For decades, Irish institutions concealed women’s suffering through silence. Now, contemporary artists are confronting these traumatic histories to foster awareness and healing
Michael Stevenson, together with frieze contributing editor Jan Verwoert, has written a small series of nine short, at times hilarious, Aesopian fables, published in connection to the artist’s project ‘Lender of the Last Resort’ at the Kröller-Müller-Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands. The Kröller-Müller is a beautiful sculpture garden museum in the middle of a park forest, an interestingly odd place seemingly removed as far as possible from the world of finance. Its foundation by the Kröller-Müller family however does have a connection to finance; and Stevenson, with an historian’s curiosity, looked into it. Instead of coming up with charts and stern message panels, however, he and Verwoert wrote short parables such as that of the ‘The Lizard and The Eagle’, or ‘The Shareholder and the Jackal’ (‘At the annual banquet held in honour of the bull, the shareholder came to sit next to the jackal at the dinner table…’). My favourite story is that of ‘The Ant and the Reclining Beauty’. If I may quote more extensively, it begins:
After a hard days work, an ant set out on his long way home, spent and tired, when he came upon a clearing where a figure was reclining on a podium. ‘Life is unjust!’ the ant cried furiously at the figure. ‘I work so hard and all you do is lie out and enjoy the surroundings. And at the end of the day you never have to worry about getting home because you never move at all!’
To cut a short story even shorter, the ant and the reclining beauty agree to swap places, leaving the reclining beauty however unhappy with the ant’s continuing, busy restlessness on the podium.
Watching the scene from above, Jove held his belly laughing and exclaimed: ‘Hard labour will never procure what elegance yields without effort. But rarely do the idle live in peace with themselves because they know not how blessed they are.’
Before telling you about what’s currently going on in Prague’s galleries and studios, I’ll start with the unashamedly sentimental and probably hopelessly cliché-ridden confession that children’s cartoons and animation from ‘60s/’70s Czechoslovakia have been important not only for my childhood, but also, still, to some extent for my children (two and five years old). They, like me, love the infectious cheerfulness of the cartoon character Krtek (Czech for ‘mole’), which for me has funny undertones given that ‘Krtek’, phonetically, could be a made-up name for a pronouncedly po-faced, super-krritikal critic. Other favourites are the awe-, and possibly Air-inspiring soft-rock soundtracks for TV children series such as ‘Vicky and the Vikings’ or ‘the Visitor’s expedition ADAM 84’, composed by Czech Karel Svoboda, who committed suicide last year.
On Thursday I arrived in Prague and met up with critic Noemi Smolik and this was one of the first things we talked about. Noemi grew up in Prague, and after a forming experience of visiting Swinging London in 1969 (her father is a liberal-thinking Hussite pastor who studied theology at Columbia in the1950s, and thus had ties to the West, which allowed him to send her there), she emigrated to Germany in 1971; today, she lives in Bonn, but is closely connected with the Prague art scene. Anyway, my immediate question was of course how a state where a psychedelic rock band could cause a seminal crisis (the manifesto Charter 77 was drawn up not least in protest against the Zappa-inspired band Plastic People of the Universe being persecuted, and famously became a major stepping stone towards the Velvet Revolution of 1989; one of Noemi’s three sisters co-signed the Charter at the time) could allow so inventive and, quite often, genuinely psychedelic kid’s-TV-stuff to be produced. As me and Noemi walked across the Legii bridge towards the National theatre, she gave me an answer and it was fairly simple: anyone seriously talented during those days, often prevented from pursuing their artistic predilections freely, least earn a living with it, found some sort of day job niche in this seemingly harmless world. And maybe it was ‘harmless’; but it was richly imaginative nevertheless.
Jirí Kovanda is an artist (interview and article in frieze) whose day job niche during CSSR-times was working in the storage of the National Gallery, and did his artwork without being an ‘official’, licensed artist as it was compulsory. He was in last year’s Documenta, and he’s having shows in prestigious museums in Europe. He’s an extremely friendly, modest man. He lives in a small apartment near the Academy of Fine Arts where he teaches and when asked in what kind of working space he develops his ideas, he picks up a small white notebook with a “I [heart] art” line on the cover – that’s it. Little careful drawings, from which he develops his installations. Kovanda is not a professor, but officially works as assistant to painter Vladimir Skrepl; nevertheless students (at least the ones I talked to during my stay in Prague) see more in him than an assistant. That said, they also praise Skrepl. And in fact they complement each other perfectly, Apollonian and Dionysian so to speak. Skrepl’s forming years where the ‘New Wild’ and ‘Bad’ Painting movements of the 1980s, and he lives up to the promise of the fervent, sometimes delirious, yet seriously committed artist. One former student I met who praised both was Eva Kotátková, who will have an exhibition in Berlin next week at the new space of Meyer-Riegger Gallery, partly comprised of the show she had at Prague’s Vaclav Spala Gallery this summer, presenting her intense little drawings in file boxes, alongside more installational and video work dealing with the ideological and physical constrictions of growing up and going to school (a little bit in the vein of Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex, with a pinch of early Erwin Wurm maybe).
Jirí David is another artist/painter who also happens to be an influential teacher. More about him, and brilliant works by abstractionist pioneer Frantisek Kupka, and curious other stuff from Prague, in part 2.
In the last week I have witnessed two totally different discussions about the economic crisis drift wistfully into the inability of so many contemporary perfumes to mirror the turbulent times we live in. Wander the aisles of perfume counters and most of them are either irritatingly literal and cheerful – Happy, Weekend Woman, Passion, Energy, Pink, etc etc – or celebrity-driven (I do wonder how many people have bought ‘Jade Goody’, the perfume.) Whatever happened to perfumes being designed for women pilots possibly getting on a plane for their final flight, like ‘En Avion’, created by Caron in 1932 in homage to female aviators (notes of cedarwood, leather, goggles and gloves mixed with Carnation, orange flower, rose, lilac and violet) or Guerlain’s ‘Vol de Nuit’ from 1933 inspired by the book of the same name by Antoine de Saint Exupéry (notes of wood, iris, vanilla and narcissus, polished gear sticks etc)?
I know I’m moaning, but in the 1920s, the most popular bohemian cafe in London was ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’. Now everyone eats lunch in ‘Eat’. I really hope the girl band currently in the top ten on X Factor, called ‘Girl Band’ don’t win.
It’s like the artist Paul Day who was commissioned to make a work of art to celebrate the opening of the wonderful newly furbished St Pancras train station, who came up with a design ‘that portrays a commuter falling in front of a train driven by the Grim Reaper’. The frieze was to be part of Day’s execrable 20 ton, 30ft-high bronze sculpture of a couple embracing, which is meant to function as a meeting place for travellers. It’s titled ‘Meeting Place’.
There is, however, a light on the horizon. A piece in today’s Guardian reports that ‘A spokesman for the company has said: ‘The frieze as originally suggested will not go ahead and work on it has stopped.’
A recent episode of the television show Mad Men – a brilliant series about Madison Avenue advertising executives in the early 1960s – featured a work of contemporary art as its surprising symbolic centrepiece. In this episode, the boss of the ad agency, the eccentric Mr. Cooper (who always makes employees remove their shoes before entering his office) is rumoured to be calling his executives to his office, one-by-one, for a personal meeting. His workers are convinced that the meetings are a cover-up – that they’re actually being tested on their reactions to Mr. Cooper’s new acquisition, a painting that cost him 10,000 dollars. The executives decide to break into his office after hours, to get a head start on formulating their opinions about the new ‘picture’. Upon opening up the door, they find a red and orange Mark Rothko hanging on the wall. ‘Hmph. Smudgy squares’, declares the secretary. One of the executives, the head of the television department, who is first-up for his personal meeting with Mr. Cooper, decides there are two possibilities: ‘Either Cooper loves it, so you have to love it, like in an emperor’s new clothes situation, or he thinks it’s a joke and you’ll look like a fool if you pretend to dig it.’ None of them, not even the ‘creatives’ or the art department, can come up with a meaningful interpretation of such a modern work of art. When the head of TV is finally called in to see Mr. Cooper, he admits, ‘Sir, I know nothing about art.’ To which Mr. Cooper divulges his secret: ‘People buy things to realize their aspirations – it’s the foundation of our business.’ And then, before dismissing the topic, he adds with a grin, ‘But between you and me and the lamppost, that thing should double in value by next Christmas.’
Either nothing has much has changed about American’s perceptions toward art since 1961, or the episode is a reflection of how we in the US view contemporary art today, seen through the lens of our past. Namely, we understand art primarily for its financial value. A recent cover story in Time (the first time, probably since Andy Warhol, that the magazine featured a contemporary artist on its cover) pictured Damien Hirst beside the headline ‘Bad Boy Makes Good’. Underneath it, the subtitle gushed, ‘Thanks to an unprecedented auction, the merrily morbid British artist Damien Hirst is about to land the biggest payday in the history of art.’ So ‘making good’, in this case, doesn’t mean making good art, it means earning lots of money. The article, which focuses mainly on Hirst’s prices and his impoverished background (calling him a ‘cash cow’), is illustrated with several images of Hirst’s work: their titles are printed in black, while their ‘Estimated Prices’ are printed even larger, in siren red. The article presents his artwork in the only terms it assumes its readers will understand: what makes him worthy of inclusion in this magazine is not the quality of his artworks, but the prices they can fetch.
So, to reiterate, what would be a counter-example to Damien Hirst’s recent refusal to explore anything with his ‘new’ works but the lows to which bidders allow themselves to stoop to by even considering buying them?
If art is really simultaneously the exploration of possibilities of communication (i.e. future) and a self-reflexive memory system (i.e. past), then there were some pieces in Manifesta 7 that did give good counter-examples. Namely in the part curated by Anselm Franke and Hila Peleg in Trento, entitled ‘THE SOUL (or, Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls)’, emerged a theme that highlighted the strong points of one particular strategy of exploring possibilities of communication: speaking in tongues.
‘Speaking in tongues’ is a religious concept (the Holy Spirit speaking through you), but the secular (technological and/or performative) version would simply be to detach the utterance from its source, displace it, and thus allow it to be heard, uncannily, afresh. There were several works in Trento that made use of that strategy to varying degrees: Omer Fast constructed a filmic scenario – Looking Pretty For God (After G.W.), 2008 – in which the embalmment facility of a funeral parlour is located right next to a photo studio with young children posing for a commercial product shooting. We hear the voices of funeral directors describing their experiences, but we see the children lip-synching to it. Last year’s The Casting was a great exercise in dissecting the Iraq war through a (staged) interview with a soldier on leave; but this felt a little laboured (and also derivative of pieces like Gillian Wearing’s 2 into 1, 1997), especially if you think of the complexity of a TV-show like Six Feet Under in comparison.
More explorative and daring was a video by Roee Rosen, The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2008). To call it bizarre would be a euphemism. It involved three protagonists – female immigrants to Israel, one of which is a mesmerizingly androgynous South-Asian – who recite the artist’s Hebrew text, seemingly without understanding what they are saying, sitting at a desk with piles of books to their side (the two titles I jotted down where “Solitary Pleasures” and The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism”, both incidentally Routledge imprints, which also kind of delineate the spectrum of Rosen’s phantasmatic confessions). The exploitation of the immigrants is doubled by them being used as ‘parrots’ in front of teleprompters, all the more so given the conflicted nature of what they are reciting and enacting, including a nazi salute (makes Anselm Kiefer or Jonathan Meese look like milksops). But weirdly I never felt this was just a clever rehashing of worn concepts of taboo-breaking; rather, it felt sincerely engaged with exploring guilty fantasies, and fantasies of guilt, and the embarrassment of dreams, by means of ‘speaking in tongues’. (Re. Manifesta, also see Melissa Gronlund’s review).
Sarah Palin, incidentally, has been baptised as a teenager in a Pentecostal Assemblies of God church. Pentacostals ‘speak in languages they have not learnt’, which she clearly evidenced in her statements about the financial crisis in the by-now legendary CBS-interview, incoherently rehashing pieces of Republican newspeak. That comedian Tina Fey so eloquently re-impersonated her thus provided a mind-boggling conundrum of speaking in tongues that speak in tongues.
I’ve always enjoyed those seemingly small historical details that turn out to have huge ramifications for art. Take, for instance, the invention in 1841 of the paint tube, allowing the Impressionists to work al fresco much more easily. Or the introduction in 1967 of the Sony Portapak video camera: lightweight, portable and just perfect for capturing those long durational body art performances in the 1970s.
With that in mind, here is the start of an ongoing, occasional catalogue of details that might – albeit in a much less significant way than the paint tube or Portapak – be tugging and pulling at the shape of our own age. As these are all limited to things I’ve noticed in the course of working for an art magazine, they are observations that mainly concern the dissemination of information. They are listed in no particular order. Although I have not included anything quite so earth-shatteringly transformative as the Internet, a few inclusions have already been much discussed elsewhere. I won’t apologize for their inclusion; firstly because I think they have specific consequences for art, but secondly because part of the fun of reading lists like this is discovering that you’re not the only person to have thought something and that someone else has kindly said it for you to save the potential embarrassment of people sniggering at you for saying something stupid. A few of these will amount to nothing. However, it’s just possible that some of the epiphenomena noted below might have an impact that punches above the weight that their merely technical or administrative character might suggest.
1. jpegs versus slides
When I first started working for frieze, in 1999, all documentation of art works received from galleries or artists for reproduction in the magazine was either on 35mm slide, a larger transparency format such as 5×4inches, or photographic print. A professional reprographic house could scan a high-quality transparency to virtually any size you wanted for the magazine. Today, all images are supplied in a digital format, and it is rare over the course of a year to have even one slide to scan. Of course, the great advantage to this is that an image owned by someone in, say, Johannesburg, can be sent to London in an instant. Magazine production schedules have become far more nimble, and much less dependent on postal services and couriers. The flipside, however, is that digital images can’t be blown up beyond the size they were scanned or taken at in the first place. In order for a digital image to be able to print properly, it must have a minimum resolution of 300 dots-per-inch. If an image file, at 300 dpi, is only 5×3cm then that’s the maximum size it has to be printed. If, however, it’s 50×30cm, then a magazine designer has more options available to them as to what size it appears on a page.
You might think this is all irrelevant geek-speak, yet the file size of a digital image directly affects how it is reproduced. A tiny, pixellated image can’t be magically made into a beautifully crisp and detailed poster-size reproduction, no matter how hard you push it in Photoshop. This has potential consequences for the pictorial emphasis of an article. In a given article, artist A’s work might, to the casual observer, appear less important than artist B’s work, because artist B sent the magazine a huge jpeg image that could be reproduced large but artist A just sent a matchbox-size screen-grab. As editors, we try very hard not to allow things to get skewed unnecessarily, but nonetheless we have found that questions of editorial design choice have changed.
2. Desktop publishing and the affordability of colour printing
Every day the frieze editorial team receives through the post, along with all the usual press releases, between five and ten highly produced books and catalogues. (That’s not to mention all the emails announcing even more books in the pipeline…) This number has increased from maybe just two or three per week ten years ago. Just look at how many full-colour art magazines and exhibition catalogues there are today: there has been an explosion in print material concomitant with the exponential expansion of the art world, but also in tandem with the increased availability and cheapness of DTP software and quality colour printing. For all the talk of criticism not being so important anymore, there’s a hell of a lot more print-matter out there. Everyone wants a catalogue and accompanying essay. Everyone wants a piece of posterity.
3. The limits of the page versus the infinite space of the blog versus ‘back-story’ art
A writer, when commissioned to produce an article for a print magazine, is given a word count, which is a guide to how long the piece should be, and their text must come within close range of this figure. One of the noted characteristics of post-Conceptual and ‘relational’ art has been work that requires the viewer to understand a complex and often lengthy back-story in order to be able to decode it, or assimilate large amounts of research material provided by the artist. A reviewer writing about such a work for a magazine must make some attempt to convey this ‘back-story’ in their text, partly because it cannot be assumed that every reader will have seen the work, but mainly in order to be able to construct a coherent and solid written argument about the piece. If they have 500 words within which to write, but the artwork requires lengthy description, then they can either detail it accurately in, say, 300 words, but sacrifice space for critical assessment in only 200 words. Alternatively, they can give themselves more room to argue a point – say, 450 words – but at the expense of giving a cursory and potentially inadequate recapitulation of the ideas in only 50 words. It goes without saying that an online piece of writing seldom has to deal with this kind of problem.
4. The anonymity of blogs
If I say something negative about an artist’s work in print, my name is always at the bottom of the article. It’s an old-fashioned convention that encourages a little circumspection about what you write. Log in as ‘artskeptik’ or ‘mud_slinger82’, however, and you can say whatever you like, with as much vitriol as you care to spew, and no one can call into question the integrity of your opinion by actually being able to know something about your background or position. (Or even just shout at you in the street.) Public debate about art has become, bizarrely, more diverse, inclusive and frank but simultaneously more dislocated, alienated and unproductive. Which brings me to…
5. …Punditry
Speaking only about the British mainstream press here, the expansion of contemporary art into the public consciousness that has occurred in the UK over the past 20 years has also resulted in the curious phenomenon of the non-expert art critic. Commentators with scarcely more than a basic working knowledge of contemporary art frequently opine in newspapers about high profile artists or are asked to sit on judging panels for prestigious awards such as the Turner Prize. In principle I have no problem with this, but I somehow cannot imagine Adrian Searle or Jennifer Higgie being asked to remark upon the Test Match or referee the FA Cup Final. Because contemporary art is viewed with some degree of suspicion, is it thus considered ‘fair game’?
6. A blindingly obvious one here: YouTube, googlevideo and ubu.com
Someone in the pub tells you about Andy Warhol starring in an advertisement on Japanese TV in the 1980s and in just a few seconds of getting back in front of your computer you can watch it. The easy availability of obscure music online – albums, for instance, that would once have taken half a lifetime (or half a life’s savings) to track down but are now easily found on blogs and fan sites – is massively transforming the development of new music being made today. There is now a huge amount of art-related content on YouTube, and specialist sites such as ubu.com. At a recent event at London’s Cubitt Gallery, I heard Tate curator Stuart Comer discuss the potential impact of ‘web 2.0’ sites like these on the work of moving image curators such as himself, which got me thinking about the domino effect that has on writing criticism and online publishing. Are all those music and art blogs packed full of mp3s of rare albums and film clips – absorbing though they can be – just a grown-up game of show-and-tell?
