The Falmouth Convention – a three-day programme of artist-led talks, field trips and artist talks – was convened by independent curator Teresa Gleadowe, aiming to ‘explore the significance of time and place in relation to contemporary art and exhibition making’. There was also an implicit objective of focusing conversation (or canvassing opinion) about a bid to bring Manifesta to Cornwall in 2014, with much of the discussion directed towards hot topics about biennials’ relationship to tourism and their responsibilities to local communities (the latter question especially relevant to Cornwall, with its longterm St Ives artists’ colony). One success of the weekend was, for me, that this question seemed significantly more complex – and far from being answered – at the end of the conference than at the beginning. In fact, most seemed to reluctant to argue the case for biennials now, more than one speaker noting that the large-scale survey show now tends more often to the hysterical than to the historical.
A broad range of curators – including Lucy Lippard, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kitty Scott – with experience of both organizing residency programmes and commissioning site-specific were invited, alongside a number of artists with links to the area: Tacita Dean (who was at Falmouth School of Art during the ‘80s), Adam Chodzko (who had a retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2008), Jeremy Millar (who is currently exploring the Cornish myth of Tristan and Iseult) and Simon Fujiwara (who grew up near St Ives).
The weekend’s focus was on the tensions between residents and residencies, and how artistic production can be enabled (or compromised) locale and localism – subjects that Lippard, the first evening’s keynote speaker, literally wrote the book on. In her key 1997 book The Lure of the Local, she argued against the ‘absence of value attached to specific place in the contemporary cultural life’.
Much of Lippard’s presentation – titled ‘Imagine Being Here Now: Towards a Multicentred Exhibition Process’ – focused on Galisteo, New Mexico, where she has been living since the early ’90s (she is soon to publish an extensive history of the area from 1250–1782). Lippard’s central criticism of SITE Sante Fe Biennial was it habit of ‘ballooning in’ artists rather than allowing for either a sustained dialogue or for local participation. As one audience member wondered in the Q&A session, when does one become a ‘local’? How many years does it take for dues to be paid?
An ambiguous note, with regard to Manifesta, was introduced: why position these biennials in places that are already known locations or tourist destinations? What about suburbia? (Lippard has previously quoted Rebecca Solnit’s definition of suburbia as a ‘voluntary limbo, a condition more like sedation than exile, for exiles know what is missing.’) She proposed a community biennial of activist organizers and local people, lighter on curatorial conceit and more breadth of accessibility. Lippard has, intentionally and by her own account, been out of the international art loop for the past couple of decades. This absence sometimes apparent, no more than in her broad criticisms of large-scale shows and biennials’ lack of interest in local politics. Resurgent interest in the legacies of locally orientated ’80s artist-activism, as well as recent biennials in Berlin and Istanbul that are far from unengaged. Lippard was closer to the mark when looking further back, noting that the art of the ’70s still defines much of what artists do outdoors – from handsome, temporary monuments to slight interventions.
Tacita Dean’s talk, titled ‘Being Commissioned’, made an eloquent argument for the ‘importance of ignorance and blindness’ – the opposite of Lippard’s thesis of understanding through long-term involvement – whereby misreadings can be creative rather than potentially dangerous. In giving an example of this, Dean discussed her early film Disappearance at Sea (1996), one of the first pieces she ever made in a place – Berwick-upon-Tweed – which she had absolutely no connection to. Defined the art of being commissioned as ‘being highly disobedient’ when faced with curators’ intentions.
Bassam el Baroni from Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), one of the three collectives curating Manifesta this year, gave an honest account of how different curatorial or artistic practices can become instrumentalized. Manifesta 8’s subtitle, ‘Dialogue with North Africa’, was apparently chosen before ACAF’s application was even selected – Baroni understandably had a number of doubts about overseeing what he called an ‘arranged marriage’ between Murcia and Mahgreb.
Other presentations returned to how best to structure openness when organizing residencies and how to allow for sufficient research when curating exhibitions. Hans Ulrich Obrist, discussed the 2007 ‘Everstill’ show that he curated at Lorca’s house in Grenada, for which the participating poets and artists were given a two-year research period. Obrist ended up advocating – affectingly, if somewhat ironically for a man who doesn’t seem to sleep – a kind of slowness. Kitty Scott presented the Banff Centre residency programme, and its intention to leave space for failure, while Adam Sutherland from Grizedale Arts in the Lake District took the opposing view: artists have to be useful; there has to be some legacy.
In the 2005 book Place, written by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, ‘place’ is defined as the projection of history onto a landscape. One definition of a successful biennial, mentioned by Millar in his closing comments, could be the production of history from a landscape. What would it mean to host Manifesta in a dispersed and rural setting? For one day of the convention, delegates were split between six different field trips. Mine, titled ‘Studios and Stones’, began at Barbara Hepworth’s studio in St Ives and continued along the coast towards Zennor, stopping at Eagles Nest (Patrick Heron’s old house and studio), the Tinners Arms (where DH Lawrence once lodged) and Carn cottage (once home to Bryan Wynter and said to be used by Aleister Crowley). Amid the quoits, this was the landscape sketched by ‘The Dark Monarch at Tate St Ives at the beginning of this year.
The convention finished with a few warnings. Andrew Nairne (Executive Director for Arts Strategy at Arts Council England) warning about ‘Hurricane George’ on the horizon (for non-UK readers: that’s a reference to George Osbourne, the Chancellor, who’s about to present a particularly bleak emergency budget). Open-ended outcomes are not quantifiable, and so are disliked by the government? Serota suggested that closing the widening separation between research, production and presentation might be one answer. Finished with hopeful suggestion that the attendees and participants were galvanized by even the possibility of a bid. Lippard voiced the final word of caution: ‘I’m fascinated by the idea of not doing Manifesta, frankly – but the, I don’t know where the money would come from…
From a show of 25 young Italian artists for the Sandretto Re Raubedengo Young Curators’ Residency Programme to Carlo Mollino’s highly secretive apartment
Day three of the Berlin Biennial blog, and I’ve been charged with taking a look around the smaller venues dotted throughout Kreuzberg housing work by Dahn Vo, John Smith, George Kuchar and Cameron Jamie (in the case of Vo, this was taken quite literally, as the site is his own apartment on Kohlfurterstrasse, a short walk from Kottbusser Tor station). These outside venues provide a nice change of pace from the larger ones, particularly Oranienstrasse, where the sheer amount of film makes for a rather relentless viewing experience, especially for those of us only here for a short amount of time.
Along a quiet, unassuming road and up a narrow set of stairs to the top floor of a smallish apartment block, the undiscerning viewer is greeted with little more than a normal, if sparsely furnished flat: an empty bathroom save for a washing machine and floor-to-ceiling white tiling with delicate red, stringy doodles; a seemingly fully furnished kitchen and a study with a large table bearing a letter written in french, and what looked like architectural plans and various other assorted documents. An inkjet print photo stuck on a nearby computer monitor and the neat layout of the documents gives the game away, bringing to mind Simon Fujiwara’s Desk Job (2009) at the Danish Pavilion in Venice last year. Like Fujiwara’s work, these objects are quite clearly related to the artist’s own family history but whilst the context of Fujiwara’s work outs its fantasy status and historical embellishment in the setting of a fictional curator’s modernist apartment, here, the installation of these works in the artist’s own (real!) home on a normal, unassuming street in Kreuzberg takes the conceit to its end point, camouflaging the works amid the debris of Vo’s everyday life.
Up the road and through the bazaar of Turkish kebab houses behind the Kottbuser Tor station to a deserted shop, dark except for a huge LCD screen and a motley assortment of chairs, we find the grimy, grubby sight of Kingsland Road in Dalston, East London in the 1970s in John Smith’s marvellous The Girl Chewing Gum (1976). (I saw this film for the first time at the RCA Curating MFA degree show and was glad to see it again.) Over documentary-style footage of this unremarkable street we hear the artist in the London accent, oh so particular to the Get Carter era, barking out stage directions to pedestrians, cars, pigeons and even buildings, who pleasingly, and quite unknowingly, obey his every command. The ruse is as simple as it is funny.
From one funny chap to another, this time the equally overlooked and even more prolific filmmaker, George Kuchar who has apparently made more than 200 films. I first heard of him when mentioned by Vincent Fecteau in his interview with Bruce Hainley published in our April issue, but this was the first time I had seen any of his films other than a few clips on YouTube. A selection of 15 of his films, chosen by the film curator, Marc Siegel, show diaristic accounts of Kuchar’s day-to-day activity; watching TV taking his aging mother out in her wheelchair, visiting friends on their ranch, his ‘filmscapes’ as he calls them – plotless, themed accounts featuring himself as actor, narrator, director and editor – demonstrate an instinctively sharp eye for editing images that mirror the passage of movement through the narrative highs and lows of day-to-day life as well as a great taste in music that soundtracks the feeling of Americana in his films. These gifts, coupled with his brassy Bronx accent and acerbic wit make for strangely compelling viewing of what is a rare glimpse back into an overlooked body of work.
Around the corner from this trove of American pastoral is the installation by Cameron Jamie, another American artist who is probably best known for documenting the peculiarities of American subcultures in films such as BB (2000) and Spook House (2002). Ushered into a pitch black room in small groups with one of your group given a lantern to hold, through the murk you make out a circle of head-height glazed clay sculptures. Painted in a variety of brilliant colours but hard to make out in the gloom, they look like pebble towers you see outside Buddhist temples and hint at the interest with ritual that runs through his work. In an adjoining back room hang a collection of equally colourful, ghoulishly styled ceramics masks. I suppose the hushed silence of the darkened room, the performative aspect of being led by perhaps someone you have only just met around these objects, the play of colour, light and shadows is meant to create a retreat away from the ‘real’ of the rows of beaten up cars outside the warehouse and the car-repairs workshops but the experience feels like bad immersive theatre – forced, mawkish and dumb.
A disappointing end to an otherwise good day of thoughtful, nuanced work – a refreshing change to some of the didactic fare offered in the main sites.
Back out into the brilliant sunshine that Berlin has enjoyed for the last week and the cheering thought of yet more Kuchar films to discover, as well as a rather dauntingly long list of openings this evening. A round-up of the highlights from these to follow in tomorrow’s blog…
For the second instalment of our rolling coverage of the 6th Berlin Biennial , I took a look at the work exhibited at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Mitte, north of the larger Oranienplatz venue (covered yesterday by Jörg Heiser).
Featuring the work of just seven artists, KW feels strangely empty rather than spacious. (Quite literally so in the case of one floor, which has been left empty and painted a dazzling white – though starting to get a bit grubby with footprints – as a curatorial ‘gesture’.) The usual entrance to the galleries is blocked off, and viewers have to enter through the basement, from which they emerge in the large ground-floor gallery to find the work of Petrit Halilaj, the youngest artist exhibiting in the show. An impressive wooden structure fills the gallery – the wooden lagging used by the artist to build a house for himself and his family in Prishtina, fixed together here to give a schematic impression of a dwelling. Scattered across the floor is dirt and a few broken, sorry-looking breezeblocks. Amongst these wander hens, who seem mostly unfazed by the gallery visitors, occasionally cooing or giving a loud squawk. Just upstairs from this are more works by Halilaj, who has, by far the lion’s share of the venue space: we see delicate drawings, a sculpture of a giant nest in which lies a beautiful vitrine (a bizarre juxtaposition that makes me think of what James Lee Byars work might look like if it came into the possession of Bigfoot), and a number of other sculptures constructed from lowly detritus or found materials.
Petrit Halilaj, The places I’m looking for, my dear, are utopian places, they are boring and I don’t know how to make them real, 2010
Halilaj’s work promises a contrast at KW from the rather heavy politics that could be found at Oranienplatz, yet this is not to be, as the title of one of his works (actually, my favourite title from the biennial so far) suggests: They Are Lucky to be Bourgeois Hens (2009). With each floor of the venue comes work that steps closer and closer back to the tone set over at Oranienplatz and the works shown there concerned with, say, protest, the Middle East crisis or the plight of immigrants in Europe; works which, in places, seem to actually fetishize the marginalized in society rather than represent them – falling into a category of artwork that can be found at biennials the world over, a kind of soft left political art that could be described as a kind of ‘failed journalism’ (a term I’ve borrowed here from an observation made by the artist Josephine Pryde in an interview from 2004).
Shannon Ebner, Distressed Holy, 2007
Works by Ion Grigorescu (a photograph, psychoanalytic diaries about sleep and a video depicting a naked man trying to sleep in an anonymous room), Olga Chernysheva (whose drawings ‘Russian Museum’, 2003, meld the faces of people looking at paintings depicting Russian peasant life with the compositions themselves) and Shannon Ebner shared the same gallery space upstairs from Halilaj, and thankfully avoided the ‘failed journalism’ trap. Grigorescu’s and Chernysheva’s works have a certain political charge to them – the vulnerability of the body, or the economic or class structures hinted at in Chernysheva’s drawings – but the personal and subjective touch of both artists kept the work just about on the right side of subtle. Chernysheva’s small group of drawings looked like a measly selection next to the large number of works by Ebner. A treat to see, these range from photographs such as Ampersand (2009) and Erratum cum Laude (2009) to the film Between Words Pause (2010) and wallpaper declaring a ‘Wallpaper Bankruptcy Sale’ (_Wallpaper Bankruptcy Sale [For E.M.]_, 2010): a dance between language, landscape and photography. Also on the same floor is Frozen War (2001), a video by John Smith, whose outstanding early work, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), is being shown over on Dresdener Strasse. Frozen War is far more diaristic and less artfully constructed than The Girl Chewing Gum ; it simply depicts a television in a hotel room that Smith is staying in. The news is on, and it is the day after bombing began in Afghanistan: oddly, the picture is frozen at 1:41am on a talking head giving, presumably, their opinion on the then new conflict. It shares with all Smith’s work a droll and deadpan humour, whilst managing to also convey the anxiety of an individual whose government has just declared war on another country. At the end of the video, Smith turns his camera on one of those stool-like bits of furniture found in hotel rooms for resting suitcases on top: ‘What a fucking useless bit of furniture…’ he states – a nice bit of bathos deflating the pathos of his war worries. What with the recent solo retrospective of his work curated by graduating students on the Royal College of Art’s curating course, it’s great to see Smith finally getting the recognition he deserves.
At the top of the KW building were photographs by Mohamed Bourouissa and a twin-screen video by Mark Boulos. Bourouissa’s series ‘Périphéries’ (2005–9) is set amongst the (presumably Parisian) banlieues, mixing documentary methods and highly staged narratives with the area’s mainly black and Middle Eastern local inhabitants. In La République, for instance, he restaged Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). His ideas have a certain appeal, but to my eyes they are undermined by the execution: the rather ‘soft’ quality of the printing, and non-altogether engaging framing and composition. I feel they could do with being far punchier – they look somewhat tentative. Boulos’ film, All that is Solid Melts into Air (2008, pictured at the top of this post), features one screen depicting traders on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the other a rather disturbing trip the artist took up the Niger Delta to visit members of the Movement for the Empancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), a guerilla group who are protesting against the oil drilling that has polluted their fishing grounds. In this juxtaposition of two groups with wildly different perspectives on the use and trade of crude oil, it has a certain topical currency given the deep water BP have found themselves in with the Deepwater spill, though it’s not exactly subtle. Whether or not that bluntness is a positive or a negative, I’m undecided – the inequalities of the world, after all, aren’t exactly subtle themselves – but it’s interesting to compare Boulos’ film with that of Renzo Martens over at Oranienplatz. I’ve written at length on Martens’ film here, so I won’t go over that territory again, suffice to say that on balance I prefer Boulos’ approach.
This is the first of several posts about Berlin Biennale 6, entitled ‘what is waiting out there’ and curated by Kathrin Romberg. It opened Wednesday as a Kreuzberg event. (I’ve heard people say good things about the The Kunst-Werke leg of the biennial, in Mitte, but I’ll have to leave that to my colleagues, and Thursday.) The press conference took place at the Anatolian Alevi Cultural Centre in Kreuzberg. The backdrop of the panel featured a huge portrait of Ali Ibn Abu Talib, with huge romantic eyes, matched only by the huge romantic eyes of his Lion (there was also his signature double-tongued sword). So like Shiites the Alevi (a minority of about 30 million mostly in Turkey) consider Ali, Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, the first Imam; but they don’t follow the Shiite understanding of Sharia. Also, like in Sufism, there is an emphasis on song and dance as religious experience, and women and men take part in religious gatherings together, as they are considered equal. All in all a carefully and smartly chosen location for the opening of this Biennale. As this time, a good part of it takes place in the heart of Kreuzberg, at and around Oranienplatz, and Mehringdamm, districts with a substantial Turkish community.
this is what the Alevi Centre looks like normally, from the website of theBerlin Alevi
Nevertheless none of the panelists really spoke about this context very much; which is fine I guess, the context to some extent at least speaks for itself. State Cultural Minister Naumann emphasized that in recent state spending cuts, he managed to exempt his department (which is only cold comfort for the unemployed and families who have to take the major blows of the 80 billion Euro cuts, while high income taxes remain untouched). Thus the German Federal Cultural Foundation, represented by its artistic director Hortensia Völckers, also got away with no cuts; it provides the lion’s share of 2,5 million to the 3 million budget of the Berlin Biennial, and will do so for the next one as well. Naumann, a conservative, argued against cuts in spending on culture, in general: because while only 1,9 % of expenses of municipalities are actually in culture, and therefore cuts would not be very effective financially, they would be devastating in their effects; culture was, as he put it, not the cream on, but the yeast in the societal dough (maybe Naumann’s ghostwriter had too much yeast in his beer though the night when he jotted down that allegory). But anyway, it’s a relief to hear this kind of arguing after having experienced, two weeks earlier, the right-wing Cultural Minister of Italy opening Rome’s MAXXI-museum with unmistakable stabs at the supposed leftist hegemony in culture.
Adolf Menzel’s foot
With this biennial, you get the oldest artists with Adolf Menzel, born 1815, to whom an exhibition curated by Michael Fried is devoted at Old National Gallery. Fried (like Naumann with an impressive sun tan) gave a short speech in which he stressed that it was Rhomberg’s idea to highlight Menzel in the BB6, with a ‘modest, but I think very powerful exhibition’ of this great 19th century master of Realism, whom he ranked up there with his more famous French contemporaries, and as ‘one of the greatest draftsmen in art history, period’.
The youngest artist is Petrit Halilai, born 1986; he created an installation at Kunst-Werke involving the wooden lagging of the new house he is building with his family in Kosovo’s capital of Prishtina. In-between, the list of 46 artists features some well-known, and quite a few widely unknown names, including a substantial number of artists from Eastern Europe. As Rhomberg put it, her curatorial approach was characterized by a ‘political decision of reduction and concentration’, against ‘over-production and the overwhelming.’ The title ‘what is waiting out there’ refers to art’s conflicted relationship to the social realities; she emphasized that her biennial was not so much about documentary approaches though but about ‘Aneignungen’, appropriations or productions of reality.
As Hortensia Völckers had put it at the press conference, this time there is little of the ‘GDR-patina’ that was characteristic for some of the earlier Berlin Biennial installments. Instead you get a bit of Kreuzberg community charm, with the inevitable side-effect of the gentrification spectre looming over the wonderful building that Rhomberg found on Oranienplatz, a former department store that for a long time had been used as a community centre for Islamic wedding parties etc. So next stop Oranienplatz, close to where Kippenberger once had his famous Büro in the late 1970s. Swiss, Vienna-based artist Marcus Geiger, with Rhomberg, co-developed the exhibition display, and it is indebted to a minimalist concept of beauty as being the congenial combination of simple, effective and cheap: unpainted plywood walls in a raw loft space, using used old used carpets etc. Generally, the aesthetic economy of that venue is defined by a kind of task force of minimalist art makers including Geiger (who also had a work there, a carpet that read in huge letters ‘Kommune’, commune, with the ‘N’ inverted), the young ex-Willem-de-Roij student Vincent Vulsma, who exhibits ready-made gallery walls with prefab canvasses, still wrapped in shrink-film, which he paints black, then superimposes thin stripes of white, thus producing a trompe l’oeil drapery effect. Plus there is the current master of no-budget minimalist deadpan, Gedy Sibony, intervening with his usual faint shadows of what a ‘wall’ or a ‘canvas’ or an ‘object’ is. German artist Adrian Lohmüller added a system of thin copper tubes to the building, collecting condensation water, which he heats up on the first floor with a small camping burner, the water dripping onto a cube of salt, in turn dripping onto a white bed set of linen and cushions placed on the floor.
These regulatory minimalist interventions – by Geiger, Vulsma, Sibony, and Lohmüller – are complemented by a set of highly emotionally charged (semi-)political videos: for example Avi Mograbi’s Details (2004), involving heated encounters with Israeli military forces at border stations, shown next to Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir’s Beyond Guilt # 1 (2003), a gonzo video of the artists instigating heated sexual encounters in Tel Aviv bar toilets (I don’t have a problem with these videos being not newly produced for the Biennial, though I find the juxtaposition suggesting the psychosexual levels of the military complex a bit heavy-handed). Or Minerva Cuerva’s Dissidence version 2.0 (2010), which documents demonstrations of all sorts of mainstream and obscure political organizations in Mexico City, to the (unnervingly unsatisfying) soundtrack provided by contemporary composer Pablo Salazar. There is several video works about demonstrations; as if these would somehow summon the vital spirit of resistance.
But there is also Friedl vom Göller (Kubelka), an Austrian performative minimalist filmmaker since many years, present with a black and white 16mm silent film of 2008 that looks like it could be from the early 1970s. It shows a man portrayed in a small Paris alley, with the artist stepping up to him and performing a small, but slightly taboo-breaking gesture that tackles aging and embarrassment and fear of death, and that I won’t give away here; it’s touching and somehow disarming both for the viewer as for the man. (Here’s the moment just before:)
There are also more stubbornly simple interventions such as Sebastian Stumpf’s video, which involves him carrying out, over and over, a simple action upon numerous garage doors closing:
I still need to make sense for myself of Renzo Martens’ 90 minute film Episode III (2008), of which I managed to see a good part (though not all of it), and a shorter version of which had already been included in last Manifesta. It involves an Erik-van-Lieshout-type guerilla intervention for which Martens went to Congo and looked into the way Western photographers produce images of poverty. All of that granted, the problem is that handsome-looking Martens keeps posing in a kind of dandy ‘Heart of Darkness’ posture (including the inevitable straw hat and the romantic visions of nature) that he incessantly repeats throughout the piece; the difficult burden of having to watch an underfed child that will soon die on film is screamingly overblown by Martens’ own unnerving presence as a supposedly ‘self-conscious’, but ultimately self-indulging-seeming ‘producer of reality’. Which makes him look weak next to Eric van Lieshout, who in his guerilla works insults everyone including himself; and to Alfredo Jaar, and his carefully calibrated work The Sound of Silence (2006), about the infamous 1993 photograph of a dying Sudanese child in the presence of a hungry vulture, the photographer of which committed suicide years later (just to make that clear, neither Lieshout nor Jaar are in this show).
image: piece by Pleurad Xhafa and Sokol Peci, a head sculpture of Milton Friedman (the economist and saint of the neo-liberals), made on a train from Italy to Albania, crossing several borders, documented on 5 TV monitors
Phil Collins’ film Marxism Today (Prologue) (2010) put an interesting twist on the story of three ladies who had formerly trained and taught as Marxist-Leninist economists during GDR times, and had to witness the devaluation of their knowledge in post-‘89 times. The work is moving in a ‘conventional’ history documentary way, but it also accomplishes a Collins-typical twist on the material in that it uses archival footage of 1970s GDR educational TV, making accessible the twisted understandings of what ‘education’ would mean in a society where you could feel free as long as you didn’t dissent; something that Collins makes apparent by fading out the blabla of the educators, blending in the lush soundtrack provided by Latitia Sadier and Tim Gane of Stereolab, producing a strangely contradictory effect of detachment and feeling touched.
_image from the installation of Mohamed Bourouissa, who traded mobile phone images and videos with a prison inmate, i.e. vistas of Paris or the countryside against
boring views of the prisoner’s feet lying on his bed. The images are quite foreseeable, but the gesture is still interesting._
All in all this major venue of this major venue of the Binneale, on Oranienplatz 17, provided a logic of the raw and the cooked: the raw minimalism rubbing shoulders with the ‘cooked up’ gestures of performative political intervention tracked on video. I liked the idea, despite the misses amongst the hits, that tackling ‘reality’ would have to involve some conceptual-performative effort or ‘incentive’ on the part of the artist, not just the easy role of the sovereign onlooker. What was missing, in parts though, was an understanding of three-dimensionality, an architectural or sculptural presence of things, beyond the flat gestures of walls and video projections. But maybe this is more highlighted in the other venues.
Good to finally see, around the corner on Dresdner Straße 19, the deadpan funny piece by John Smith, a black and white film of 1976 projected in an empty and darkened shop: it just involves a soundtrack of Smith directing, with the puffed-up voice of an ironic schoolmaster, the ordinary goings-on on a London street, i.e. saying “I want the two girls talking to each other entering from right” and then of course exactly that happens; or the lorry stopping and starting according to what he says etc. We, directors of our reality – how uncannily apt to the age of digital social media. If John Smith had done the same piece today, it could well have been a viral hit on youtube.
Oh, Rome. Such great buildings (the Pantheon – its cupola with the oculus open to the sky, its perfect proportions, the footsore tourists happy for a rest on its benches!).
And great gelato (check the dark chocolate sorbet at Gelateria dei Gracchi, Via dei Gracchi 272 and Viale Regina Margherita 212), and a contemporary art scene putting on a real show and effort on the occasion of last weekend’s opening to the public of the first Italian state museum for contemporary art and architecture, the MAXXI (the acronym stands for Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, National Museum of 21st century Art): tonnes of shows in institutions, private foundations and galleries, plus an art fair, plus another museum, the MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma) opening a new wing. Oh, Rome – but then, of course, the dire politics and a less than happy encounter between contemporary art and architecture.
At the press conference on the occasion of the first exhibitions opening in architect Zaha Hadid’s ambitiously torn and twisted, fair-faced concrete structure (some call it silver boa, some fettucini), the Italian Minister of Culture Sandro Bondi stated that the institution’s completion was a merit of Berlusconi. The statement prompted spontaneous boos and hisses from the mostly Italian journalists, as the right-wing government is in fact known for its hostility towards contemporary art and architecture, suspected to be strongholds of the liberal left. Bondi qualified his remark a few sentences later by saying that of course previous governments had their merits in this too. Hadid sat next to him, patiently, with a ring as big as a knuckle-duster, and a dramatic dress with a standing black collar worthy of an opera star who has seen buffos come and go. (Hadid had to deal with no less than six different Ministers of Culture during the eleven years it took to finish the 150 million Euro building which was initially planned to open in 2005.)
The day after, rumour had it that directly after the press conference Sandro Bondi, enraged by his statement having met with unanimously seeming disapproval, told the president of the museum foundation, Pio Baldi, something along the lines of ‘forget about the money!’, i.e. that the first Italian state museum for contemporary art and architecture would get little further support by the current government. A rumour that sounds believable given that this is the same Cultural Minister who two years ago unabashedly stated that for him contemporary art in general was something he didn’t understand and could see no beauty in; and who recently cancelled his visit to the Cannes Film Festival because of a Berlusconi-critical Italian film being screened there (Draquila – Italy shakes, a satirical documentary by filmmaker, actress and comedian Sabina Guzzanti on Berlusconi’s response to last year’s earthquake in Aquila ). Also, the museum new curator at large, Carlos Basualdo, appointed less than a month ago, when it comes to acquisitions to the museum’s collection, will have to deal with none other than Vittorio Sgarbi – the notorious media figure, politician, and ‘art critic’ who for a while authenticated paintings on a shopping channel, has always readily expressed his disdain for Arte Povera, and who has recently been appointed ‘personal advisor’ to the Cultural Minister in regard to state acquisition of art works, including MAXXI’s (he will also be curator of the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2011).
I wish I could report that Hadid’s building would have served to bolster the standing of contemporary art against this phalanx of hostile political figures. But walking up the huge suspended black staircases dominating the vast entrance hall, the impression is that of a corporate headquarter or designer hotel lobby, when even a huge 1985 painting of a beek-nosed red devil by Roman mystic conceptualist Gino de Dominicis (1947–98, declared antetype of Maurizio Cattelan)
suddenly becomes the decoration above the banister (that’s the crucial difference to the Guggenheim in New York, where the upward-leading spiral is seamlessly integrated into the wall and thus simultaneously a gallery); it get’s even worse with smaller works displayed in huge wall-mounted vitrines.
Ironically, the great early work of De Dominicis – including his seminal 1971 video Attempt to Fly, involving the elegant but hapless jump down a slope with flapping arms, or a photo documenting his attempt to cause square ripples with a stone thrown into a lake – is displayed in a conventional white cube, part of an older casern building that Hadid integrated into the front façade. Up on the tilted top floor however, the exhibition continues with De Dominicis’ hit and miss late, largely painterly work, crammed into a labyrinth of walls hastily built for the exhibition, making you feel like you’re visiting an art fair on a sinking ship.
The disadvantages of the building in regard to display are perpetuated by unfortunate curatorial decisions in the collection, which includes some 300 works by a slightly random-seeming selection of international and Italian artists of the last 40 years or so. Two large Thomas Ruff photos are positioned directly across from an elevator, and a wall work by Lawrence Weiner, combined with a huge tapestry work by William Kentridge, awkwardly sits at the end of a bended dead end hall dominated by a huge pedestrian ramp leading downstairs, into a glass-fronted corridor that finally, truly makes you feel you’re in an airport, walking towards your gate. Again, ironically, the one part that works ok is a long stretch – with works by Gerhard Richter, Tony Ousler or the Kabakovs – that is almost white cube-ish.
Over at MACRO, the municipal Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, French architect Odile Decq designed a new wing. Previously, she has been praised for her yacht designs, and unfortunately, she applied some maritime themes to this art space, tucked between existing neighbouring buildings: a huge red bulbous ship of an auditorium sits in the middle of her structure, producing a lot of junk space all around it. On the first floor there are footbridges leading around the red ship, and another footbridge leads into and along the one major exhibition hall she added to the existing ones in the old part of the museum. Looking down at three huge exhibits (a Jannis Kounellis set of sails, a Subodh Ghupta pile of steel kitchenware, and a gigantic Mario Schifano canvas) from that footbridge, I couldn’t help but be reminded of similar footbridges leading through safari park jungles, with the art works turned into wild animals. In the old part of the building, there was a set of no less than six artists’ solo shows, all by men.
I liked Jorge Peris’ strangely idiosyncratic space of on-site salt stalactite formations, and aquariums filled with plankton; and there was an interesting documentary exhibition devoted to Graziella Lonardi Buontempo, a collector and prime mover of the early 1970s Roman art scene (she co-masterminded two seminal exhibitions, “The Vitality of the Negative in Art” and “Contemporanea”).
A reminder of a bygone era where new things seemed possible even in the Eternal City of the emperors and popes. Zaha Hadid and Odile Decq are arguably the first women ever to have built noteworthy public buildings in Rome – at a time when for Berlusconi, the only way women can come to a position of power is if they are former showgirls of one of his TV channels, appointed to his Cabinet. Disregardingly both Hadid and Decq’s structures are part of a larger problem of contemporary architecture around the world: often it threatens to reduce a building’s supposed function – in this case, the display of art for visitors’ engagement and contemplation – to a mere side-aspect of its seemingly actual function to provide visible landmarks for economical urban development statements, and photo opportunities for gala events, in the vein of a boom era that is now over. The MAXXI makes this apparent in that Hadid put the biggest emphasis on the building’s lobby, and it’s bird’s eye view (in fact it seems designed for a bird’s eye view).
Given this background, the inaugural presentation of the MAXXI (and the new MACRO wing) confront the Italian contemporary art scene with a difficult burden: in the face of right-wing flack against contemporary art (and contemporary architecture) in toto, they have to embrace it, help to make it develop well despite the difficulties, like a beloved but ill-bred child. For if they don’t, the MAXXI will be the paradigm for future politicians to turn down public engagement with other institutions or developments, saying ‘see, it didn’t work with the MAXXI, why should it work in this case’.
In some way the scene is thrown back to what it is familiar with in Italy’s art centre Milan: the good things are more or less thanks to private initiative. Two private foundations, Fondazione Giuliani, and Nomas Foundation. I failed to make the fairly long trip to Nomas, which is quite a bit north of the city centre, but I have heard good things about performance projects involving Ryan Gander and Tris Vonna-Michell, and last year’s exhibition by Rossella Biscotti, for which she transplanted the abandoned, isolated larger-than-life bronze heads of fascist monuments into the modest space (_The Heads in Question_, 2009), a succinct gesture at a time when Silvio Berlusconi, only last week, compared his political decision-making to Mussolini’s. At Fondazione Giuliani, there was a group show with a sculptural emphasis, with a greatly stubborn piece blocking a doorway by Manfred Pernice, and another well-working piece by aforementioned Jorge Peris (a ceiling coming down at you once you enter the space, blocked only by a ladder standing around).
A group show entitled Things You Never Saw, comprised of works from five private collections highlighted the range of good work that resides in Italy, though the sloppy instalment between makeshift walls in an otherwise spectactular former hospital hall near St. Peters Cathedral made it hard to fully appreciate it. A piece by Jimmy Durham was impressive nevertheless: an Ikea-style office, with sofa and copier etc., covered in thrown cement (we all know the feeling). It’s from the collection of Maurizio Morra Greco (full disclosure: in 2008 I curated a show at Morra Greco’s foundation in Naples), who showed me around and explained the backgrounds of the different collectors, one of whom, Annibale Berlingieri, is a Marchese in his eighties, whose father once urged him to do something useful, so he became a collector. As one might suspect, the father wasn’t too excited about the weird art the son bought; but maybe he would have been relieved to learn that eventually one of the works, Eight Elvis by Warhol, of 1963, was sold for 100 Million Dollars last year (no big Warhol’s here, but still a nice Lucio Fontana for example).
Another highlight was the small, but concise Philip Guston show at Museo Carlo Bilotti (another collector foundation, initially private, however now under the municipality of Rome). It consisted of a cycle of works that Guston did on a hiatus at the American Academy in Rome, 1970–71, after his show of figurative work at Marlborough Gallery New York had met with abrasive derision, turning him into the official traitor of abstract expressionism. In Rome, his new language of simplified comic stumps and hoods and shoe soles collided productively with the Roman stumps of columns and former glory. One painting is a homage to his Italian painter heroes (de Chirico, Titian etc.), simply stating their name next to a white canvas on an easel, and a switched-on light bulb – a true comic style rebus with a deadpan denouement.
Another interesting show is on at the Istituto Svizzero, or Swiss Institute, co-curated by Kunsthalle Basel’s Adam Szyzmcyk and the Institute’s Salvatore Lacagnina (formerly director of Galleria Montevergini in Syracuse, Sicily). It’s inspired by Malcolm Lowry’s short story ‘Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession’, in turn inspired by a visit to the Keats-Shelley-House in Rome (the show extends to it, as well as to a neighbouring Franciscan cloister, an antiquarian bookshop, and the Non-Catholic Cemetery of Rome, where Keats and Shelley buried). I especially liked the Duchamp-reappropriations by conceptual veteran Franco Vacari; and Ross Birrell’s and David Harding’s twin video installation of two Cubans singing Guantanamera – one by José Andres Ramirez from Guantanamo, the other by exiled by Rennes Barrios from Miami; the song’s national hero José Marti is claimed both by pro-Costra and exiled Cubans alike. Finally I want to shortly mention Nathaniel Mellor’s show at gallery Monitor, which brought his short film The Seven Ages of Britain Teaser to Rome (Mellors presented it in one room, and the animatronic rubber face starring in it, lying helplessly on the floor, in another). Produced for the BBC it features the ‘Seven Ages of Britain’ history show’s presenter David Dimbleby voicing a mask made from his own face, which is the protagonist of a strangely absurd post-Monty Python moment involving ancient gladiators and current special effects, letting dumbness collide with sophistry. Which, thinking of buffo figures like Bondi and Sgarbi, makes the work all the more appropriate to be shown in Rome these days.
PS: some more links –
Caravaggio, on until 13 June (terrible exhibition architecture, terrible wall texts, terribly crowded, but of course still worth the visit, bringing together authentic Caravaggios from around the world)
VEDO COSE CHE NON CI SONO, curated by Sebastian Cichocki, at the Istituto Polacco, feat. work by Wojciech Bakowski, Tania Bruguera, Oskar Dawicki, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Sanja Ivekovic, Deimantas Narkevicius, Agnieszka Polska, Katerina Seda, and Piotr Uklanski
A show about Michigan 1970s band/artist collective Destroy All Monsters (which featured Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw), presented by the DEPART Foundation and Rome-based NERO Magazine at the American Academy in Rome.
Nice new small hotel where I staid – if you like a nice chat with the owner (she’s very nice and put fresh flowers in the rooms).
Great unconventional food at Pastificio San Lorenzo (thank’s Mario Codognato for pointing us there)
great conventional food at that Hosteria, corner of Via Giovanni Battista de Rossi, and Largo 21 Aprile, near the Villa Massimo (thank’s Heidi Specker for taking us there).
