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
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