I went to Rome for a flying visit last week, for the opening of Doug Aitken’s new film installation and performance Frontier (curated by Francesco Bonami, it’s the third commission for Enel Contemporanea). I hadn’t been to the city in years, though, when I was about 20, I lived there for a while and loved it. Even so, I had forgotten precisely how weary and magnificent it is – the very air seems varnished. I went for a walk and kept getting lost; I thought I knew my way around, but was constantly disoriented. Birds (swifts? swallows? bats?) were flinging themselves across the twilight blue of the sky in the kind of intricate choreographed formations Busby Berkley might have liked; infinite Baroque churches were lit up by the fading gold-tipped rays of the sun, every side street promised a journey towards a piazza of absurd, melancholic beauty and the sound of the gridlocked traffic was deafening (why do people toot their horns when no-one can move?). How can a city look this good, be this fascinating, and still, despite its chaos, function with such boundless charm? Hackney it ain’t. (But at least we don’t have that dangerous clown Silvio Berlusconi running the show; Italians seem to both deplore and reward his ludicrous shenanigans in equal measure.)
Doug’s piece was the perfect complement to my struggling memory. Staged on the tip of an island in the middle of the Tiber after the sun went down, the immersive experience that is Frontier takes place in a roofless, minimalist structure, interrupted by small, glowing windows, within which a frieze of filmed scenes shot in Rome, Los Angeles, Israel and South Africa (although you’d be hard-pressed to know which was which) drift across multiple screens. The film follows (if that’s the word for such a meandering, enigmatic journey) a Hollywood-handsome Ed Rusha wandering through urban wastelands and modern-day ruins, sitting in a cinema, looking up at buildings, gazing out on a prairie or being absorbed in the shadows formed by a tree. He appears both wholly absorbed in his own thoughts, and aware of everything going on around him which he observes with the inscrutable gaze of a modern day, west coast Buddha; it’s hard to imagine he was directed. Various characters wander in and out of shot: a couple sleeping, a man reading a book, people strolling across a soulless square; at one point a cowboy emerges from an inky, misty gloom to crack his whip and the image dissolves suddenly to focus on a house of cards tumbling into darkness which, in turn, dissolves into an ominous scene of young men running wildly, as if scattering after a crime, through mist. Despite these occasional intimations of violence or unrest, the overall mood is one of intense, often languid, concentration; no one talks – how could they, absorbed as they are in such an environment?
Gorgeous swathes of intense colour wash across the screen: deep red material appears to billow; the mid-west sky is stained a perfect, faded denim-blue; the inky patterns of book type explode in close-up after an image of a man reading. The soundtrack adds to the sense of vague, disjunctive hallucination; it’s an impressionistic sound collage, comprising repeated snatches of the piano, drums and horns from a Billie Holiday track; water dripping and wind blowing; machines; the whirring of film running through a projector; footsteps and tap-dancing; the strains of music from the Middle East; and ominous repeated chords and tones that increase and decrease in urgency. When I saw it, the film was accompanied by live performances that included young men whip-cracking, tap dancing and playing instruments, and a woman, as imperious as a statue, standing in the middle of the ‘Coliseum’ calling what sounded like a sort of operatic cattle auction. To say any of this seemed incongruous in Rome is beside the point; this is a city familiar with the vagaries of invasion. The film ends where it began; with Ruscha sitting in a cinema, observing images flickering on a screen.
If Frontier is about one thing – although reducing this complex work to a simple idea is a little like trying to hum Wagner – I’d say it’s about the panoramic vagaries of memory and the minutiae of the details that created the way we think of the past; after all, for a memory to be made, and before the inevitable distortions that time heaps upon it, it first has to be lived and living is a visceral, as well as a mental activity (we sometimes have to be reminded of this). An undercurrent of Frontier tugs at some deceptively simple questions: at what point do fiction and documentary merge? At what moment do we begin to create fictions of our own lives? When do frontiers become absorbed into the very areas they’re demarcating?
We live through time and all we’re left with is impressions and objects. Neither are flimsy or – weirdly despite the absence of the moments, the people, the emotions that created them in the first place – ever fleeting. Doug once said in an interview he did with Ed Ruscha that we ran in frieze that ‘not being concerned with time is the most difficult thing that were confronted with.’ I second that emotion.
As the art world has grown it has sprouted many cumbersome appendages. One of these awkward outcroppings is the hiring of public relations companies to promote biennials, museum exhibitions and other events. At best this promotional structure, which often inexplicably bypasses the institution’s own PR department, means that journalists are given more information and access to the organizers and artists in the event. At worst it gives rise to a proliferation of a kind of institutional propaganda – this can be as hands-off as a thick press kit or as full-on as a booked schedule of interviews with curators and speeches by museum directors. In any case, it’s how I found myself in the official apartment of the president of the Centre Pompidou, listening to an amplified speech next to a mountainous dish of shrimp and duck liver.
I should provide a disclaimer here to make it clear that this is no fault of the PR company involved – they did their jobs professionally and went above and beyond fulfilling the wishes of their client. But the biggest loss in an arrangement like this is that the PR company is called upon to do the interpretive job of a curator or a museum department that hasn’t done theirs. A 50-page press pack, no matter how lovingly prepared, can’t serve to explain a curator’s chaotic and malformed idea of an exhibition.
Such was the case at the opening of the Centre Pompidou’s ‘Nouveau Festival’ – a five-week festival billed as a ‘non-stop research lab into today’s creation’, including exhibitions, conferences, screenings and performances, with up to ten events per day by more than 160 participants. Last week’s opening in the ground-floor spaces of the Centre Pompidou proved to be a literal manifestation of this overweeningly ambitious project, a chaotic admixture of unrelated events that no press person could make sense of, no matter how dedicated.
I’ll admit that the initial confusion began with my inability to speak French, combined with a schedule for the opening night’s events that was printed only in French. I kept looking and re-looking at it, trying to solve it like a maths problem. Starting times and artists’ names were listed in bold, but no matter how many times I read it I saw nothing that prompted any sense of recognition. Just the jumble of information on this single sheet of paper conveyed the sense of an event that had been drastically over-planned. A ‘new festival showcasing today’s creation in all its shape and colours’ may have sounded promising in press releases, but it quickly became clear that not much consideration had been given to how all these shapes and colours would function together in time and space.
Feeling disoriented, I followed the escalator up to Galerie Sud, which houses the permanent installations of the festival, each demarcated by black curtains that could be opened or closed around them. I was looking at things that seemed to suggest art, that even reminded me of art – a metal cage housing paintings on racks, a platform surrounded by scaffolding from which you could look down on the space, a square of carpet with a laptop in the middle and headphones radiating from it – I even recognized Carsten Höller’s well-lit Mirror Carousel (2005), but none of it was gelling into something I would call an exhibition. Is it possible to have a festival of static art works? Is that nouveau?
I wandered aimlessly for the first half an hour, riding up and down the escalator a few times, checking the time on my phone against the printed schedule, but still not encountering anything recognizable as ‘performance’, until I entered Espace 315. Here was an empty stage with a wooden backdrop, topped by an enormous theatrical mask with an exaggeratedly bulbous nose. I made my way to the back side of the stage, which was actually a wooden cube lined with blue curtains, somewhat like a large coffin, and adorned with stumps covered in gold. Inside, a group of four performers from La Compagnie du Zerep – two men and two women dressed in outfits fit for a dinner party, were constructing a series of short, 20-second tableaux vivants in the space. They struck pose after pose, with deadpan expressions, using the props around them, which included a dish of cookies, a dead alligator, and something that looked like an oversized bicycle horn. The actors were perfect parodies of characters from French films about middle-aged bourgeois couples in Paris: the men played macho while the women played frustrated housewives. One picked something from her teeth while the other held her stomach as if she’d just eaten too much; In each successive tableau the man checks his breath, his hair piece falls off, he buries his face up her skirt. More than anything the performance was an act of stamina and invention as they improvised each new pose, barely breaking their straight faces while the audience laughed hysterically.
But the mood was disturbed shortly afterward as a procession filed through the crowd to the other side of the stage. This turned out to be an orchestra of about 20 accordion players, Les Accordéons de Paris. There are, I realize now, many different types of accordions. And many different types of accordion players. They each donned black Zorro masks, and proceeded to play theme songs from 1980s television shows and other standards for contemporary accordion. Meanwhile the giant plaster nose on top of the stage set hovered over their heads.
And with that, I’d apparently seen all the performances on the schedule for the evening, excluding the ones I couldn’t find and the ones I’d already seen that were scheduled to repeat throughout the night. I wandered around a bit more. The theatre troupe was booked to perform for another four hours, and I wondered how they’d keep that up. They seemed really delirious and sweaty. Outside the gallery I took a seat on a tiger-striped bench beside a live lizard in a terrarium. I felt confused. Maybe I was misled by the original press materials, which, among many names I didn’t know, had promised performances by Elmgreen & Dragset, Aurélien Froment and Andrea Fraser. But none of them were there. I couldn’t even find a schedule that published when exactly they would be there. Is this the point of a ‘Nouveau Festival’, that we have to let go of these classifications? Or perhaps the organizers were trying to recapture some of the original function of the Centre Pompidou as a multidisciplinary space that encouraged crossover among the arts. But if this opening was any indication, this model no longer holds up, or at least needs a clearer structuring principle to justify it.
The next day we visited the off-site half of the festival, a (relatively) conventional exhibition entitled ‘The probable fate of the man who swallowed the ghost’, housed in the Conciergerie’s Salle des Gens d’Armes, the cavernous basement of the former royal palace. This space, with its Gothic vaulted ceilings, was once where the king inspected his knights. It was later converted into the prison where Marie Antoinette was detained. We were accompanied by press representatives from the Centre des monuments nationaux; the festival’s Art Director, Bernard Blistène; and a few of the participating artists – all with their own interests to promote but none of which came together. This show, Blistène informed us, was about the ‘body in space’ inspired by a performance of Merce Cunningham’s Scenario (1997) and designed and conceived by the ‘human orchestra’, Christian Rizzo. I didn’t feel so badly about not knowing who he was, even after the curator described him as ‘the most famous choreographer in France’, because I quickly realized that he described every participant in the exhibition as the greatest or most famous at something. Hence, the exhibition included ridiculously high striped high-heels created by the most famous shoe designer in France, Benoît Méléard, as well as sculptures by the very famous cock-ring designer and most famous piercing artist, Jean-Luc Verna, who joined us to give a short but revealing lecture about the glass cock-rings that he had designed (_Bracelets érotiques_, 2009), which he reminded us several times were indeed wearable. Glancing at my notes now I see that I wrote ‘all the cock rings are wearable’ several different times. To me they looked a bit big to be ‘wearable’, and also sharp, and made of glass, but I let that slide because I genuinely believed he might strip down and demonstrate them if I asked any more questions.
Though the list of artists involved was impressive, for the most part each one had contributed only a small figurative piece, most of which were placed on a black stage-like platform that resembled a catwalk lined with tall globe lamps that dimmed and illuminated alternately. This shiny runway, designed by Rizzo, was peopled with sculptures by Berlinda de Bruyckere, Katharina Fritsch, Antony Gormley and Ai Weiwei, among others, in what was perhaps the largest collection of contemporary figurative sculpture I’ve seen in one place at one time. A procession of ghosts made of white bed-sheets and cartoonish drawn on faces seemed to emerge from one of the apses off to the side. This work, Ghosts (2003) by Olaf Breuning and Bernhard Willhelm, was actually one of the few successful works, if only because it seemed to be gleefully escaping this bizarre, stilted art/catwalk in a former prison/palace. When I asked if there were also performances taking place in this part of the festival, the curator pointed to a man dressed as a toreador lying on the ground (Pierre Joseph’s Le Toreador – personage a reactiver). Yes, of course.
The afternoon continued with a visit to the official apartment of the President of the Centre Pompidou, a modest residence situated across the plaza from the Pompidou. The President, Alain Seban, read from a prepared speech – at a Perspex podium that boasted another, shorter podium expressly for his glass of water – about statistics and figures (‘Four heads of department report to me’) and the museum’s future plans (‘Our Indian project will be centred around society issues, et cetera et cetera’). We diligently scribbled this carefully controlled collection of bullet points in our notebooks, if only to avoid having to make eye contact, particularly when someone on the plaza outside started yelling angrily, and I could see the President’s gaze fix on something through the wooden shutters, as if he were making a mental note to tell his assistant later to have that nuisance removed.
Over a dish filled with bread and paté, I tried to figure out what exactly about this arrangement had made me so uncomfortable. Was I just disturbed by the aims of the festival itself, which felt out of step with Blistène’s insistence that the museum can accommodate the ‘latest trends in art’? To me this looked more like the creation of something with no specific point of reference, historical or otherwise. (When I asked him if there was an ‘old festival’ or some other precedent for the ‘new festival’, he could refer only vaguely to the initial spirit of ‘crossing boundaries’ when the Pompidou first opened in 1977.) It seemed to be a symptom of an unspoken imperative for the Centre Pompidou to do something ‘cross-disciplinary’, even if the elements included might function best inside their own disciplines. Such a hugely ambitious programme would have benefited from a more rigorous institutional structure and some thought as to which kinds of performance might be able to exist simultaneously, and which are better given their own forum so as not to get lost in the shuffle. Blistène’s hope for the visitors to become ‘_flâneurs_’ in the space seemed a poor analogy, as Baudelaire’s flâneur was most likely never assaulted by an entire orchestra of accordionists wearing Zorro masks.
‘Là où je suis n’éxiste pas’. ‘Here where I am doesn’t exist.’ It’s not a comfortable translation – I had to read it twice – but the subtitle to ‘Le Printemps de Septembre’ (Spring in September) is not intended to be a tidy, comfortable idea. It responds in part to the equally gnomic strap-line of the 2008 edition of this yearly contemporary art festival (which was also under the artistic direction of Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, director Christian Bernard): ‘Wherever I’m going, I’m already there.’ Bernard and associate curator, Jean-Max Colard, were keen to downplay the significance of these subtitles; they were designed as jumping off points for some – not necessarily all – of the artists involved, rather than as an adhesive to bind together the more than 40 discrete exhibitions, commissions, concerts and performances of the three-week festival.
Ironically, many of the festival’s best works seem to articulate this evasive concept the most clearly, by simultaneously acknowledging and thinking beyond their surroundings. Victor Burgin expressed the subtitle’s implication of temporal and geographical dislocation in Hôtel D (2009). The work was made especially for the space in which it was shown – the magnificent, wood-panelled Salle des Pérelins and its adjoining chapel in the Hôtel-Dieu, Toulouse’s first hospital. Sequestering himself within the space, Burgin has built a grey cube within which he shows a film of ponderous, creeping pans and zooms through the Salle des Pérelins as well as an anonymous hotel room, which looks out onto a cityscape. It was only when I noticed that distant cars in the street were not moving that I realized every scene was a still photograph; despite the movement between here and elsewhere, between now and then, Burgin’s eye is as chilly and dispassionate as the digital media he records with.
In Toulouse’s Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Sylvie Fleury has interspersed a selection of chrome-plated, bronze-cast fetish objects throughout the museum’s ethnographic and natural history display. Did her Dior Shoes (2008) align themselves more to the Mongolian shaman costume, the turtle shell, the stuffed bird of paradise or the Maori hunting equipment? All of it, and none of it, I guess; while appraising contemporary culture through an anthropological long-view, the juxtapositions reveal the essential strangeness of our moment, making these items at once mystical and unknowable.
On the other side of town, Cyprien Gaillard showed a new film, Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009), in the cavernous hall of the Théatre Garonne. (Many of the exhibitions of the festival employed previously derelict, but impressive, historic spaces in the town, as well as museums, independent spaces, the art school, commercial galleries and, in one instance, a bookshop.) Gaillard’s film shows the night-time demolition of a Glasgow block of flats, framed poignantly by a graveyard in the foreground. Gradually the thick smoke clears to reveal an image of the silently thundering Niagara Falls in their place. This description belies the immaculate execution of the idea; while digital trickery would divert the work’s impact, the seamless transition seems entirely natural, as if Gaillard is uncovering the eternal sublime at the core of the Modernist structure. Pruitt-Igoe was, of course, Minoru Yamasaki’s public housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri that was dynamited in 1972, signalling, according to the critic Charles Jencks, the death of modern architecture. (Incidentally, it was Yamasaki who designed New York’s World Trade Center, which fell 29 years later, marking the end of another era.) Gaillard presents the collapse of the Glasgow building as a perpetually repeating event, both a beautiful failure and a never-ending catastrophe.
While the festival’s high points were very high, equally the lows were very low indeed, though I would concede that – in some cases – this was down to personal taste. The gloss-black and silver, adolescent hard-rock aesthetic that was so painfully demonstrated by Claude Lévêque in France’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale was here too in force. An overblown installation by the Swiss artist Pierre Vadi titled Hell is Chrome (2009), a gloomy display of sculptures and paintings by brothers Florian and Michaël Quistrebert in one of the town’s ubiquitous arched cellars, and Jean-Luc Verna’s posturing emulations of heavy-metal imagery were all classics of the genre.
Equally teenage, but far more objectionable, was Christian Marclay’s 35 mm film Solo (2008), shown in the town’s arts cinema. The film opened with a lithe, blonde young woman entering what looks like a soundproofed room, and starts exploring the curves and knobs of a Stratocaster that happens to be plugged in to an amplifier. Given the work’s title, and Marclay’s interest in using instruments in unorthodox ways to make sound (think of 2000’s memorable Guitar Drag), you can probably guess how the film pans out. The woman is soon naked, grinding her groin ecstatically (and presumably uncomfortably) against the strings. Perhaps Marclay has a point here about subliminal attraction to the muscular, phallic emblem of the electric guitar (particularly the Strat), although I’d argue that the real erotic charge of the instrument speaks, like this film, primarily to 14-year-old boys. Perhaps, at a stretch, Marclay is deliberately quoting the language of high-grade porn. But by the 20th minute, as the camera lingers on the writhing model’s breasts, I wondered how this film ever got to be made, let alone shown. In an interview published last year in the Daily Telegraph, Marclay says of the work that previously ‘it would not have been politically correct [...] But today it doesn’t seem to be an issue.’ When he goes on to compare it to Marcel Duchamp’s once-scandalous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the full extent of his obliviousness is revealed.
If you’re considering visiting ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’, don’t let Marclay put you off. It’s worth the trip just to see Jim Shaw’s remarkable installation Labyrinth: I dreamed I was taller than Jonathan Borofsky (2009), in the contemporary art museum, Les Abattoirs. Shaw’s carnival of figures on cut-out panels responds partly to the vast paintings by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí between which it is sited, partly to the iconic work of US artist Barofsky, and partly to the cast of characters from graphic Americana that already populate Shaw’s work. Also excellent are the series of smaller exhibitions, ‘Seven Easy Pieces’, also in the museum. To those who complained that these drew too heavily on the collection of Christian Bernard’s own institution, Mamco, he might have answered that ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’ was in no way meant to be about the local or the site-specific; after all, ‘Là où je suis n’existe pas’.
On the morning after the 60th anniversary celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic of China of October 1, I overheard a conversation among three volunteers on the street, who belonged to the community of 800,000 uniformed citizens mobilized prior and during the National Holiday to safeguard the city at every street corner. One of them had witnessed the fireworks on the official gala performance of the previous night on Tian’anmen Square and was describing in detail and excitement to the other two the changing of colors and patterns of the fireworks. I witnessed briefly the animated exchanges and was deeply moved by such a simple human gesture of appreciating and sharing the splendor of fireworks out of a situation where human individuals were reduced to faceless performers and executors of repetitive and robotic movements and the feeling of being an insignificant person in the face of the government’s grandiose ambition and claims was more than ever present. Tian’anmen Square and the extended area around it were blocked off for days during the celebration and only the leaders, the performers and the selected few had access to it. Cai Guoqiang was one of the privileged, who were granted exclusive entry into this heavily secured area, as he had an enormous task to fulfill. Following his design and directing of the fireworks display at the opening of the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games, he was again appointed to design the fireworks for the evening of the 60th National Day celebration, which led to the street conversation mentioned above.
There was no question that Cai’s fireworks display was a rather usual art project, unprecedented in scale, complexity, technical sophistication, the extent of public presence and influence, as well as the number of its audience. Cai’s contribution to the evening’s extravaganza included his usual fare of splendid and awe-inspiring explosions as well as a roster of crowd-pleasing realist configurations, including 60 “birthday candles”, the number of 60, as well as three giant ‘fireworks paintings’ depicting Chinese landscapes against a 90-meter by 25-meter pyrotechnic “curtain” hung by 250-tonne cranes over Tiananmen Square. One of the ‘fireworks paintings’ portrayed the ‘Qinghai-Tibetan’ train, which was more of a symbol for territorial unity than a transportation achievement, and the other an ink wash painting by master Fu Baoshi. Carefully constructed to convey and embody desired political messages and ambitions, these fireworks at the same time provided an enormous amount of visual sensations and satisfactions. Cai’s project of the evening was an aesthetic and artistic triumph yet it remains a question whether the ideological purpose an art project serves should be something to waive against it.
The festive and highly elevated mood trumpeted all over the media around the 60th anniversary celebration was contrasted by the emptiness and quietness of the streets in Beijing. A few bus and subway stops near Tian’anmen Square were closed off as early as one day before Oct 1st and made it difficult for some people to go to work even. Many major hotels, restaurants and public entities along the Chang’an Avenue and in the neighborhood were ordered to close business for a few days. The extensive roadblocks and the armed police force and police cars patrolling and positioned all through the city cast a rather solemn and gloomy atmosphere and made it less desirable to travel within the city. Besides, many people were on leave and away for the extended official eight-day National Holiday. Almost half of the population in Beijing consists of new immigrants or temporary residents from all over the country, many of whom choose to return to their hometowns during long breaks.
In the art circuit, things had also settled down quite a bit following two momentous openings on the previous weekend. On September 26th, Pace Beijing, the Beijing branch of PaceWildenstein from New York, reopened its door after a year of renovation to defy ongoing speculations of its premature demise as a result of the economic crisis. The inaugural exhibition of the gallery Encounters was opened last August, six days before the opening of the Beijing Olympic Games and paired up works by international big shot artists with those of their local counterparts. The lineup of names – including Andy Warhol, Alex Katz, Chuck Close, Cindy Sherman, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, Marlene Dumas, Richard Prince, Tim Eitel, Fang Lijun, Qi Zhilong, Takashi Murakami, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Huan, and Zhang Xiaogang, among many others – gave an impression of Pace Beijing as the bastion for showing artists who are mature both artistically and commercially. The 22,000 square feet gallery was closed at the end of the exhibition and went through a exhaustive and expensive reformation involving state-of-art temperature and humidity controlled facilities.
Zhang Xiaogang was a both natural and challenging choice to start a new chapter of the gallery with. Zhang is one of the most sought-after and iconic artists in the Chinese art scene. The curator of the exhibition, Leng Lin, the president of Pace Beijing, has been working tightly with Zhang Xiaogang for many years now. Zhang was one of the artists he represented in his own gallery Beijing Commune, which he established in 2005 and still owns. Leng knows Zhang’s work by heart and has written many essays and curated shows on his work. However, like many artists of his generation, Zhang has, over years, produced very many of his signature paintings based on family portraits, which had granted him generous recognition and market success. While constantly complaining about established artists repeating themselves, people tended to feel less enthusiastic about the possible transformations someone like Zhang would make to his work after seeing too many artists of his generation having failed miserably in that account. The success stories of many Chinese artists have been more coincidental than logical and many operate on intuitive feelings instead of having any methodology or coherent line of thinking. For that matter, people are always ready to write off new works by well-known artists, be it Zhang Xiaogang or any others.
Zhang Xiaogang: The Records took its title from Records of the Great Historian, an ancient documentation of the history of China and its neighboring countries covering more than two thousand years from the Yellow Emperor to Emperor Han Wudi (156 BC–87 BC) by the first major Chinese historian Sima Qian (135 BC–86 BC). The works presented were all recent and shown for the first time, including thirteen stainless steel plates painting and a series of sculptures made of cement and bronze. Zhang’s records were more personal than public. The polished stainless steel paintings still carried some of his most recognizable visual motifs including the half-painted green walls, light bulbs, freely traveling electronic wires, TV sets, trails of tears and bloodlines. These melancholic paintings allowed the viewers to see their own reflections on the small patches of unpainted surfaces but more importantly provided a fitting backdrop to the personal diary of Zhang Xiaogang hand-written across these surfaces. Zhang proved himself to be a great writer, a natural one. He would start with the most unassuming sentence but it hit hard. On the painting of Green Wall – Study Room No. 2, he wrote, ‘I feel tired and empty due to another one of those “parties”.’ His notes of his daily activities, meetings with friends, weather conditions, his diets, regular records of his blood pressure, his emotions and responses, thoughts over another artist’s work or general reflections on art making, rendered the objects he depicted in his paintings or cast in concrete or bronze in small or large sizes, less empty signifiers of a certain point of time or collective memory and more concrete, specific, accessible, and endearing references to this one person’s real life, which is Zhang Xiaogang’s. It’s worthwhile to spend a few hours of an afternoon strolling through this exhibition on one’s own, just to read carefully through the words and take in the reflective and emotional input of the artist.
Zhang Xiaogang’s opening at Pace Beijing on that Saturday was so highkey and attracted so many celebrities, important people in the art world, Mercedes and Audis that it created a traffic jam on the road near the gallery inside the art district. A few streets away in the same compound, Wang Yin’s exhibition in Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, situated in the same compound, wasn’t as star-studded or well-attended as Zhang’s yet equally attractive and significant to the art world. Wang Yin, an artist that many people hadn’t heard of before and whose work wasn’t familiar to many at all, is not to be missed. His paintings were a challenge to both the viewers and China’s modern painting history. Without understanding the development of oil paintings in China, which was exposed to all sorts of external influences from the West and shaped by ideological and political changes inside the country, the audience would find Wang Yin’s paintings inaccessible, if not utterly incomprehensible. This also partly explains why Wang Yin has not yet made it to the radar of the art market or art media despite the inarguable value of his years of practice and thinking. The alternations and mixture of the Soviet painting tradition, the Cultural Revolution painting tradition, Western modern art movements, conventional art academic trainings and powerful official ideological settings, have all left their marks on the modernization of the practice of oil paintings in China in terms of subject matters, training methods, techniques and stylistic preferences. Wang’s paintings made thought-provoking references to and telling revelations of these elements in a myriad of ways, an ongoing exploration of the artist that deserves more critical engagements and discussion.
A couple of weekends ago, I visited Vilnius at the invitation of the CAC, for the opening of the Baltic triennial (which I’ll be reviewing for the January issue of the magazine so won’t go into here but I must say it was one of the the busiest openings I have ever seen). I had never been to the city before – the capital of Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic states and, in the 14th century, the largest country in Europe – and found it both fascinating and depressing. Simon Rees, the Australian curator of CAC was a great guide. Vilnius is an amazingly pretty town – cobbled streets, painted shutters, gables and Baroque churches – but it’s a scarred and haunted place. In the 20th century alone it was taken over by Poland in 1920, then Germany in 1939, then the Soviet Union in 1940, then, once again by Nazi Germany in 1941. After the final retreat of the Germans, in 1944, the Soviets once again took it over, establishing the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which lasted until 11 March 1990, when Lithuania declared its independence – the first Soviet Republic to do so.
The country suffered horrifically during the war – around 780,000 Lithuanians died. Before World War II, Jews made up roughly half of the population in Vilnius – the town was known as ‘Little Jerusalem’ and had 105 active synagogues. During the war, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered around 94% of the Jewish population. There is no memorial in the city to this atrocity and, bizarrely, the town’s ‘Museum of Genocide Victims’, which is located in the former KGB headquarters – which was, during the earlier part of the war the Gestapo headquarters – makes no mention of the genocide of the Jewish population. Apparently the museum’s ‘logic’ is that it’s devoted to the genocide carried out by the Soviets upon the local population – and by the time they came to power, there were very few Jews left. I tried to question the woman behind the desk about the museum’s sinister policy, but she suddenly and rather mysteriously lost the power to speak English.
Simon took me to the small, local Holocaust museum but the door was locked. We could see a man asleep on a desk inside, a bottle of Vodka beside him, so we left. After taking me for a walk through the streets of the old Jewish Ghetto, where some old signs in Hebrew had been discovered beneath more recent paint-job
Simon then directed me to the Jewish museum, which was open. On the way, I passed dusty, graffitied, windows. The Jewish Museum, located in a non-descript building on a quiet street, was full of the almost unbearable history of Lithuanian Jews but very few artifacts. The first Jewish museum had opened in Vilnius in 1913. On the eve of World War II, the museum had accumulated more than 6000 books, thousands of historical and ethnographic works and documents, publications, periodicals in 11 languages, a rich folklore collection and 3000 art works. It was nearly all destroyed in the war.
On a more cheerful note, Simon organized a visit to the extraordinary, recently opened National Gallery of Art. We walked there, through the autumnal streets, and across a bridge guarded by Soviet sculptures.
The bridge also had some locks attached to it – it’s a tradition in the city for lovers to paint their names onto them and attach them to the railings for eternity.
At the NGA, the dynamic head of the museum, Lolita Jablonskiene, gave us a tour of the beautiful spaces housing the collection of Lithuanian art and of the installation-in-progress of Cold War Modern, which has traveled to the NGA from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. It looked incredible – seeing this work in a former Soviet-controlled country certainly added a frisson to the viewing experience. Simon Rees wrote a report on the controversial opening of the gallery for the frieze website in May.
Wandering around this amazing gallery, I fell totally in love with these sculptures, made by an artist I had never heard of before, Matas Mencinskas – just another extraordinary artist who died in the war.
