayed his own audience by placing glass walls around his foggy chamber, Janssens offers a much more private, and more exploratory experience. The installation spans several rooms, and as you begin to wander blindly about, you find yourself drifting from white light to red, to blue – in a possibly satiric nod towards the myopia of patriotism.
All three works play with perceptions in the most literal way, offering a re-born OpArt for the era of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics. Erlich was included in Bourriaud’s ‘Notre Histoire’ exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2006, but in the present works, perhaps more than anywhere else, he brings the fun fair into the art gallery (by way of the cinema), offering works that, like Janssens’, are ludic, interactive and inviting.
Robert Barry
Laila Shawa
October Gallery, London, UK
They stand on either side of the room – headless, limbless mannequins adorned with peacock feathers and jewels. There is something of the fantastically kinky about these torsos, yet a second look reveals belts of ammunition and dynamite. One figure, painted with roses (a reference to Yasser Arafat’s declaration that Palestinian women were his ‘army of roses’), is bound in chains, a brightly-painted hand grenade between her legs, like a macabre chastity belt.
Palestinian artist Laila Shawa was only eight years old during the Palestinian Exodus of 1948, and it is issues of her homeland, and its women in particular, that have long fuelled her practice. In her exhibition ‘The Other Side of Paradise’, she explores the fact that female suicide bombers only achieve equality with men through their death, a project that has its origins in the 2007 documentary The Cult of the Suicide Bomber. Captured on CCTV at an Israeli checkpoint, a young woman becomes increasingly distraught as she is forced to strip down, revealing an explosive device. When the device turns out to be faulty, the viewer is witness to her mental breakdown. The re-worked video, Checkpoint Fashion Week (2011/12), hangs on the gallery’s far wall. The video gradually becomes shakier, more abstract, coloured in strange hues as a mishmash of script eventually takes over the screen, obscuring her from view, as if behind a veil, a wall of white noise. This is echoed in the adjacent series, ‘Trapped’ (2011), and the script, although gibberish, evokes the Qur’anic text that religious fanatics use to justify suicide bombings. ‘I thought, how could she not know what she’s doing if she’s a trained suicide bomber?’ asks Shawa, as the video shows the woman trying to reattach the pin into the bomb. ‘My conclusion was, possibly because whoever gave this to her didn’t care whether she lived or died: she blows herself up, fine. If she doesn’t, she’ll get caught. She’s dispensable.’
Where the mannequins provide kitsch glamour with a sobering edge, pieces such as Scream (2011) pack a punch. Comprising ten panels lined up in two rows, the work features a close-up of a still from the video, the young girl’s eyes squeezed shut in anguish, mouth open in a silent scream. Each panel zooms in closer to her mouth, until, by the last frame, it is simply a shapeless black hole dominating the canvas. Shawa relentlessly shows how this woman, like the countless other women in her situation, has no voice – her mannequins have no heads, her scream has no voice, and every repeated image in the series depicts her strangled, choked, obscured and consumed by layer upon layer of meaningless script. For Shawa, it is precisely the collision of Pop and colour with such a deadly serious topic that gives it its unique brunt. ‘I grew up in the Middle East but I also grew up in the West,’ she explains. ‘I don’t think in a typical way, I see things, I don’t accept things. I try to put them across in my own language and my vision and probably some people would find it shocking that I made sex objects out of suicide bombers but that’s exactly what they are, if you take it down to the bare reality: They are used, and they are used and used and abused. These women are not considered people – they have no head, no arms or legs – it is only their sex that counts.’ There is something defiant in the mannequins of Disposable Bodies (2011/12), who seem to be rebelling against this. Belts on some of them, designed by Nadine Kanso and Rachel Spencer, like some Pandora’s box, proclaim ‘Release me if you dare.’
Others works, like Gaza Sky (2011) have a more playful air, with its proclamations of ‘WHAAM!’ à la Lichtenstein, while Birds of Paradise (2011) at first appears to be a beautiful illuminated manuscript, until the eye focuses on photographs of drones in both works. Used to drop bombs in Gaza, here they are shown in bright hues of pink, yellow, red and blue, belying their deadly nature. And there, again, so tiny she is almost goes unnoticed, amongst a host of exotic birds, is that poor girl, this time veiled in script. ‘I had to put her, the girl, in context,’ explains Shawa. ‘I had to put the bomber within context of the occupation. I cannot divorce her totally from it.’ Indeed, there is a sad irony about Birds of Paradise, for here is the destination promised these bombers, a reward for martyrs, but for which, ultimately, there is no guarantee. In Birds of Paradise, the girl has, in a way, strangely achieved her goal.
Overall, the exhibition successfully immersed the viewer into Shawa’s world – a soundtrack includes the sounds of bombs going off and aborted plans to hang resin models of drone plans, along with a turnstile like those found at the Israeli checkpoints would have further added to the experience. Furthermore, with the gallery space divided in two, the second features a selection of Shawa’s older works, including Fashionista Terrorista (2010). This division works well, providing a backdrop on the Palestinian situation in general. This is an exhibition that works, it draws the viewer in and then forces one to confront the themes of this fiercely intelligent artist.
Anna Wallace-Thompson
Alan Stanners
CCA, Glasgow, UK
Exhibited alongside 12 of his paintings, Alan Stanners presents Qualmlessist Manifesto (2011). Framed and printed on pink paper, its 23 declarations are central to his current practice. They announce the young Norwich-based artist’s sentiment – ‘Qualmlessism will piss where it wants to’ – and sets the overall tone of the exhibition, his biggest solo show to date: ‘Qualmlessism will not tolerate fetishists of genre or perverts of style.’
As well as a tongue-in-cheek take on similar declarations of the early 20th century, Stanners’ manifesto, like those that came before it, is a device to set creativity flowing anew. Less a proselytizing gesture, it’s an individual’s attempt to animate and enliven a seemingly sclerotic art practice. The result of which is a collection of works with little other than a manifesto in common, painted using a variety of disparate styles and techniques.
Qualmlessism (2011) is a typographical experiment painted in muddy Picabia-greys and lacklustre Braque-browns that further asserts Stanners’ clumsy neologism. Crudely finished in broad, visible brushstrokes, it reiterates the contemporary distaste for anything suffixed with an -ism, echoing Dada’s predilection for nonsense words and self-deprecating humour.
Quick Response (2011)
Quick Response (2011) best represents the manifesto’s anything-goes attitude. Not only is it a representation of a QR Code, perhaps one of the most visually ill-advised inventions of any media, Stanners has taken certain artistic liberties in rendering it, giving it alternative, non-square dimensions, and painting it in vibrant blues and purples. While scrimping on realism, Stanners encourages an ironic comparison between the QR Code and De Stijl-era grids, drawing similarities between the encryption of mediated information and the development of abstraction in modern painting.
X (2011)
Elsewhere, Stanners further combines representation with abstraction, placing familiar objects against planes of colour and gestural brushstrokes. In X (2011), a pair of splayed kitchen scissors are set against a lively background; the words ‘action must be taken’ have been repeatedly scrawled in the familiar Qualmlessist script around the painting’s edge. What might have been a convincing imperative to act is muted by the domestic nature of the scissors and its considerately ergonomic handles, and once again we’re reminded of the contemporary inability to bear conviction.
Headless Shoulders (2010)
Tellingly, the earliest work shown here, Headless Shoulders (2010), least associates itself with the represented world, and aside from its title is more or less entirely abstract. It comprises a cluster of painterly marks surrounded by three colour planes broken at points by overspill from the gestural area. Its composition encourages the eye upwards, while the sphere at the bottom right is rendered in such a way that it pulls the gaze back down again. In this way, Headless Shoulders keeps you entirely devoted to its painterly surface.
Similarly captivating is Blue Swan (2011), in which an economy of brushstrokes produces what seems to be a typographical chimera that simultaneously looks like the first two vowels of the alphabet. Its apparent familiarity at once draws you in, while it’s subsequent illegibility leaves you floundering – the title seems like a red herring, leading you further off the track. It is here that Stanners truly encapsulates the sentiment of the punning Dadaist whose representations are rarely unequivocal and who always invites bewilderment. What’s more, it is here that Stanners marries a forthright approach to materials – his decisive use of paint – with an elusive subject matter that lies always on the cusp of representation.
The deceptive nature of works like Blue Swan was played out by the exhibition as a whole. With the heterogeneity of paintings on show and only the manifesto – which is itself duplicitous – grounding the disparate styles and techniques, the show was inherently elusive. Never settling on one particular mode of painting, Stanners offers a cynical account of the avant-garde legacy, implied by the exhibition’s title: ‘No Vacancy’.
Andrew Cattanach
Diego Iaia
The Gallery Apart , Rome, Italy
Artist Diego Iaia approaches the phenomena of cosmetics and ageing in ‘Anti-Age’, his second solo show, held across both floors of the The Gallery Apart, close to the lively Campo Del Fiori square in central Rome. The show incorporates video, painting, drawing and sculpture and is an ambitious undertaking for a gallery that seeks to promote young Italian artists whilst continually raising the quality of its programme.
Exploring the premise that art is, like cosmetics, fundamentally a ruse, Iaia set about producing fakes, based on methods learnt from The Art Forgers Handbook (which was first published in Italy in 1996) by Eric Hebborn, a prolific 20th-century forger who famously sold his fakes to some of the world’s most important museums. The resulting polyptych Il manuale del falsario (The Manual of Fakery, 2011), features paintings based on fakes of 16th-century Old Master drawings, alongside photographs of men and women applying make-up. The work serves as a reminder that whilst art often aims at deception – in the sense that paint on canvas becomes a landscape or portrait, or a urinal or neon light becomes art – the conceptual or aesthetic illusion of beauty that it presents is only ever fleeting. In this sense, Iaia demonstrates that all works of art are a type of ‘vanitas’, highlighting the impossibility of transcending our material conditions. Ageing is inevitable and whilst we attempt to evade its effects, what lies beneath the cosmetic surface resists the alchemic conversion suggested to the eye. Indeed, the aesthetic ruse at having evaded nature is often farcical, drawing derision as much as sympathy. With fixed botoxed expressions and an unnatural orange pallor the signs of ageing are ungracefully defied in a mimesis of art’s own inability to transcend physical limitations.
Elsewhere in ‘Anti-Age’, Iaia explores the postwar popularity of grand yet quickly executed art works, by reproducing a Jackson Pollock painting gouged out of mdf board coated in black paint. Number 32 (1950) – which took several months to make as the lines of were painstakingly dug out – questions the notion of time conveyed by gestural painting. Ralenti (In Slow Motion, 2011) demands reflection, whilst re-visiting the cliché of the heroically-won image, though this is a heroism requiring patience and a protracted physical engagement, leaving traces of the work’s long production etched into its black monochrome surface. In this way the notion of art suspending or transcending time is addressed, for despite the deliberate engagement with temporality conveyed by Ralenti, its forbidding black surface signals a limit point as the viewer meets with the finite nature of experience. This, indeed, is the experience that painting perpetually conveys, for beyond the momentary sensation of being ‘lost’ in an art work there is always a return to normality.
Alongside Ralenti the artist presents a series of untitled black and white works (2011) that appear to be composed of cut and paste magazine images, but which are actually photorealist paintings of collages. Across the room, a large abstract ‘painting’ (Carne, Meat, 2011) made with layered foundation make-up on board presents a continuation of age-old attempts to deceive nature, that only ever partially succeed: close inspection of a work, or a person, will always reveal the material that lies beneath the surface: the painting gives way to raw paint and canvas, whilst the heavily made up model is pictured as flesh and bone. Attesting to this very point, the one video in the show, l’artista (The Artist, 2011), presents the application of make up played in reverse.
The centrepiece in the gallery’s main upstairs room, Eterno presente (Eternal Present, 2011) is a resin sculpture of a bald male head wedged between a plinth and a mirror, which, in mirroring the work, presents the head and plinth in their usual relationship. Such a formation questions the sense of deception: ultimately, try as we might to escape our fate, it’s all smoke and mirrors and when the smoke clears and the mirrors lose their allure, one is left confronting oneself. Iaia deftly points to this fact from within a culture where image and deception are crucial to everyday life.
Mike Watson
Daniel Rapley
PayneShurvell, London, UK
‘In the beginning was the Word …’ The opening of the gospel according to St. John has always held a strange fascination for me, the residual hypnotism, perhaps, of many childhood mornings on hard assembly hall floors. Even at 11 I could sense the enormity of what was meant by ‘Word’ but it did not occur to me until many years later that the passage is less a riddle than an opening caveat, a defence of what is to follow. Binding language with God’s eternal truth at the moment of the world’s birth, John asserts the sovereign power of testament. (John demands to be taken at his word, the rest be damned.)
Artist Daniel Rapley has spent a significant portion of the last 18 months transcribing the King James Bible by hand, using a ballpoint pen on standard-lined paper. The result, Sic (2010–12), is a dense ream of A4 sheets, stacked with the greatest precision atop a plinth in the centre of this very white, very rectangular gallery space. Only the top page, what might amount to the first half-hour of painstaking labour, is visible. Row upon row of tightly formed, navy-blue characters march east across the page in single file. Like a modern-day Arc of the Convenant, a transparent display case enshrines the work as material artefact, whilst simultaneously performing a noli me tangere move which asks the viewer to accept that all 66 books, 31,102 verses and 783,137 words are there on the strength of faith alone.
To one side of the plinth, an equally neat stack of white frames leans against the gallery wall. The first, facing out into the room, reads: ‘I did not want to make this drawing 10 times but I did anyway.’ Only the slightest of inconsistencies in line and shading betray the characters to be anything other than the printed typeface that they first appear, but closer inspection reveals each to be an exact and meticulously rendered pencil reproduction. This sleight of hand, so deft as to be almost imperceptible, is a further stake / ups the stakes in the tentative game of ‘cheat’ played out between artist and viewer.
Rapley is not unique in using the convention of the ‘convenanted’ artist-spectator relationship to question the fragile and contingent nature of truth, belief and meaning. Since Magritte’s treacherous pipe that was not one, the viewer has been cautioned repeatedly against the seductions of authorial authority. Nevertheless, the PayneShurvell show is effective because, like Wilfriedo Prieto’s One (2008) in which a single diamond was supposedly mingled in amongst 28 million crystals piled up on the gallery floor, Rapley undertakes the monumental with a lightness of touch that renders the work both entirely serious and exquisitely absurd. There is certain folly in the labour that Sic represents not unlike certain of the durational performances of, say, Tehching Hsieh: a personal, secular martyrdom whose futility is simultaneously frivolous and compelling. ‘Covenant’ stands as testimony to the enduring power of words and the force of their repetition.
Amy Sherlock
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.
Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Après la reprise, la prise (2009)
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).
Brent Green, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then (2010)
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?’).
Akram Zaatari, Red Chewing Gum (2000)
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.
Rosa Barba, A Private Tableaux (2010)
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).
Katja Mater, ‘Density Drawings’ (2011)
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).
Horse of the Prophet (2011)
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.
Spaghetti Tornado (2010)
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.
Petrit Halilaj, They Are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens II (2009)
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.
Hans Schabus, Appostamento (2011)
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)
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.
Arboreal (2011)
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.
Translated by Rosalind Furness
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.
Yang Fudong, Red Tassel (2011)
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 Shanzhuan, ‘Butterfrog’ (1992–2011)
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.
Trevor Lloyd, Untitled Landscape (2011)
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.
Jamie Isenstein, Rug Woogie V (2011)
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.
Laurent Montaron, 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)
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.
History (2007)
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’.
Black Series No. 12 (2008)
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.
Alex MacLean, Marina di Pisa (2007)
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.
Francesco Radino, Gardaland (2002)
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, Marina di Massa (2002)
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.
Fulvio Ventura, Venezia (2007)
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.
El Capitan, Yosemite National Park (1999)
Audience 1, Florence (2004)
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.
Space Shuttle 1, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canavarel (2008)
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.
The Ma Family, Shanghai (1996)
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.
Crosby Street, New York/Soho (1978)
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.
Coenties Slip, New York/Wall Street (1978)
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.
Aleksandra Wojcik, Untitled (2011)
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.
Edward Todd, Paralytic Feedback (2011)
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.
Tom Pounder, Balenciaga Bullseye Liquidity Annunciation (2011)
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.
Alberto Tadiello, EPROM (2008)
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.
O Grivo, Tocadiscos (Turntables, 2011)
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.’
Newsha Tavakolian, from the ‘Listen Series’ (2010)
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.
Between Me and You (2011)
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.
Struggle With the Mess Age (2011)
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’.
Night Conversations With None Other (2011)
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.
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.
Unica Zürn, Untitled (1953)
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.
Marianne Vitale, Horse Fed (2005)
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.
Jutta Koether, ‘Mad Garlands’ (detail, 2011)
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, The Dead of Night (2011)
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.
Marianne Vitale, Patron (2009)
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.
Bernardo Buried (2011)
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.
Bernardo’s Tomb (2011)
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.
R.I.P Bernardo (2011)
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.
Bruce Nauman, Burning Small Fires (1969)
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, Various Fires and Four Running Boys (2009)
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.
Reynold Reynolds, Burn (2002)
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.
Superflex, Burning Car (2008)
‘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.
Bombaramento aereo (Aerial Bombardment, 2008)
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.
Barbara Bloom
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.
Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Cross (1920)
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
Fiona Tan
‘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.
Oscar Fernando Gómez Rodríguez, 24 de mayo 09 (078) (2009)
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.
Adriana Lestido, 09. Alma y Maura (1995–8)
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.
Juan Pablo Echeverri, Mucho Macho (2008)
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.
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.
Translated by Simon Pleasance
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).
Silvia B, Blanche LeBlanc (2008)
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.
Translated by Stephen Piccolo
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.
Rainforest (2010)
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?
Vineyard (2010)
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.
Andrei Monastyrski, Branch (1995)
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.
Corridor of ‘Collective Actions’ (2010)
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.
Andrei Monastyrski, Cannon (1975)
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.
Hu Xiaoyuan, Wood/Wood (2010)
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.
Shi Jinsong, Beigao Village (2010)
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.
Song Dong, Hutong (2010)
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.
Qiu Xiaofei, Utopia (2010)
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.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
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.
'Field of Action: The Moscow Conceptual School in Context', a special adaptation for Calvert 22, installation view (2011). All photos: Steve White. Courtesy of the artist and Calvert 22
Shi Zhiying, High Seas (2008)
Saint Jerome Garden (2010)
