The human race is a monotonous affair
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April 2014
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vol 66 no 3
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MATTI BRAUN BO LAK MARCH 15 – APRIL 17, 2014 LIAM GILLICK REVENONS À NOS MOUTONS MAY 2 – JUNE 28, 2014 GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN MAY 2 – 4, 2014
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Michael Riedel Laws of Form 5 April - 31 May 2014
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Wilhelm Sasnal March 27 – April 26, 2014
Anton Kern Gallery
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Berlin design, Glashütte at heart: The classic NOMOS Tetra in four new metropolitan colors.
Here: Tetra Goldelse (l.) and Tetra Kleene. With retailers before Easter. nomos-glashuette.com
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Art for all… or something Last month, in New York, ArtReview had a revelation. At the 2014 Whitney Biennial it learned that what it does is art. Indeed, it learned, more generally, that everyone is an artist. Not everyone (or jeder mensch) in the Joseph Beuys sense, where it means what you think it means – everybody; but rather ‘everyone’ in the sense that everyone involved in what we know as the ‘art’ world is an artist. That’s ‘everyone’ constituted in terms of an intrinsically self-defining, self-nurturing, self-sustaining, self-congratulating whole. But ArtReview doesn’t intend to get bogged down in the fact that words that have one meaning in the common sense have different meanings in the artworld sense. Back at the Whitney, as ArtReview stumbled into the heart of the three-curator show, there was publishing house Semiotext(e), listed as an artist and with a whole room dedicated to its work. As well as publishers (digital publishers Triple Canopy also had their own room), there were critics (movingly Gregory Battcock, a now-dead artist-turned-critic whose archive is presented as an artwork by Joseph Grigely, who discovered it – before it was an artwork and when it was merely a collection of some guy’s stuff – in an abandoned storage facility located in the same building as his studio, where he makes artworks) and writers (David Foster Wallace, whose handwritten questions for an interview with Roger Federer did chime nicely with Joshua Mosley’s animation Jeu de Paume, 2014 – documenting an early form of modern tennis – but nevertheless didn’t seem to be art, at least not according to the clearly conservative definition of the term that ArtReview has been allowing to drag it down over the years).
Pop art
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ArtReview admired the generosity and optimism of the Biennial’s inclusive philosophy. The make-you-feel-good-and-part-of-the-whole-big-thing vibe seemed more like what you might find at the Armory Show art fair down the road. Over there they had some strange digital pylons (produced in collaboration with Artsy, one of those ventures that suggests that the truth – or perhaps money – in art is to be found online) that told visitors what was popular (galleries, artists, etc) so that they wouldn’t need to waste their time with the galleries and artists that no one else was looking at. ArtReview assumed that, being an art fair with galleries and artists as its clients, the Armory had some sort of deal with Artsy that would ensure that every gallery and artist was top at one point in time, but every time ArtReview passed a screen, it seemed that Lehmann Maupin and Damien Hirst had pretty much locked up the top gallery and artist slots. Hey, if you’re one of those people who wants to go and see only what everyone else is seeing, then read on no more! – ArtReview’s already told you. Funny though, when ArtReview wanted to know what was popular with Artsy backer Wendi Deng Murdoch, it wasn’t Artsy but an old-fashioned print edition of Vanity Fair that told it what was so great about Tony Blair. It’s all such a confusing mess! Sometimes ArtReview hankers for the good old days when art was art and no one expected it to be popular… These days even the optician round the corner from ArtReview’s London offices advertises itself with a sign that says ‘Welcome to my concept’. Will it be in the Whitney Biennial one day? That’s something ArtReview likes about the Germans. They have rules. Like the one about only using one of the two single beds placed at opposite ends of the room in which ArtReview recently stayed on a trip to Frankfurt. It’s clear – you can’t wake up in the middle of the night and decide that you’re going to have more fun if you sleep in the other bed. You have to make a decision at the beginning of the evening and then stick with it. Or pay the €20 consequences. You see, you have to understand the law in order to break it. It’s with something like this in mind that ArtReview asked new contributor Mark Prince to look at how German artists have managed to cultivate and resist their role within an international art mainstream, even while Berlin is being hyped over and again as one of the world’s most significant art centres. Not entirely without justification, of course. No one is looking forward to this month’s Gallery Weekend in Berlin more than ArtReview… the mysteries of cultivation and resistance will be revealed!
Rules
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ADAM PENDLETON 534 West 25th Street New York April 4 – May 3, 2014
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Artist of the Year 2014 March 21– June 22 Deutsche Bank KunstHalle Ad.indd 203
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ArtReview vol 66 no 3 April 2014
Art Previewed 25
Previews by Martin Herbert 27
Juan A. Gaitán Interview by Raimar Stange 52
Points of View by Jonathan T.D. Neil, Oliver Basciano, Maria Lind, Mark Sladen, Mike Watson, Sam Jacob, J.J. Charlesworth, Hettie Judah, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Laura McLean-Ferris 35
James Lingwood Interview by Tom Eccles 56 Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Interview by Joshua Mack 60 The Law and Its Ideas by Daniel McClean 64
page 28 Jean-Luc Blanc, Untitled, 2013, pencil on paper, 41 × 30 cm. Photo: Dorine Potel. Courtesy the artist and Art: Concept, Paris
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Art Featured 71
Wilhelm Sasnal by Martin Herbert 72
Resistance to Communication Is Essential A conversation between Dieter Roelstraete and Anselm Franke 90
Berlin’s Capitalist Realists by Mark Prince 80
Dienstag Abend Artist project 94
page 74 Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled, 2013. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zurich
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Art Reviewed 103
Merlin James, by Mark Prince Stefan Panhans, by Raimar Stange Matt Mullican, by Barbara Casavecchia Sarkis, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Walter Swennen, by Sam Steverlynck Deniz Gül, by Sarah Jilani Elevation 1049, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Goshka Macuga, by Jacquelyn Davis 140 Caracteres, by Claire Rigby New Abstraction: Chapter 1, by Iona Whittaker
Exhibitions 104 Magali Reus, by Morgan Quaintance Alexandre Singh, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Christian Jankowski, by Helen Sumpter Caroline Achaintre, by J.J. Charlesworth Jessica Jackson Hutchins, by Ben Street Pae White, by Florence Waters Dean Hughes, by Jennifer Thatcher Anat Ben David, by Robert Barry Return Journey, by Oliver Basciano Thomas Struth, by Joshua Mack Christopher Williams, by Terry R. Myers Liz Glynn, by Orit Gat Objects & Thin Air, by David Everitt Howe Michael Fullerton, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Joel Kyack, by Jonathan Griffin Liz Larner, by Ed Schad Alex Prager, by Brienne Walsh Sue Williams, by Joseph Akel Stan Douglas, by Siona Wilson Adrián Villar Rojas, by Gabriela Jauregui
books 134 The Ringtone Dialectic, by Sumanth Gopinath Unposted Letters, by Franciszka Themerson & Stefan Themerson Visual Cultures as Seriousness, by Gavin Butt & Irit Rogoff A Philosophy of Walking, by Frédéric Gros thE stRiP 138 oFF thE RECoRD 142
page 120 Alex Prager, Crowd #12 (speedyclick.com), 2013, archival pigment print, 151 × 142 cm (framed: 154 × 145 × 6 cm), edition of 6. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong
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I am 50
Juergen Teller 21 March until 25 May 2014
Opening Friday 21 March
Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve 7, rue Pastourelle F–75003 Paris T +33 (0)1 42 71 76 54 info@suzanne-tarasieve.com suzanne-tarasieve.com
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Wilhelm Sasnal
TAKE ME TO THE OTHER SIDE Lismore Castle Arts 25 April – 28 September 2014 Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled, 2013, oil on canvas Copyright the artist
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Lismore Castle Arts Lismore, Co Waterford, Ireland www.lismorecastlearts.ie gallery@lismorecastlearts.ie +353 (0)58 54061
With the support of Anton Kern Gallery, New York Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw Hauser & Wirth Sadie Coles HQ, London
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Art Previewed
The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery 25
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FutureGreats 2014 Zach Blas
Want to evade face recognition by looking great? Zach Blas’s Mask – May 31, 2013, San Diego, CA (2013), from his ongoing Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–), creates facial anonymity by confusing visual recognition patterns. The superimposed result doesn’t resemble any contemporary human or other known organic figure. But it makes a wonderful in-yourface statement about elegance, defiance. ArtReview and EFG International are proud to present the first in a series of six specially commissioned poster projects featuring unique artworks created by artists following their selection as 2014 Future Greats. Each artwork is reproduced in ArtReview and is available as a full-size limited-edition poster in subscriber copies of the magazine
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Previewed Richard Jackson S.M.A.K., Gent through 1 June Vik Muniz Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York 10 April – 10 May Jean-Luc Blanc Art: Concept, Paris through 23 April
Glasgow International 4–21 April Smart New World Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 5 April – 10 August A World of Its Own MoMA, New York through 5 October
Tauba Auerbach ICA, London 16 April – 15 June Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Reina Sofía, Madrid through 31 August Yinka Shonibare, MBE Brand New, Milan 28 March – 31 May
Rachal Bradley Gregor Staiger, Zurich through 26 April
1 Richard Jackson, Painting with Two Balls, 1997, Ford Pinto, metal, wood, canvas, acrylic paint, 610 × 1097 × 610 cm. © the artist
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‘I thought about crashing a Bentley – there an 8.5-metre-tall canine sculpture, leg cocked autobiography, Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer.) Part 1 are plenty of those around,’ Richard Jackson and about to paint the facade with puppy piss. of the pleasure of Muniz-watching is seeing said in a recent artforum.com interview. The message is clear – painting, urine trouble! him locate wiggle room where there seemed ‘Then I decided on wrecking six sedans that – but the process is double-faced: a long to be none. His last show at Sikkema Jenkins will each be painted a different color and loaded goodbye and a kiss of life. involved intricate images, running a gamut with paint akin to its exterior. I plan on Chocolate sauce, diamonds, industrial of cultural portraiture and nonportraiture colliding complementary-coloured cars and waste, peanut butter, sugar, caviar, dust, toy (Scarlett Johansson, a Klimt painting, a snippet inserting wreckage into a gallery.’ The quote soldiers: the standard shopping list for an of text), collaged with casual dexterity from speaks volumes about the rowdy enlargements ArtReview party matches the taxonomy of fragments of magazines; one year later a Paris of gestural abstraction that the Sierra Madreshow served up fish and birds fashioned from 2 materials Vik Muniz has used, one by one, in based artist has practiced since the 1970s, the images he’s photographed, then destroyed, slivers of scrap metal. As with Jackson, possibly showcased in his first retrospective, Ain’t since the 1980s. Here, subject matter typically the biggest rug-pull Muniz could effect Painting a Pain, currently at S.M.A.K. Jackson’s pulled out of the collective memory – from the now is actual oil-on-canvas. You wouldn’t bet background is in engineering. Making art, lone figure facing down a tank at Tiananmen on it, however. he rips up painting’s blueprint, whether 3 Square to Warhol’s Jackies – is restored, via Jean-Luc Blanc, like Muniz, devotes constructing splattery ‘painting machines’, conversations with materiality, from blinding himself to refreshing what’s already there building a multicoloured paint-strafed laundry overfamiliarity into plain sight. (For evidence and known; or, perhaps, being productively room, making sculptures out of stacked of how variously and thoughtfully, see the haunted by it. For about 20 years the French canvases or installing, outside museums, Brazilian artist’s discursive 2005 artist has collected printed imagery – film stills,
2 Vik Muniz, Vik, 2 Years Old, Album, 2014, digital c-print. © the artist. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York
3 Jean-Luc Blanc, Untitled, 2013, pencil on paper, 41 × 30 cm. Photo: Dorine Potel. Courtesy the artist and Art: Concept, Paris
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postcards, press photos, magazines – which ArtReview’s bibulous Glasgow friends like recently telling The Scotsman: ‘What I wanted apparently sift in his mind until one of to joke that GI stands for ‘Get Inebriated’, to do was to bring in new voices. You don’t see the images pops up and becomes the basis of 4 a state hard to avoid at the opening of Glasgow much work [in Glasgow] about new technology, a drawing or painting, which is subsequently International. But the evidence of Sarah post-internet art’. We just noticed that Glasgow reworked and overworked. The resultant McCrory’s dependably energetic stewardship International Festival acronyms as GIF. oeuvre, more concerned with a measurable should be something to see with a clear head. ‘Industrial capitalism is transforming distance from the original image than with Some 50 shows are spread across the city itself into digital capitalism,’ write the organfaithfulness, explicitly filters the historical during the biennial event’s 18-day run, from 5 isers of the great-looking Smart New World image archive through subjectivity. Though the first UK institutional solo by Aleksandra at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf – which also features this may be too rational a reading to impose Domanović – who diversely addresses the Domanović, as well as Trevor Paglen, Omer Fast, on Blanc’s work, given the tone of one CV he history of technological development through the International Necronautical Society and published a few years ago, which, pushing a feminist mindset – to shows by Jordan Wolfson a number of other bleeding-edge artworld a vampire-dandy angle, reads in part: ‘squatted (a minisurvey of his films), Avery Singer, thinkers on the reshaping effects of technology. a ruined studio at the Hopital Ephémère, Charlotte Prodger, Sue Tompkins and Michael Expect disquisitions on surveillance society and easily sold his [Blanc’s] drawings, wandered Smith, among others; Reclaimed: The Second Life the dissolution of the private sphere, drone the night dressed in black leather accompanied of Sculpture, another huge group show at the technology and our complicity in launching by a wolf with gold spangled eyes, watched Briggait; and, inevitably, the city’s commercial a new kind of society – and bear in mind, before several films a day and appeared sometimes on galleries parading their finery. If there’s a you get there, this choice statistic, listed in the television in a slot for night owls…’ thematic arc, it might be discerned in McCrory’s preview info: if you wanted to print out the
5 INS Copyright, INS-Erklärung zur Uneigentlichkeit, Tate Britain, London, 2009.Photo: INS Department of Propaganda. © 2014 Richard Eaton/Tate. Courtesy International Necronautical Society
4 Charlotte Prodger, :-* (detail), 2012. Photo: Adam Reich. Courtesy Essex Street Gallery, New York
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7 After Venice (detail), 2013, 5 digital c-type prints mounted on aluminium, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Michael Heilgemeir. Courtesy the artist, Piper Keys, London, and Gregor Staiger, Zurich
6 Man Ray, Laboratory of the Future, 1935, gelatin silver print, 23 × 18 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2014 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
8 Tauba Auerbach, The New Ambidextrous Universe I, 2013, plywood, 191 × 244 × 122 cm. Photo: Vegard Kleven. Courtesy the artist and Standard (Oslo)
is new (ex-Pompidou) chief curator of photogwet process of printing; but water in the entire Internet, according to blog TechHive, raphy Quentin Bajac emphatically signalling air is also phantasmal: ‘water as apparition’, it would take you 4.73 billion sheets of paper change to come. to quote the London press release, and the and the stack would stand 492km high. 6 Then again, for a truly radical approach not-quite-fixed, not-quite-solid quality suits The ‘world’ in MoMA’s A World of Its Own, to photography, MoMA might want to consider Bradley’s deliberate vacillation between fixed meanwhile, is the photographer’s studio, as the augmenting their displays with a sprinkler form and solid connections and ambiguous subtitle ‘Photographic Practices in the Studio’ system. In her recent exhibition at Piper Keys, intent. At Gregor Staiger, where the show makes crystal-clear: a retreat, a laboratory, is retitled Im Zurich, she’ll raise the number a theatre, a parallel reality. The conceit is simple 7 London, entitled After Venice, Rachal Bradley combined six photographs reminiscent of of photographs to nine and retain the misting: but expansive, this show demonstrates, framed touristy shots hung in cafés, but far less more clues, more mystery. encompassing practitioners as superficially dogmatic – pipework, foliage, boats – with the ‘At the root of my interest is the question dissimilar as Walead Beshty and Cindy kind of ambient overhead misting used to cool of what consciousness is: what it’s made Sherman, Eadweard Muybridge and Richard 8 of and what its limitations might be,’ Tauba the terraces in the selfsame establishments. Avedon. There’s institutional politics here The photographs, designed to look somewhere Auerbach told Art in America a couple of years too. MoMA has possessed a photographic between early street photography and snapago. ‘As creatures that operate in three dimendepartment since 1940, but its focus has been shots, have a waiting quality: they’re specific, sions, what capacity do we have to conceive on what’s recorded (and relatively objective but why they’ve been taken is another question. of a dimension that’s beyond, or even coiled photographers like Walker Evans and Garry They link to water, meanwhile, through the within, the space that we experience? What if Winogrand), not how it’s done. Here, then,
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Zoo(M) De large (Jail D'art). inStallation view. 2014
january 17 — april 26 2014 w w w.bjergga ard.com
Market, StockholM / april 04 — 06 art cologne / april 10 — 13
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this 3D volume that is our space is in fact the surface or boundary of a 4D volume, just as a 2D plane is the boundary of a 3D volume, and so on down the line?’ Reflective of Auerbach’s fascination with logical systems and binaries and how they might break down, that’s useful context to have when looking at her laser-precise photographs, graphics, sculpture, jewellery and book design, and Fold paintings, showcased in her first UK solo show, The New Ambidextrous Universe. On the one hand, then, if you seek Cartesian anxiety, it’s there. On the other, if you just want aesthetic transportation, there’s that too. 9 Mise-en-scène has been Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s medium for the last couple of decades – indeed, if we take Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe and Loris Gréaud into account, it looks like the medium of the most advanced 10
French art of recent times. In GonzalezFoerster’s case, though, scenography has regularly been infused with tropical modernity. That much we can anticipate – if not much else – in her newest project. Splendide-Hotel is a site-specific work housed in Madrid’s Palacio de Cristal, a pavilion built in 1887 and designed to simulate equatorial climates and support plantlife from the then-Spanish colony of the Philippines. It interweaves, we’re told, ‘two of the themes that have appeared repeatedly in her career: books – as text but also as objects and structures – and the idea that in film and literature endings often do not fulfil our expectations’. Talking of fulfilling expectations: it’s reasonably easy to guess what you’ll get from Yinka Shonibare, MBE: Dutch wax African
fabrics wrapped around mannequins or dancers, and referencing European colonial history in Africa. But the British-Nigerian artist is hardly a one-size-fits-all figure. His recent show at Pearl Lam in Hong Kong, for example – a region itself shaped by colonialism – adapted his work into a critique of materialism (see the partying Champagne Kid sculptures, 2013), and the need to exploit labour to get rich (see the bent-over Cake Man, 2013). His current show at Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation (closing April 21), meanwhile, syncs with the collector’s own practice: he was one of the first American collectors to seriously collect African art, and to see it as fine art. As such, one wouldn’t be surprised if Shonibare rustles up something specific for Milan. Supposedly they know their fabrics there. Martin Herbert
9 Palacio de Cristal, Parque del Retiro, Madrid. Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid
10 Yinka Shonibare, MBE, Fake Death Picture (The Suicide – Leonardo Alenza), 2011, digital chromogenic print, 194 × 149 × 4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist
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mac birmingham 12 April – 8 June 2014 Cannon Hill Park Birmingham B12 9QH 0121 446 3232 www.macbirmingham.co.uk Aberystwyth Art Centre 4 October – 22 November 2014 Aberystwyth University Aberystwyth SY23 3DE 01970 62 32 32 www.aberystwythartscentre.co.uk
BL ACK SMOKE RISING TIM SHAW R.A
Curated by Indra Khanna Co-produced by mac birmingham and Aberystwyth Art Centre
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Points of View Jonathan T. D. Neil Who’s afraid of qualitatively weighted metrics? Oliver Basciano Letter from Dhaka
Mark Sladen What is a book?
Hettie Judah Sauce for the sacrificial lamb
Mike Watson Living with the Maldives
Jonathan Grossmalerman I keep visualising Hauser & Wirth! Why can’t I let that one go?!
Sam Jacob Return of the Jedi
Maria Lind Late-modernist housing
Laura McLean-Ferris Off-space No 19: Castillo / Corrales, Paris
J.J. Charlesworth How not to make public art
Jonathan T.D. Neil Who’s afraid of qualitatively weighted metrics? Feel like taking a flyer with a spare $10,000? Let Brussels-based Jean-Baptiste Bernadet be your wingman. Made a couple of moves on stock tips early this year and now you’re circling the block looking to park that extra $100K? Mark Flood will be your valet. Oh, were you on the other side of those trades and are now letting those margin calls go straight to voicemail? #Sellnow your Oscar Murillo (lucky dog) and live to speculate another day. Holding Banksy? (Schmuck.) #Liquidate – best to lock in the losses and the humiliation now and hope that Art Basel’s VIP list manager still remembers how to spell your name come June. I like to imagine that in some corner of the contemporary artworld someone actually talks like this. It makes it easier to complain about the sinister effects of the ‘market’ when their cause is some used-car salesman who has read too much Nietzsche, or the 1%, or some other similarly stupid reduction of the problem. Nevertheless, when a new website, such as the wonderfully provocative sellyoulater.com, comes along, and those dark imaginings stare back at us from the distant reaches of the Internet, we have a tendency to be taken aback. No one would really do this, would they? Rank artists using some ‘qualitatively-weighted metrics’ that spit out trading-floor mantras – ‘Buy now!’ ‘Liquidate!’ – all appropriately hashtagged for increased social-media stickiness? It’s just, so, tasteless. Funny, Matisse said nearly the same thing about
Picasso’s Demoiselles. Well, he actually called it Picasso’s hoax, and in those terms, sellyoulater. com may be the most modernist of art-market sites. It is spare, yellow, gridded, like Mondrian’s Broadway minus the Boogie-Woogie, and it’s bent on confrontation. Its wager appears to be that intrigue and outrage are enough to drive traffic, gain attention and, presumably, at some point, turn a profit. If Artnet can sell its reports on individual artist’s markets for $186 each, and Josh Baer can charge $250 for a subscription to his insider-ish ‘industry newsletter’, then there is money to be made as a purveyor of art-trading data, and perhaps even more if one’s methodology remains proprietary. Placebo effects aside, do you still call it ‘snake oil’ if it works? The great disappointment of sellyoulater. com is not that it exists, however, but that its creators appear to be too cowardly to stand up and take a bow. Besides remaining anonymous, they first made the rather pusillanimous choice of hiding behind a Guy Fawkes mask, which was the icon that appeared on the site’s accompanying Instagram page and in the tab of its browser window, before this changed to a borrowing of the Yves Saint Laurent logo (YSL/SYL, see?). How to understand this? The membership of the global hacktivist group Anonymous, which has waged its crusades under the banner of Fawkes’s grin, might
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remain mysterious, but their actions, when they reach the public stage at least, bespeak clear intent and strong principle (just ask the Church of Scientology). The most we can say of sellyoulater.com is that it may be offering straight-up art market analytics. But it may also be a hoax. Or a work of art. Preferably a kind of tactical intervention, a mimetic exacerbation in quintessential avantgarde style of what many view as an increasingly venal marketplace for the fruits of some artists’ labours, fruits that are meant to be venerated for their embodiment of the liberty – in matter, in life, in spirit – that most of us can only hope to experience tragically few times in our lives. Would that it were so, because from the reactions on Facebook and Twitter, apparently believing that sellyoulater.com is real is just too great a burden for us, and for art, to bear. When, exactly, did we become so terrorised by the bogeymen of the art market? We would be better served by asking what happens to that liberty when its avatars are bought and sold like stock. I’m not at all convinced that anything does happen to it. A work of art is not like the Nobel Prize. Buying one doesn’t compromise what it stands for. If our ideal of art, why and how it matters, were that fragile, that easily corrupted, one can hardly believe that it would have remained with us for so long.
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Oliver Basciano Letter from Dhaka In the car from Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal Airport to my hotel I get a text from a friend, a British curator whose family comes from Bangladesh. It was in reply to a text I’d sent him, which mentioned I was off to the Dhaka Art Summit. His reply was a short, wry, rhetorical question: ‘Is the artworld in Bangladesh now? – is nothing sacred!?’ Bangladesh is a country that has not previously registered on the international artworld’s radar to any great extent, bar a few breakthrough artists such as Runa Islam (Bangladesh-born but London-based) and Naeem Mohaiemen (British with Bangladeshi heritage and now based between New York and Dhaka). While it is undoubtedly a culturally rich country (just a glimpse at the modernist architecture of Louis Kahn’s National Assembly Building, completed in 1982, and the universal popularity of the monthlong Ekushey Book Fair, confirms the country’s artistically progressive tendencies), contemporary visual art has made little local impact. Besides the notable exception of the pioneering Drik, which doubles as a photography agency, and artist-run nonprofit Britto Space, there are few local galleries and only a couple of desperately underfunded national institutions, much-maligned. This is surely down to economic reasons – whatever the argument towards the socially improving qualities of art, its public funding must be a low priority in a country where the capital’s pavements are frequently nonexistent, child begging is rife and 40 percent of the population lives in slums without sanitation. While the country is making inroads in reducing its poverty levels, it remains in the bottom quarter of the Human Development Index ranking, a composite statistic of life expectancy, education
and income indices used by the United Nations Development Programme. It is against this backdrop that the second Dhaka Art Summit opened. Funded and instigated by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, collectors whose business interests range from property to food (and who own a mix of art-fair-friendly works by Westerners such as Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst, and a more nuanced collection of art by South Asian artists), the summit is a multifaceted event. While the ground floor of the government-owned summit venue, the Shilpakala Academy building in central Dhaka, hosted large-scale commissions – Pakistan-born Rashid Rana’s full-scale replica of a gallery at Britain’s Tate Modern, albeit with the artworks and interpretation texts pixellated out; and Indian Shilpa Gupta’s bitty installation, investigating the chitmahals, the enclaves along the Bangladesh-India border, were highlights – the rest of the four-storey building was occupied by a performance and film programme, a series of independently curated shows, an art fair (predominantly featuring galleries from South Asia and the Middle East), an exhibition of work shortlisted for an emerging-artist prize (which, while varying in quality, gave a flavour of the mainly political concerns of local younger artists: a highlight, though not the eventual winner, was Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty’s gif-like animation of a Bangladeshi action film poster; inanimate, paper versions of which were then flyposted across the city) and a busy timetable of panel discussions. It was while on one of these panels that Mohaiemen, whose practice mixes objectmaking with critical research into the history of leftist politics, spoke about a research project he
did for a Bangladeshi magazine, describing how he made it in the frustrating knowledge that it would never circulate beyond the publication’s Bengali-speaking readership. Mohaiemen was using the anecdote to question how art circulates. If a foetal local art scene wants to grow, and wants to be international-looking, it has to, for better or worse, speak the language of the international artworld. While we might have a democratic vision of art circulating freely via the web, artworks travelling across borders and critics reporting on farflung destinations, what the artworld resembles more closely is one of those maps airlines produce to show which routes they fly, where a spidery mass of lines radiates out from a few hubs. For anything to register to any notable extent – be it an article, work of art, curatorial endeavour – it must first pass through one of those hubs. Formally the summit was a number of things combined: a distillation into one event of all the elements that normally come together to form a multifaceted, mature art scene. The aim of this was to communicate to the outside world, over the course of three days, a message of what Bangladesh could be for the artworld. An ecosystem that mixed the institutional, commercial and artist-run, in which it would be practical for artists to maintain international careers while being based in Dhaka and to translate local concerns to a global audience. In fact, the image of Dhaka not just being on the map, but being an international gateway. An ambitious vision given the country’s wider problems; but with its gradual economic advances and the few striving, well-placed personalities pushing it forward, it might not be entirely fanciful.
Posters from Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty’s The Acting project (2014). Photo: courtesy the author
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Maria Lind Late-modernist housing During the 1950s, architect Constantinos Doxiadis was invited by the Lebanese government to devise a national plan for social housing. Eighteen different types of residential building were developed, each responding to the Mediterranean climate, regional topography and local building materials. However, a change of government in 1958 caused the ambitious plan to be forgotten – and since then nothing similar has been proposed or realised. Until recently, that is, when the artist Marwa Arsanios dug the drawings out of Doxiadis’s archives in Athens and made them the starting point for a new work. In After Doxiadis Social Housing Project (2013–), two of the residential building types have come alive in the shape of maquettes. They are two-storey, concrete, single-family houses with wooden details and generous balconies. Considering that Doxiadis is best known as the architect behind Islamabad (which itself is a reflection of the discipline of ‘ekistics’ – the science, identified by the artist in 1942, of where and how people settle and how largescale and complex habitations come into being), the two residential buildings show a surprising attention to detail. Curious about how a corresponding project, based on ideas of social justice, could look today, Arsanios turns to contemporary urban planning and architecture: how do they relate to the idea of housing for all, in 2014? Her work gives us a fragment of a grand vision, originally formulated in the immediate postwar period and reanimated by a contemporary artist. She joins a number of artists – among them Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Pia Rönicke, Terence Gower,
Jakob Kolding, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber, Solmaz Shahbazi & Tirdad Zolghadr, Minouk Lim, Marion von Osten and Florian Zeyfang – who have engaged with late-modernist housing since the 1990s. This might even be described as a genre. Sometimes the interest is interwoven with other concerns and motives, at other times it is the main focus in the work, which might, for example, take the shape of video essays, posters, installations, paintings, photographs or wallpapers. The question ‘Is modernity our antiquity?’ – the leitmotif of Documenta 12 (2007) – can here be answered with a clear ‘yes’. Modernity, and even more so Modernism as a programme, is the light that envelops all these works. Most of these artists have treated the phenomenon of late-modernist housing (often large-scale and industrially produced) as interesting albeit scary planning feats, as well as ideologically challenging political proposals and programmes. They even address the aesthetic refinement and downright beauty of this kind of architecture, otherwise typically described as monotonous, rough and ugly. Or even as ‘a carbuncle on the face of an elegant friend’, as Prince Charles famously described a modern proposal for the extension of the National Gallery in London 30 years ago. Often the artworks focus on an individual building that they describe and portray through research into its origin and current state, frequently including the voices of the inhabitants. Heidrun Holzfeind, to take one example, has delved into Il Corviale, a one-kilometre-long Viktor Rosdahl, Elineberg 2020, 2009, oil on plaster mounted on wood, diameter 27 cm. Photo: Anna Bokström. Courtesy the artist
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housing complex from 1972 outside Rome, and Mies van der Rohe’s elegant Colonnade and Pavilion apartment buildings in Newark. Late-modernist housing is a global phenomenon, and so are artists dealing with it. Many of them have profound and concrete knowledge of the buildings and their locales – in some cases they have grown up in these places; in others they still reside in them. Furthermore, in many parts of the world these buildings and areas are contested sites: economically and socially deprived, stigmatised as ghettos and prone to contemporary bare life. Thus, they have become condensors of the more general living conditions under neoliberalism, and fertile grounds for anything from books such as the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection (2007), films like La Haine (1995) and Attack the Block (2011), hip-hop by Sweden’s Adam Tensta and this whole genre of visual artworks. At the same time, these areas are turning into contemporary cultural heritage. By now, this is the heimat of several generations. Viktor Rosdahl’s small and detailed painting Elineberg 2020 (2009) depicts two of the five highrises in Elineberg, Helsingborg, in the south of Sweden (where the artist himself grew up). Designed between 1958 and 1965 by Jørn Utzon (famously the architect of the Sydney Opera House), they are rebuilt in Rosdahl’s futuristic scenario. But more importantly, vegetation is creeping up against the buildings and a waterfall is coming out of a window. It is dystopian and melancholic, postcivilisation like Piranesi but without the street-smart moralism of Hogarth or so many other works in this genre. Nature is about to take over completely in Elineberg – not a single human being can be spotted.
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Mark Sladen What is a book? ‘What is reading? How does reading turn into knowing? What is a book? Is reading a book different from reading a menu, or an affidavit, or a painting? Why are books associated with bodies? When books are burned, why is it natural to assume that people are next? How do you burn an e-book?’ These are some of the questions from the blurb for Wht Is a Book?, an e-book by New York artist Paul Chan, published in 2011 by the imprint that he founded in 2010, Badlands Unlimited. Badlands, which Chan runs in partnership with Ian Cheng and Micaela Durand, is an extraordinary experiment in publishing, most notably for its exploration of the e-book form. Its publications include the Wht Is series, each focused on a high-sounding question, and in which found pages are overlaid with unattributed quotes and images of Internet memes. Other works include Hell_Tree (2013) by Petra Cortright, an astonishing collage of the digital debris at the edges of this net artist’s life. The outfit’s most radical e-books are more akin to artworks than to conventional publications; and although they do not revel in interactivity or animation for the sake of it, they are completely a product of the digital age. One of the curious things about Badlands is how few other people are making art e-books that come anywhere close to this level of interest. It is now apparent that e-books have taken off in some areas, such as novels and children’s books, whereas other sections of the market have remained stubbornly print-bound; and art publishing is an area in which take-up for e-books is relatively low. This may in part be
because the various software and hardware combinations that can come together to make an e-book are not always conducive to making art publications: Kindles, for instance, have traditionally been best suited to simple text-led narratives. More obviously, the e-book fails to provide the ‘object’ character that is arguably more important for art books than for many kinds of publications. Whatever the reason, the result has been a stunted market for art e-books, and one in which few of the larger art publishers and art organisations have shown much sign of innovation.
E-books have taken off in some areas, such as novels and children’s books, whereas other sections of the market have remained stubbornly print-bound; and art publishing is an area in which take-up for e-books is relatively low In Britain, for instance, Thames & Hudson has mainly restricted itself to text-led e-books. Phaidon and Tate, meanwhile, have produced some art books for iPad, but usually offering a rather basic version of what an e-book can be, allowing the viewer to expand some images and keywords but with little more in terms of augmented features. However, more interesting publications are slowly starting to appear from such sources. One excellent new release from Phaidon is A New York Minute (2013), which
features a simple sequence of short street films by the American photographer Stephen Shore. Among smaller publishers the picture is similarly patchy. There are some outfits that are producing excellent text-led publications, including Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Moscow-based Strelka Institute, which publishes polemical e-books on its specialist subjects of architecture and design. There are also some smaller publishers that have been making interesting art books for iPad, including the Green Box, a Berlin-based press that has made a number of e-books that are ambitious in their use of multimedia elements. One of the most active small publishers is the London-based MAPP, the core of whose list is made up of picture books by contemporary photographers, as well as reissues of out-of-copyright photography classics. What is most often missing from the scene are e-books that really explore the potential of the technology, and that think about what a book might be in the digital age. This is what makes the titles issued by Badlands such a joy. One such is How to Download a Boyfriend, which the publishers speculate is the first group show published as an e-book, and which contains a riotous mix of pages by different artists, featuring many photo-based works drawing on digital and popular culture, interspersed with interactive quizzes on love and sex. In addition to their playful queerness, publications such as these – which substitute a conventional textual narrative with images, audio, found material and errant voices – can be seen as part of Paul Chan’s extended answer to the question posed by Wht Is a Book?
A page from Petra Cortright’s Hell_Tree, 2013, an e-book published by Badlands Unlimited
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Mike Watson Living with the Maldives If climate change has become an unprecedented global challenge, our generation’s failing may reside in its inability to provide a global response. This difficulty resides, in part, in the fact that while the weather system is clearly global, its traces and effects are only ever registered at the local level of nation or region. In this sense, the cost of repairs and of future disaster prevention in the wake of, say, Hurricane Katrina, was no more an Italian or Maldivian problem than the gradual sinking of the Maldives islands or of Venice is of concern to the United States. Yet – if we concur with the majority of the scientific community that global warming is manmade – it is arguable that industrial countries should take responsibility for the cost of, for example, sea defences and relocation due to flooding. In this sense the Maldives, which according to some projections will be completely submerged by the end of this century, are at the frontline of the urgent quest for an adequate global response to climate change – though it is an argument with increasing relevance to the UK, following recent flooding due to storms across its coastlines. In the context described above, the Maldives Pavilion – situated in Venice for the 55th Biennale between May and November 2013 – raised a number of questions, not least due to its unusual genesis, coming about during a period of regime change which left the pavilion without official backing, and subsequently without a building, prior to its last-minute relocation to Gervasuti Foundation. The pavilion was placed firmly at the nexus of several issues crucial to our times; among them climate change, democracy, global and national governance and, within the context of the Biennale, the adequate artistic response to these issues.
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The Contingent Movements Symposium, held at the Library of Historical Archives of Contemporary Arts of the Venice Biennale on the 28th and 29th of September 2013, included interventions by, among others, Irit Rogoff, T.J. Demos, Mariyam Shiuna and Suvendrini Perera on the themes of disappearance and dispersal raised by the touted disappearance of the archipelago nation of the Maldives. Being an event held in parallel with the Maldives Pavilion that included interventions from some of its artists and curators, a tangible sense of urgency was present. However, the linking
The Maldives, which according to some projections will be completely submerged by the end of this century, are at the frontline of the urgent quest for an adequate global response to climate change of the left to climate change via the arguable connection between capital and harmful fuel emissions, while possibly well founded, also served to reinstate the left as a movement waiting for deliverance from an intolerable present to a utopian future, inscribing the environment within a linear form of time that is particular to human understanding. The ostensibly pragmatic humanism of third-way politics returns to an old-style Marxist injunction to honour a future delivery from barbarity (enslavement of the worker and now the ecosphere) to utopia (freedom from Stefano Cagol, The Ice Monolith, 2013, installation and video documentary. Photo: Alisia Cruciani. Courtesy of Oredaria Gallery, Rome
slavery and an ecosphere unfettered by technological intervention). What would arguably make more sense would be to inscribe Marxism within the ecosphere so that rather than climate change being seen as an extension of capitalist exploitation which An argument includes an anthropomorphised implying that there could be nature, the exploitation of the noncapitalist worker would be seen as one of global warming, innumerable phenomena that which is no doubt take place within the ecosphere. true, since there This would tether our future is no such thing firmly to that of the ecosphere as Communist without subjugating nonhuman carbon dioxide. concerns to human ones. The only problem then becomes that of why we should care about the fate of the worker, or indeed of nature at all. Once tethered to nature – ‘red in tooth and claw’, as Tennyson famously wrote – the ethical imperative to treat others as we would wish to be treated becomes lost. For aside from YouTube videos showing dogs rescuing cats from near calamitous motor incidents, we can see no overarching ethical core in nature and no reason scientifically to suspect one at work under the surface. How then might we reasonably append the concerns of the left to nature, so that the latter’s rescue would not be seen as a pointless and egotistical human concern? Finding an adequate response will require work across the fields of ecology, philosophy and politics. The artworld, Is the left now with its international subordinate to network of people and ecologism? spaces, may be the ideal place to stage such a discussion, as attested to by the presence of the Maldives Pavilion at the last Biennale.
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Sam Jacob Return of the Jedi It’s the nagging sensation that pervades what we vaguely call ‘modern life’: there, somewhere in the background like a dull distracting hum, is that feeling that something is somehow lacking. The malevolent fug seems to leak from TV, the Internet or the phone twitching in our palms. Alienation, we suspect, emanates from the forces of work, capital and media. And this sensation only gets worse when we try to escape it. Because the awful irony is that it is ‘modern life’ – in the form of things like cheap air travel – that allows us to fill that void, to head off to the unspoiled exotic, to get back to nature and try to find ourselves. It’s exactly that uneasy sensation I’m feeling at a table in a guesthouse in Thailand’s Chiang Mai. We – that’s to say a few European backpacker types and me – have signed up for a two-day trek advertised as an ‘Eco-sensitive tour... an experience for life’ that promises ‘spectacular scenery’ and ‘friendly colourful tribes’. It also promises ‘no other tourists, no drugs, no rubbish, pure nature’. But before we voyage into the primitive, we need briefing, like adherents of Star Trek’s Prime Directive (“No interference with the social development of said planet”). Our guide lays down the rules: “Don’t wear skimpy clothes; don’t take pictures without asking. And no, you can’t charge your phone.” We meet early the next morning and drive past golf ranges and gated communities before the strip malls begin to give way to paddy fields. From there we trek four hours up into the hills, with occasional jungle for shade. At strategic points we come across coolboxes
manned by locals with cardboard menus of Coke, beer and crisps. In the afternoon sun we arrive in the village. We walk past primitive huts on stilts, their roofs made from leaves folded over bamboo. Chickens scratch around the roots of exotic fruit trees. We reach what will be home for the night, and our guide slips off. We find ourselves alone with each other, and inevitably start performing our own stereotypical roles: the serious Eastern European, the earnest German and, I suppose, the cynical, flippant, supercilious Englishman. After dinner our guide returns to tell us that he’ll take us up to visit his friend, the Head Man. Come the time, we troop up the hill
Our guide lays down the rules: “Don’t wear skimpy clothes; don’t take pictures without asking. And no, you can’t charge your phone” to a small hut, take off our shoes and climb a ladder into an atticlike room lit by a bulb powered from a car battery, a fire burning in a hearth. Warming himself next to it and propped against a post is the Head Man. We sit in a circle, and the Head Man offers us tea. His wife pours it from a blackened pot into bamboo cups. They might be authentic, but the hot tea leaks from their sides; the Head Man doesn’t seem too concerned and gets his wife to swap them for less folkloric mugs. There’s an awkwardness as we contemplate how this cultural exchange might work. The
silence is broken by fantastic belches from our hosts. Then the wife, who seems to know the drill, starts asking questions: “What do you eat in your country? What do you have for breakfast?” “Toast,” I answer, which seems a disappointing cultural revelation, but, it turns out, I’m just finding my range. “What do people do in your country? Are they farmers?” She asks as though she knows exactly how to push our cultural buttons. I find myself describing a world where everyone works in big buildings, spends the day sitting in front of computers regardless of their job. How farms are giant fields harvested by satellite-controlled robotic machines. I feel a little like C3PO in the Ewok Village. And it feels just as staged. We’re all in on the act, playing parts written a long time ago when industrialisation and colonisation invented the idea of the primitive. And it’s an act that happens here three times a week as group after group of authenticity-seekers climb the ladder to meet the Head Man. Still, this is a real village, a real hill tribe and a real way of life. And if being primitive – or rather being a place onto which we can project fantasies of authenticity – is part of its economic reality, then who I feel a little are we to argue? Perhaps the like C3PO only authenticity we can ever in the Ewok really encounter is the reality of Village our own cultural machinations. And that it’s in the awkwardness and ironies of this suburban jungle that we really find a truth: that the myths of primitivism are as delusory as our myths of modernity.
Photo courtesy the author
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J.J. Charlesworth How not to make public art What do Hans Haacke and David Shrigley have in common? The former is one of the godfathers of political conceptual art, the latter one of Britain’s finest exponents of art as a vehicle for existentially absurd deadpan humour – so not much, you’d think. But both of them have just been commissioned to produce sculptures for Trafalgar Square’s ‘fourth plinth’ – the otherwise vacant pedestal at the northwest corner of London’s most well known public space, which over the last 15 years has become the site for an annual public commission, funded by the Mayor of London and the Arts Council. The commissions announced for 2015 and 2016, Haacke and Shrigley respectively, might seem poles apart, but underlying them is an attitude that now seems to dominate the culture of public art in the UK: an attitude that favours public art as either a self-conscious deprecation of the status of public art – not very serious, not very important – or conversely, as an opportunity for a bit of earnest social commentary about the issues of the day. Shrigley’s Really Good is a large cartoonish fist doing the ‘thumbs up’ gesture, but in which the thumb is elongated absurdly skyward. As Shrigley pieces go, it’s a good ’un, neatly condensing the artist’s usual schtick – credulous optimism forever sunk by a cackling, blackhearted comedy of human failure. ‘It is my hope that this piece would make Trafalgar Square, London, the UK and the world a much better place. And it would be quite a cost-effective way of doing it,’ says Shrigley, his tongue lost somewhere in his cheek. If Shrigley ventriloquises the idiot-speak of social amelioration that now dominates
arts policy in the UK, then Haacke’s Gift Horse reminds us that the only thing public art likes more than flattering the public by satirising its own pointlessness is condescending to the public by lecturing it about serious contemporary ‘issues’. So Haacke’s clodhopping, boorishly didactic work is a bronze horse’s skeleton, which is supposed to contrast with the statue of King George IV on horseback on the opposite side of the square. Fixed to the horse’s foreleg will be an electronic display strip, displaying ‘live the ticker of the London Stock Exchange, completing the link between power, money and history’, according to the work’s droning publicity text. Capitalism is going to ruin us! Yeah! All this pomp and splendour that surrounds you is built on the sand of the stockmarket! Wooh! We are the 99%! And this under the indulgent gaze of Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson… Haacke’s horse isn’t the first work for the fourth plinth to take on ‘issues’, of course. Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005) was meant to make us think about disabled people and beauty; Yinka Shonibare’s Ship in a Bottle (2010) was meant to make us think about the history of British imperial power; Elmgreen & Dragset’s Powerless Structures, fig. 101 (2012) was meant to make us think a bit about war, and y’know, innocence and stuff. They’re the sculptural equivalent of a Live Aid concert. top left Hans Haacke, Gift Horse. Photo: © James O Jenkins. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York top right David Shrigley, Really Good. Photo: © James O Jenkins. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London
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What goes on in the internal discussions of the fourth plinth commissioning group, made up as it is of London artworld power-people such as Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick, artist Jeremy Deller and Frieze’s Matthew Slotover? These are people who do smart, interesting stuff in their normal roles, but here appear to imagine the public as a strange fusion of bored teenager and angry mob; restless, distracted, excited by bold shapes and colours and thoughtless political truisms about the state of the world. Or is it merely that the priority is always for a quirky, photogenic landmark to provide some PR gloss for Boris’s increasingly sterile, expensive, non-dom-friendly and overregulated city? Either way, such preoccupations with audience management and second-guessing have little to do with what might actually be the most interesting work of art, in and for itself, and what’s striking is that it’s usually the genuinely open and unpredictable work that gets left on the drawing board. So Mark Leckey’s proposed Larger Squat Afar, a bizarre recombining of elements copied from all the other statues on the square, might have offered the chance for an audience to puzzle and reflect on such subjects as the history of sculpture, the purpose of public monuments, or a culture now driven by remixing and editing, or… or a whole bunch of ideas led by an artist’s insights and interests, rather than by the dull managerial need of officials to please, placate and patronise us. But instead, big, loud and didactic win every time. Which is ironic, since so many fourth plinth works are made out to be somehow critical of the bad old days of traditional monumentalism – which was big, loud and, um, didactic…
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Hettie Judah Sauce for the sacrificial lamb As a pretentious twenty-something I once invited a large group of friends to dinner, then equipped them with charcoal and invited them to decorate the walls. Rather than the masterpieces and bon mots that I had hoped for, the result was a living space patterned with obscenities, a rich seam of pornographic slander and a bouquet of vast, hairy cocks and balls splurting enthusiastically across the plasterwork. It was at the time a revelation to me that while you can fill a room with artists and writers, you cannot make them engage in cultural practice – particularly after a well-lubricated dinner. This lesson came to mind in February as ArtReview’s Oliver Basciano and I – alongside artists Dan Coopey and Maria Georgoula – cooked dinner for 30 in the serene new buildings of the Delfina Foundation, in London, as part of their Politics of Food programme. It was a rare dry day at the very end of a grim winter – our ‘political’ menu included parts of a sheep that had come from one of the UK counties worst affected by the floodwaters that had been making headline news during recent months. The sheep had arrived in parts – bagged up and dripping: very much the stuff of curtain-twitcher’s fantasy – in the back of my cousin’s car. On the day of the dinner, I received heartfelt emails from the farm about the policy of flooding the countryside to save areas of greater population density, how local land had become so drenched that it was sterile and now considered ‘derelict’, and the abandonment of rural areas by urban politicians. The flyer
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Panic and catastrophe automatically that Delfina had sent out advertised a literal seem high on the agenda when we come ‘sacrificial lamb’ at the heart of our meal – our to talk about food. Such feelings certainly flesh-and-blood ovine started to feel cruelly chimed with the theme of our meal, which symbolic of the countryside that had produced we introduced with a discussion of how it, the inhabitants of which evidently felt that disconnected British consumers are from their land had been sacrificed to save the cities. the sources of food production, and how Downstairs in Delfina’s gallery, a strong badly we would fare as a result should we theme of disaster and devastation permeated the Politics of Food exhibition. Tadasu Takamine’s experience an economic crisis on the scale series of staged films Japan Syndrome (2012) of those in Greece or Spain. For feelings of panic and catastrophe replayed dialogues about post-Fukushima to continue high on the agenda while you contamination in Japan’s food chain. A film are actually eating food is quite a different and posters of Asunción Molinos Gordo’s proposition – one perhaps originating in El Matam El Mish-Masry (The Non-Egyptian something rather ickier than political territory. Restaurant, 2012) documented a food kiosk Thus as bread was broken and plates filled that the artist had run for three weeks in an and then emptied, the conversation shifted informal neighbourhood of Cairo that had away from agricultural grown up on former agricultural crises. We didn’t talk about land. In the first week the kiosk Based on the conversaflooding and agriculture, served prime Egyptian produce tion at his end of the table, or the political abandongrown for export; in the second, Oliver Basciano thinks ment of rural communities; affordable but imported ingredithat Hettie was simply indeed this room full ents that formed part of the staple sitting in the wrong place of creative practitioners diet of the area; in the third, ‘food’ didn’t address many urgent harvested locally – trash dug from the once rich soil, presented on plates like food-related issues at all (though mercifully delicacies. The claymation footage projected they didn’t quite hit the lows of daubing from a fibreglass pig’s backside in Candice Lin’s the walls of Delfina in obscene graffiti). Bacium Sub Cauda (2012) animated the obliteraBut in an era when so many of us chew down every meal without speaking, engaged tion of hardy local pig species in favour of only with a screen in front of us, simply to high-maintenance breeds more acceptable sit down and share a meal and a conversation to the international market. – of whatever kind – with strangers in Molinos Gordo, El Matam El Mish-Masry this way already felt like a political opening (The Non-Egyptian Restaurant), 2012. Photo: Tim Bowditch. gesture of sorts. Courtesy Delfina Foundation, London
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Jonathan Grossmalerman I keep visualising Hauser & Wirth! Why can’t I let that one go?! Oh Misery and Humiliation! You two dirty sneak thieves! How did you even get in here? Had I not fastened tightly the latch of my tiny heart? I mean, I’m a pretty optimistic guy, but searching for new gallery representation is really putting me through the wringer! I’m just glum of spirit… bummed out… down in the dumps. Firstly, is it actually possible that none of these young gallerists has any idea who I am? Me? Jonathan Grossmalerman? Don’t try and hide it! I know a blank stare when I see one! Secondly, someone could really have given me a heads-up that no one uses slides any more. It would have saved me a great deal of embarrassment. No end of it. I really can’t stress that enough! Really! Is there no one looking out for me at all? Imagine my shame, as that pretty gallerina’s second blank look of the morning flashed at the slide sheet dangling ungracefully from her delicate hands. Upside down. It was bad. Really bad. Oh! Hélas pour moi! How has it come to this? How do I find myself in this godawful predicament? What is an artist without a gallery!? Can one even call oneself an artist without a gallery? I suppose you can call yourself anything you want, but you and I both know that the real answer is plainly obvious indeed! And not the answer that some of you are hoping for! No. It’s the bad answer. The other answer. The one hiding in the shadows!
Personally, I blame ArtReview! It is evident that something fishy is going on there. I mean, explain to me how my own private musings, detailing the well-founded animosity I harboured towards my ex-gallerist, Maximillian Bingeweary, would, despite their being published in an obscure British art journal, somehow find their way into his office? All the way to New York’s Chelsea district? Thousands of miles away from ArtReview’s offices in Yorkshire. Hmmm? No, that is a bridge too far. I smell a rat and I don’t like it! But I suppose that’s all water under the bridge now. There is no profit to be found in mulling over the past. After all, however down in the dumps I might be at present, it’s still up to me to turn these lemons life has handed me into… a pie… or… well… some other thing one can make with lemons. I mean, no one else is going to do it for me. I’m referring to getting me a gallery, of course. Not baking a pie with lemons or anything. That was simply a metaphor. Anyway, back to the smoking detritus of my career… I must shake myself out of this torpor and do something! Anything! But what!? Positive thinking! Yes! I will visualise the gallery I would like to show with… Goddamnit! It’s Hauser & Wirth again! I keep visualising Hauser & Wirth! Why can’t I let that one go!? OK. Fuck positive thinking. Maybe I simply need to
calm down. That’s what my studio assistant Neal thinks. I should just stop worrying about it. I suppose he has some sort of point. After all, I’ve only been without a gallery for a few months. I imagine it could be argued that in the grand scheme of things a couple of months is not that big a deal. But then again, Neal has proven himself time and time again to be a complete fucking moron! And even he has a gallery! Albeit a small one in Bushwick that also sells dumplings. Why the fuck should I listen to him? What I need to do is snap out of this depression and get my gumption back! My sizzle! My razzle-dazzle! The je ne sais quoi that makes me so attractive to men and women alike. I can already And even he feel it coming. Perhaps I’ll write has a gallery! a couple of emails to a museum Albeit a small curator and/or a gallerist and wait one in Bushwick that also sells patiently for a response. Yes! dumplings That’s what I’ll do. It’s amazing what an enormous sense of accomplishment simply writing a couple of emails gives me. Provided I get a response. Oh, dread! What if no one responds to my email!? Maybe I’ll just make myself a little drinkywink. Yes. That’s what I’ll do. That’s the stuff! I imagine the staff of Hauser & Wirth are beginning their workday. I wonder what they’ll do. What dreams will they fulfil in that fun factory of the imagination?
I’m the one in the water
April 2014
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Laura McLean-Ferris Off-space No 19: Castillo/Corrales, Paris The first time I had a meeting at Castillo/Corrales it was a busy Saturday in the Belleville gallery and the artist David Douard was looking after the space, fielding questions about the exhibition and manning Section 7, the in-house bookshop. “Just go upstairs and make yourself at home,” Douard said. “Do some work, use the computer, make coffee, whatever… Just make yourself at home.” So I did. I made my way up the narrow stairs to the flat (which houses visiting artists, curators and suchlike), did a bit of washing up, made a pot of coffee, logged out of the Castillo/Corrales Gmail on the Mac in the office and into my own account. Time wore on, and stirring noises came from the room across the hall. Liam Gillick, half asleep, grizzly round the chops, lurched out of the bedroom. “Oh, hi,” I said (we don’t really know one another). “Would you like some coffee?” He assented, gruffly, and I washed another mug. Soon the Italian artist Alex Cecchetti appeared, apparently there to fix the windows. Another mug, another coffee, a conversation about the window frames. And there it was: “Make yourself at home.” A welcoming, immediate intimacy that I have never experienced at another organisation, but have since come to appreciate as integral to this one. Exhibitions at Castillo/Corrales (which takes its name from a historic boxing match) often have the enjoyable riskiness and intellectual glee that come with artist-curated shows – 2010’s Breaking Point: Katherine Bigelow’s Life in Art comes to mind. ‘Let’s keep it simple’ read the press release: ‘In the 1970s in New York, Kathryn Bigelow was part of the art world.
She collaborated with Lawrence Weiner, Art & Language, Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, and others.’ By presenting Bigelow’s early conceptual collaborations, the exhibition asked how these might have influenced the career of the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Director. The Issues of Our Time, a 2013 exhibition of four female artists – Bonny Poon, Loretta Fahrenholz, Morag Keil and Mélanie Matranga – took a quote from Victoria’s Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, about creating a brand of the self, as the departure
Liam Gillick, half asleep, grizzly round the chops, lurched out of the bedroom. “Oh, hi,” I said (we don’t really know one another). “Would you like some coffee?” point for a question that many artists face in their own careers. CCA Wattis director Anthony Huberman has regularly returned to curate the ‘Castillo/Corrales biennial’. A pamphlet edition of Donald Barthelme’s 1969 short story ‘Paraguay’ (which describes a journey into an invented country of unfathomable laws) has been reissued as the calling card for the gallery’s publishing house, Paraguay Press, which has published artist books with Dora García and Lili Reynaud-Dewar. Founded in 2007 by five artists – Thomas Boutoux, Boris Gobille, François Piron,
Benjamin Thorel and Oscar Tuazon – in a tiny space on Rue Rébeval, Castillo/Corrales started with undefined ambitions and purposes – storage/office/shared studio/occasional gallery – though the amorphous status of the collective was shaped by its constantly changing space; Tuazon – known for his rough, architectural sculptures and installations – was constantly modifying the architecture, using it as a playground or test-bed for his own work. Though it still runs on favours, fundraising and the energy of the group, Castillo/Corrales has moved to a slightly bigger space close to commercial galleries in Belleville, and the collective has changed and swollen to include (around) 11 members, each with varying roles. (The ‘us’ section of the website commences: ‘Admittedly, this is where it can get a little confusing sometimes’.) They pleasingly describe themselves as a ‘headless’ organisation; as Boutoux puts it, this lack of fixity allows them to ‘keep the range of ways of working in the artworld open, and somehow resist and criticise the naturalisation of ways of working as necessarily, ineluctably, individual, careerdriven, obsessed by visibility, top-down, authoritative, humourless, unfriendly, macho.’ While such attitude might gladden the heart anywhere, in Paris, where artist-run organisations are few, it seems more like lifeblood. And surprisingly effective. Because somehow, even in an organisation with no head and many arms, the Gmail account gets answered, the shows go on, books get published, the windows get fixed and the coffee gets made.
Seyoung Yoon, Sun Shades for Cars (Exterior), 69 × 178 cm. Courtesy Castillo/Corrales, Paris
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ArtReview
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13/03/2014 13:25
ULRICH RIEDEL
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Free Open late Fridays Until 31 August 2014
Collective Gallery City Observatory & City Dome 38 Calton Hill, Edinburgh, EH7 5AA
Nils Norman & Assemble 12.04.14 – 14.04.14 Glasgow Green
+ 44 (0)131 556 1264 mail@collectivegallery.net www.collectivegallery.net
Play Summit is a collaboration between Collective’s All Sided Games and Baltic Street Adventure Playground. Baltic Street Adventure Playground is a VELOCITY project delivered collaboratively by ASSEMBLE and Create London and is funded by Creative Scotland, Clyde Gateway and Glasgow City Council.
Germany divided Baselitz and his generation From the Duerckheim Collection Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), Ein neuer Typ (A New Type) (detail), 1965. Reproduced by permission of the artist. © Georg Baselitz.
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Win a luxury weekend for two, with a guided tour of the exhibition, afternoon tea, and dinner, bed and breakfast at nearby Radisson Blu Edwardian. artreview.com/competition
13/03/2014 13:25
Multiple points in this crude landscape
C O MMI SSI O N # 1
Jonathan Baldock 1 0 M AY – 7 J U NE 2 0 1 4
Preview and performance: 9 May 2014
COM I NG U P T HI S AU T U M N
Jonathan Baldock, A strange cross between a butchers shop and a nightclub (2013) PHOTO: Mike Cameron
C O MMI SSI O N # 2
COM M ISSION #3
Edwin Burdis
Shana Moulton
3 3 S E E LY ROAD N OT T I N G H AM N G 7 1NU | WE AR E P R IMARY. O R G
colin booth time spins
2nd April – 11th May 2014
one one six
116 High Street, Tenterden, Kent TN30 6HT Gallery open: Wed – Sat 11:00 – 17:30, Sun 11:00 – 16:00 tel: 01580 761196 email: oneonesix@tiscali.co.uk www.jennymilleroneonesix.com www.colinbooth.com
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Barbara Galerie Rudolfinum Alšovo nábřeží 12, CZ 110 01 Prague 1 galerie@rudolfinum.org www.galerierudolfinum.org
Generální partner galerie / General partner of the gallery
Hlavní mediální partner / Main media partner
Probst Mediální partneři / Media partners
Galerie Rudolfinum 23/4 – 6/7 2014
Total Uncertainty
HEINRICH DUNST LITTLE WARSAW KERSTIN VON GABAIN 11. 4.– 8. 6. 2014
secession Friedrichstraße 12, A-1010 Wien, www.secession.at
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Great Curators and Their Ideas No 1
Juan A. Gaitán Interview by Raimar Stange
The 8th Berlin Biennale opens on 28 May. In contrast to its controversial predecessor – curated by Artur Źmijewski, the Voina group and Joanna Warszwa – this is a show that does not rely on activist approaches but, rather, on more or less autonomous artworks and a vivacious sense of history. Ahead of the opening, Berlin-based critic and curator Raimar Stange sat down with the exhibition’s curator, Juan A. Gaitán (Canada/Colombia), to discuss his concept for the Biennale.
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ArtReview
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ARTREVIEW I read online that your curatorial concept for the 8th Berlin Biennale focuses on the work of the nineteenth-century German scientists Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Is this still up to date? JUAN A. GAITÁN Things have changed over the past year or so, of course, as it’s a long process. We are still interested in how a certain history, that of the nineteenth century, relates to the Berlin of today and the world of today; we’re also interested in certain moments where culture and mercantilism convey each other’s programmes, both historically and currently. AR What exactly is your interest in the nineteenth century? That it represents the beginning of industrialisation? JAG The interest isn’t strictly historical. It rather relates, for example in Berlin, to how the city’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture and culture are being restaged, with buildings like the Humboldt Forum [a reconstruction of the historical Prussian city palace] and Museum Island in general. It’s an interest that therefore emerges from the present, and from what I see as something like a restoration of the Prussian past, together with another kind of architecture that is forward-looking, like the Sony Center [in Potsdamer Platz]. Between these two forms (the Sony Center and the Humboldt Forum) lies the twentieth century, which seems to be thus actively negated. I’ve noticed similar situations in other cities around the world. AR Do you think that this negation of the last century occurs in other parts of society as well? And what is its ideological function? JAG I think the twentieth century, being our recent past, has an enormous presence in any society’s emotional composition. It is perhaps
not unusual, then, to want to put it away, at least for a while, until its effects are clear, or until it is narrowed down in discourse. I am not sure there is an ideological function in this negation, as it might thus be less purposeful than the resurrection of previous centuries. In other words, I wouldn’t want to approach negation from a purely rationalist point of view. Thus we focus on the signs of this negation, on what surrounds it – in this case, the restoration of the Prussian principle in Berlin’s Mitte [district], and also the projection into the future that is signified by architectural statements like Norman Foster’s dome atop the Reichstag, or the Sony Center, and so on. The upcoming Humboldt Forum I see as an example of this too, and a more extreme example at that, for in this case it is the entire thing that is being built, so it’s no longer a reconstruction but a step removed, an imitation of a reconstruction, but based merely on images: the image of the palace in the three facades that will resemble it, and the image of the contemporary museum in the interior, and so on. AR How could art inscribe itself in this process that you describe as a putting away? As memory-work against this negation? JAG I am thinking more in the direction of a discourse on and around the image, and the kind of literacy that the image-world has established. So indeed your point about memory against negation is right, but we are also concerned with the notion that we are surrounded by images and that art might above Andreas Angelidakis, Crash Pad, 2014. Photo: Uwe Walter. Courtesy the artist and the Breeder, Athens & Monaco preceding page Juan A. Gaitán. Photo: © Thomas Eugster
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provide counter-images to the ones that dominate our world. AR Please make it a bit more concrete. Can you describe works that actualise this in the upcoming Berlin Biennale? JAG It is important to point out first that the Biennale is developing two statements in parallel. One is cartographic and has to do with Berlin itself. As you know, we are developing the exhibition in the Museen Dahlem and in Haus am Waldsee as well as at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. In this respect I think it important that the Biennale uses spaces already dedicated to art and culture, museums and art centres, because it is within these that we develop most of our relationship to contemporary cultural production. These spaces mark a space between them, and once the Ethnologisches Museum [Ethnological Museum] and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst [Asian Art Museum], both now housed in the Museen Dahlem, are translated into the Humboldt Forum, this space will become narrower and will concentrate almost all of the symbolic capital in Mitte. The second statement has to do with the image and image-literacy. Basically everywhere one goes the visual landscape (especially in urban areas, though of course it also happens in the rural areas) is dominated by images: we are exposed to them everywhere. We have become very good at ‘reading’ images, and perhaps even better than at reading and writing text; but the landscape of images, or the lexicon of images that surround our daily lives, is quite limited. There is surely much more in terms of what images can do or how they can function in the world.
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AR For example? JAG The most obvious case for us is Andreas Angelidakis’s Crash Pad (2014) at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, our pilot project [the first work commissioned for the Biennale], which is both a room – a multipurpose room for gatherings, for meetings, events, talks and so on – and a visual statement that counterpoises two divergent durées in the history of Greece: one that ties it to the Ottoman Empire and to the Eastern Mediterranean’s history of trade and empire, and another that bypasses nearly two millennia in order to claim a continuity between antiquity and modern Greece. The Crash Pad contends with this latter narrative by revealing its reliance on a very modern invention that in historical and art-historical circles is referred to as ‘the invention of antiquity’ (by intellectuals of the Enlightenment and the humanists). Another work has been commissioned from Olaf Nicolai, who is also part of the artistic team I am working with for the Biennale. He is going to work with a floor ornament taken from commercial architecture, namely a shopping mall in Berlin-Lichtenberg that will soon be demolished. The ornament will be deconstructed and recomposed anew on the floor of the Museen Dahlem. And then we are going to produce a series of posters as standalone visual statements accompanying the Biennale. For this I have invited several artists, some of them very well known in Europe, such as Mariana Castillo Deball, and others hardly noticed so far, whose posters will represent a wide range of artistic practices.
AR If I understand correctly, the focus of the forthcoming Berlin Biennale is on cultural production in the form of images. In contrast, the last edition, which was curated by Artur Źmijewski two years ago, put its emphasis on the agency of activist art. Concentrating on images and exhibiting in three traditional art institutions, isn’t there the risk of catering to a notion of art that overly corresponds to a conventional and market-oriented one? JAG You seem to think that exhibiting in art institutions is equivalent to collaborating with the market, and that activism is its opposite. This assumption implies that we don’t need to discuss these institutions in themselves, for how they are and where they are, in their current state (which is far from stable) and how they fit in the larger cultural projects of the state and the city, points which my last answer I think at least tries to bring up. As public institutions they are also part of the state, and they thus mirror the current practices around cultural institutions by the state. Can we say that these three institutions, the KW Institute, the Museen Dahlem and the Haus am Waldsee are similar? I think these are three carefully chosen places for the Biennale, with specific histories, specific realities, collections in the case of the Ethnological Museum, and more importantly they’re located in specific areas of town, themselves loaded with history. As for the image, I am approaching it, as I said, as the primary source
of information in our time, and I think it imperative (politically, socially) to continue to generate a critique based on understanding the way they are used in our everyday lives. AR For ages I haven’t seen a solo show at KW or at Haus am Waldsee by an artist who is not represented by a gallery. The audience in all three of the institutions are the better-educated people. So my last question is, for whom do you make the Berlin Biennale? JAG The question of the public always comes up framed by the idea, sometimes unspoken, that it is the responsibility of art to speak to a total audience. I think this is the ideal scenario, but one cannot expect everyone to like contemporary art, or to be able to relate to it. It is important to bear in mind that what we call contemporary art is one of many forms of critical engagement with the world and its cultural composition, its social and political realities. The Berlin Biennale is for everyone. It is for those who visit it and who are interested in contemporary art and artistic practices. It is also for those who only read and hear about it, and who would continue a conversation about themes raised in the Biennale but in their own place, in their own time and in their own terms. We could call these the ‘first’ and ‘third’ audiences of the Biennale, one that is immediately interested and involved in contemporary art, and one that is present in other ways, and which challenges the confines of contemporary artistic practices. Yet more precisely I think of the Berlin Biennale as a project for the city, and my hope is that it manages to raise questions that are important today, in 2014, in Berlin.
Haus am Waldsee. Photo: Berndt Borchardt
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Other People and Their Ideas No 14
James Lingwood Interview by Tom Eccles
James Lingwood is codirector of Artangel, a London-based art-commissioning and -producing body that pioneered the use of unconventional urban spaces as sites for major temporary installations in a variety of media. Since its founding in 1991 Artangel projects have included Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993–4), Gregor Schneider’s Die Familie Schneider (2004), Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn/Library of Water (2007), Yael Bartana’s And Europe Will Be Stunned (2012) and Clio Barnard’s debut feature film, The Arbor (2010). Lingwood has also curated exhibitions independently of Artangel, among them Juan Muñoz’s Double Bind (2001) at Tate Modern, London, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Robert Smithson: Field Trips (2001) at the Museu Serralves, Porto, and Douglas Gordon’s What Have I Done (2002) at the Hayward Gallery, London.
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ArtReview
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ARTREVIEW You have now been codirector (with Michael Morris) of the commissioning organisation Artangel for more than 20 years. Trying to discern a pattern to your approach to commissioning and to probably more than a hundred projects, besides the obvious sensitivity to finding just the right site for each artwork, I came back to the Spanish artist Juan Muñoz, with whom you were close. Juan described himself as a storyteller. Is the narrative function of art important to you? JAMES LINGWOOD Yes, it’s over a hundred different projects now, and there isn’t really one overriding pattern. There are more like a number of tributaries, which at a certain point intersect. There’s certainly quite a wide tributary of work with a narrative dimension. Quite a few works we’ve produced, notably film and video such as Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave (2001) or Yael Bartana’s Zamach (Assassination) (2011) or Lindsay Seers’s Nowhere Less Now (2012), have a narrative structure, though not necessarily a linear one. But then again quite a few do not. If you think of Juan Muñoz’s sculptural ensembles, they suggest something has happened, or is about to happen, but they are waiting for you to make it happen. You make the story as you move around them, or between them. AR With Artangel you made a strategic shift in commissioning public art away from site as a starting point and parameter. It all seems rather straightforward now, but was rather radical in its day. In contrast, you selected artists first and foremost with whom you wanted to work. When you began in the early 1990s, how did you choose the artists and what were the parameters? JL As you suggest, many of our projects are embedded in a specific place. The material of
the place is part of the material of the work and part of the experience of the work. Perhaps this lends itself to narrative, the way the experience unfolds in time and place, the way you encounter a work and remember it. It seemed more interesting to set off without knowing the destination. Steering artists to historically loaded sites, which was becoming more widespread in Europe in the early 90s, had some limitations. It began to seem as if the experience of the place was more memorable than the work. We wanted to avoid too much pointing, and we still do. How did we arrive at inviting individual artists to go on that kind of open-ended journey? Seeing some work which had substance and which stayed with you. Having conversations which opened up possibilities. Not knowing how an idea which seemed special and singular might work out, but feeling it was important to find out. In a way, the invitation is mutual – the artist invites us as much as we invite them. The only parameter was that the work needed to materialise somewhere outside the normal institutional situations. That was the case when we started talking with artists like Juan Muñoz, Rachel Whiteread, Michael Clark and Matthew Barney in the early 90s, and it’s still the case now. AR Martha Rosler once admonished me for only working with ‘A-list names’ (her terminology), which seemed brutally unfair at the time. How would you respond to the same criticism? JL I’d think it was brutally unfair too! We’ve worked a lot with artists towards the beginning above Mike Kelley, Mobile Homestead, 2012, an Artangel commission. Courtesy Artangel, London facing page James Lingwood. Photo: P.Fleissig
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of their careers. Each year, we have projects with artists who aren’t A-list or B-list or on any kind of list. Maybe in time they might become well known, and it’s great if they do. Over the years, we’ve opened the Artangel inbox to UK-based artists to share ambitious ideas with us. We’ve taken forward proposals by artists including Jeremy Deller, Roger Hiorns, Ruth Ewan and Clio Barnard that came to us through this open invitation. They were not well known at all at the time. Last year, we looked at 1,500 proposals and decided to work with two artists – Ben Rivers, whose films we knew a little, and Katrina Palmer, whose work we had never heard of, seen or read. We’re as excited to work with her as we would be to work with an artist like Pierre Huyghe, or anyone else whose consistent brilliance we’ve been slow to recognise. The projects take the time they take and we’re not rushing to get to the finishing line just so we can say we’ve done something first. For instance we started talking with Steve McQueen in 1996 and he completed Caribs’ Leap / Western Deep in 2002. Francis Alÿs took seven years to make Seven Walks in London… AR Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4, Deller’s Orgreave and McQueen’s Western Deep were all ambitious films. They also mark a period when arts organisations became producers of a different kind. In this you were groundbreaking. What were the challenges? What shifts in organisation did they necessitate? JL An organisation such as ours needs to be able to change shape according to the needs of each production. Each one in turn has its own needs, its own challenges and its own microeconomy. Working with Matthew Barney on Cremaster 4 came very early on for us, and to be honest, Matthew really drove the production forward.
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When he was filming on the Isle of Man, I was basically hanging on in the sidecar, just trying to put my weight in the right place. On the other hand, Michael Morris worked very closely with Jeremy Deller to prepare the ground for The Battle of Orgreave. This involved years of planning and hundreds of meetings, gaining the trust and involvement of hundreds of ex-miners and their families in South Yorkshire, and recruiting amateur battle reenactors from around Britain. Jeremy’s initial idea – which he called The English Civil War Part Two – was for a performance. To make it possible for the performance to happen, which necessitated both money and goodwill, it became clear we needed to make a film for television. To make the film we had to persuade Channel 4 that it was more a distinctive kind of documentary about an important moment in recent British history than it was an art project. We then needed to bring together a dedicated production team who could coordinate a weekend of filming with about a thousand participants, a few horses, a film crew, reenactment specialists, a crowd of spectators, etc. When you’re working on this kind of scale, it’s better to have a separate entity and that’s why we set up Artangel Media. AR Working in film is a whole different economy from traditional art production and exhibition. It can get quite frightening as a producer. What issues did you face, for example, working with Steve McQueen, where much of the production took place in the Caribbean and down a coal mine in South Africa? Were there moments when you had to say “enough already”? JL You’re absolutely right, there was a big shift in the 90s from arts organisations being for the most part presenters to becoming more actively producers. You can see that clearly in the way that more and more museums today have embraced that approach, that more and more of what they do is a kind of production. Steve McQueen’s shoots in Grenada and South Africa weren’t the kind where time equals money in a really worrying way. There were small crews, and no storyboard or script. In fact, for Western Deep, the film Steve made in South Africa, there were only two, Steve and his DOP Sean Bobbitt. The challenge was more about securing the agreement to film in the mine. Most of the time, artists are resourceful and they understand what’s at stake. Mostly, when you’re filming, you worry about time, and the weather. Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead videos were a case of a project growing way beyond what we’d
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expected. We were having difficulty getting the money together to build the full homestead in Detroit, so we decided to go ahead with the mobile home element. It was built to travel around the city and the suburbs on a trailer. I suggested to Mike that he make a ‘trailer’ of the trailer. I was thinking of maybe a 5–10 minute promo which might help us raise some money. A year and a half later, he’d made three videos, about three hours in total, and we’d spent a great deal more than we’d raised… I should add that when I voiced some concerns about the budget, Mike offered to take up the slack. AR How has the funding landscape for art projects changed over the past 20 years, particularly for the kind of ambitious, challenging and somewhat open works proposed by Artangel? JL Look at the landscape of the artworld right now. There’s a lot of irrational exuberance out there. It’s like an early-twenty-first-century equivalent to tulipomania in Holland in the seventeenth century. Our challenge is getting the resources for projects where all you can do is signal a direction of travel rather than a destination, and which really might not be commercial. Fortunately there are some imaginative angels out there. It’s worth saying that in Britain, public funding for the arts increased quite significantly for most of the past 20 years, and this gave Artangel a stable foundation on which to build our work. But public funding is at best going to stand still for the next period, and the betterresourced galleries are now having to take a more proactive role in the commissioning process. Their artists need them to get behind certain kinds of projects, and many of those who can, do. AR A rather sticky issue for any not-for-profit art producer is how to involve the gallery system in funding the production of works. As you say, it’s now fairly commonplace. I was always rather wary of asking for funding from galleries, but certainly many aspects of the works I produced came from outside of the philanthropic realm. Correct me if I’m wrong, but on occasion you seemed to feel it was almost an ethical requirement for galleries to support projects sometimes in the form of reimbursing production costs if projects ultimately sold or parts of projects were sold. No easy task!
There’s a lot of irrational exuberance out there. It’s like an early-twenty-first-century equivalent to tulipomania in Holland in the seventeenth century
JL If it’s a work that an artist really wants and needs to make, and it needs significant funding, then their galleries come into the picture. The pragmatic needs and ethical requirements shouldn’t be at odds with each other. We look for the idea first, and the funding later, and it’s important to be able to make projects with artists who don’t have galleries, with artists who don’t make films or installations within the logic of the limited edition or the gallery system. AR You have also established the Artangel Collection for the Tate, which comprises many of your groundbreaking moving-image projects as part of the Tate Collection, and these are available for loan to galleries and museums across the UK as well as for possible exhibition in nongallery spaces. Do you see this as a model for preserving these unorthodox projects for the future? Are the projects reconfigured for the collection or are the works essentially films derived from event-based projects? Could you imagine, for example, allowing for projects to be restaged as part of the collection, much as one might, say, restage a Merce Cunningham dance? JL There are two concerns at the heart of the idea of the Artangel Collection at Tate – which has about 20 film and video projects, for the most part installations, or bodies of work such as Francis Alÿs’s Seven Walks, for example, or Tony Oursler’s The Influence Machine. Firstly that the production of these works was made possible because of public funding and we believe they should remain in the public sphere – by which I mean an edition or some presentation rights. And secondly, there seems to be such a striking disparity between the time, effort and money invested in making some of these works, and the extent to which they are presented. We want these works to be seen more widely, to be part of a living collection. Given the complexity and scale of some of the projects, they often need to be reconfigured or restaged. When you were at the Public Art Fund, you presented The Influence Machine in Madison Square Garden in New York, then we presented it in Soho Square in London – right next to where John Logie Baird had first demonstrated his prototype for a television, and Tony has gone on to reconfigure the work in a number of other different contexts. The same could be said of an installation like Kutluğ Ataman’s Kuba or Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett. Works like these offer a repertoire of different possibilities; the artists are interested in exploring that and so are we. Wherever you look now, you see artists orchestrating the experience of their work in increasingly complex ways. It’s becoming much less fixed.
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THE INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION OF CONTEMPORARY & MODERN ART
18–21 SEPTEMBER 2014 NAVY PIER
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Great Collectors and Their Ideas No 5
Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Interview by Joshua Mack
For more than 30 years, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros has dedicated herself to the preservation and study of the material culture of Latin America. Her holdings of modern and contemporary art from the Hispanic world are unmatched in breadth and depth, and her collection also includes colonial art and landscape paintings by European and North American artists who travelled to South America before the twentieth century. Under the auspices of the Fundación Cisneros, which she established with her husband, Gustavo, in the 1970s, the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros also administers the Orinoco collection, comprising objects from the Amazonian peoples of the Cisneroses’s native Venezuela. It also originates innumerable loans and standalone exhibitions (the Royal Academy, London, will host an exhibition of geometric abstraction from the Colección this summer), and sponsors educational initiatives, curatorial initiatives and publication programmes.
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ARTREVIEW When and how did your commitment to Latin American work develop? PATRIcIA PhElPs dE cIsnERos My commitment to art from Latin America developed from my youth. I grew up surrounded by art in my native city of Caracas. In the 1950s and 60s, the Venezuelan art scene was one of the most dynamic in the world; it was progressive and constructive and integrated into everyday life. Artists such as [Jesús Rafael] Soto, [Alejandro] Otero, [Carlos] Cruz-Diez and Gego were part of our commonplace because contemporary abstract art and architecture were combined in public structures. I saw, when I attended college in the Us, that these extraordinary works were little known to my classmates or even to my professors. And I felt a calling, if you will, to make those works, along with the larger contributions of Latin American culture, seen and appreciated by the rest of the world.
crucial moment in her life. Had she become an architect in her native land (impossible, because her family was Jewish, and came to Venezuela as a matter of survival) I wonder what her accomplishments would have been. Certainly it’s hard to imagine that they could have been more significant than her achievements as an artist. As for ‘why abstraction’ – the artist Jesús Soto once spoke about the need to create order where one doesn’t exist. Artists express this desire through the work they make, but it’s a universal need. On one level, being in the presence of abstract works, particularly those of geometric abstraction, gives me a sense of calm, of harmony. In retrospect, I can see in my early interest in Whitehead a confluence with
AR Where did you study? PPc I studied philosophy, at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. In particular, I was fascinated by the writing of mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, whose interest in mathematics was in its metaphysics. I remember reading in Adventures of Ideas his insight that discord and progress are intertwined; that change results from the process of confrontation. I was impressed by his long-term perspective and broad view; his total belief in the rule of law; and by his acknowledgement of the ways in which extra-European societies had provided the foundation for Western civilisation. The appeal of these ideas to anyone from Latin America must be evident. AR Your modern collection is spectacularly rich in works of geometric abstraction, and remarkably rich in works by Gego, among other artists from Venezuela. Why abstraction? And how did you come to define your aesthetic, intellectual and emotional relationship to it? PPc Gego is one of my favourite artists. She came to Venezuela as a young woman from Germany, where she had studied architecture and engineering. She is one of many instances of cross-pollination across the seas, of a cultural exchange that didn’t privilege Europe over Latin America. In fact, it’s very difficult to imagine that Gego would have become the artist she did without having arrived in Venezuela at that
AR Do you share this desire for sociopolitical change? And if so, how do you feel art can promote it? PPc There are many artists whose work either is overtly sociopolitical in terms of content or, as was the case with many of the modernist Latin American artists involved with geometric abstraction, is the product of a particular prescriptive manifesto or vision of a utopian future. Though the result is rarely, if ever, political revolution or reform, innovative art does effect change by proposing the previously unimaginable, shifting paradigms and initiating cultural exchange. However, it can do so only if it is seen, which is why it is so important to Gustavo and me that we have the works from the collection in circulation as much as possible, and that we also provide opportunities for international curators and artists to exchange ideas and information by travelling to and from Latin America. AR You also have significant holdings of objects from the indigenous cultures of the Venezuelan Amazon, Spanish Colonial pieces and historical works by European and North American artists who visited and recorded Latin America. Did these collections develop simultaneously with your modern and contemporary holdings?
what later drew me to Latin American geometric abstraction: the serenity of a mathematical structure that seeks perfection; the call for social change as expressed by its creators in manifestos and in the radicalness of their inventions. It’s important to remember that many of these works came from a radically utopian desire for sociopolitical reform, and that their forms were dictated by various written manifestos that saw art as a way to change the world. In that sense, the geometric abstraction from Latin
above Gego, Esfera, 1960 preceding page Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
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America is geographically specific, because it comes from a region where there has been much upheaval.
PPc When the children were young, our family went on a number of expeditions to the Amazonas region of Venezuela, where we met members of the indigenous groups who populate the region. We saw that their longstanding, deep traditions were under threat through acculturation, and began to collect objects that they created for use in their daily and ritual lives in order to preserve them, gathering them into what became known as the Orinoco collection, named for the Orinoco River that runs through Amazonas. I say “their daily and ritual lives”, but in fact the indigenous populations would not make a distinction between the two because all of their activities are governed by a holistic cosmology. David Guss, who wrote about his experiences with the Yekuana people in To Weave and Sing [1990], originally travelled to record and translate their creation epic. What he found – eventually, after much frustration – is that the story simply did not exist apart from the activity of basket weaving, and it was only after he had
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been accepted as a weaving apprentice that the stories began to be told to him, as an integral part of the process. The Colonial collection began, as all collections do, with the purchase of one or two pieces, but we began to see what an important story those furnishings and paintings had to tell – one intimately bound up with global history and the incredible exchange of ideas, goods, decorative motifs and technical acumen that occurred in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This occurred not only through the colonisation of South America, but through the communication of ideas and objects from South America, and the development of a culture independent, in some ways, of Spain’s rule. It’s a history that can most eloquently be told through the visual evidence of these objects that combine the cultural dnA of Asia, Europe and the Americas in inventive, original ways. It was really the first incarnation of what we call today a global society. These collections did develop simultaneously with the modern and contemporary holdings, and the impetus to collect in all of these areas has a common goal: to preserve and better understand Latin American culture. Needless to say, there are conservation issues specific to each area of concentration, and we have worked diligently to fulfil our obligation to be good caretakers, and to send these pieces out into the world through travelling exhibitions and loans. Every year we agree to several hundred loan requests, so the exhibition is rarely in the same place for very long. The Orinoco collection has been seen in ten countries in the past 15 years, and works from the Colonial collection have been seen, most recently, as part of the Brooklyn Museum’s wonderful exhibition Behind Closed Doors, and on long-term loan at lAcMA, and at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in their new Art of the Americas galleries. AR In much contemporary art, as in the contemporary world, the idea of something being geographically specific is being eroded. Do you see the collection as a stand against this emerging ‘understanding’? Assuming you see it as a problem, or even a valid way of looking at things. PPc We’ve had a global culture for centuries, so that the blurring of boundaries between languages, practices and nations could even be considered a kind of world tradition. There was a wonderful show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently called Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade 1500–1800 that created a gorgeous visual index of the cross-fertilisation of ideas that resulted from the development of ocean routes between the lands of Asia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, Oceania and the Islamic nations. The boundaries of culture are mutable;
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so are those of politics, as can be seen by studying historical maps of any place on earth. What changes much more slowly is the actual geography of a place: the topography, the climate, the light that is particular to a place. Those are all qualities of a place that make it seem special, and to which artists have a special attachment. Armando Reverón was a painter who excelled in capturing the special quality
Our family expeditions to the Orinoco River basins gave us an intimate knowledge of the peoples whose cultural artefacts comprise the Orinoco collection, and it was not uncommon to have artists mixing with our family of light on the coast of Venezuela, but even those artists who do not concern themselves directly with light in their work, like the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer, confess to missing the light of their homeland when they have lived abroad. AR Is it important to know the artists you collect? Is knowing them a way of testing the sincerity of their work? And if it is, how do you deal with those where you find sincerity wanting? PPc We have known most, if not all, of the modern and contemporary artists in the collection because they have been part of our daily lives. Our family expeditions to the Orinoco river basins gave us an intimate knowledge of the peoples whose cultural artefacts comprise the Orinoco collection, and it was not uncommon to have artists mixing
I don’t believe that anyone who makes the creation of art his or her life can do so without tremendous commitment, because it is not a particularly easy path, even for those who become well known with our family. My parents weren’t collectors, but my uncle Alfredo Boulton, the art critic, photographer and cultural historian, knew everyone in the Venezuelan artworld and introduced me to many of them – though sadly I never met Reverón. After I married Gustavo, we often invited artists to our home, and with Paulo Herkenhoff, we would visit the studios of Brazilian artists who’d been ignored, like Judith Lauand. We frequently saw Soto, and some
of my fondest memories of him are hearing him singing and playing the cuatro; Cruz-Diez became the godfather of a number of our nieces and nephews. I discovered Gego’s work because I saw the intriguing little wire figures she had made as gifts for the young son of a woman who worked for both of us. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by ‘testing the sincerity of the work’; I don’t believe that anyone who makes the creation of art his or her life can do so without tremendous commitment, because it is not a particularly easy path, even for those who become well known. Either I connect with a work of art or not; it is partly visceral and partly intellectual and certainly also a function of my having looked at and studied a great deal of art over the past decades. AR When you spoke at the opening of The Geometry of Hope [2007] at the Grey Art Gallery, you said that you and your husband were “fifth-generation Venezuelans proud of our country”.That’s a sentiment that requires no elucidation, but can you speak of how it informs your interests and goals in terms of collecting, exhibiting and sponsoring educational initiatives? Both in terms of modern and more ‘historical’ work. PPc Gustavo and I created the Fundación Cisneros to develop initiatives that would promote an international dialogue about Latin American culture and provide educational programmes that would develop opportunities and appreciation for Latin America’s richly diverse contributions to the world of art and ideas. All of our efforts – whether collecting, publishing, research, programming, collaboration or advocacy – are directed towards that goal. We are proud to have partnered with institutions of culture and higher learning to create exhibitions, foster scholarship and provide direct experience in the field of Latin American art. We have endowed professorships; granted funding for curatorial travel; awarded grants to artist-run and independent art spaces in Latin America; and created scholarship funds for Latin American artists to attend prestigious arts training programmes such as the one at Skowhegan or soMA Mexico. We have hosted intimate salons in New York for young curators and, in Caracas, larger ‘seminarios’ where participation is live as well as virtual (and for which we offer travel grants for those whose attendance would be impossible without funding). We have published catalogues and ‘cuadernos’ [notebooks] about Latin American art, and most recently have embarked on a bilingual series of ‘conversations’ – in-depth discussions between a contemporary Latin American artist and a curator or historian – that are also available as e-books, with additional material not possible to include in the print version.
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It’s really all about making connections – or highlighting the ones that are already there, but that perhaps we didn’t see. Our most recent exhibition of the Orinoco collection, in Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, is a case in point. Santiago de Compostela, in the northwest part of Spain, is about 7,000 kilometres away from the Orinoco and just about as distant culturally – or one would think. Yet Santiago is surrounded on three sides by rivers, and their traditional canoes and river culture have much that is shared with their Orinoco brethren. Movingly, they made this point by exhibiting some of their watercraft adjacent to the canoes and paddles from the Orinoco. It was a revelation. AR The revelations you’ve sketched out seem to derive from a deep dialogue between intellectual and emotional passions and personal and institutional engagements. How do these streams coalesce for you? What are the satisfactions of each, and have they changed as the collection has developed? PPc Dialogue is an apt description – I measure my initial preferences and predilections against the perceived needs of the collection and opportunity for growth of scholarship both within the collection and at large, and it is very satisfying to create something over time in which the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. I would say that technology has been a significant factor in how the development of the collection has changed. For example, we have always created publications, but lately have stepped up our efforts in that area because the possibility of creating e-books has made it possible to sidestep the distribution problems we faced in certain Latin American countries.
AR The collection has a more ‘institutional’ structure – curators, the publication programme – than it did at first. How do you determine what initiatives to pursue and how do you identify partner institutions? Have your acquisition priorities changed as your programmes have grown? PPc The field changes so rapidly that we keep checking in and evaluating what we’re doing to make sure it’s still relevant. In general, we’ve found that long-term partnerships are the most rewarding and productive for all concerned, so we’ve moved away from individual, ‘one-off’ projects to focus instead on initiatives like awarding annual travel grants or underwriting staff positions. There have been many partnerships, but a few of the ones that are most active at the moment are with the Museum of Modern Art and Hunter College in New York, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid. We are also now actively collecting contemporary art, with the goal of discovering new talent and looking to the future, but of also understanding contemporary art’s connection to the past. AR Any collection is a reflection of personal passions. How do you dial back from the public position the collection maintains and determine what it is you live with, assuming you do indeed enjoy the private
privilege of enjoying some of the works you share with the public? PPc The priority is always to institutional needs. Although I love to see new acquisitions and to live with them for a while, it isn’t often possible because there are so many demands on the collection with exhibitions and loans. AR You and your husband have such a powerful commitment to the collection and its programmes. How will it grow and continue once you are no longer involved? PPc Our daughter Adriana is very involved, and we have been making provisions for the collection to be passed along and for its individual parts to be preserved. We are creating more and more virtual space for the collection to make it more widely accessible. In our programming, we have deliberately created circumstances that will start new traditions: that there will, as a matter of course, always be curators and scholars devoted to Latin American art in cultural and educational institutions; that people will automatically think of Latin American artists when they are putting together seminars and exhibitions; and that a familiarity with Latin American art will be fundamental for students of art everywhere. Ultimately, however, one has no control, and despite careful forethought, circumstances change in ways unimaginable in one’s lifetime. Mr. Barnes had very specific ideas about how his collection was to be treated, but in fact I imagine that he might have changed his mind in the face of developments in climate control and its importance in the conservation of art, for example.
Lygia Clark, Sundial, 1960, aluminium with gold patina, 53 × 58 × 4 cm. Collection MoMA, New York. Gift of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in honour of Rafael Romero all images Courtesy Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York & Caracas
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The Law and Its Ideas No 5
Going up in smoke? The fake Chagall and the role of artist authentication committees by Daniel McClean
above Fake or Fortune? presenters Philip Mould (left) and Fiona Bruce, with UK businessman Martin Lang, owner of a painting the Chagall Committee has declared a fake and is attempting to have destroyed. Photo: BBC and Glenn Dearing facing page A painting owned by British collector Joe Simon-Whelan and stamped ‘denied’ by the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board. Courtesy myandywarhol.com
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The TV show A recent report that the Chagall Committee (Paris), run by two granddaughters of the artist Marc Chagall (1887–1985), plans to destroy a fake Chagall painting depicting a female nude has made international news and caused widespread outrage, particularly in England. The sensational story is a development of the BBC’s popular artdetective television series, Fake or Fortune?, where owners of unauthenticated artworks are invited to submit them for expert appraisal in the hope that they might be identified as ‘sleeping’ masterpieces. Fake or Fortune? makes compelling viewing, and aside from the artworks on offer, it provides an entertaining if populist insight into the often arcane authentication practices of the artworld. In a recent programme, the show’s presenters (the foppish art dealer Philip Mould and the tenacious broadcaster Fiona Bruce) investigated a painting purportedly signed by Chagall and entitled Nude (1909–10). The work was acquired speculatively by a Leeds-based businessman, Martin Lang, for £100,000 when he visited Russia during the 1990s. Lang purchased the painting (which really doesn’t look anything like a Chagall) knowing that it had not been authenticated by the Chagall Committee and with little evidence of its provenance. When forensic tests established that the work must have been executed later than 1910, Lang was advised on the programme to send it to the Chagall Committee in Paris as a last resort. This proved to be a fatal mistake. Not only did the committee reject Lang’s work as a fake, it declared that it would be applying to the French court for an order for its destruction. The programme suggested (though it is unclear on what basis) that Lang’s painting might even be burnt: flaming the fires further, so to speak. Authentication and the droit moral When Lang sent his painting to the Chagall Committee, the right to retain and destroy the work was apparently not referred to in the committee’s contractual terms and conditions. Yet the committee’s decision appears to be validated under French law because of its strong recognition of moral rights of authorship (droit moral). These ‘inalienable’ rights continue after an artist’s death and can be exercised posthumously by an artist’s heirs. In particular, the so-called right of ‘paternity’ contains the ‘positive’ right to be correctly attributed as the author of an artwork and the ‘negative’ right to object to its false attribution. This right in France provides
strong remedies, including the destruction of fakes. Importantly, the French protection of moral rights potentially trumps contractual rights and property rights. The role of authentication committees Authentication committees and leading experts play a crucial role within the art market. The art market needs an authoritative source of judgment of artistic authentication that it can follow: this prevents the circulation of fakes. Yet, the more power is vested in a single source, the greater the danger of corruption and abuse. How can the art market escape from this dilemma? Artists’ authentication boards have experienced a bad press in recent years. In the US, the Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Keith Haring authentication boards have all voluntarily closed, faced with the mounting legal costs of fighting disgruntled collectors. The Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, an arm of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, suffered a series of highly damaging legal claims, including that brought by the English collector Joe Simon-Whelan in 2007. Whelan’s claim followed the board’s refusal twice to authenticate his Red Self-Portrait (1965) and its subsequent stamping the back of his canvas ‘denied’. Whelan took umbrage with the board’s ‘arbitrary’ decision, claiming fraud and abuse of market position on the board and foundation’s part. SimonWhelan’s claim was later abandoned in the face of mounting legal costs, but survived a summary motion for dismissal. Experts’ and committees’ fears of being sued, particularly in the US, have led to calls for legal reform. A recent bill put forward by the New York City Bar Association proposes that there should be a far higher threshold of protection for art experts when offering opinions, so that experts would effectively have to be clearly negligent or fraudulent to be held liable. Such reforms would seem to be welcome in encouraging scholarship and the dissemination of expert opinion. Yet questions remain as to what mechanisms owners of artworks can rely upon when attributions are made seemingly arbitrarily. It also leaves open the question of how artworks that are deemed to be fakes should be physically treated when they are de-baptised: should such works be permanently removed from the market by being stamped, or should they even be burnt? And more disturbingly, what happens if subsequent scholarship suggests that the experts got it wrong?
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The Divine Comedy
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory Revisited by Contemporary African Artists 21 / 3 — 27 / 7/ 2014
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No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going 71
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Wilhelm Sasnal Meet an artist who makes graphic novels and movies to keep his love of painting – itself engendered by goth and heavy-metal music and album covers – alive by Martin Herbert
Untitled, 2010. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zurich
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When Wilhelm Sasnal’s face pops up on a Skype connection from effectively just the starting point for an engagement that has gotten, Kraków, he’s just returned from the Berlin Film Festival, where he Sasnal says, “slower”. He’s become the kind of painter where the and his wife, Anka, premiered Huba (Parasite, 2013), their third feature unpredictable needs of the painting take over. But the source material film collaboration. He’s about to edit some short 16mm films for Take is still primarily photographic and representational, and the result Me to the Other Side, an exhibition at has been an accumulating, off-balance Lismore Castle Arts, County Waterford, oeuvre of disconnected, atmospheric Ireland, themed around Hans Christian fragments, extracts, edits, a constellaAndersen. He’s also apportioning time, tion of black holes in which imagery can come from Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 13 years after he drew artworld attention Holocaust documentary Shoah (as in for canvases that enlarged and isolated Shoah (Forest), 2003), from the annals of mute details from Art Spiegelman’s Maus pop culture or from Sasnal’s own “note(1991), to one of his own graphic novels, a mix of fact and invention concerning book”, his camera phone. murder and suicide in Hawaii. And Among Sasnal’s paintings from following a gap of two months, he’s 2006, for example, are Roy Orbison, from a publicity photo of the singer (‘the about to get back to painting, a prospect saddest person in the world, even when he’s evidently relishing. For other artists, he smiled’, the artist wrote in his 2007 such a footloose stylistic approach might catalogue Lata Walki (Years of Struggle)); be the headline. For the forty-one-yeara bleached-out painting of his family old Sasnal, one of the most assured yet (Family), where the flash went off accimercurial artists of his generation, it’s a dentally, obliterating features; and sidebar. Yet a relevant one, because his Kielce, 2003, oil on canvas, 145 × 145 cm. portraits of priests accused of wrongart emerges from an abiding sense that, © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London doing, eg, Untitled (Priest 2) and Untitled in terms of the culture of images, everything is levelled, everything can slip contextual bonds, everything can (Priest 3), which set schematic representations of their features onto loose, brushy backgrounds, faces warping and tangling. There’s a speak in troubling depth. This goes back. Picture Sasnal, a young metalhead from Tarnów, smooth, antiseptic quality about the brushstrokes in each of these Poland, seeing album covers for Slayer’s Reign in Blood (1986) and South that’s both fast and weighted and marks distance from ‘expressive’ of Heaven (1988) as what they really were, albeit in repro: paintings. “I painting. It’s technically superb – Sasnal says he believes in “quality loved the music first, but then I loved the images, the upside-down and craftsmanship” – but the technique serves withholding as much crosses and so on,” says the artist, who in 2001 would paint Kirche as giving. Sasnal’s imagery never tells the whole story. It’s lossy and (Church), the first of several inverted churches in reductive graphic flattened like a third-generation tape recording and skids to periphstyle, dripping blue paint like blue blood. “In Poland, even if not polit- eries where speech is muffled, for which reason he’s sometimes been ical, you always have to position yourself in relation to the Catholic characterised as a post-Luc Tuymans painter: see, for example, Kielce Church,” he adds, “because it’s so influential on everyday life.” (Ski Jump, 2003), a painting of a silhouetted ski jump in a Polish town ‘Visual culture’ may be a punchline for jokes about subpar university where Jews were attacked after the war. One might see this as rhetordegrees, but in Sasnal’s life it has been a crucial assuaging category, ical concerning what single images can ever really communicate, the Damascene moment coming when he discovered Bauhaus, the particularly about large historical events (Sasnal’s great-grandfather school and aesthetic, through Bauhaus, was in Auschwitz, and Sasnal has painted I loved the music first, but then the goth band. “Before 1989, there was contemporary silos that recall concentraa shortage of many things in Poland, I loved the images, the upside-down tion camp architecture), or as generously but not of music – you could hear that open-ended (Sasnal has repeatedly said crosses and so on on the radio – and that was an importhat he wants the viewer to find their tant moment, when I realised that there was art underneath the band own readings in his work), or both. Rationales for his use of images I loved. Everything was equal, either music or this sophisticated art. are always implied, even if they float below the painted surface. I didn’t feel excluded.” I ask Sasnal, more generally, how tenable is the hagiographic model That sense of horizontal availability was still powering Sasnal of broken narrative that some observers have projected onto his work, when, in 1999, finishing his studies in Kraków’s Academy of Fine in terms of growing up in a Poland that was first Communist, then Arts, he found himself “fed up with school and an ‘artistic’ way of post-Communist, and that is haunted by a twentieth-century history looking at things: that the artist is a ‘creator’ in a very old-school, obso- that is only partly visible. “For me,” he says, “reality is a jigsaw puzzle lete way. I wanted to get rid of any artistic movement. I just wanted to that’s being put together, but we only see parts – knees, say – and it’s repaint photographs, where the only important factor is the choice. permanently changing. I don’t know where history ends and where I didn’t even use colours. I just made drawings on canvas,” he says. the present moment begins. It’s like liquid, or sometimes like mud. “Of course, it’s changed now.” Now – skimming over an interval in It doesn’t have a shape. I know this is an awkward feeling to experiwhich Sasnal cofounded the deliberately deskilled Ładnie Group ence sometimes, when one looks at my paintings. But basically that’s of Polish artists, worked briefly in advertising, had his comic strips it. And maybe that’s why our films are so hard to watch, because they published and became an artworld luminary – the photograph is are broken narratives, and you lose the plot.”
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Untitled, 2013. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zurich
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above Wojtek, 2004, oil on canvas, 32 × 46 × 2 cm. Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ , London overleaf Untitled, 2013. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zurich
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You don’t need to be an armchair psychologist to suspect that this Sociopolitical and locally historical concerns, accordingly, are a will-o’-the-wisp in Sasnal’s work: glimmering, there and not there. The has roots in childhood. Sasnal seems to know it too, and to be actively stark recent film Huba (Parasite), for example, made using nonprofes- tapping it. The first feature he made with Anka, the monochromatic, sional actors, is indivisible from an idea of ‘bare life’ that feels, firstly, elliptical Swiniopas (Swineherd, 2008), featuring lesbian lovers in rural tied specifically to a Polish rural context: it concerns a mother, a baby Poland and an Elvis soundtrack, was loosely based on Hans Christian and an older man, a factory worker, Andersen’s fable ‘The Swineherd’ sharing a raw and claustrophobic (1842); again, the new work for indoor life. At the same time that Lismore relates to the author, too. “I it reflects contemporary Poland, was pretty keen on Andersen when I though, Sasnal wants the storyline was a kid,” says Sasnal, “not because to scale up to something like univerof the content of the stories but because of the illustrations. There’s sality. It also scales down, being based, he says, on his and Anka’s experience an edition from the 1970s with three of having a difficult second child: different illustrators, and they are “a really harrowing experience, very scary. Perverse, cruel – they and I did the same for the paintings don’t look like they’re for kids at all. when I painted myself as a father They’ve stayed in my mind, and I repainted some of them, maybe six being sucked by a parasite, by a leech Huba (Parasite), 2013, directed by Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal. Courtesy Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal or whatever”. years ago. Then there was Swineherd. Getting art to operate like that, And now it’s conscious, getting back expanding and contracting depending on who’s looking, is like trap- to him. But not to the stories: to the atmosphere, the mood, which ping lightning or something similar. Press too hard, know too much, is obscure, psychedelic and obsolete, and that’s what I like about it.” and it’ll go inert and narrowly illustrative. Talking to Sasnal, you Among the paintings at Hauser & Wirth last year was Untitled get the impression he spends as much time working on keeping his (J. Ch. Andersen), from 2006. In a blackout sky above a small hemicreativity alive as he does producing art, and that painting comes sphere of planet floated a winged moon. Somewhere – perhaps in first. “For the sake of painting,” he says, “what’s important about Andersen’s ‘What the Moon Saw’ (1840) – is the source material, but being involved in making films is that it doesn’t restrain me from Sasnal’s version is both voiceless and speaking anew, conversing being in the studio every day, restrain me from thinking about with crashed bikers and Stanisław Lem and coldly lunar landscapes. painting. I don’t like to think in a dead-end way, where you’re just It speaks, in context, of the wavering ontology of painted images: the a painter and you always think about that. Then you start to repeat potential for an extracted scene to radiate panoplies of new signifiyourself; you’re just the master of yourself, and you want to be a great cations, for a fairytale moon to turn saturnine. For us to be taken, as master. This is not my aim. I don’t the Lismore Castle show’s title has it want to get bored of myself, with (with a nod to an Aerosmith song), painting. So it’s also important to be to the other side. involved in film.” The Andersen-related films for that exhibition, Sasnal tells me, An attitude to the creative prowill feature soundtracks derived cess might be discerned, too, reflexively, in the art itself. An exhibifrom mountains of vinyl he recently tion last year at Hauser & Wirth, picked up while spending six Zurich, featured multiple images months in San Francisco. There’s of downed motorcycle racers and a relation, for him, between 16mm also outer space (via images related celluloid and vinyl – this is an artist, to Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, 1961), after all, who approvingly uses linked, one would think, by the the word “obsolete” in conversaHuba (Parasite), 2013, directed by Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal. Courtesy Anka and Wilhelm Sasnal motif of the protective helmet. This tion and whose 2013 show at Anton all related, the press release stated, Kern, New York, featured multiple to ‘the sensation of losing control’, and if that’s something that reso- paintings of analogue Kodak film canisters and logos. But what one nates fearfully through the work, it’s also central to Sasnal’s approach, anticipates is the happenstance conjunction of found image and wherein it might be no bad thing. Navigating through the imagistic found sound, fusing in an emotional sphere grander than either thickets of his oeuvre, what feels to hold it together, time and again, alone. You seem like a very instinctive artist, I suggest to Sasnal. “Yes, is mood, as if Sasnal accepted not knowing exactly what he was doing pretty much,” he says. “Instinctive, but not naive. When I’m working, as long as it felt right. “If I could say what my films and paintings have I rarely do strict projects, because then you can’t exploit the accidents. in common – beyond cropping and angling, because I’m also the cine- And this is what I like about it: it’s like life. You can’t plan everything, matographer – then it’s anger and anxiety towards certain subjects,” from the very beginning to the very end.” ar he says. These are attitudes big enough to encompass worlds and histories, and in Sasnal’s art they do, from the historical cataclysm Wilhelm Sasnal: Take Me to the Other Side is on show at Lismore of the Holocaust to the difficulties of being a parent. Castle Arts, County Waterford, Ireland, from 18 April to 21 September
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Untitled, 2013. Photo: Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zurich
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Berlin’s Capitalist Realists
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Over the past decade, the growing significance of Berlin as an international art centre, rivalling New York and London, conceals a complex and longstanding exchange between German and American art through which German artists have both cultivated and resisted their role within an international art ‘mainstream’ by Mark Prince
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Twentieth-century Modernism was a ground contested between the European avant-garde and the nascent cultural and economic clout of the United States. Competition and collusion were simultaneous, often indistinguishable. The expatriate American poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were so European-embedded they helped initiate a poetic modernist movement in Europe that was to influence North American literature as though from a foreign source. From 1925 onwards, Marcel Duchamp lived between Paris and New York before settling in the US in 1942. In the 1930s, he collaborated with European Surrealists based in New York, and curated two major exhibitions of their work. Indirectly, he was an influence on the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, for whom Surrealism was arguably their most significant source, even if one they would ultimately define themselves by rejecting. The ground being contested was not merely that of cultural value, but of how value was to be defined: as contingent upon historical tradition, and therefore concentric and centripetal, or as linear, directional, conforming to measure; invested in the dynamic of supercession by what Eliot called ‘the supervention of novelty’. The centres have since shifted, on the European side, from Paris and London to Germany: to Düsseldorf and Cologne in the 1980s and 90s, and over the past decade, to Berlin. German art of the past half-century has equivocated between assimilating American influence and a sceptical entrenchment. Global network culture has been embraced with reservations. The tone of the exchange ranges from irony, satire and self-serving opportunism to homage. Last year, when the novelist Martin Amis was asked to comment on the recent exodus from London to New York of British writers of the generation that came of age in the 1970s – Salman Rushdie, the late Christopher Hitchens, the poet James Fenton and now Amis himself – he replied, ‘There’s an odd sense in which the novel follows the power.’ But his work suggests that the location of the artist is irrelevant to the truth of his statement. In novels of the 1980s and 90s, such as Money (1984) and Night Train (1997), written in London, he was registering the challenge posed by the American twentieth-century novel by inventing a transatlantic idiom capable of traversing the US/European axis. The German writer W.G. Sebald spoke of ‘the conspiracy of silence’ that descended on postwar German writing of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. German art of the period ‘followed the power’ indirectly, planting forms originating in the US against a German backdrop. Franz Erhard Walther’s First Work Set and Second Work Set (1963–76) took minimalistic sculptural forms and rendered them as wearable/usable adjuncts to the human body, their semifunctionality realigning them into an antithetical, critical relation to their American source. Walther photographed his sculptures in the empty fields of the Hochrhön region surrounding his native city of Fulda, their minimalist autonomy subverted by the foil of a symbolically barren terrain, a Germany swept clean to ‘silence’. In his work of the same period, Gerhard Richter combined idioms adapted from US Pop art (photo-paintings of advertising images onto which graphic text is superimposed), US Minimalism (grey monochrome paintings), and US Conceptual art (the ‘Colour Chart’ paintings, begun in 1966, intimating the arbitrariness of aesthetically determined chromatic decisions), with imagery evoking recent German history, such as the 1965 painting of his Uncle Rudi in full Nazi regalia. The blur of a photograph of a nondescript, administrative building registered, when painted, as the brush’s self-silencing erasure of the image it had created. Günther Förg’s geometric,
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gestural painterly abstractions were homages to, and sometimes appropriations of US abstract expressionist idioms radically disabused of their metaphysical address. Förg grounded US modernist forms in the stubborn sensuality of a materialistic facture. His photographs of European architecture associated with fascism – such as the IG Farben building in Frankfurt, which was used for Nazi research projects, or Marcello Piacentini’s University of Rome campus, built under Mussolini’s auspices – convert European architectural neoclassicism into a neomodernism that references the formalistic scale of American abstract painting of the mid-twentieth century, but ambivalently: through the tremor of a handheld camera. Richter lived and worked in Düsseldorf during the 1970s and, from the 1980s onwards, in nearby Cologne, where Martin Kippenberger was also based. Kippenberger’s art trumpeted its Germanness as a badge of political negation, a ‘silence’-denying rhetoric. His approach has been taken up by the generation of originally Berlin-based artists who emerged in the early 2000s – André Butzer, Andy Hope 1930 (the former Andreas Hofer), Kai Althoff, Michaela Eichwald and Gunter Reski. Their approximate contemporaries the late Michel Majerus, Sergej Jensen and Kitty Kraus have adapted to their own purposes the more passive-aggressive stances of Richter and Förg. Majerus’s installations of tiled canvases, painted in heterogeneous modes, allude to an American late-twentieth century artistic canon: Andy Warhol’s silkscreened skulls, or Christopher Wool’s text paintings (one painting consists of the phrase COOL/WOOL, a parody/homage to Wool’s formalistic treatment of block capitals). The dynamics of the burgeoning digital network culture of the late 1990s are reflected in the form of a virtuoso painterly sampling. US cultural signifiers appear as a repertoire of branded commodities, like corporate logos. But Majerus’s submission to his American references is undercut by the paradoxical status of the tiled painting installation as both an assertion of the primacy of network commodification and a restatement of Kippenberger’s constellating of painterly modes as a satire on the postmodern diminishment of the intrinsic value of any single artistic position. Gunter Reski’s exhibition at Zwinger Galerie in Berlin, earlier this year, lined the walls with paintings on paper in an array of disparate styles that recalled Majerus’s scattershot sampling. Text paintings, decorative abstractions and graphic illustrations abutted. But to one side, the cacophony thinned into a conventional painting hang of stretched canvases, as though the imagery they supported demanded a more stable and traditional ground. In these paintings, a surrealistic figuration emerged as though establishing a clearing within an indiscriminate flux. Reski enacts his own succumbing to the onslaught of contemporary pop-cultural imagery as a theatrical backdrop in which to plant images that distil desperation into metaphors for desperation. The distinction is also that between a sampling method which has its roots in US Pop art and canvas-bound, easel-scaled forms of European Surrealism. Jensen’s fabric-collaged stain paintings of the early 2000s technically derive from the US postpainterly abstraction of Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis; but this influence is channelled through the German formalism of Blinky Palermo’s fabric works of the 1970s. Similarly, Kitty Kraus’s recent light installations, casting shadow stripes that span the dimensions of a gallery, Europeanise a US minimalist trope by translating it into the theatrical chiaroscuro of light decor. The dematerialised stripe, lassoing the
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German art of the past half-century has equivocated between assimilating American influence and a sceptical entrenchment
above Andy Hope 1930 & Paul McCarthy, Down Show Show Down, 2013 (installation view, 8. Salon, Hamburg). Photo: Roman Märzc. Courtesy the artists preceding pages Gunter Reski, Das Selbst ohne Ich, 2014 (installation view, Zwinger Galerie, Berlin)
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top left Christopher Wool, Untitled, 1989, alkyd and acrylic on aluminium, 244 × 163 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
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top right Andy Hope 1930, Martian Cubism, 2013, acrylic, glitter on canvas, 80 × 80 cm. Photo: Roman März. Courtesy Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin
above Günther Förg, Untitled, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 181 × 200 cm. Photo: Def Image. © the artist. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
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top André Butzer, Untitled, 2012–13, oil on canvas, 230 × 350 cm. Photo: Def Image. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
above left Sergej Jensen, Untitled, 2001, chlorine on jute, 140 × 90 cm. Photo: Stephen White. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London
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above right Andy Hope 1930, 0,10, 2011, oil and paper on canvas, artist frame, 54 × 44 cm. Photo: Roman März. Courtesy Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin
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dimensions of a gallery, invokes the Polish artist Edward Krasinski’s national or local culture and positing the national and local as interbands of blue masking tape, traversing a gallery wall and the pictures national. Unlike London or New York, Berlin is innately provincial: hanging on it, as much as the American minimalist Fred Sandback’s it has no historical pedigree as a capital city, and no native economy. gallery-spanning lengths of string. US Minimalism was originally Newcomers have been only superficially integrated as the mallintended to humble the overblown commodification of modernist style padding to a persistently local infrastructure. The significant painting; but now that minimalist tropes have been absorbed into commercial galleries are still those that have been in business since and attenuated by the commercial aesthetic of minimal decor, Kraus the 1990s: Buchholz, Neu, Barbara Weiss and Esther Schipper; and recharges them by having them profess their own functionality. This although they are now exhibiting clutches of young Americans, their would be a merely reductive gesture if it were categorical; but Kraus’s core programmes remain German. light installations aspire to sublimity as much as they efface themHaving both recently relocated to New York, Jensen and Althoff selves as decor. The light sources for her shadow stripes are chest- have ‘followed the power’. Jensen’s paintings of the past half decade high plywood plinths, placed in the centre of a gallery and levelled have become larger, and his paint – previously characterised by parsioff by a thin sheet of opaque black glass, which leaves an infinitesimal mony or absence – thicker, as if he were testing his language against gap between wood and glass out of which light of penetrating inten- the demands of another context, and from within rather than vicariously or remotely. Abstention has sity leaks. These plinths resemble minimal furniture, but they can ceded to plenty, and ambivalence to also be seen as energy-charged idols embrace. And yet the self-definition surrounded by an aura rendered of German artists of his generation incommensurable by the apparwho have remained in Germany, ently illogical, inverse equation if not in Berlin, appears no less between the slit of light and the determined by their reactionary relation to a cultural mainstream, line of shadow (rather than light, as which usually means an American one would expect) that it deposits one. Over the past decade, André onto the walls. James Turrell’s tranButzer’s output has bifurcated. scendentalism, Dan Flavin’s mateHis early, cartoonish figure paintrialism and Jorge Pardo’s functionings have diversified into maxialism intersect. Like Reski, Kraus malist painterly abstractions, on subversively reverses the linear US abstract expressionist scales. A narrative of twentieth-century US series of black-and-white or greyart. Reski takes a sampling method and-white geometric, formalist ultimately deriving from US Pop art of the 1960s, and supplants it with paintings, under the group heading a painterly idiom that connotes of ‘N-paintings’, have emerged European Surrealism of the first in tandem. Butzer has exhibhalf of the twentieth century, ited the ‘N-paintings’ in extended the rejection of which 1950s US series, putting a simple composiModernism was founded upon. tion through a spectrum of variaKraus has the 1950s qualify the 60s tions in format and scale. by recharging the phenomenoHis installation at Max Hetzler logical materialism of US Minimal last autumn consisted of sixteen art with modernist metaphysical ‘N-paintings’ based on the same composition: a black top half, yearnings. containing a horizontal white It is surely not coincidental Michel Majerus, Untitled, c. 1993, stripe, balanced on another black that these various redressings of acrylic on canvas, 275 × 200 cm. © Michel Majerus Estate. rectangle in the bottom right US cultural history in semicritCourtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York ical guise have emerged concurcorner containing a vertical stripe. rently with the expansion of Berlin as an internationally visible hub The rudimentary structure was pimped up and shrunk down, the of contemporary art driven by a massive influx of gallerists, cura- white rectangles morphing from thin bands into fat blocks. From tors and artists from all over the world, but especially from the US. 4 m to 40 cm in width, the range rendered US high Modernism as a German art and the infrastructure surrounding it wears its interna- cartoon film reel, a flick-book sequence. The monumentality of the tionalist credentials as ambivalently as Berlin has assimilated this dour monochrome composition was undermined by wobbly juncexpansion. Several large group exhibitions – Made in Germany and tures and uneven facture, as though Butzer were demonstrating Made in Germany 2, at various venues in Hannover in 2007 and 2012 the absurdly arbitrary relation between his application – sometimes respectively, and Based in Berlin, at various sites in Berlin in 2011 – have heavily impastoed, sometimes thinly glazed – and the static frame been intended as surveys of contemporary art produced in Germany of a repeated motif. This ironic narrative was emphasised by the (or Berlin) by artists living in Germany but not necessarily German. presence of two small figure paintings in one corner of the gallery. In each case, the premise is torn, paradoxically, between asserting If these cartoonish figurations, in his earlier idiom, stem from the
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Gunter Reski, Doktor Morgen neue Sorgen Borgen, 2013, oil on paper on canvas, 170 × 140 cm. Courtesy Zwinger Galerie, Berlin
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Gunter Reski, Die Untermieter, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 130 × 110 cm. Courtesy Zwinger Galerie, Berlin, and Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg
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dimensions of a gallery, invokes the Polish artist Edward Krasinski’s bands of blue masking tape, traversing a gallery wall and the pictures hanging on it, as much as the American minimalist Fred Sandback’s gallery-spanning lengths of string. US Minimalism was originally intended to humble the overblown commodification of modernist painting; but now that minimalist tropes have been absorbed into and attenuated by the commercial aesthetic of minimal decor, Kraus recharges them by having them profess their own functionality. This would be a merely reductive gesture if it were categorical; but Kraus’s light installations aspire to sublimity as much as they efface themselves as decor. The light sources for her shadow stripes are chest-high plywood plinths, placed in the centre of a gallery and levelled off by a thin sheet of opaque black glass, which leaves an infinitesimal gap between wood and glass out of which light of penetrating intensity leaks. These plinths resemble minimal furniture, but they can also be seen as energy-charged idols surrounded by an aura rendered incommensurable by the apparently illogical, inverse equation between the slit of light and the line of shadow (rather than light, as one would expect) that it deposits onto the walls. James Turrell’s transcendentalism, Dan Flavin’s materialism and Jorge Pardo’s functionalism intersect. Like Reski, Kraus subversively reverses the linear narrative of twentieth-century US art. Reski takes a sampling method ultimately deriving from US Pop art of the 1960s, and supplants it with a
painterly idiom that connotes European Surrealism of the first half of twentieth century, the rejection of which 1950s US Modernism was founded upon. Kraus has the 1950s qualify the 60s by recharging the phenomenological materialism of US Minimal art with modernist metaphysical yearnings. It is surely not coincidental that these various redressings of US cultural history in semicritical guise have emerged concurrently with the expansion of Berlin as an internationally visible hub of contemporary art driven by a massive influx of gallerists, curators and artists from all over the world, but especially from the US. German art and the infrastructure surrounding it wears its internationalist credentials as ambivalently as Berlin has assimilated this expansion. Several large group exhibitions – Made in Germany and Made in Germany 2, at various venues in Hannover in 2007 and 2012 respectively, and Based in Berlin, at various sites in Berlin in 2011 – have been intended as surveys of contemporary art produced in Germany (or Berlin) by artists living in Germany but not necessarily German. In each case, the premise is torn, paradoxically, between asserting national or local culture and positing the national and local as international. Unlike London or New York, Berlin is innately provincial: it has no historical pedigree as a capital city, and no native economy. Newcomers have been only superficially integrated as the mall-style padding to a persistently local infrastructure. The significant commercial galleries are An exhibition of work by Michel Majerus is on view at Matthew Marks, New York, through 19 April; work by Christopher Wool can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago through 11 May; and Living with Pop: A Reproduction of Capitalist Realism is at Artists Space, New York, from 8 June to 17 August
Kitty Kraus, Andere Bedingung (Aggregatzustand 6), 2009, steel, copper, glass, mirror, iron, mop embroideries, seven parts, dimensions variable. Photo: Roman März. Courtesy the artist
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Resistance to Communication Is Crucial These days a new generation of curators is treating the exhibition in an essayistic rather than thematic way. ArtReview asked two of the leading proponents of this trend to tell it what that’s all about A conversation between Dieter Roelstraete and Anselm Franke
Anselm Franke and Dieter Roelstraete are each, in their own unique way, exploring an essayistic, expansive approach to curating that takes the discipline into uncharted territory. Franke, curator at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (and former director of Extra City, Antwerp, and curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin), has done so via shows such as his landmark touring exhibition Animism (2010–) – a self-described ‘collection of artworks exemplifying different ways of achieving the effect of life or the lifelike within a field demarcated by the dialectics of movement and stasis’, which anticipated the artworld’s recent fascination with the speculative life of inanimate objects. And Roelstraete, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (and former curator of MuHKA, Antwerp, and also a writer and poet), through projects such as his recent The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, which ‘re-imagines the art world as an alternative “History Channel” that is as concerned with remembering histories as it is with challenging their truthfulness’, and developed out of an essay for e-flux journal. Here, the pair exchange thoughts on the relationship between art-making and curating, the questionable need for exhibitions to be ‘about’ something and the ‘anarchic potential’ of their medium. Dieter roelstraete I would like to start with a couple of remarks, posing as questions (or vice versa, depending on how you put them), regarding the relationship between artistic and curatorial practice, which continues to be
something of a source of professional anxiety. I guess it’s fair to say that we are both curators associated or identified with an ‘essayistic’ style of exhibition-making – I, for one, consider the exhibition format to be something like a platform for the development and formulation of certain speculative ideas, or arguments. But I’m obviously also interested in the seductive power of those ideas or arguments as aesthetic experiences – and in that sense I think of what I do in an exhibition – namely the articulation of a certain hypothesis – as an artistic under-
Curatorial work has to communicate, while art may be at its best when it is resistance to communication taking, an artistic enterprise. This does not have anything to do, in my estimation, with the tiresome commonplace of the curator-as-artist and/or the exhibition as a work of art, as a gesamtkunstwerk, but still – if the exhibition is to be considered an essay, it should be wellwritten, stocked with figures of speech of all kinds, poetic and elliptic as well as didactic and informative. What is your take on this whole tangle of interests? How do artistic and curatorial impulses intersect and converge in your work?
anselm Franke The professional anxiety you mention is, in my eyes, a sign of a widespread confusion, a lack of a clear sense of difference between roles, frames and registers of legitimisation. I think the difference between curatorial and artistic work is important but not categorical – I tend to think that such borders and differences are never real, but they produce real spaces and discourses and hence can make all the difference; it all depends to what degree we are committed to these spaces and their culture. To me, curatorial work ought to be responsive to the precarious conditions of consciousness and their dependence on certain forms and their histories, and to a whole set of institutional parameters. Art, to the contrary, may relate to the very same things by being irresponsive. There is an obvious difference in the economy of signification. Curatorial work has to communicate, while art may be at its best when it is, to paraphrase Deleuze, resistance to communication. It is our task to negotiate the relationship between these poles. I think that curating has perhaps yet to develop its own Modernism, in the sense of a developed critique of the medium, and its implicit conditions. I am trying to address, to make explicit, these implicit frames, and hence to challenge and renarrate the framing in which certain aesthetic products have been perceived,
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canonically, mostly without challenging the frame as such. Much of this implicitness has to do with the history of media in modernity (my curatorial projects Animism [various venues] and Mimétisme [Extra City, Antwerp, 2008], for example, dealt with this question). I am trying to challenge the institutional, even ontological designations underlying ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’ and their place within modern media. This was of course already a holy task of the avant-gardes, but I think that it is now absolutely necessary in the realm of curating, where it is a question of narratives and spaces of signification and their historical becoming and conditioning and relation to larger cultural imaginaries. In my own work, liminal concepts and liminal aesthetics play a major role to this end. It is about unbounding and delimiting, but not towards some expanded field with an indeterminate play of signifiers, but to the end of mapping the imaginary onto concrete spaces and histories. To me, the essay exhibition is the negation of a certain kind of positivism, a certain kind of obscene, antirelational objectivism that is inscribed into the medium. Against the reifying machine of the exhibition, the essay exhibition is an exemplary dialogical space, a testing ground of ‘media-conditions’, in which subject– object relations can be tested, experienced, scrutinised, deconstructed. My aim is to bring
this historical conditioning into a condition of ‘tripping’, which simply means to mobilise and destabilise its certainties. So when I do ‘essayistic’ exhibitions, it is towards this end. But what is for you the difference between a thematic exhibition and an essay-exhibition? And another important question: your recent show on the artist-as- archaeologist, The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology began as a critical, polemical essay, and was then turned into
The ‘thematic’, which is another notion you brought up in your string of questions, is too self-assured for my taste, too monolithic, too confident in the solidity of its ‘theme’. I don’t believe in ‘themes’ a template for an exhibition. How did you deal with the critical and polemical dimension in this transition? Was it necessary to give it up,
top left Dieter Roelstraete. Photo: Nathan Keay. © Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago top right Anselm Franke at the Animism conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012. Photo: Jakob Hoff
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because we tend to think that we can only exhibit things affirmatively? DR I’d like to answer this series of questions by going back, firstly, to your distinction between curatorial work as essentially communicative and art work – both artistic practice and the artwork – as anticommunicative at best, which I think is quite useful: curating as the articulation of a type of discourse – this one material, perceptual, phenomenological, physical – that does not revolve, in essence, around the direct communication or relaying of content. Nice one. An exhibition is necessarily a rather direct form of communicating: no matter how abstruse or oblique the underlying curatorial premise, a concatenation, a stringing-together of objects, images and events, inevitably makes for a type of immediacy that cannot help but be experienced with a kind of physical directness that is unavailable to, say, an essay that tries to make the same point. In that sense the very notion of the essayexhibition is a bit of a contradiction in terms, although I do try to think of exhibitions as spatial constructs that can accommodate footnotes and parentheses much like an essay can. As for your question with regards to The Way of the Shovel: indeed, that project originally started its life as an essay that was quite critical of a certain cultural ambience in twenty-firstcentury art production, and ended its life (for
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now at least) as an exhibition that cannot be other, in the end, than a form of endorsement of the very developments and symptoms and trends of which the original essay was somewhat critical. An exhibition, I think, is by definition a type of celebration – affirmation. No matter how critical or polemical the underlying premise… And that’s fine – that’s where and why curating and writing differ in my personal professional practice, that’s why I keep doing both. I keep trying – just to remind ourselves of the etymological root of the word ‘essay’ in the French verb for trying, attempting, speculating, guessing. The ‘thematic’, which is another notion you brought up in your string of questions, is too self-assured for my taste, too monolithic, too confident in the solidity of its ‘theme’. I don’t believe in ‘themes’. Do I like exhibitions (just like artworks) to be ‘about’ something, I wonder – which often makes me feel like a bit of a Philistine, actually. What do you think about this particular pressure – that both exhibitions and artworks, and indeed writing as well, should be ‘about’ something? And what do you think about the relationship between writing and curating more generally? AF Are you really sure exhibitions are necessarily affirmative celebrations? I’d like to return to this. But first, do exhibitions and works of art
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always have to be ‘about’ something? I think of it in exactly the terms you mention, namely as a ‘pressure’ only. Underneath it, the cultural frontiers move into this or that direction, never quite left to chance. To understand this pressure and its relation to the drifts and trends of cultural spaces is, I think, our task to diagnose and articulate. The pressure furthermore lies obviously in society and the order of things itself, and is entirely historical and political, and art acts as a potentially
Within this form, the fact that all exhibitions ought to be affirmative and celebrative of what they exhibit can perhaps be challenged anarchic (some would prefer the tired word ‘subversive’) force in relation to it. One of the curatorial questions is what direction we give to this anarchic potential. This is where history and politics kicks in. I understand this pressure to be a principal condition of the institution and medium that is
Animism conference at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2012. Photo: Jakob Hoff
the ‘exhibition’. It weighs upon every exhibition space, and art has to wrench its spaces of mental sovereignty from it. It produces a certain reified facticity (which is why museums have so frequently been compared to mausoleums), but also a desire and demand for unambiguous meaning and identity. To conform to it means to equate the gaze with the act of identification and the act of naming, which in turn produces a very specific kind of ‘understanding’. This regime of representation, of course, has undergone several historical transformations. It used to be more about objectification and control, but is now more about animation, affect and subjectification, producing a certain kind of hypervisibility and the phantasm that everything can be communicated (and perhaps that everything is communication). The kind of ‘understanding’ that is possible within this regime of hypervisibility is highly specific; it’s similar to a kind of nontransformative, ideally real-time availability. I think that art is about the everrenewed assurance that a different kind of ‘understanding’ is possible. For this experience, resistance to communication is crucial, or as Adorno would have it, mimesis without the compulsion to identify. The pressure has to be lifted, reflected, turned against itself, made to speak about its own conditions of production: this is what good exhibitions achieve.
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It doesn’t matter whether they do this through a more ‘poetic’ approach that desynchronises signifiers from signified and dissects the collective sign and body-space thus opened, or through a narrative that defies this sort of reifying positivism and the pacification of art through academic histories, etc. There must be narratives that are dangerous in their very implications on the order of things, that make us ‘trip’ in a certain sense, by which I mean that the aesthetic – between the sensory and the cognitive – itself is being put at risk, or denaturalised. How do we have to frame a work, in terms of narrative and space, such that the very existence of both subjective and objective reality hinges on it? I spend most of my time trying to find the right angle for the curatorial frame or narrative in this sense, a historically qualified ‘grounding’ that is capable of putting the implicit background assumptions that bear upon art to the fore, putting its parameters at disposition. To me, the essay exhibition would be a form that first of all is qualified as a matrix, that sets a dynamic of feedback in motion, of self-reference and self-monitoring. And within this form, the fact that all exhibitions ought to be affirmative and celebrative of what they exhibit can perhaps be challenged. This seems important to me. In Animism, I have tried something like this, perhaps success-
fully to a certain degree. To open up a terrain of ambiguity, in which things exist precisely as symptomatic. That would mean to translate from the written essay the analysis of symptoms into an experiential format, which inscribes ourselves into the workings of the symptom, but also creates a distance from it, both at the same time. In The Whole Earth (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2013) Diedrich Diederichsen and I tried to create an analytical parcours of images and discourses around the counterculture of California towards networked neoliberalism, as a way to narrate a whole set of transformations through which we are still living right now, by taking measure of cultural imaginaries, their narrative logic and expectational horizons. It was crucial for us to make the entire exhibition with a diagnostic gaze, tracing certain movements and working with the collapse of dialectical constellations, of outlived oppositions if you will. A last note on writing/reading and exhibiting: I find the difference stunning, in terms
of experience. I always find the fact curious that, while reading, we tend to think we are smarter than we are, while in exhibitions, we are usually much duller. This difference can be exploited, I think! DR There is much more to pick apart in these last remarks of yours than I fear we have time and/or space for here, but I do want to conclude – and invite this conversation to continue beyond the pages of this interview – by picking up on your remarks regarding the exhibition’s ‘reified facticity’, your reservations concerning the exhibition as affirmation and your closing intimation that ‘in exhibitions, we are usually much duller’. This is precisely what constitutes the difference, for me, between the essay as text and the essay as exhibition, and why I enjoy the difference between both: I like the fact that the exhibition is made up of hardheaded, wilful things (‘facts’, moments of reification); I like the dullness and firmness of these things, and the immediacy of my experience of it. In an exhibition, there’s only so much you can do in the way of (what, as a curator, you might think of as) bracketing, footnotes, interjections, parentheses, tangents. As a writer who is always using these tools in the formulation of long-winded, pathologically self-reflexive arguments, I find the irreversible linearity and directness of the exhibition… well, liberating. ar
Tony Tasset, Robert Smithson (Las Vegas), 1995. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. © the artist. Courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago & Berlin
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photography Pawel Tarasiewicz lighting and animal handling Clemence Thurninger tights model Fredrick Randau
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Dienstag Abend
We are not making any kind of project; introducing new contents or some exotic theory nor fantastic philosophy; nor are we putting forward any kind of conclusion, or advocating any kind of specific statement. But together, we are observing what is happening around us. We invite friend artists to different locations/occasions to form a collaborative (co-labourative) situation to serve as a hub for research of artistic methods, mechanisms and conditions of co-working(-being) regarding that situation. d.a is a ‘non-serious’ platform, professionalism is not expected nor rejected, focusing rather on the subject (that may come up) than the object. It’s an (illusive) attempt to shake off contemporary (art) world behaviour, restrictions and expectations, whatever one regards worthy to be abandoned. The name Abend (‘evening’) itself is an indicator for a get-together, announcing agitation in the form of confrontation and exhaustion, at least, participation, discord, positioning and rejection. Talking about friendship-based/confidential projects, Viktor Misiano once said that the main feature is that the human aspect dominates the professional. Because friendship is not creative cooperation, but the ‘ethical form of Eros’. The confidential project excludes the possibility of a representative selection of participants. The choice is immanent in relation to the friendships. (…) There can be no successful or unsuccessful project in friendship. There can only be disappointment.* Ben Cain, Hugo Canoilas, Djana Covic, Lukas Heistinger, Ludwig Kittinger, Mikael Larsson, Alastair Levy, Fernando Mesquita, Carlos Noronha Feio, Lucy Pawlak, Diana Policarpo, Alicja Rogalska, Sophie Thun, Ben Washington
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The old man looked at me More than twice With the naughty gaze in his eyes Of a man in need I showed him the finger The cat was just next to me I smiled and felt safe The old man sends a man to take care of the case He tried to push us off the wall we were sitting on With the woods right behind us There was a laugh after a smile, again And the cat was Right next to me The old man said, “I am the owner of the woods!” I replied, “I don’t care!” And together the cat and I laughed, again The cat next to me Both sitting on the wall In the woods Together with the cat we promised That in the woods we will not care About what Time will bring We simply have to know when to stop Knowing that the water will bring all the answers Because we’ll stop We must stop the old man When we are not in need any more And only then he’ll stop Because we are not in need any more
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Oeuvre #1
3d designer, admin assistant, advert model, animator, art advisor, art director, art director (film), art fair intern, art foundation intern, art handler, art shop assistant, art technician, art writer, artist assistant, artist studio manager, au-pair, babysitter, bank clerk, bar manager, bar staff, barista, barman/barmaid, bartender, best boy/girl, bicycle shop assistant, bingo card seller, bookshop staff, bookstore warehouse clerk, bricklayer, builder, cable tv seller, café staff, café manager, camera assistant, camera operator, car factory worker, carpenter, cinematographer, cinema usher, chef, cheesemonger, cleaner, cook, curator/co-curator, data entry (error corrector), digital imaging technician, director assistant (theatre), doorman, driver, editor, educator, events assistant, event organiser, exhibition coordinator, factory worker, farmer, fashion model, film production assistant, fitting model, flyer distributor, fortune teller, gallery assistant, gallery attendant, gallery director, gallery intern, gallery sales assistant, gallery technician, gardener, glass collector, graphic designer, hostess, independent curator, insurance salesman, interviewer, investment company managing director, investment sales assistant, investment salesperson, invigilator, joiner, juice seller, kitchen prep, labourer, language teacher, landscape gardener, lecturer, light designer, light installation assistant, location scout, magazine co-editor, male nurse, market researcher, market stall manager, mascot, medical interpreter, moderator, music library checkout clerk, nude model, painter and decorator, pension fund portfolio manager, performer, photographer (music), photographer (portrait), photographer (product), photographer (theatre), photographer's assistant, pizza delivery man, police interpreter, pool heater salesman, post-production assistant, postal clerk, print technician, private bank manager, private dancer, production manager (performance), prop designer (film), receptionist, researcher, review writer (music), sausage seller, set builder, set designer, shelf stacker, shop assistant, stage technician, stage design assistant, stage designer (opera), stage designer (theatre), steady cam operator, steel yard worker, street performer, supermarket staff, teaching assistant, teacher, theatre technician, tour guide, translator, tutor, unemployed, video editor, videographer, waiter/waitress, wedding decorator, window dresser, wood restorer, workshop leader, youth worker
________When approaching the building from the East side, walking towards Liverpool Street from Aldgate, its silhouette was disturbingly well recognisable. Not a necessarily pleasant view. Its shape followed, more than anything else, the logic of the real estate market. Nothing new in this concern, but rather the dominating ground rule for any architectural business district development going mad. Based on an incomplete physical model or maybe with just some parameters misjudged, the concave shape collected the sunlight and – operating like a
giant magnifying glass – projected it down onto street level. When visiting the site, one felt the penetrating heat caused by the phenomenon and, in my case, was equally reminded of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project, Cerith Wyn Evans’s s=u=p=e=r=s=t=r=u=c=t=u=r=e and that scene in Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, of Indy figuring out the spot on the excavation site where he would later discover the ark. The melted unfortunately parked ritzy Jaguar or the burned plastic lemon from one of the shop windows, turned into yet unexhibited
Grossglockner’s stew*
ready-mades directing the attention towards the multi-authored character of this event. A journalistically celebrated failure reported by rags and broadsheets, international architecture blogs and local community initiatives protesting against London’s urban development policies. A potentially annual event soon to be worshipped by fans, dressed in swimwear and marketed as the Death Ray Days. This is a humankindwith-planet-earth collaboration, finally bringing the right scale to the term – in memory of Buckminster Fuller. ___________________
Serves: 13 | Preparation time 15 min | Cooking time 60 min
Ingredients: 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil 5 carrots, peeled and diced 3 stalks of celery, diced 4 medium onions, diced 5 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped 3 large potatoes cut in cubes 50g plain flour 400ml white wine 2 400g cans of chopped tomatoes 500ml of chicken stock 200g button mushrooms, sliced A few sprigs of thyme Bay leaves Sea salt Black pepper 26 chicken pieces (can be legs, thighs or breast)
* Great dish for big parties or group shows
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In the woods A love song was being played By two rabbits on the piano Two different colours Piano, pianissimo On Easter Sunday Between the two evenings they sang “Our garbage bin is full of gold” And they kept on singing Piano piano, pianissimo “Nothing is on our mind Pretend you’re blind While the Kween goes naked Close your eyes Pretend your blind” Piano piano, allegro “She is dreaming A dream that is happening The Red Knight Riding a Red Horse His Armour is Red And his sword is full of Red” Together with the cat Between the two evenings we danced.
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A man travels to London with a box filled with shoes collected from a flea market in Vienna. The shoes were selected for their singularity (there was just one shoe, either left or right foot) and for their inner qualities (objectified in the exterior as a matter for our senses; a receptacle for our projections). With the help of a piece of raw canvas that was lying on the floor, a display for the shoes was created, enhancing their qualities and giving back some dignity to the abandoned objects. The presence of the collector on the side of the display showed that someone cared about it. One could also think that he was there to sell these items, no matter how absurd it might seem to sell one right or left shoe. People passed by and noticed a small interference in their daily routine. Some didn’t stop, neither slowed down, but one felt their eyes moving like when passing by advertisements that people see without looking. Others smiled and looked, giving their body a new time experience (although spontaneous or extemporaneous). Two other people came and talked (one cracked a joke about the inexistence of flat shoes for ladies, and another, asking money, projected that
the man was there “for the same thing”, and wished him good luck). After half an hour, a police car stopped far away from the spot. Two policemen walked down slowly on the opposite side of the street and approached them (in the meantime another man joined the first one). They asked what they were doing and the one responsible for the collection answered that it was an artwork and that they were there to make a photo of it. A small conversation took place: – So you are not selling? – No, as you can see, these shoes have no pairs, so we can’t sell them. – So what is your aim with this? – Well, the idea is to create a situation and place it in relation to the passersby. There was a work in the past made by David Hammons… He was selling snowballs… Well, the work seems to follow the track of that work from the past. In between the two policemen started to enquire individually each one of them until the second man states: – … But I’m not the artist, he is the artist… Which brought a sort of amazement and
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despair to the gaze of these two policemen, who hold the columns of reason and objectivity in this world. – So let’s try again… You know… There are people here who sell in the streets. – Well we are not selling… – And some of them don’t have a license. – Ah! You mean people who open their jackets and a full array of chains and wristwatches are displayed to the people? – Exactly. So I would say you should leave… – We are just smoking a cigarette and soon we will pack and leave… – Please do it now… So they left. The work was made with the Provo theatre flyer in mind, launching the ‘Bare feet plan’ against: I The addicted consumer (mass-produced shoes). II Suppression of freedom (the boot). III Hypocrisy (hide your toes). IV Unhealthy city atmosphere (smelly feet). V The impossibility of communication (the sole of the shoe prevents contact with the earth). VI Stifling of creativity (tight-fitting shoes). Therefore: provoke shoe wearers! Walk barefooted!
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Together with the vegetable realm and embracing all animal ideas, we saw the most successful of all rabbits. He didn’t have a gun. Before the accident, the things we didn’t know were much more than the ones we thought we knew. The living stone came to us and showed us the trunk, and together we walked with Gucci and some other friends. We took our shoes off and we nailed them on a piece of wood. We draw together Sir Francis B’s self-portrait, while walking through the garden as if we were him. Red carpets were rolled, filling the entire green house. – Champagne! – Bury the Champagne in the snow and let it rest for a while. Some friends drank while one grew his beard, while another drew Caravaggio’s portrait with her eyes closed. M was pregnant and didn’t know who the father was, but she drank a glass of Champagne. – Cheers to the in-between! The beard was shaved and the moustache
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was born. The kiss was kissed and from Cabaret to Cabaret, we decided to stop by in Tesla. The Champagne was now served next to a highlighted wooden pyramid. Thoughts were spoken out loud of a head made of styrofoam: – Bacchus, Bacchus, Bacchus, Bacchus! With the apple trees already in a mature state, we thought it was the moment for the feast, and we ate the fruit with honey and cinnamon. We were half naked and half drunk that day! Sir Francis was not there, just his portrait drawn in our heads. To hell with the reputation, dance baby dance! A killed B, and was not too late! Finger on its back, B was against the wall. The smell of fish invaded our Francis heads. – Nail them on the wall like we did with our shoes! Fishes were nailed and eaten! The guests just arrived, producing all kind of noises and shapes! (How I recall Les Chants de Maldoror! V&V were
singing them like I never saw them do before!) Religion as the last frontier a cosa mentale in Claustropolis. In between the two great eternities, the Cabaret’s door was kept open for one day. That day we were blinded by cheerfulness, immediately happy in the present moment. Self-sufficient. – A bas le mérite and the envious conspiracy of silence! – said B before his next eternity. Friends and guests soon made the Cabaret full, as if they were all invited for the marriage between Heaven and Hell. We were thinking of the highlighted wooden pyramid, while a paprika powder cone hill was waiting on a green grass background. We even thought of cooking in boiling water a Laurel Tree, hoping to recover our deceptive uniqueness! We cooked for all the guests while waiting for the K-night to come. – If not today then next time, when we will be somewhere on a beach in Norway, where it would be warm resembling lost postcards from the Pacific – said one of us.
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Photo: Jimmy Kets
Fri 25–Sun 27 April 12 noon – 8 pm Brussels Expo www.artbrussels.com
@ArtBrussels artbrussels
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Magali Reus In Lukes and Dregs Approach, London 18 January – 16 February A potential poetics of domesticity is explored via London-based Magali Reus’s latest collection of sculptures: objects whose quotidian and industrial forms are recognisable as derivations of modern appliances, slightly abstracted by structural alterations and their presentation as non-functioning equipment, present-at-hand tools now imbued with aesthetic value. Whereas recent works by Reus have evoked the bloodless artificiality of the administrator’s office via wall-mounted desk chairs and translucent inorganic materials, In Lukes and Dregs moves away from a consideration of bureaucracy to a consideration of the human body. Doorless fridges, cooking pots and toilet seats, all fabricated (not appropriated) by Reus, are arranged, like groups of abandoned flytipped objects, in tight constellations that draw attention to the body in two ways. First, through a minimalist installation evoking Robert Morris or Donald Judd, which subsequently carries those artists’ phenomenological considerations along with it – specifically the Maurice MerleauPonty-inspired privileging of an embodied spectator’s interactions with an environment filled with art objects. Second, Reus places material designed to look like the detritus
of human use in or amongst the various objects. Fridges are scattered with takeaway trays and filled with liquid; cooking pots contain a burnt, charcoal-like residue, and rusty kitchen knives and single insoles are distributed across or slid in-between the larger industrial forms. In Lukes and Dregs, then, offers a number of thematic strands that could be said to constitute the exhibition’s subject matter, or at least the set of histories and discourses with which the works engage. Perhaps the least rewarding angle explored is the modern sculptural take on trompe l’oeil – readymades that are not readymades. Disregarding double takes, the rectilinear fridge-forms offer a playful, almost tongue-in-cheek engagement with the austere legacy of Minimalism. Lukes (03:00) (2014), a small zinc-coated, doorless freezer, seems a striking riff on Judd’s copper-and-zinc pieces whose materials prohibit any touching. What look to be corrosive effects, of some liquid, on the surface of Reus’s work reinforce that these are not idealised objects abstracted from the universe of physical engagement, what Martin Heidegger called the relational ‘totality of equipment’. Reus’s exhibition could be looked at as a point of synthesis between two opposing
positions, the high seriousness of Minimalism versus the almost postmodern registers of irreverence available to young artists working today. But her distributed cooking pots, especially in Dregs (Pyramid Simmer) (2013) and Dregs (Flash Batch) (2014), bring a more anecdotal set of references to In Lukes and Dregs, in that they point to the basic procedures of life – eating, walking, shitting and pissing – that have been or would be enabled by the activation of each object. In Lukes and Dregs’s vision of ‘dirty realism’ speaks to the existential concerns – the anxiety of home ownership, the transitory nature of rented accommodation – today’s precariat face. These works evoked a certain absence, a kind of hollowness at the core of contemporaneity; a doss house, temp-accommodation emptiness, where the sum total of a transitory life can be reduced to the traces bodies leave behind. While Minimalism’s phenomenological concerns are exhumed, it is by reconnecting the ontic minimalist body (the body reduced to its physical properties so often referenced in discussions about art’s effects on it) with the living active body that Reus articulates something beyond a contribution to abstract discourse. Morgan Quaintance
Lukes (Wet Wet) (detail), 2013, powder coated, folded and riveted steel, powder coated aluminium foil, rusted knife, bio resin, pigments, protective netting, laser cut and powder coated aluminium, toilet paper, laser cut steel, magnets, foam foot soles, shellac, rusted sheet, PVC, cotton, 73 × 110 × 140 cm. Courtesy the Approach, London
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Alexandre Singh The Humans Sprüth Magers, London 24 January – 29 March It all sounds like so much fun. A reworking of ancient Greek comedies, with sculptor Charles Ray epitomised as a Prospero-like figure ‘seeking’, as he says, ‘pure form in geometry’ on an island supposedly run by a deity who communicates through an air conditioner and a Nespresso machine. His demigod offspring try to disrupt celestial machinations, only to bring about the calamitous creation of humanity itself. Alexandre Singh’s three-hour play The Humans (2013; video 2014) has singing, dancing, Existentialism and toilet humour, and oodles of nods to The Tempest (1610–11), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1590–96), The Jungle Book (1967) and Dumbo (1941). But as Singh has said himself, ‘I often prefer reading plays to seeing them.’ Contemporary comedic musical dealing with theological and philosophical issues it is. The Book of Mormon (2011) it is not. Singh’s ambitious theatrical debut is a verbose mashup of origin stories and theosophy, about the struggles between rational, Apollonian traits and wild, Dionysian emotions. Desire is the engine that moves the plot, whether in the suppressed tryst that produced the demigod protagonists Tophole and Pantalingua, Tophole’s unwittingly incestuous love for Pantalingua or the humans’ own
unleashed anarchic cravings. But tellingly, those desires are always offstage, mediated only by language; even N, the silent rabbit embodiment of earthly, bodily fecundity, can only be understood through translation by her daughter Pantalingua, a hyper-intellectual Victorian dandy. Singh seems to take his commitment to the dramatic genre very seriously, filling his play with familiar stock characters, whether plucked from Shakespeare or The Office; Tophole seemed written for Martin Freeman or Richard Ayoade, and the human Prime Minister is, inexplicably, an overweight Scouser. With its constant musings about determinism, of course we know what’s going to happen: the statues made by Ray will become humans, their transformation marked by donning Greek drama and commedia dell’arteinspired grotesque masks; the humans will make their own pathetic pantheon from the comedy of errors we’ve witnessed. Singh’s version of dramatic irony, though, isn’t so much to lead us on a cathartic journey through a well-told tale. It seems more to want constantly to point to its overstuffed trunk of references to Nietzsche, Leibniz, Hegel, Kant and on and on. For a newly written parable about the search for
meaning in life, what Singh mostly seems to be saying is that contemporary culture hasn’t added anything particularly insightful to the debate; it’s just good for a few quick butt-in jokes. Singh took pains to emphasise the theatricality of this work; that despite it being shown only within the framework of the Witte de With in Rotterdam and Performa 13 in New York, it is meant not as a visual artist’s project, but as musical theatre in itself. The video documentation of the performance is accomplished but loses some of the allure that (I’d imagine) the live performances held; instead we end up focusing on the microphone scratching and sometimes incomprehensibly muffled voices of the humans behind their masks. Despite that, and surprisingly, this exhibition does the project a favour. Rather than just the ‘sellable bits’ from the stage, the drawings, props, sculptures and character portraits shown here at least give the ideas more room to breathe, and allow the audience more of their own ways in than the hermetically sealed creation on stage. Perhaps, as in his earlier installations, Singh’s strength lies more in the creative suggestion of intertwined, referential narratives than in their realisation. Chris Fite-Wassilak
The Humans, 2013, theatrical performance. Photo: Sanne Peper. Choreography: Flora Sans. © the artist. Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin/London; Art: Concept, Paris; Metro Pictures, New York; Monitor, Rome
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Christian Jankowski Heavy Weight History Lisson Gallery, London 31 January – 8 March It’s the truly collaborative element with real people in Christian Jankowski’s ‘performance’ projects that allows for their serious insight into his subject matter, even when those works also contain a fair amount of humour, which they often do. This minisurvey features five such projects, from 2007 to 2013, the title work being Jankowski’s 2013 project in which he reengages the city of Warsaw with its public statuary. Eleven Polish weightlifters at the top of their profession are shown working as a team to attempt to raise some of the city’s monuments off the ground – statues of Ronald Reagan and Willy Brandt among them – with mixed success. The resulting short film, shown with a series of accompanying photographs, is produced in the format of a TV sports show, and presented, at adrenalin-fuelled pace, by Polish sports commentator Michał Olszański. It’s his unscripted comments, such as the weightlifters being ‘overwhelmed by history’ when they don’t succeed, that are, in the context of Warsaw’s history, as loaded as they are lighthearted. The weightlifters apparently liked the film so much that they invited the project to be part of that year’s World Weightlifting Championships.
While the other projects included here seem slightly random selections, there are themes that connect them. Public statues are also the focus of Living Sculptures (2007), for which Jankowski cast three human ‘living statue’ performers – in the guises of Che Guevara, Julius Caesar and Salvador Dalí’s female ‘chest of drawers’ figure from his painting The Burning Giraffe (1937) – as lifesize bronzes. He then installed the works on Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, where he had first seen the originals. As ‘real’ sculptures, the works have subsequently been shown in various ‘art’ contexts, including a New York park. There the bronze of El Che was criticised because of the real Guevara’s negative views towards the US, highlighting the conundrum of whether this work was in fact promoting Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary, or the street performer. Communist politics also feature in Crying for the March of Humanity (2012), for which Jankowski refilmed an episode of the melodramatic Mexican telenovela La Que No Podía Amar (The One Who Could Not Love), with the original cast, but replaced all their dialogue with crying. Jankowski takes his title from communist artist David Alfaro Siqueiros’s mural, La Marcha de la
Humanidad en la Tierra y Hacia el Cosmos (The March of Humanity on Earth and Toward the Cosmos, 1965–71), an artwork that might be described as equally ‘overwrought’. Then there’s China Painters (2007–8), inspired by Jankowski’s visit to the Chinese village of Dafen, where the majority of the country’s copyist painters work and where the Communist party was building an art museum. Having photographed the half-built galleries, Jankowski commissioned a group of the painters to copy the photos of the empty exhibition spaces, but to paint in an artwork of their choice, allowing the artists to not only showcase their skills but to become ‘original’ painters. Curiously, on the evidence here, many of the artists seemed unable to paint the perspective of the museum’s incomplete architecture. However, that didn’t prevent the works being shown in the Dafen Art Museum three years later. Maybe it’s no coincidence that the other professionals with whom Jankowski has collaborated include fortune-tellers, televangelists and magicians. Whether it’s people, places or perceptions, Jankowski always manages to pull off that tricky act of a positive transformation. Helen Sumpter
Heavy Weight History (Little Insurgent), 2013, b/w photograph on baryt paper, 140 × 187 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London
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Caroline Achaintre Mooner Arcade, London 24 January – 1 March Two blots paired, one blot below them. Two eyes and a mouth. It doesn’t take much to trigger an instance of representation, and when what you’re representing is the human face, it’s a moment fraught with the possibility of misrecognition as much as recognition – masks are always strange. Caroline Achaintre’s drawings in ink on paper exploit these tensions with abandon, and while the means appear minimal compared to Achaintre’s recent technique – heavy wall-weavings and sculptures – these drawings are by no means slight or subordinate. Achaintre’s work is often discussed for its revisiting of aspects of primitivism and expressionism (and the awkward status of these tendencies in the story of modernist art) and how she blends these with more contemporary subcultural strands of sci-fi, gothic and psychedelia. Comprised of no more than coloured ink and masking fluid, however, the works in Mooner are stripped of some of the burden of history that attaches to her sculptural work, the better to focus on the hallucinatory strangeness of what emerges from the pools, dribbles and bleeds of ink.
Three (2011) sets up the eyes-mouth-face trigger in its most apparently basic form. It can’t help but induce visions of other things – eg, two discs of blood-red floating like ill suns above a fragmenting black hole. This involuntary illusionism conjures up faces that are themselves always something other, something elsewhere – Sue High (2014) has a spreading oval ring of washed black in a spattered field of twilight blue, yet the aperture contains a set of pinkish triangles against a pale-green ground that suggest nose and mouth, but also a teetering pyramid. Achaintre’s prowess lies in how the apparently spontaneous and accidental dynamic of the ink is harnessed to producing figures that are themselves almost accidental apparitions, both there and not there: LL. Ost (2011) is little more that a squashed ovoid of bleeding black ink, with two openings onto a spattered blue background, both staring visage and the image, perhaps, of a rock that resembles the same. Meater (2012) pushes this ambivalence hardest: a custard-coloured head-shape is populated with busy, jagged concentrations of reds and purples, floating against a field of mint-green diamonds.
These doublings, between thing and face, between something else and what there is, are a bizarre, knowing regression to the most basic questions of representation. Achaintre’s preoccupation with such atavism is leavened by the queasy retro of the patterns that float through and in these little fields and which in some cases almost eclipse them: candy-stripe pinks and mints recall 1980s graphic styling, which was itself already aping the dynamism of early constructivist art. It’s true that such historical throwbacks have been something of a characteristic of British art, and Achaintre won’t be the last to deploy them. But her claustrophobic collapsing of multiple histories back onto this simple motif of the human face isn’t mere playful quotation. Perhaps, in the context of debates about the anthropomorphising of the inanimate that have gained currency in the last few years, Achaintre’s weird mask figures, taking shape or fading away, ponder a very contemporary sense of loss and estrangement; not finding ourselves in the things we make, but discovering something quite unlike us, staring back. J.J. Charlesworth
Sue High, 2014, ink on paper, 40 × 30 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Arcade, London
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Jessica Jackson Hutchins Timothy Taylor Gallery, London 31 January – 8 March “Yes, and,” says the teacher of improvised comedy in your nightmare. “Yes, and.” In Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s work, found items – battered, stained furniture and discarded clothing, like the contents of a prop cupboard in a regional theatre – become placeholders for sculpture as improvisational act. The sofas and armchairs, lugged off street corners or up from a family basement, are props in both senses of the word: they’re both plinthlike in their support of Hutchins’s lackadaisical ceramics, and act as shorthand narrative elements, in this case for a life beyond the studio. Yes, and: why chairs? A chair with its seat obstructed – by a pipe and tobacco, say, or an upturned bicycle wheel – is an invisible thing made suddenly visible. In use, a chair disappears from sight, but locates the sitter here, there, with, beside, a preposition in real space. Hutchins’s interest in language’s connective tissues finds form in her attention to the gaps between things: the arms of soft furnishings are cut open,
their interiors painted (Pink on the Inside, all works 2013); jugs gape open like mouths, their innards flipping outwards; the space around a chair is cast in slapped-on plaster, like a hipster Bruce Nauman (Wave Hill). In #1 Rainbow, linen pulled taut across a stretcher catches and snags, opening yawns in its surface; this is painting in reverse, its inner surfaces and edges stained in warm primaries for emphasis. In Hutchins’s work, conjunctions acquire a physical embodiment, as do letters themselves. In M, N, OH, a soaring cliff of plaster, bolt upright on a sofa, acts as surface for a collaged letter ‘N’, which resembles a slice from a Lascaux cave wall. That fusion of painted sign and visual density (Hutchins has referred to cave painting in previous work) is part of her inversion of linguistic emphasis: letters acquire the weight of words. Words become bodies. That a body is implied in Hutchins’s work is of a piece with its use of loaded physical proxies: fat-bellied pots, tonguelike sofa cushions, used
clothing dangling like a matador’s cape. In Hutchins’s Two Hearts, an armchair, daubed in swatches of acrylic paint, is surmounted by a glazed ceramic harness, which pins two sweatshirts to the chair’s back. Though made in an improvisational manner – Hutchins never trained in ceramics, and often renders potters speechless when she presents her work to be fired – the vessels in these sculptures flirt with functionality. Yoke-shaped ceramic forms, sometimes used in performance, end in bowllike cavities, absent the stooping, slurping, slumping human animal. Her recent objects relax and spread, lolling across their sofas like truly baked ceramics. Gravity is a punchline in a joke about the body, and the material is literally the artist’s own: checked and speckled clothing discarded by her husband and children create readymade abstractions; collaged magazine images make glossy patinas. “Use it”, says the improvisation teacher, of the stuff of daily life. And then you wake up. Ben Street
Two Hearts, 2013, acrylic on armchair, shirts, glazed ceramics. 93 × 92 × 70 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
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Pae White Genau or Never Greengrassi, London 24 January – 1 March Given Pae White’s respect for architecture and her experience with installations in public spaces, she was an obvious choice for a commission to mark the 150th anniversary of Gloucester Road Underground station. She planned something ambitious, expensive and very risky in the station’s brick arches: 2,450 neon lights, in a dozen shades of off-white, all twisted into ornamental forms and tessellae in a complex layered design containing 23 patterns, some inspired by oriental carpets (allowing for a ‘magic carpet’ transport narrative). Had it come off, White’s Underground neon mural, arranged between a dozen columns in a gloomy wintery space, could have been impressive. When the commission was sadly cancelled, production was already under way and the LA-based artist had produced 540 sculpted lights for the work. It is with these that she has created Genau or Never, a vast, immersive light installation that surrounds the viewer in the gallery space. All 540 of the neon tubes, in various distinct shades of white, are mounted on three walls, overlapping here and there. The comprehensive Gloucester Road design (clearly taken from traditional oriental textile patterns) has been ‘randomised’ using a computer program to take the pattern to pieces and put it back together again. The result is that the twisted light shapes – rectangles, squiggles, circles, semicircles – are no more recognisable as oriental
fabrics than traffic signals. However, the overall effect is soft, no doubt aided by the fact that the lights glow more softly than regular neon because they are filled with SAD lamps (so called because of their seasonal therapeutic qualities). White’s work looks to challenge the limits and expectations of her chosen materials. She proved that you can make something as formless as billows of smoke into a solid cartoon for tapestry in Smoke Knows (2009). Equally, her gilded porcelain popcorns suspended from invisible threads (Popcorn, 2011) toy with the concept of striking a satisfactory balance between a light-as-air subject and a precious, luxury craft. Last spring, to fill the vast atrium of the South London Gallery, she merged 3D computer-graphics with textiles by spinning threads through the gallery, which then created bold letters in space. True to form, then, the Gloucester Road proposal would have used neon lights (a material limited by its dynamism, its electric, static nature) lavishly, like textiles (an ancient craft, delicate, yielding, adaptable), to weave subtle distinctions between the designs, to create a three-dimensional monument to the rhythms and versatile beauty of the ancient forms that make up a Middle Eastern rug. It might have worked; there is an almost exotic beauty to be teased out of neon, as Stephen Antonakos proved in the 1970s. What’s more, the neon lamp made
its first public appearance in 1910, and its associations with industrial progress, modernity, advertising and art come together nicely for a celebration of the underground network. Yet at Greengrassi the concept is dramatically different. The pattern is not recognisable as a textile, nor does it have a decorative beauty. The design element has deliberately been abstracted. It is not only chaotic – it’s a recycled artwork; and neither gallery nor artist has made an effort to disguise the fact (when I asked at the front desk, an immaculate blueprint for the Tube installation was handed to me). The title mixes German and English colloquial expressions (genau roughly meaning ‘exactly’ or ‘right on!’) and hints at the underlying playfulness of the work, the idea of making do with what one’s got, and of mixing and matching from different languages (these could be the languages of design and abstraction, public and gallery installation spaces, Underground poster and ancient carpet). Perhaps the implication is that the price of reaching for a universal artwork, one that crosses cultures and languages, is that it’s always going to be somehow superficial or ‘randomised’ like scattered pieces from a puzzle. Yet to see such a chaotic installation from such a precise, calculating artist, one cannot help but feel that, at bottom, the work is just that: making do. Florence Waters
Genau or Never, 2014 (installation view), 540 pieces of neon. Photo: © Marcus Leith. Courtesy Greengrassi, London
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Dean Hughes Maria Stenfors, London 24 January – 8 March Dean Hughes used a great line in a recent talk at Glasgow School of Art, available online: ‘I used to be a waiter, I used to wait for work.’ Given his deadpan delivery, it’s hard to tell whether he intended the pun (on the kind of clichéd crap job on which many an artist relies financially), but the line offers a useful way into his latest body of work, which is more about materials and making than worrying about concept and a self-conscious relation to ‘art’. For this series, Hughes has dyed little cutout shapes of calico in a variety of colours, stitched their edges and hung them delicately on wooden rungs, like miniature washing left out to dry on a towel rail, or bunting strung up. The supports are the size of small stretchers and are hung on the wall as if they were paintings; perhaps no surprise, since Hughes trained as a painter. Yet they appear so light, so loose, that it’s hard to think of a category to which they belong. The titles bear out this ambiguity: they refer to things, shapes, work, matter, multiples. Hughes definitely wants us to notice the
making – the multilayered process, the precision, the hand-dyeing, the dainty handstitching. The calico has taken on the vivid colours of the dye but crinkled lightly in the process, creating little marks on the otherwise perfect shapes. On some pieces of fabric, Hughes has stitched small ‘u’ characters. Set against blank fabric, like words on a page, or graffiti on a wall, the marks urge us to read them as signs, but of what? Letters, smiley faces, cheeky body parts, phases of the moon? Likewise, the dashes on Dashed Matter (all works 2013) suggest a cartoonist practising facial expressions or some kind of semaphore. They look abstract yet familiar: a code or a language; a trace of something whose source we won’t know; a Rorschach test. Sometimes the titles lead you into seeing figuration in otherwise abstract shapes, as in Drawn Edinburgh Shapes, that transforms the coloured shapes into architectural motifs: a rooftop, a steeple, a rotunda, a tower block. The title Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday reinforces the
idea of the washing line, suggesting that the seven pieces of cloth are items of laundry – it made me think of those kitsch ‘knickers of the week’ that Stella McCartney has recently been peddling. But the tracking of days might just as well be about routine and banality: the idea that making things is inseparable from the general business of getting through another week. Indeed, you could say that Hughes’s work makes tangible the passing of time – time taken to cut, to dye, to dry, to sew, to hang; repetitive actions that slowly build to make a whole. It is about small details, fiddliness, concentration, picking up and putting down and picking up again. But Hughes’s works are not retro; they are not paeans to the kind of wholesome craftmaking that we like watching on TV. If they are nostalgic, it is for a time when objects and materials were valued, not threatening to overwhelm us; when terms like ‘activity’ and its cousin ‘hobby’ were commonplace, before we all got too busy and distracted. Jennifer Thatcher
Windowless Work, 2013, wood, dyed calico and thread, 64 × 42 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London
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Anat Ben David MeleCh Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston upon Thames 8–18 January “Propagate air,” she intones elastically, her voice morphing from a childish treble to an inhuman basso profundo. “Blast the spine that has become reptile… keep breathing, as it will save you, as it is electricity… Sound athlete… Body-instrument… Source-transmitter.” Anat Ben David’s Deleuzian-Dalcrozian text scorecum-manifesto is performed to a backing track of looped electronic croaks and stutters in the main gallery at Stanley Picker. Simultaneously stripping back and complicating the codes and gestures of pop, Ben David is multiplied and transformed by diverse digital prostheses (echoes, loops, harmonisers, video projections); her machinic, Cathy Berberian-esque sprechstimme itself becoming the arch double of a pop singer’s affected hyper-affectivity. This electrifying performance is just one aspect of Ben David’s current show, but the way her stage equipment remains set up throughout the life of the exhibition suggests that a concert might spontaneously erupt at any moment (and, indeed, Ben David is apt to rehearse here during gallery hours). Ultimately the artist considers the whole show to be one work, MeleCh (king, 2014), with each iteration housed in the
gallery’s two rooms – photographs, video, performance, text, a vinyl album – sprouting from the same technical-conceptual seed. That process, elaborated in the text already quoted, combines the surrealist art of automatic writing with the biomechanical theatre practice of Soviet director Vsevolod Meyerhold to forge a versatile autopoietic discipline. In the first room of the gallery we find a series of black-and-white photographs that immediately evoke images of Meyerhold’s avant-garde workshops, with Ben David herself striking a series of dynamic poses: arms outstretched or crooked at 90 degrees, legs bent and poised for action. But in the next room we find a set of strikingly different – though formally similar (A4, portrait, colourless, etc) – images. Here the artist throws her body violently against the ground, her naked torso brutally contorted. Though wrung from the same technique, these images present a dramatically different image of the body from the futurist strongmen in the other room. It is significant, perhaps, that Ben David worked alone, snapping herself on a timer. If there is a relation of subjection to be dealt with, it is the
artist’s relationship with herself – or with the device. The three videos in the main room at once provide the mirrored reverse of the photographs while closing the circuit back to the performance. Their bright primary colours contrast with the photographic greyscale. Though set in constant motion, Ben David’s variously starched or supine static poses counterpoise the sprung vitality of the stills. Each video emits noises, mostly layered vocals processed into lolling oscillator whoops, and superimposed they produce a strangely inviting kind of cacophony. It is from the third video that the show takes its title. Though generated as spontaneously as the others, the sounds subsequently evoked for Ben David a ritual of supplication to an Egyptian king. Developed by Aleksei Gastev as a kind of Soviet scientific management for the socialist workplace, in Meyerhold’s hands biomechanics became a utopia of mind and body, physical discipline and futurist dream. Anat Ben David’s work reaches towards these other worlds with disarming frankness. A soft machine for the production of new myths, as engaging as it is unsettling. Robert Barry
Yellow, MeleCh (video still), 2014, digital video. Courtesy the artist
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Return Journey Mostyn, Llandudno 18 January – 6 April Poor, frustrated George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart’s swell guy in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). That’s who I keep thinking of while walking round curator Adam Carr’s Return Journey, a busy but tight group show that looks at the emotionally charged, nostalgia-laden, occasionally frustrating relationship one has with one’s hometown. George told his sweetheart: “I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world!” This show sees 22 British artists return whence they came, now the dust has settled. Some towns are only really haunted by our own personal ghosts: Sue Tompkins was born in Leighton Buzzard (population 39,000 according to a wall text, in keeping with similar signs next to all works in the show, each indicating the number of inhabitants in the respective artist’s hometown, together with its geographical coordinates). With all due respect to this Home Counties parish, it’s not got an extensive cultural history, so Tompkins’s typed words on newspaper seem to recollect
her own childhood memories. ‘Whizz!!!!!!!!!!!’ cries one, evocative of childish highjinks, perhaps rollerskating down one of the Chiltern Hills sometime in the late 1970s. Tracey Emin’s grainy 1995 film, Why I Never Became a Dancer, about escaping the underage sex and petty misogyny of 1970s Margate, is similarly personal, but with a touch more pathos. “By fifteen I’d had them all, and for me Margate was too small,” Emin rhymes. Likewise haunting is Jonathan Monk’s The Gap Between My Mother and My Sister (1998), a six-by-eight grid of black-and-white photographs. Each photo depicts an inauspicious junction or minor road on the journey between Leicester – where the artist grew up and his mother still lives – and Birmingham, where Monk’s sister now lives. The work is, in the context of this show, a quietly sad commentary on leaving home and familial dispersal (Monk himself now lives in Berlin). There are more universal, or public, histories mined: Alan Kane and Simon Periton’s The ASBO
Mystery Play (Tableaux and Vitrine) (2011/13), a multimedia sculptural mise-en-scène of street life in which clothed dummies of a hooded youth, a street cleaner and other archetypal personas of British urban life stand in front of a giant wall-pasted photograph of a street in Faversham, Kent, for example. Simon Fujiwara’s video drama The Mirror Stage (2013), meanwhile, theatrically entangles his early years in St Ives, first sexual awakenings and Damascene moment in front of a Patrick Heron painting (a replica of which is installed alongside the video monitor). The message of Return Journey is that our personality is inextricably wrapped up in the place we spent our formative years. The exhibition is oddly melancholic, in a warm fuzzy sort of way: for the most part Carr avoids overtly political works (apart from Paul Seawright’s monochrome photographs of sites of conflict in Belfast from the Troubles), and instead the curator asks us to look at our own internal conflicts: about where we came from, and where we want to be. Oliver Basciano
Simon Fujiwara, The Mirror Stage (film still), 2013, installation, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
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Thomas Struth Marian Goodman Gallery, New York 10 January – 28 February Of the various acolytes of Bernd and Hilla Becher – Thomas Demand, Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff among them – Thomas Struth has developed the most nuanced and broad argument for large-scale photography as contemporary History Painting. His subject matter ranges from family groups to cityscapes, church interiors to crowded museum galleries; his work both probes culture and history writ large, and measures the present moment against the past. Recently, Struth has extended his investigations from the places of socioeconomic ritual and continuity to the means and mechanics of intellectual production by photographing facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and complex machinery at research centres like the Max Planck Institutes in Germany. At Marian Goodman, similar images – pictures of Disneyland (the quintessence of realised fantasy) and of robotics labs – are combined with older photographs of architecture. The graffiti-defaced alley in Kovenskij Pereulok, St. Petersburg (2005) and the high-rise
juggernaut of a new development in South Korea, Ulsan 2, Lotte Hotel, Ulsan (2010), for example, offer a long view of human endeavour by way of Struth’s lens. There are few grace notes: the doe-eyed rubber dinosaur before a theorem-covered whiteboard in Table 1, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, for example, and the saluting robot in a work titled Golem’s Playground, Georgia Tech, Atlanta (both 2013). Everything else, from the labs’ Sheetrock walls to the panoramas of Disneyland rendered in saturated colours that emphasise the cheapness of the spectacle, seems as relentlessly soulless as the phalanx of apartment blocks in Ulsan. Titles like Golem’s Playground and scenes of the Magic Kingdom indicate that Struth’s subjects are artifice and artificiality, and beyond the means used to effect them, the complex desire to create and to amuse. To these he adds an ethical imperative: ‘Let us consider the vulnerability of the human body and soul under these circumstances,’ the artist writes in a statement accompanying the show. ‘It’s all
creation; it’s made. It’s not a given.’ In Struth’s sober images, most devoid of people, this doesn’t add up to much. He seems to suggest that humanity, as represented by the tools and products of the intellect, lies in the divergence between aspiration and its realisation, or perhaps in the persistence of imagination and creativity, despite the mediocrity of its results. Struth is often praised for what appears as a humble resignation to this ineluctable failure, for his sober-eyed embrace of the human condition, but there’s a current of Calvinist faith in predestination in his stance, and it lends the work a nasty bite. Moreover, this installation elides communal and urban spaces with personal workplaces; even Disneyland, for all its commercial mechanisms, began as the expression of one man’s vision. While they might serve as examples of how the individual is translated into the public, these pictures also create equivalences that discount, if not judge, the fulfilment and pleasure the people who use these labs and machines might derive from their work. It’s troubling. Joshua Mack
Ulsan 2, Lotte Hotel, Ulsan, 2010, c-print, 152 × 317 cm, edition of 6. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris
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Christopher Williams The Production Line of Happiness Art Institute of Chicago 24 January – 18 May The colour yellow, of course, is often a warning. The particular version that Christopher Williams has used in the oversize signage that accompanies this cutting retrospective is so extreme (as if the museum has become a hazardous site delineated by billboard-size caution tape) that at first glance it’s impossible not to think that his photographs have no chance of surviving its assault. Somehow they do, even though the exhibition has been pulled apart and placed in three separate locations. Partially this is because Williams’s yellow signs successfully broadcast not only useful factual information about his work and its sources on the exterior walls of the galleries, but also function as actual cutaway moments of wall sections left uninstalled and prone on the floor here and there in the spaces themselves (in one instance, the section of wall is upright but the apparatus used to move it remains attached). Such staging makes it more likely that we come to Williams’s work in an appropriate frame of mind: photography, despite the exponential
increase of its popularity, remains dangerous, but it can also be useful. The 27 black-and-white photographs that comprise the series Angola to Vietnam* (1989) are well positioned at the start of the exhibition in the basement galleries, which are normally devoted to the museum’s permanent collection of photography. By lining up individual and rich images of blown-glass flowers with titles naming countries that in 1986 were reported to persecute their citizens, a key procedure of Williams’s work is provided straightaway: anything can be made to look a certain way and to mean a certain thing, but more importantly, it can just as easily be made that same way to mean the very opposite thing. For example, I was particularly drawn to the way that one of his most important works – the installation Bouquet for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo (1991) – became the lynchpin for the entire exhibition. Installed alone in a small gallery in the Modern Wing, it could easily be (mis-)read as a mere moment of photographic beauty rather than as
an exegesis on types of artistic production (especially if the provisional construction of its temporary wall goes unnoticed). I’ve always appreciated Williams’s willingness to risk situations like this with his work, and it’s especially effective here. Upstairs, in the final galleries of the exhibition (which, tellingly, are usually devoted to exhibitions of architecture and design), Williams has presented work from the past decade or so. After the bunkerlike first galleries, and the singular moment of the Ader/D’Arcangelo piece, these rooms support the ways in which Williams has always, in his very particular way, celebrated the seduction of photography as separate from any ideology (as Herbert Bayer demonstrated in his evolving approach to photomontage, it can easily flip from revolutionary to reactionary), even when the depictions are of the apparatuses of photography themselves, such as, for example, Cutaway Model Nikon EM… (2008; the full title is a paragraph of information). It is a killer image. Terry R. Myers
Bouquet for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D’Arcangelo, 1991, colour photographic print, on paper on wall. © the artist. Courtesy of the artist; David Zwirner, New York & London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
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Liz Glynn On the Possibility of Salvage Paula Cooper Gallery, New York 11 January – 1 March Liz Glynn has developed a recognisable style at a very early point in her career. Her sculptures are composed of simple materials – which are gradually getting cheaper and more basic, shifting as they have from bronze and cement to papier-mâché and cardboard – and derive their subject matters from the history of art, trade and politics. The series Gaza/Giza (2012), for example, retraces the illegal trafficking of items such as food and wedding dresses from Egypt to the Gaza Strip via a system of underground tunnels, presenting copies of these objects in cast lead (a pun on the name of an Israeli operation in Gaza in 2009). In California Surrogates for the Getty (2009), Glynn displayed the kind of generic decorative clay vases prevalent in California bungalow backyards, but in her case they were made of plaster and placed on industrial shelves as suggested replacements for artworks that the Getty returned to the Italian state in 2007. With a similar interest in the trajectory of things, Glynn, in her first New York solo show,
On the Possibility of Salvage, presents the aftermath of an imaginary shipwreck, down to the broken wooden body of the ship itself. Accompanying it are a number of items a viewer would identify as possible inventory from a ship’s cargo hold, including wooden pallets displaying a number of blue-and-white painted plates (here made of papier-mâché) that look somewhat like porcelain; a giant anchor, whose title alludes to its back story: Anchor from the King Solomon with Chain Cut by Pirates (Looted, Capt. Roberts), (2013); and a set of disintegrated busts (also papiermâché) based on real sculptures that were looted from ships or recovered at sea. The history of art is full of shipwrecks. The famous Artemision Bronze and Jockey were found in the 1920s off Cape Artemision in northern Greece. The Riace Bronzes were found in the 1970s off Riace, near the tip of the Italian boot. All originally disappeared when Greek ships carrying art to the ends of the Greek Empire were lost at sea. That these pieces were recovered from the deep added to their cachet:
otherwise unknown and undocumented sculptures became some of the most famous in the history of art. The value of things is based as much on the narrative that stands behind them as on what they actually are. Such stories form the backbone of Glynn’s practice, a large part of which turns a critical eye to the art market itself: this is evident in the Getty piece (there are others dedicated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Neues Museum in Berlin, too), where the restitution of works of cultural heritage signals reparations for the market’s earlier transgressions. Like Hans-Peter Feldmann’s 2010 installation at the Guggenheim, where he used his Hugo Boss Prize winnings to coat the room with 100,000 one-dollar bills, when Glynn draws our attention to the way objects interact with the world, she includes a statement about the market in which she works. These cheap, not necessarily attractive papier-mâché objects become precious through circulation, and Glynn makes no attempt to sugarcoat that. Orit Gat
Sixteenth Century Pewter Tableware (Wrecked and Recovered, Dominican Republic) (detail),2013, 22 pieces of papier mâché with acrylic, in birch box with oiled casein paint, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
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Objects & Thin Air Foxy Production, New York 10 January – 15 Feburary It’s no joke that Foxy Production titles its winsome three-person exhibition Objects & Thin Air: there are blissfully few objects and a lot of air. So much so that the gallery feels like an oxygen bar, or that it might double as a yoga studio in the evenings. The breathing room is much appreciated, and accords the work the kind of rapt attention it deserves; there’s a lot of fine-detailed art here, which makes the show a handsome one. You could start with the tiny, positively Lilliputian dinner tables occupying a far corner, which comprise Sam Anderson’s installation Table 2 (2014). Arranged in rows around a central sculptural motif that looks like wood building blocks stacked together, the tables’ matchsticklike legs support tops draped with faint blue napkins. Atop these, in some instances, are miniature table settings, often with a peanut or a tooth placed on fingerling plates. In other instances
there are nail clippings, or a stem of a cherry. Because these tables are only a few inches high, you feel like a clumsy giant standing next to them, as if exhaling too hard might scatter them. The whole setup – like something you might find in a Joseph Cornell box – is so dainty that it’s simultaneously embarrassing and charming. Less precious but just as refined are Stephen Lichty’s sculptural works, Cane and Ring (both 2013), each made of polished, golden bronze. They look like the readymades of their titles, but they have been forged by the artist with hammer and anvil. Cane rests a few feet off the ground in a wall recess, and Ring is suspended by string at eye-level. No sloppily-executed loose end is in sight: the string disappears into the floor and ceiling, a testament to how carefully and finely wrought is Lichty’s installation. It makes all the difference in making these seemingly ordinary objects strikingly auratic.
For the real readymade action, though, look no further than Michael Wang’s shelf of alternating Old Spice and Axe deodorant sticks. They march along a wall symbolising the amount of stock in Procter & Gamble, which sells Old Spice, and Unilever, which sells Axe deodorant, that Wang would receive in lieu of cash if he were to sell the work, which is titled PGUN (2014) after the two stocks’ ticker symbols (he would own one millionth of one percent of both, in effect foregrounding their codependent rivalry). Hopefully the lucky collector’s a deodorant hoarder, as he or she will receive the shelf, as well as a signed certificate stating the amount of stock Wang purchased in both companies, imprinted with the companies’ logos and the work’s title. It’s an appropriate new way to value an artwork, and perhaps a fitting reflection of Objects & Thin Air itself. David Everitt Howe
Michael Wang, PGUN (detail), 2014, exchange of common stock, certificate, powder-coated aluminium, stick deoderants. 15 × 538 × 7 cm (sculpture); 36 × 27 cm (certificate). Photo: Mark Woods. Courtesy the artist and Foxy Production, New York
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Michael Fullerton Meaning, Inc Greene Naftali, New York 9 January – 8 February Michael Fullerton’s first exhibition at Greene Naftali, in 2006, was titled Get over Yourself, an admonishment no doubt directed at artist and audience alike. It’s a phrase most often levelled when our interpretative or creative flights of fancy become overbearing; and if delivered just right, ‘Get over yourself’ can shine like a klieg light on even the best shitinto-Shinola thinking, revealing it for the turd-work it really is. Such quick reversals are key to Meaning, Inc as well, primarily because almost all of the work in the show – predominantly very well executed portrait paintings, some in greater states of finish than others – comes across as a kind of setup. The portraits, each of different kinds of media types and icons (the victims and villains of our age of image power), are accompanied by lengthy wall texts that explain just who each figure is. Everything is laid bare, clear, including the feeling that someone is tugging at the rug beneath our feet. There is the portrait, for example, of Samuel Goldwyn, The Producer (all work 2013), one of the founders of MGM. The wall text tells us how
Goldwyn was born Gelbfisz in Poland and details his many successes as a Hollywood producer as well as how his name will forever be associated with MGM’s roaring-lion production logo. That logo isn’t pictured here, but a large screenprint diptych of a spotlit lion in profile appears in Trade-Mark, and a silkscreened closeup of another lion’s face constitutes the extent of This Is Not Symbolic, This Is Real (Lion from Majete Wildlife Reserve). But of course this picture is symbolic, not least in its nonsymbolism when presented in the context of MGM, and Trade-Mark gets its double valence not only from the fact that it pictures the same lion twice but also from the right-hand print of the diptych, which emphasizes the streaks and registration effects that are signatures of the silkscreen process – ‘trade marks’, get it? There are other ‘ciphers’ at work, as in Ciphers I & II (Jean Harlow, MGM circa 1936), which picture the iconic ‘blonde bombshell’ Jean Harlow, who died in 1937, as the wall text tells us, in the middle of filming Saratoga. Doubles were used to finish the film. The two most presumably indecipherable works in the show,
Two Stars, Two Magnitudes (Polaris Due North. The traversal of Regulus, Due East Between 2001 hrs and 0302 hrs), which consists of two green lasers, one describing a line on the wall, the other a point, and Working Maquette for a Sculpture Entitled ‘Formalism – Sucking Corporate Cock Since 1968’, a cube of red, blue and white police strobe lights, are pretty well explained by their titles. For something to have meaning it requires two things: difference, a gap or interval between the thing itself and its representation (be it in paint, print, or memory); and intent, a will that animates that interval, that stands behind the gap. As all of the doubling in Meaning, Inc would indicate, Fullerton is fascinated by meaning’s interval, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but his work risks a paradox of the ‘Thisstatement-is-false’ variety: if we take the work at face value, then we’re likely missing it’s meaning; and if we look past the work for that meaning, then we’re likely missing the work. Perhaps such irresolvable scepticism is what we’re meant to associate with the ‘Inc’ of the show’s title. But then again, perhaps we’re just meant to get over ourselves. Jonathan T.D. Neil
Starlet – The One Who Got the Job if You Know What I Mean (Actress, MGM, Circa 1935), 2013, oil on linen, 61 × 46 cm. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York
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Joel Kyack Old Sailors Never Die François Ghebaly, Los Angeles 18 January – 8 March Joel Kyack is an artist not naturally given to subtlety. His last, maniacally overhung exhibition at François Ghebaly Gallery, in 2011, was titled Escape to Shit Mountain, and it included a large banner painted with the words ‘Kill all endings’. Old Sailors Never Die, his latest outing and only the second exhibition to take on Ghebaly’s new and enormous gallery space, reveals some remarkable and uncharacteristic moments of restraint. For those partial to Kyack’s trademark blend of brash, cartoon aesthetics and salt-ofthe-earth allegory, however, there is still plenty to behold. Megalodon (all works 2014) is a ten-foot-high set of shark jaws, cut from wooden planks and bristling with teeth fashioned from kitchen knife blades. Kyack might not welcome a comparison with Damien Hirst (who would?), but with Megalodon he seems, like Hirst, to prioritise impact over complexity. A shark represents, for most of us, a rather hyperbolic signifier of death; more than being
eaten, what keeps me awake in the small hours is a dread of floating into oblivion, helpless and alone. Which, as it happens, is the allegorical fate that Kyack describes in the exhibition’s central and eponymous work. In the installation Old Sailors Never Die, a video plays inside a rudimentary shack. A man is seemingly adrift on a flat-topped boat with no evident means of propulsion. Planted in the deck beside him is a small palm tree, under which he shades himself from the sun. Then, without explanation, he lashes the tree to a rock and pushes it off the side of the boat into the green abyss. Alright, so the tree is not very big, and there is little sense in the short video of any real peril, or even that the man is alone (the camera crew were surely following his every movement). However, with this simple surrealist gesture, Kyack structures the show around a mystery, a failure of sense, rather than cheap sideshow wisdom. A highpoint of the exhibition is the press release, which consists of ten multiple-choice
questions. Number five, ‘What do you feel in destroying something that provides you comfort and companionship? (a) freedom (b) remorse (c) indifference’, gets close to the heart of the conundrum that is Old Sailors Never Die. Stepping out of the shack, you see that the roof is formed from the boat in the video, and a giant pair of cutoff denim shorts turns its twin prows into legs. The prone sailor and the grounded ship are one and the same. Kyack is at his most restrained with Water Level, a clear hose containing dyed blue water and pinned to the wall at each end. The device is a makeshift spirit level, and a demonstration of empirical fact. It contrasts with a nearby tableau contriving a ship’s table with a seesawing horizon out the window and a motorised swinging lamp. NIGHT – INT. SHIP – DINING TABLE, though an elaborate construction, is a simple fiction. It offers, like the best parts of this show, a space for viewers to fill with their own answers. Jonathan Griffin
Old Sailors Never Die (video still), 2014, HD video, 5 min 19 sec. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
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Liz Larner Regen Projects, Los Angeles 11 January – 15 February Ceramics in Los Angeles can be quite exciting. Peter Voulkos, who exploded clay into cosmic networks of gnarly twists, lives on like a spectre. John Mason brings the biblical story of God making man out of clay into a world still thinking through Constructivism and Brancusi, where structure is manmade and transparent. Sterling Ruby sees the breakdown of clay in the kiln as a window into the fractured self defined by trauma. And the young Bari Ziperstein finds surrealist tendencies springing from any teacup or porcelain lamp. Perhaps Liz Larner’s approach is the most primal of all, finding in clay the tectonic motions and events of the earth itself through a ceramics subject to geological rips and tears and folds. Larner is maybe the least conceptual of all LA’s contemporary sculptors. She is at home in the twisting of space and form into new and eccentric volumes and, subsequently, their emptying out. Ideas, social content and the like, seem always to play second fiddle to her belief
that a viewer should be allowed simply to be fascinated with a form and should be able to come to such a form without any concept that might offer an explanation of what is being seen. For her erratic works, Larner has looked to science, to the strange geometries created both by the more obscure forces of the earth and at the frontiers of mathematics. Larner’s new work lines Regen Projects’s largest galleries with lozenge-shaped plates hung high as though an X-ray to be examined. Each plate is heavily glazed in blues and greens and browns that appear translucent with a resin-like glow. This is fired clay, however, and one knows it: the plates are heavy and substantial, like stone. Larner’s shaping of them is inspired by several geological principles – caesura, subduction, inflexion, mantle, and passage – based on which Larner breaks or twists or shines the surface for effect. For example, in vIII (Caesura) (2014), Larner slices the plate in the same way that lightning
might slice a tree or an earthquake might split a fault. It’s Barnett Newman’s zip taken out of painting and returned to the world as a primal event. Also in the gallery are larger sculptures, for example the mirror-polished, cast stainless-steel X (2013), and two twisting shapes – v (Planchette) and vI (Planchette) (both 2014) – made of paper, aluminium and egg tempera. There is not a bad sculpture in the show. Every piece entices the viewer in one of two ways: the plates move one’s eye as fine relief carvings would; the 3D forms move one’s body around out of a need to understand their kooky geometry. Put together, though, one cannot help wondering if the plates should have stood alone, as this would have rendered their effects less diluted and more powerful. Larner is reaching into the earth here, connecting the sculptor as creator to the earth’s oldest stories. For such old revelries, polished stainless steel and computer modelling just get in the way. Ed Schad
vIII (Caesura), 2014, ceramic, epoxy, and pigment, 46 × 94 × 29 cm. Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
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Alex Prager Face in the Crowd Lehmann Maupin, New York 9 January – 22 February Perhaps it’s the fault of my Catholic upbringing (or the fact that I watch too much television) that led me to believe Alex Prager’s three-channel video installation, Face in the Crowd (2013), was about dying and going to purgatory. Opening with single shots of 11 people who tell anecdotes about their lives as if they are being interviewed for a documentary, the work closes with all three screens flooded by chaotic, teeming crowds wandering aimlessly on the street, like a zombie apocalypse, only everyone is in full possession of their extremities. The star of the film, the striking blonde actress Elizabeth Banks, looks at them all from behind glass. Tears well up in her eyes. In the next frame, the window is empty, and Banks is out on the street too. According to the press release, the work is about things like ‘the decline of interpersonal contact in our media saturated society’ and the idea that in a ‘swirling sea of strangers, there are countless individual stories’. I’ll keep the purgatory reading.
The video is anything but sleepy, however. In fact, its beauty is jolting. Shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles, the city where Prager was born and still works, the settings include a movie theatre, an airport, a lobby, a beach and the aforementioned street. These artificial spaces are filled by Prager’s friends, family and 150 extras dressed in brightly coloured clothing that recalls a variety of different time periods. Utilising the Technicolor aesthetic that has become a signature of Prager’s work (it also comes off as a derivative of Cindy Sherman), the characters, for their costumes alone, are arresting to look at (need one mention that, in the beach scenes, there are large-breasted women in string bikinis?). The time and place of the work is meant to be impossible to surmise, but a close second to purgatory would be Coney Island during the 1970s. The installation is accompanied by 16 large photographs that have been divided between the gallery’s two locations. Why the split is a
mystery. It wouldn’t be too ridiculous to think that someone decided that the money put into the project warranted more than showing just a dinky 12-minute video. The photographs are rich compositions nevertheless. In each there is a single character who looks directly at the camera. You search for them as you do with a Where’s Waldo? book. Face in the Crowd might have maudlin origins, but the works themselves do have visual depth, which makes one want to linger – I watched the video three times, surely a personal endurance record. It reminded me of the way I feel in my dreams: disoriented but curious, free from the exigencies of my body. The problem I have with the video’s intended critique, however, is that contemporary life isn’t a calm Technicolor purgatory. No one in Prager’s video is frantically checking their iPhone for directions with someone behind them yelling, “Keep moving!” Brienne Walsh
Crowd #3 (Pelican Beach), 2013, archival pigment print, 151 × 234 cm (framed: 154 × 238 × 6 cm), edition 1 of 6. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong
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Sue Williams WTC, WWIII, Couch Size 303 Gallery, New York 16 January – 22 February The spectre of terrorism never looked so bright. A cotton-candy-hued meditation upon a war-obsessed, post-9/11 society, Sue Williams’s latest exhibition invokes architectural forms that have become symbolic of a zeitgeist characterised by threats of bodily assault and indignity. Deploying a colour palette that could have been borrowed from a pack of SweeTarts, the six large paintings included in the exhibition mordantly sugarcoat an otherwise bitter reality. If there is a leitmotif to the show, it is an incorporation and iteration of the form of the Twin Towers, which locates in their silhouette a readily accessible cultural archetype of terror and destruction. In Ministry of Hate (all works 2013), nebulous clouds in shades of robin’s egg blue and sea-foam green are bisected by sinuous lines that render contorted and elongated rectangular forms. Nestled deep amidst the chaotic flurry, in small green text, the words
‘ministry of hate’ faintly appear. Memory, it would seem for Williams, colours perception, and from out of the hectic frenzy of serpentine lines, distorted architectural forms and flossy bursts of colour, one has the sense that the artist is depicting the synaptic firing of fear itself. Indeed, the paintings come off as partly abstract, occasionally figurative, ‘mind maps’. In some cases, as with Philip Zelikow, Historian, one has the sense that Williams depicts the machinations of those individuals directly responsible for shaping the War on Terror. The eponymous Zelikow was, among other things, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, as well as the principal author behind George W. Bush’s 2002 national security strategy for preemptive war. Repetitions of twisted rectangular towers emerge from out of dynamic cloudbursts of confectioner’s pink and Day-Glo orange, while in the left corner of the canvas, Williams crudely
paints fattened bombs and crude pentagons, the latter silhouette an allusion to another institution targeted on 9/11. The depiction of amorphous, often gratuitous anatomical forms (puckered sphincters, bulbous mounds), for which Williams has become so well known, are here far less present, though not absent. Amidst the smoking towers and general chaos of Hill and Dale, Black-Ops, and the gridlike pattern found in The Serpent, one can clearly make out the rendering of rounded, gaping orifices and fleshy, wrinkled crevices. If, in her earlier works, Williams evinced certain cultural attitudes towards specific sex organs through their figural manipulation, the scant appearance of them now indicates a further subjugation of the bodily to the ideological. Terror may ultimately manifest itself in very physical forms, but its origins lie within the realms of the psychic. Joseph Akel
The Serpent, 2013, oil and acrylic on canvas, 137 × 163 cm. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
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Stan Douglas Luanda-Kinshasa David Zwirner, New York 9 January – 22 February I only recently discovered electric Miles Davis. His jazz-funk albums from the early 1970s, including Bitches Brew (1970), were largely recorded in the same 30th Street Columbia studio in New York, which Stan Douglas meticulously recreated for Luanda-Kinshasa (2013). This six-hour-and-one-minute film-loop installation is staged as an epic documentary of a marathon recording session from sometime during the 1970s (with fashion and hair styling as dating cues). Luanda and Kinshasa are the titles of two stunning long-form jazz-funk compositions, named for the then recently independent capital cities of Angola and Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) and played in several different improvisatory configurations. Douglas’s oblique reference to postindependence Africa, the mid-1960s ‘Africanised’ renaming of the former Portuguese and Belgian colonial cities, is also seen in some of Davis’s track listings. ‘Ife’ on Big Fun (1974), for example, and the psychedelic Black Power imagery of his cover art from 1968 onwards, declare a political utopianism that LuandaKinshasa animates anew. Likewise, the diversity
of Douglas’s ensemble suggests renewed hope for a post-1968 political internationalism (including a slight nod to feminism in the female rock drummer) in the face of the brutal failures of the Mobutu regime and the reign of iniquitous global capital more generally. But there is no Miles or equivalent superstar frontman in Luanda-Kinshasa. As a result, the relationship between image and soundtrack provides an absorbing experience of musical collectivity. Sweeping slowly through the space, the camera rests on individual musicians for a few moments before moving on. This visual attention pushes us to discern singular elements within, and together with, the compositional whole, instead of favouring the solo, the performer apart from the group. In this the camera directs us to listen more astutely. It is didactic in the best sense, showing us how to hear. Each musician is isolated spatially (and therefore visually), one apart from another in semi-screened-off booths. But each is connected aurally, since the whole mix must pass through each of their headphones. Fully absorbed in their playing, with affective
responses suggesting delight and even bliss, we see occasional moments of visible interaction, brief glimpses of the group’s auditory bond. For example, the bass guitarist in one segment vigorously stamps out the rhythm of the rock drummer’s bass while he picks out his own in counterpoint. We see her behind him, apparently lost in performance; he does not see her, but hears and feels here nonetheless. Luanda-Kinshasa is spellbinding for the viewer. Music, that most abstract of the arts, is also, as Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno have famously argued, the most resistant to the means-end logic of bourgeois rationality. It provides an ‘archaic’ connection to preindividualistic collectivities in its absorptive experience of spatial inclusiveness. (Although this also tempts the ideological dangers of group psychology.) Luanda-Kinshasa is perhaps Douglas’s strongest nod towards Frankfurt School political aesthetics. While Douglas’s audial world of complex collectivity demands reflection on its political correlates, it is as open-ended and speculative as the imagined utopia of electric Miles. Siona Wilson
Luanda-Kinshasa (film stills), 2014. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
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Adrián Villar Rojas Los Teatros de Saturno Kurimanzutto, Mexico City 5 February – 26 April When you enter Adrián Villar Rojas’s Los Teatros de Saturno (2014), you enter a mode of being in the world akin to what Walter Benjamin called ‘the adorable detail’, and, I might add, the generous detail. In Villar Rojas’s works there is an overabundance that is lavishly baroque and at the same time as simple as dirt: everything starts with clay and mutates forth from there. One might even borrow the term neobarroso, coined by Argentinean poet Néstor Perlongher (with the intentional pun between barroco and barro – mud, clay), to crystallise the experience of this exhibition. And it is an experience, more than a mere show. For those who saw Villar Rojas’s exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery, his universe of plenty might be familiar, and yet this time, one could say that the works have taken root, germinated, luxuriated, propagated, branched out, pullulated and invaded a whole new host – and transformed it, as all good parasites do. Villar Rojas’s ever-changing work is not focused on a single piece or group of pieces; rather, it is a whole process that is porous to the context and involves a highly adaptable team of people, a nomadic ‘studio’ that takes momentary root at any given place.
Even more than a ‘studio’, his group of carpenters, welders, farmers and jewellery makers is both a lab and a theatre troupe: confecting and concocting the pieces that seem to sprout from the gallery floor and also playing their parts as workers, collaborators, accomplices. Saturn, the planet, has many rings and many satellites, and so these players orbit around their director. Behind the scenes, then, we have a working lab. And onstage, the entire gallery floor is taken over by a fertile soil that has given way to a maze of mutant maize, a bejewelled watermelon walkabout, a snaking path of sneakers grafted onto eggplants. As you walk along this gallery-cropped-up-asfield, you notice dead betta fish are organised next to a clay and coloured plaster-filled squash, the sprouted potatoes (already present in his previous show) have now been grafted onto other vegetables and crowned with the melted plastic of a fluorescent running shoe, a silver claw hangs onto a shell next to a sneaker filled with crystals and bound by metal triangles, bones grow out of bread and fruit incubates eggs. Saturn, the god of agriculture, has blessed this space with fertile objects – small, discreet, mundane even – which acquire a small but potent weight, often enhanced, framed or mounted by surprising
excrescences of various kinds. Mutatis mutandis, it would seem that in this context Villar Rojas’s work reads less romantically than before and suddenly closer to the textures and feeling of a piece by Gabriel Orozco or Abraham Cruzvillegas: earthy, alive, simple yet filled with gravitas. It even echoes Colombian-Armenian performance artist María Teresa Hincapié’s clothing maze Una Cosa Es una Cosa (1990), forcing the visitor to walk carefully and in a way directed by the artist – do we become actors in his play as well? The work is to be experienced: to be felt through time as it disintegrates back into pure organic matter. It is less a monumental ‘piece’ simply to be admired and consumed. Villar Rojas’s work here is as much the intricate process behind the work: you can only imagine the working tables filled with vegetables, fruits and sprouts of various kinds alongside a welding atelier, a ton (literally) of watermelon in the studio, the many weeks of grafting, sprouting, growing, casting, moulding collectively, the everyday interlocked and perfectly rehearsed action to create something together, to cultivate – these too are the theatres of Saturn. Gabriela Jauregui
Los Teatros de Saturno (detail), 2014. Photo: Michel Zabé. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
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Merlin James Freestyle Kunstverein Freiburg 17 January – 9 March Merlin James’s motifs emerge as though unbidden out of a painterly process too shy or too proud to elicit them. Content is not a glimpse, as in de Kooning’s famous phrase, it is a clear-cut image, but one that the painter registers as though by default, with his eye on other things: on painting as material accretion (as distinct from the temporal singularity of the still image); as an open-ended process, not intent on closure. These motifs have the explicitness of signs for content – the three dimensions of a house, the stacked landscape zones of field/treeline/sky – as though the Welsh painter were demonstrating how susceptible we are to illusionism. But irony is counterbalanced by sentiment, or apparently so, as yearning often proves to be a received image of itself; received, that is, from the reservoir of art-historical precedent James taps into. The ambivalent nature of their self-revealing makes James’s paintings subversive within the jamboree culture of contemporary art, in which what an artist is ‘about’ should be as manifest as possible in order to distinguish him. James’s work reveals itself when seen, as here, en masse, cross-sectioning three decades of work. Chronology is an issue only insofar as it is shown to be immaterial. The 65 paintings in Freiburg
were made between 1982 and the present; although technical foibles date them, there is no obvious sense of development. Time, so deeply invested in each work, is defeated by the paintings’ conjunction. A motif often appears as an afterthought, floated over a ground exposing myriad minor decisions and indecisions, which seem to have little to do with the superimposed image except that the latter is the catalyst to reconcile them into a final order. The narrative of construction emphasises itself despite the motif it grounds. In Squaw (1994–2007), for example, a geometric abstraction has been restretched over a larger support, the unpainted edges becoming part of the pictorial plane. This, in turn, becomes the ground for a sketch of a female head with headdress, hence the title. A structuralistic testimony to the previous life and function of the work’s elements doubles as an element in its composition. Those decade-spanning dates highlight a straddling of heterogeneous registers of thought and process, and of diverse identities: an artist may become a different person over 13 years. But in this exhibition, the consistency of content is emphasised by the inclusion of two vitrines containing a series of tiny architectural models made of timber
offcuts: three-dimensional improvisations of the serendipity by which material becomes motif. They confirm the relative primacy of subject matter in James’s work. Although they are three-dimensional, they precisely embody the remote, ephemeral, visionary world rendered illusionistically by the paintings. The wistfulness of a painting such as Pier and Cliff (2003) contains a good dose of irony that doesn’t disqualify the painting’s sentiment, but holds it at a realistic distance from the viewer; the same distance exacted by the contingency of the figuration of Buildings (2008), in which only the blocking-in of the flat, black background adumbrates three house forms as more than a formalistic constellation of coloured forms. The apparent serendipity with which such an image is clinched registers as the image’s unattainability. James disabuses us of our illusions, even as he confirms how much we want and need them; and this disillusioning is intrinsic, on the level of facture. Two small early paintings, Tree and Tree and Wall (both 1983) seem to have been painted in Tipp-Ex onto bits of blackboard. The white’s resistance to adhering to its matt ground is a metaphor for the eerie obliqueness of what it represents: a world so barren and monochromatic it could only exist in a picture. Mark Prince
Toy Train, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 31 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mummery + Schnelle, London
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Stefan Panhans Too Much Change Is Not Enough Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 19 January – 23 March On video, a young woman wearing a white shirt and red sports pants sits on a cross trainer: dripping with sweat, she makes herself fit for our neoliberal meritocracy. Here, self-optimisation is career-enhancing and, in addition, gives the subject the physical and psychological stability that has long been lost in the context of the digital age and its immaterial data streams. Yet this foothold seems to be endangered, because the runner continues to crouch as if she were dodging bullets. Glow (2006), shown in the first room of Stefan Panhans’s powerful solo exhibition in Haus am Waldsee, is typical of his aesthetic; like all videos by the Rhineland-born artist, it gets by without cuts, panning shots or zooms. In addition, as usual, it consequently forgoes a developing plot: the young woman on the machine runs and runs and runs, albeit without even moving forward an inch; the kind of action philosopher Paul Virilio calls ‘racing standstill’. The artist uses this movement-instagnation in order to contrast the speed of postmodern image production with seemingly meditative ‘time-images’ (to use Gilles
Deleuze’s formulation). You can hear a mix of soft techno music, the metallic sound of the cross trainer and the protagonist’s breathing; however – and unlike the other videos in the exhibition – language is not used. Language, where it is used, plays a dual role in Panhans’s videos. On the one hand, he cites text fragments from the world of popular media and the Internet. On the other hand, these fragments are assembled into a new text, suggesting the aggression that underlies collage; an aggression that Panhans’s images do not possess. This is easy to see, for example, in the video Sieben bis zehn Millionen (Seven to Ten Million, 2005), which shows the face of a young man. It’s snowing in the background, while the man, wearing a fur hat, looks stoically into the camera and delivers a monologue about his problems with daily shopping. For him, excessive consumption becomes an almost religious activity. He describes the moment after a successful purchase with the words: “Suddenly everything just falls off of you, oahh! An amazing feeling.” While the image conveys a relaxed
attitude, the speech on the soundtrack successfully involves us in a contradictory scenario, one that tells of the commodification of subjectivity. Hollow Snow White (2014), the newest video here, further emphasises the precarity of the postmodern identity. A black racing-motorbike stands to the right in a white room, while to the left are pink bubblewrap, green bamboo and blue candyfloss. A woman enters the scene, dressed in black-and-white camouflage and green pantyhose. She examines the candyfloss, listlessly lingers in the room, puts on a helmet and then disappears. Off-camera, we hear a text collage made from the biography of an American actress, the traumatic report of a burned-down shopping mall and sentences from videogames as well as from eBay auction texts. In this work, the subject – who tries to save herself with a warlike attitude but nevertheless at the same time acts almost passively – dissolves into an absurd image, commented on by a potpourri of reified language taken from the epicentres of commerce. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Emily Terényi
Homestory (Il Cielo in Una Stanza) (video still), 2012, video with sound, 3 min 10 sec. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Feldbuschwiesner, Berlin, and Galerie Dorothea Schlueter, Hamburg
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Matt Mullican Stone Video Rubbing Wire Massimo De Carlo, Milan 28 November – 18 January If the Voyager Golden Record (launched beyond the Solar System by NASA on the Voyager 1 and 2 probes in 1977) could have included a contemporary artwork in its collection of images of life on Earth, I think Matt Mullican would have deserved that podium. Mullican’s unrelenting efforts at creating a coherent cosmology, based on a codified system of signs that explains how we perceive the world, now span four decades, during which they have reached intricate levels of complexity and abstraction. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Aztec stone carvings, his works seem unearthed by an archaeologist, although one with a contemporary mind. They tell our individual and collective histories as memory does, by synapse development, so that instead of chronology, synchronicity prevails: the same pictographs recur, unchanged, across years and all sorts of media, from notebooks drawings to massive fabric banners. Despite its obsessiveness, this compartmentalising drive is the ‘external’, more controlled side of Mullican’s output, while its ‘internal’, unconscious side is represented by ‘that person’, the artist’s official alter ego, who emerges and operates under hypnosis, by producing performances, free-flowing drawings and streams of handwriting. The graphic aspect is always present, in both incarnations: the inspiration for Mullican’s first symbols came
from studying cartoons, commercial logos and street signage when he was still a student of John Baldessari at CalArts. With its basilicalike volumes, Massimo De Carlo’s exhibition space (the gallery’s largest room, on the ground floor) is perfect for lending an almost sacral aura to Mullican’s exhibition. Possibly by chance, but quite in tune with his meta-messianic aspirations, in 2013 Mullican exhibited in two former churches, the Böhm Chapel in Cologne (now part of Jablonka Galerie) and the Church of St Francis in Como, Italy, where the retrospective exhibition The Meaning of Things was presented during the summer, on the occasion of Mullican’s presence in town as visiting professor at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti. The exhibition in Milan combines two works, both originally created in 1987 and here presented in a new ad hoc version. On a wall, presented as a single mosaic – though ‘polyptych’ would probably be a better definition, in this case – is Untitled (1987/2013), a series of eight black oil stick rubbings on canvas. They all have different sizes, but as they are all multiples of a standard module of 122 cm/48 inches, the visual impact is that of an orderly gridlike pattern. As a mirror image, on the floor rests Untitled (1987/2013), a sequence of 40 carved black granite slabs, almost 10 metres long and over 6 metres wide.
The two compositions include the same combination of symbols, although arranged in a different order, so that the gaze keeps bouncing back and forth from vertical to horizontal, positive to negative, black to white. The correspondence is only visual, as the rubbings are slightly larger than the carvings, so that both works come forth as copies of an ‘original’ to be found elsewhere. Mullican provides a key for interpretation – a map printed on paper – in order to assist viewers in navigating the different ‘chapters’ on show: Cosmology, Angels Before Birth, History, Signs, World Framed (Arts), Buildings, House and Yard, City as a Map, Anatomy as a Map, Generator, Evolution, Materials, Steam Engine Boiler, Elements. A personal favourite are two panels belonging to the History section, titled Stonehenge, where Mullican juxtaposes representations of pyramids, pharaohs, dolmens, temples and stupas with those of vehicles, televisions, planes, phones, cameras, laptops, the outline of the first astronaut on the Moon – the evidence of our faith in the saving graces of technology and of our daily intercourses with it. In a world where app design, social media and visual data turn everything into an ‘icon’, Mullican’s invitation to reflect upon what we see and how we think, because of it, feels more than timely. Barbara Casavecchia
Untitled (Cosmology 8 Parts), 1987/2013 , oil stick on canvas, 244 × 122 cm. Photo: Alessandro Zambianchi. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan & London
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Sarkis Au Commencement le Blanc Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris 9 January – 1 March Au Commencement le Blanc In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth – and Sarkis said, let there be white. And there was white all over the already-white cube, the achromatic colour being the single leitmotif (or should that be light-motif?) in his third exhibition at Nathalie Obadia. Indeed, whiteness immerses the viewer here in an alabaster mist, and is diversified across a surprisingly large corpus for a show confined to a single room: over 80 artworks, more than the Paris-based Turkish artist has blown out candles. Most of them are recent series of oils on paper, 50 of these arranged in a metal cabinet at the visitor’s disposal, the others scattered on the walls of the gallery. The remaining works comprise four neon wall-sculptures, a silent film and ten mixed-media works (framed glass works, watercolour on photographs and assemblages). Talk about a chaos that requires some serious enlightenment. Working with pure materials, Sarkis’s conceptual and minimalist aesthetic is in fact essentially, and multiculturally, referential. The history of humanity is, for him, not just a source of inspiration but sometimes the actual springboard for his own practice. With After Ice Age (2013), the collection of 50 oil-on-papers displayed in wire-mesh racks, Sarkis goes back to
the origins of art. At the centre of each sheet, within a thick mass of titanium white paint, is modelled a female, male or animal effigy, all of them made after specific and captioned prehistoric bone statuettes from 40,000 to 10,000 BC, presented in the British Museum’s 2013 exhibition Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind. While the whiteness of the paper makes completely apparent the natural expansion of the paint medium – linseed oil, it appears – outside of the figures delimited by the brush, the resultant stains around each prehistoric Western idol resemble here haloes, aureoles. Speaking of Christian dialectics, La Colonne Vertébrale du Retable d’Isenheim de Grünewald (2012), one of the neon wall-sculptures, reproduces in fluorescent tubes the silhouette of the famous altarpiece. Another light-based piece, D’après Sátántangó de Belà Tarr (2013), uses a single tube to divide in half an enlarged photograph of a child from the Hungarian director’s 1994 film, whose title literally means ‘Satan’s Tango’: white being also symbolic of innocence, here threatened. And while the eight glass works of Vitrail Touché à Blanc (2013) bear multiple white fingermarks from Sarkis and his master glassmakers (Helder da Silva and Anne Ellus from Lux Maxima), the series Image Touchée (2013) further encourages
viewers’ haptic capacities, inviting us to lift up silk curtains – like a defloration, if you will – covering four abstract photographs, only to discover in the middle of each the single white fingerprint of the artist, using watercolour. Is this defiling really a sin, though? Beyond the evident references to Christianity or the Demiurge, the overall theme of the show reminds me here of albedo, the second ‘white’ stage of the magnum opus – the alchemical work of creating the philosopher’s stone, fabled elixir of golden metamorphosis and life – during which the chaos or ‘black’ matter of the previous phase, nigredo, is cleansed and purified. For Sarkis is, after all, some kind of an alchemist. Suitably enough, while experimenting with a fifteenth-century Japanese technique of fixing broken ceramics with gold powder and resin in D’après Urushi (2012) and Kintsugi Libre (2013), the artist happens to have delicately put back together torn white paper sheets for the one and a ripped-up photograph for the other. Golden repair? Aren’t transmutation and rejuvenation the exact purposes of the philosopher’s stone? There are further stages to the alchemical magnum opus, but here a transformative process feels completed, and a ‘Great Work’ indeed it is. Violaine Boutet de Monvel
Scène en Cuivre avec Néons et Deux Tubes en Cuivre, 2012, neon, copper, transformers, 300 × 300 × 150 cm. Courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris & Brussels
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Walter Swennen So Far So Good Wiels, Brussels 5 October – 26 January Belgium has a strong tradition in painting, ongoing to the present day. Think of Luc Tuymans or Michaël Borremans, household names in the contemporary art world. But there are plenty of other great painters out there, like Walter Swennen, a painter’s painter who has not really received the international acclaim he deserves. In 2013, however, at the age of sixtyseven, Swennen had an exhibition at Culturgest in Lisbon: his largest solo show abroad to date, featuring 73 paintings. Wiels, in his hometown of Brussels, has now almost doubled the size of this, presenting a 130-work show. Swennen was a late bloomer who only started painting at the age of thirty-five. Prior to this, he wrote poetry. The earliest painting in the exhibition, Sans Titre (Mots Effacés) (1982), consists of words that have been blotted out and become signs: a gesture almost as symbolic as that of his late friend Marcel Broodthaers, who embedded his unsold poetry volumes in plaster and hence emblematically made his transition from poetry to visual arts. Whereas Swennen’s early works still share wild gestures and brushstrokes of the neo-Expressionism with which they were contemporary, they already display the relativistic approach that is so characteristic of his practice as a whole. Take La Commande (De Opdracht) (1982). The work depicts a rapidly painted phone, mice, cars and a rubbish bin.
Faced with painter’s block, the artist called his daughter, then age five, and asked her what he should paint. The result, the fruits of a child’s imagination, can be seen on canvas. That notion of ‘what to paint’ is a crucial one. Hence Swennen’s sources are versatile, ranging from art history to psychoanalysis, via comic books. In Veronica (2007), his ironic version of a Bible story, Swennen uses the title to evoke the tale of St Veronica – whose veil bore an impression of Jesus’s face – while his imagery comes from a dated advertisement of a housewife hanging up washing. In Konijn & Canard (2001), he depicts the rabbit-and-duck gestalt diagram as two separate entities. And in the letter painting Tum de Dum (1992), he draws on the Flemish Suske & Wiske comics, evoking the sound of an animation character humming a tune. But it is rather painting itself that is his main subject, as in Super Blaue Reiter (1998), made according to instructions in a painting manual. Swennen not only tackles the issue of painting by routinely changing his style or imposing restrictions on himself (eg, working in the dark or in a confined space) but also by experimenting with the carrier, the support. Besides painting on canvas, he also uses wood or even washingmachine lids. And he deliberately overpaints earlier works, like L’Oncle du Congo (1989) or Patmos Revisited (1988), an approach that
contributes to the palimpsestlike quality and richness of his oeuvre. Though Swennen’s aesthetic is highly individual, one can see parallels with Philip Guston’s cartoonish style, Sigmar Polke’s and Martin Kippenberger’s versatility, and René Daniëls’s poetic and painterly observations. Yet none of these comparisons – or labels like ‘neo-expressionist’, ‘post-Pop’ or ‘postmodern’ – quite catch his unique position. In his whimsical way, Swennen prefers the vernacular to the international: painting the logo of a no-longer-existing Belgian brand of potatoes (Jef Patat, 1986), for example, or the aforementioned comic books, the references all lost on an international audience. The many linguistic plays between Belgium’s national languages that he slips into his paintings might be another reason why Swennen has not received the international fame obtained by less interesting artists. Hence the importance of this comprehensive overview. A smaller selection might also have done the trick, since the diversity on show doesn’t always aid coherence, and some of the abstract and more neo-expressionist paintings are less convincing. It’s a minor issue, however, in a show that will hopefully contribute to the establishing of Swennen’s international reputation. Sam Steverlynck
Kapitein Detzler, 1997, oil on canvas. Private collection, Antwerp. Photo: DMF. Courtesy Culturgest, Lisbon, and Wiels, Brussels
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Deniz Gül B.I.M.A.B.K.R. Galeri Manâ, Istanbul 28 November – 25 January The unforgiving daylight inside Galeri Manâ – a nineteenth-century wheat mill in Istanbul’s ancient waterfront district of Tophane, now a renovated industrial space of large windows and concrete walls – serves to emphasise just how apt a venue Turkish contemporary artist Deniz Gül has chosen for her stark and intriguing second solo exhibition. The punctuation of large areas of space with various objects, configured in a fluid composition, quickly reveals itself to be the unifying tone of what Gül chooses to call her ‘spatial proposition’. Even the works themselves remain in constant flux, as the installations are showcased then replaced with other pieces over weeks. Temporally and spatially displaced from their everyday representations, a seemingly disconnected array of objects such as shoe soles, plaster busts, taxi meters and nail clippings come to form new boundaries, relations and contexts among one another, as well as revealing unexpected fissures and new meanings otherwise overlooked during their daily functionality. True to the Istanbul-based artist’s sustained interest in using photography, installation, text and sculpture, B.I.M.A.B.K.R. opens paths of association and contextual meaning between these media, while the viewer’s personal response repeatedly adjusts and readjusts to accommodate the disorienting freedom of roaming from piece to piece in no specific order. However, despite the strongly latent symbolism within Gül’s individual objects, their collective
form and composition performs more of a recoil from the imposition of a singular essence. At times, their powers of representation are undermined by certain deliberate, material incoherences, challenging our tendency to immediately look for contextual meaning in the composition or form of an installation artwork. This encourages a productive kind of failure to conjure the associations these objects may otherwise carry in their daily contexts. For instance, a bust of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, is a familiar sight in Turkish schoolyards and government buildings; Gül offers us a plaster male bust uncannily reminiscent of this familiar symbol, yet keeps it featureless. Thus she treats these objects as the constructions of class, domesticity, patriarchy and nation that they are, but in displacing and rearranging them she suggests it is our behavioural patterns and daily rituals that make them so. The show’s title comprises the initials of three fictional characters typifying the social attitudes, private habits and cultural norms commonly observed by the founding republican elite of Turkey. The objects in B.I.M.A.B.K.R. are, according to the artist, her attempt at visually manifesting these typologies. First featured in a book of the same name that Gül penned alongside her 2011 exhibition 5 Person Bufet at Arter, Istanbul, these characters are eventually constructed through free-flowing notes,
quotations, prose and poetry. Indeed, the ailing spectres of state power and militaristic patriarchy shadowing quotidian life could not be more visible than in Vitrine (2011), a cumbersome, wood-panelled wardrobe resembling the Republic Monument in Taksim Square, Istanbul. In a similar subversion, detached taxi meters, suggesting to all Istanbulites’ minds a traditionally working-class, macho cultural domain, spell out a stream-of-consciousness narration of a female sexual experience. However, in striking contrast are also more ethereal works of transformation and dispersion. Leakage (2013), for instance, features a cracked basin dripping water, surrounded by glass sculptures containing a pale liquid: the boundaries of the object indeterminate, its function void. In fact, the ultimate bind of this spatial suggestion is the rendering of this interdependency visible: as Gül herself argued in a newspaper interview earlier this year, ‘The fluidity of the show, the merging of the three people, is about the domains of power in our lives [and] how we are constructed, programmed and labelled by these various power domains.’ B.I.M.A.B.K.R. communicates with originality how the unstable intersectionality of these domains makes the very distinguishing of its constituents possible; these, in turn, can and often do perpetuate, through object and text, everything from national to personal identity. Sarah Jilani
Leakage, 2013, plaster, wood, wheels. Photo: Korhan Karaoysa. Courtesy the artist and Galeri Manâ, Istanbul
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Elevation 1049: Between Heaven and Hell Various venues, Gstaad 27 January – 8 March Elevation 1049, subtitled Between Heaven and Hell and described as ‘the first of a series of site-specific exhibitions created out of the specifics of time and place’, consisted of around 30 works by more than 25 artists – mostly Swiss – distributed throughout the mountain villages of Gstaad and Saanen and the surrounding countryside. The main exhibition, curated by Olympia Scarry and Neville Wakefield and produced by the LUMA& Foundation, was united under the slight theme of altitude. Olivier Mosset bookended this vertical scale with Toblerone (2003–14), two ice versions of a sculpture he had previously realised in cardboard, recreating massive concrete blocks installed along the Swiss border during the Second World War to prevent invasion by tanks. One of these was to be found at 2,964.4 metres above sea level, a height reached via two ski lifts; the other melted slowly in an underground carpark at a mere 1,010.9 metres. Other works popped up in diverse contexts: Olaf Breuning’s Snow Drawing (2014) deposited powder colour on a piste, an action that was unimpressive on the first performance but had the potential to improve with repetition and skiers’ interaction during the exhibition; nearby Roman Signer’s Alles fährt Ski (Everything Skis, 2014) was a short but sweet action that sent a wooden hut down a
slope on snowboards till it hit a bank, where, cockeyed, it rested to house the film of its own descent. Works by artists including Claudia Comte, Kilian Rüthemann and Pamela Rosenkranz along the main drag of Gstaad responded to the landscape and idiosyncrasies of the site, Rüthemann for example installing Acht Säulen für den Winter (Eight Columns for Winter, 2014), a short, dense row of upended palmtree trunks on a lawn adjoining one of several grand hotels in the vicinity, seeming less ridiculous there than the nearby champagne brand-sponsored ice bar. Thomas Hirschhorn’s Mürrischer Schnee (Grumpy Snow, 2014) was akin to a protest camp by a bus stop outside Gstaad. Here one could escape ‘into reality’ through Hirschhorn’s customary displays of collaged text and collected objects in a number of igloos divided into topics including inequality, war, corruption and epidemics, watched over by totemic sprayed snow sculptures representing friendship, love, lust for life and more. Fantasies about the region formed the topic of Christian Marclay’s Bollywood goes to Gstaad (2013), a 17-minute montage from Bollywood films of the 1980s and 90s featuring Gstaad as their exotic location. Unfortunately the work is poorly executed by Marclay standards, adds nothing to the wit of the source
material and upholds an anachronous viewpoint of Indian culture. Thankfully film curator and producer Matthias Brunner’s installation was more insightful; within a bunker dug into a rock face he screened excerpts from films by Daniel Schmid, a Swiss director who died in 2006. The dark, damp underground warren was the backdrop for projections in which traditional Swiss mountain life was portrayed with affection and parody in equal measure. Faced with the absurdities and inequalities of Gstaad, Gianni Jetzer was wise to embrace fiction as his strategy for the show-within-theshow Milky Way: A Layer of Snow and a Layer of Silence. Located in a hut only accessible via several hours’ snow-shoe hike or helicopter, it was unlikely anyone would ever see the exhibition, particularly because Jetzer had closed the building once installation was complete. Thus it existed as little more than a conceit, and the catalogue includes only the barest description of works by Eric Andersen, Hans Bellmer, Bruno Jakob, Ylva Ogland, Daniel de Roulet, Olympia Scarry and Andro Wekua. Nonetheless, the idea was more engaged with place than most of Elevation 1049. The closed capsule marooned in deep snow spoke volumes about purity, privilege and the mountain landscape as a place of sanctuary or incarceration. Aoife Rosenmeyer
Olaf Breuning, Snow Drawing (detail), 2014. Photo: Stefan Altenburger, Zurich
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Goshka Macuga Non-Consensual Act (In Progress) Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm 14 December – 12 April Given that Goshka Macuga’s exhibition primarily consists of one twenty-two minute video, Non-Consensual Act (in progress) (2013), one may be inclined to think that it is missing fundamental components. Yet focus on this one work, and you won’t feel inadequately compensated. Macuga visited the Afghan Film Archive in Kabul in 2012, out of both curiosity and concern for how it had been affected in the period of the Taliban’s regime. Due to an ongoing lack of resources, funding and consideration for the archive, newsreels, documentary and feature films were neglected – the material was rarely properly digitised. Macuga, therefore, decided to support the archive and purchase small portions of film discarded via the digitisation process; she was then sent 35mm offcuts as 19 separate film rolls which appeared to contain sexually charged (and thereby censored) scenes which never made it to the screen. (Strangely enough, these images were sent to her without any specific request for this kind of footage.) Macuga has a history of re-appropriating sourced materials, such as in the series Untitled (2008) which incorporated photographs from a Vietnam War veteran as part of the installation I Am Become Death (2009), as well as with her collaboration with anthropologist Julian Gastelo to realize the documentary Snake Society (2009).
Additionally, she displays an ongoing interest in iconography and rituals, as in her artistic research on art historian Aby Warburg and Hopi American Indian art. This is par for Macuga’s course: she utilises found materials and recontextualises them to support the propagation of newly devised narratives. On hearing the artist’s voiceover during her film, one discerns Macuga’s discomfort when examining the delivered offcuts; these are oftentimes out of focus, comprising the beginnings and endings of reels. In Non-Consensual Act (in progress), we hear the artist express that she is not confident as to whether or not it was a deliberate move of the Afghan Film Archive to send her sexually explicit material which more often than not shows men forcing themselves on women, women objectified or women manipulated as conquests. In Macuga’s patchwork of filmic images (black and white and colour imagery juxtaposed) women are viewed from a distance, in compromising situations, in the midst of precarious and lustful rapports – alongside additional images of men as powerful, oftentimes crazed victors on horseback or dominating domestic scenes, enshrouded in patriarchy. The compiled scenes are askew and foreboding, for what will become of the film industry at large when it is so often manipulated
by sociopolitical forces or consciously filtered? From an international perspective, films cater to a target audience – they are created to persuade the mindset of the masses. Images in Non-Consensual Act (in progress) range in source from James Bond to Bollywood, and in content from violence to copulation. The archive appears to be invaluable, for its existence despite the Taliban’s presence in Kabul was a perilous undertaking: it was hidden behind a wall, and closed to the public during moments of intense turmoil. Purchasing offcuts was supposed to help support the Afghan Film Archive’s decision to repair their roof, but there is no verification that Macuga’s funds were used for renovation. Macuga asks the viewer to consider the context and meaning of this exchange between herself, the archive and those representing the archive. What is implicitly or explicitly relayed by such charged materials being sent to her? Macuga notes that the images used from the offcuts hardly incorporate or utilise dialogue; they instead focus on visuals which are never wholly decipherable. Is the archive attempting to express a perspective that the film industry has been corrupted by women? As in the myth of Pandora’s Box, some eyes may simply not be ready for the offcuts, both literally and metaphorically. Jacquelyn Davis
Non-Consensual Act (In Progress), 2013 (installation view).Photo: Johan Wahlgren. Courtesy Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm
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140 Caracteres MAM (Museu de Arte Moderna), São Paulo 28 January – 16 March With the aftershocks from June 2013’s wave of protests still pulsing in Brazil, images of street-fighting kids and baton-happy cops have become ubiquitous in homegrown art produced during the past 9 months. 140 Caracteres is inspired by June’s events, but takes a indirect approach by venturing deep and wide into the Museu de Arte Moderna’s collection, weaving 140 works by twentieth and twentyfirst century artists into a cloth shot through with threads of dissent and resistance, identity and conformity, urban alienation and the power of the multitude. Just inside the entrance, in a 1997 performance by Laura Lima, Bala de homem = carne / mulher = carne (Candy man = meat / woman = meat), a man sits naked on a stool, his cock and balls curled softly in his lap, his mouth drawn open by a cruel-looking metal device. People draw back to a safe distance for a proper look; or they’re forced into his personal space by a wish to read the label beside him, and it’s there that the most discomfiting (dis)connections are made. The impossibility of speaking to the man; the shock of looking into his face close-up, even obliquely; the fear of meeting his gaze. Across the room in a
work by Marcelo Zocchio, Os cem (The Hundred, 1997), the same interpersonal impasse crystallises in images of 100 São Paulo street-sleepers – a constellation of misery you see across the city; or you don’t see, or you do, and you look away. Here, the sleepers are depicted in red over the photographic images, their shapes, sizes and poses – loose and abandoned to sleep; tense and curled inwards, on guard – impossible to ignore. Brazil’s military dictatorship, in the news lately thanks to an ongoing Truth Commission into the 1964–85 regime, figures in Antonio Manuel’s striking ‘flans’, in china ink over newspaper printing plates, and Cláudio Tozzi’s Multidão (Multitude, 1968) and Luta (Struggle, 1960–9), in which fists are raised in overt opposition to the military junta. In a series of subversive documentary photographs taken in Brasília between 1966 and 2003, Orlando Brito snatches revealing moments, stealing images of conspirators in silhouette in corridors, hooded guards raising a sodden Brazilian flag in the pouring rain, and statesmen in motion inside a meeting room, clumsy and off-kilter as they stand and move around in what looks like a game of musical chairs.
Dotted through the exhibition, masks echo the sight of June’s hooded black blocs, and the Guy Fawkes/Anonymous masks that became briefly emblematic of the protests. There’s a whimsically kitsch carnival mask by Beatriz Milhazes; a futuristic, metallic mask by Pablo Reinoso; and a pair of delicate, all-too-human masks by Sergio Romagnolo, almost like death masks, which strip away the headwear’s concealing power to reveal the face as a layer of its own. Towards the centre of the exhibition, four modules of Nicolás Guagnini’s máquina Curatorial (Curatorial machine, 2009), rotating displays that can be spun to change the relationships between artworks, are a playful reference to the origins of the show: it’s the fruit of a curatorial course given at MAM in 2013 by the museum’s curator, Felipe Chaimovich, to a class of 20 students. The result might have been a chaos of competing visions, dissent and confusion. But instead, like a transcendent moment in which protest takes flight into new movements and new iterations of mass desire, the exhibition brings together its mass of artworks in a disciplined, coherent and beautifully curated version of events. Claire Rigby
Lia Chaia, Folingua, 2003, photographic print, 60 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist and MAM, São Paulo
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New Abstraction: Chapter 1 Hadrien de Montferrand, Beijing 18 January – 28 February That this should be called ‘new’ abstraction is an interesting starting point. Engagement with this mode of working has been a prominent part of Chinese art production (and consumption) over the past few years. The question of its identity in the Chinese context is at issue, particularly where criticisms have arisen of some emerging artists’ work as being simply derivative of twentieth-century Op art and Colour Field painting. In a 2011 essay, curator Bao Dong noted that in China, abstract art lacks the kind of transcendental preoccupations that propelled it originally in Europe and America. Instead, it has proved attractive to artists interested in pure form, materials and tools, as well as the dissolution of the personal gesture. It also offers alternate territory for painting in China, where this is still a robust medium, intensely taught. On this basis, it is worth asking what one desires from the abstract-looking art now encountered. Arguably, what satisfies about this approach in general is a certain intrinsic hum: a distinct energy suffusing colour, tone and surface, either as the embodiment of something
intangible lying beyond, or else a sense of strength derived purely from the success of form. In Beijing, for reasons just mentioned, it is more logical to seek the latter. The works in this exhibition are more moderate than the grand abstract pieces that have already appeared in emerging artist shows in China and in private museums abroad. Their scale is smaller, their aims perhaps more modest. These things accepted, however, their general effect still isn’t strong, or necessarily unique. The two minutely gridded works in paint marker on canvas by Cao Yu, for example, are very similar in outcome to ink on paper works done previously by Li Huasheng. Of three works here by Tie Ying, two are Colour Field-type paintings, with fields of oil pigment bisected horizontally. Missing the spiritual backdrop Rothko’s paintings have, one wonders what fuels these. Wang Yi’s acid-hued geometric grids, where shards of colour echo from yellow as if around a light source, feel, though not unattractive, reminiscent of recent efforts by other Chinese artists. Hou Yong, who in the past filled canvases
with crayoned visions of liquid so smooth and detailed as to appear abstract, more recently began exploring perspectival space. The planar acrylic painting here called Angle 1 is impressive, though Angle 2 (both works 2013) suggests that this technique is still in progress for him. A more consistent impression is delivered through drawings by Yu Xiao, whose featherlike patterns achieve a desirable leap into abstract life. Overall, it is difficult to assess the collective import of these works. Abstraction is certainly popular, and classic elements of it – pattern, optical dazzle, grids or fields of colour – are in evidence here. Yet a certain want of energy pervades this show. ‘New’ can mean recent, but also something different from what went before. If, as Bao Dong asserts, the term ‘abstraction’ – seated in a Western movement – actually limits our looking at the work of these artists in China, could these works propose something different? New Abstraction: Chapter 1 does not define new terrain, but it does raise important questions concerning the goals of nonrepresentational art in China. Iona Whittaker
Tie Ying, Painted Wall 03, 2012, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hadrien de Montferrand, Beijing
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The Ringtone Dialectic by Sumanth Gopinath MIT Press, £24.95/$35 (hardcover) Born to two musician parents and classically trained on the piano from a young age, keyboardist and composer Martin Plante rose to prominence in the 1980s with the Canadian rock group Bundock before going on to work with Cirque du Soleil and several acclaimed international ballet companies. But such are the vicissitudes of the early-twenty-first century music industry that for several years in the mid-2000s, Plante’s most consistent paying gig came from composing monophonic ringtones for the ad-supported website about.com. Nor was he alone. With estimates from 2007 putting a multibillion dollar value on the global ringtone industry, record companies for a time found themselves seriously contemplating the surreal prospect that the oncehumble ringer could be just the thing to rescue an ailing music business from the brink of financial ruin. That the first death knells of the paid ringtone market were already being sounded when those figures were minted and that within a year that market had entered a seemingly irreversible decline marks the era dubbed ‘the ringtone conjuncture’ by Sumanth Gopinath, a period roughly bounded by the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the financial crisis of the late 00s, as an epoch sufficiently discrete for historical study. Hence the timely arrival of the present volume by Minnesota University professor Gopinath, a Marxist and Yale graduate who has previously published articles on minstrelsy in the music of Steve Reich and the techno-social lineages of the Nike+ sport kit. Written on leave from Minnesota’s School of Music, Gopinath’s discourse ranges freely from economic and
sociological analysis to the close reading of scored transcriptions of individual ringtones. With a certain dry humour mixed with the arch tones of mild scholarly disdain, reading Gopinath on ‘the degraded pre-adolescent utopias’ of the Crazy Frog tune can be a little like reading Glenn Gould blithely discussing the ‘harmonic primitivism’ of the Beatles. Nonetheless, this unique and often fascinating volume unearths a sufficient number of intriguing artistic responses to suggest that there may have been more to the ringtone as cultural form than Für Elise rendered in coarse FM synthesis and dididing ding bing bing. The eventual ubiquity of a Swedish teenager’s imitation of a two-stroke moped engine applied to an ambiguously genitalled cartoon frog may finally have exhausted what little patience the consuming public had for overpriced novelty call alerts. Meanwhile, Salvatore Sciarrino incorporated the (in)famous Nokia Tune into his Archeologia del Telefono (2005); artists like Peter Hrubesch, Dirk Scherkowski and Golan Levin produced interactive ringtonethemed installations; and Touch records released an album of avant-garde ringtones produced by the likes of Ryoji Ikeda, Phill Niblock and Gilbert & George. If Gopinath is sufficiently astute to recognise that the more ambitious works of ringtone media art tend perilously close to glib marketing exercises, he is equally attuned to the genuinely emancipatory potential released by the mass prevalence of mobile sound-producing devices when appropriated by political mass movements. It was in the Philippines, in the summer of 2005, that the hitherto untapped power of the
ringtone was unleashed when a recording of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo apparently conspiring to rig the forthcoming election was released, first to a press conference and later cut, spliced, uploaded and shared widely on the net. “Hello Garci,” the recording began, as Arroya affectionately addressed elections commission official Virgillio Garcillano. Before long “Hello Garci” had usurped “Hello Moto”, usually backed by a sample from 50 Cent’s In Da Club (2003). The irony is that Arroyo had swept to power in 2001 backed by the young, tech savvy members of ‘Generation Txt’, for whom political organisation by SMS was second nature. But he who lives by the phone shall die by the phone. At least 30 variants of the Hello Garci ringtone were produced, and downloaded over a million times. Heard at angry press conferences and public protests, the sound was apparently instrumental in bringing about impeachment proceedings against Arroyo. If ever the ringtone had its ‘utopian’ moment, that moment surely has now passed. But in holding a lens to this most curious of fads, wherein for a brief time content providers could charge 200 to 300 times the price of a song for just a brief electronically whistled rendition of it, Gopinath reveals something of the curious alignment of music, technology, aesthetics and economics in the present capitalist conjuncture that remains as relevant today as it was when Nokia’s then vice president Lauri Kivinen programmed an old nineteenthcentury waltz into his handset and became the first person to know that diddy-dee-deediddy-dee-dee-diddy-dee-dee-dee meant that someone wanted to talk to him. Robert Barry
Unposted Letters by Franciszka Themerson & Stefan Themerson Illustrator and painter Franciszka Themerson and her husband, Stefan, settled in Paris during the late 1930s because, as Stefan wrote, it ‘was the world’s centre of the arts’. Polish Jews, they soon found themselves, like so many others, caught up in and separated by war. The story is here given a fresh telling via the contents of 150 letters, 150 telegrams, 100 drawings and nine of Stefan’s diaries, all written between 1940 and 1942. Franciszka escaped to London, where, immediate survival secured, she had the time to imagine the
Gaberbocchus & De Harmonie, €45 (softcover)
horrors of those still stuck on the Continent. Her letters, which she heavily censored – the darker ones were written with no intention of being sent – generally project strength and love. The ‘unposted letters’ of the title, however, refer to her drawings: London views, portraits and imagined scenarios full of the machinery of war. Stefan’s position back in France was far more precarious, and much of his early writing fixated on food. Gradually other topics found space – movie ideas, poetry fragments, scenes he had
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witnessed; and later still he was able to write to his wife with the tenderness she had shown him throughout. This artfully presented archive is fleshed out with official documents and occasional contextual details, including one noting, in the days just prior to Franciszka and Stefan’s reunion in Britain, family suicides in Otwock ghetto in Poland. So while theirs is a story with a beginning, a middle and a happy-enough ending, it is, as were most such stories, overwhelmed by events elsewhere. David Terrien
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Visual Cultures as Seriousness by Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff Accompanying the celebrations and tributes to the rangy, generous contributions made to cultural studies by the late theorist Stuart Hall have been some contemporary glossings of the academic discipline for which he became a figurehead, and appraisals of its success. Giving subjects such as television, music, street fashion and mainstream cinema serious academic consideration was part of the cultural studies project: developing a politics of representation and the theoretical tools to consider how various forces shape popular culture and how these in turn shape identity. Subsequently, the idea of ‘the serious’ was in some ways transformed from the late 1960s onwards, as areas of culture not previously considered for ‘serious’ study were permitted into academia, albeit in order to ask urgent questions about race, class, politics and so forth. Around half a century later, Goldsmiths, University of London has launched a series of publications considering the discipline of visual cultures – one of those ushered in by Hall and Richard Hoggart (among others) in the 1950s – and among these are Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff’s contribution on the topic of ‘seriousness’. The publication is somewhat brief and chattily propositional; most akin to the experience of watching two papers and a panel discussion at a talk or conference. Though there are points of convergence, the ways in which Butt and Rogoff approach seriousness are rather oblique. To radically condense these positions, Rogoff believes that the artworld needs more seriousness, while
Sternberg, £10.50/€12 (softcover)
Butt, in a more narrowly focused study, analyses the ability of camp and drag performers, specifically David Hoyle, to approach angry, political, ‘serious’ subjects. For readers of this magazine, it’s Rogoff’s essay that is perhaps most germane, as it stems from a kind of fundamental mistrust of the artworld, and joins a litany of recent articles that essentially denigrate what has happened to art in the age of a) popular spectacles put on by museums such as Tate Modern and MoMA, or by Frieze Art Fair and b) the power of the art market and its wealthiest collectors to shape what we see. (Jerry Saltz’s ‘The Long Slide: Museums as Playgrounds’, New York Magazine, 2011; Holland Cotter’s ‘Lost in the Gallery-Industrial Complex’, The New York Times, 2014; etc.) Concerning museums, Rogoff argues convincingly that a focus on accessibility as opposed to a more productive notion of ‘access’ has fundamentally damaged one of the key motives for trying to bring more people to art in the first place, which is that it allows them to take part in a very active conversation about what art and culture is or should be, and to have some kind of agency in deciding what might be worthy of attention or deep thought. Handling artists’ works in prepackaged, marketed, bitesize formats, as though all issues are fully resolved, she writes, ‘does not allow for the inhabitation of this processual and ongoing conversation, opting instead for entry points that assume a fully completed entity which can be entered frontally.’ In other words, we consume culture as clients, rather than being involved in any form of live
thinking. She also believes that an emphasis on accessibility implies there is ‘something impossibly complicated here, something that needs mediation and explanation, so that the entire experience is framed by a stated determination to avoid complexity at all costs’. This is surely a tricky balance, however, as we must accept that some art is complicated, and demands time and attention to understand. A big part of me wants to take issue with the book’s stated subject, which is that ‘the contemporary art world has become more inhospitable to “serious” intellectual activity in recent years’. Really? Which artworld? There are, of course, elements to the artworld that are radically divorced from serious thought, and one can’t discount their presence. There are, it’s true, crowd-pleasing spectacles such as Random International’s Rain Room (2012) at MoMA and the Barbican. And the recent appearance of a website called sellyoulater.com (whether legitimate or not) is a chilling glimpse of artworks as pure commodity, categorising artists based on a supposed algorithm that rates their names as though they were companies for financial investment. However, given that Rogoff ends with a call for a recalibrated, focused intellectual intensity or passion as a form of seriousness, one can only suggest that in an expanded world of art that has invited different forms of masses to take part, from fun-seeking daytrippers to hedge funders, there are now many interlinked artworlds. And so the question becomes: which one do you want to give passionate attention? Laura McLean-Ferris
A Philosophy of Walking by Frédéric Gros ‘I went on my way with light step, freed from this burden; youthful desires, enchanting hopes, brilliant plans filled my soul.’ This is Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Confessions (1782), recalling his coming-of-age trip on foot across the Alps, from Geneva to Turin. Take another quote used by modern-day French philosopher Frédéric Gros in this first English translation of his 2011 manifesto on the joys of walking, this time from a work by the poet Charles Péguy. ‘We go straight forward, hands down in pockets / Without any kit, without any clobber or talk / With a pace always even, no haste or
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Verso, £16.99 (hardcover)
refuge.’ Both are used in the service of Gros’s central theme that walking – in particular the extended hike – is an act of radical escape from the responsibilities, pressures and economics of daily life. While Gros does not ignore the romantic or spiritual connotations of the sojourn – references are made to William Wordsworth and his disdain for the light strolls of his fellow bourgeoisie and the poet’s belief that an extended journey on foot was, as Gros relays, ‘a poetic act, a communion with nature, fulfilment of the body’, together with due attention given to
walking as an act of pilgrimage, such as the journeys those of Hindu faith might make to Pandharpur – the writer’s main preoccupation is walking as a politically expressive act. Gros’s book, which, rather like a ten-miler, can feel like a slog at times, describes how the act of walking cannot be monetised, it is not a sport; it can’t be branded or sold. To pack up your bag and pull on your boots, Gros nonetheless persuasively argues, is, if not anticapitalist, at least places one beyond the reach of capitalism. Which, in the twenty-first century, is a rare, possibly profound, state to be in. Oliver Basciano
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Contributors
Orit Gat
Sam Jacob
is a writer based in New York. She writes about contemporary art, publishing, the Internet and all sorts of links between these. She is a contributing editor for Rhizome, and her writing has appeared in a variety of magazines, including Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Leap and Modern Painters, where she was senior editor until last year. Orit’s interests are currently in thinking through the structure of art magazines and their function, and she organises a reading group devoted to them at the Public School New York. This month she reviews Liz Glynn’s On the Possibility of Salvage at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. She highly recommends critically reading magazines cover to cover, and especially the November/ December 2013 issue of Art Papers, which was dedicated to art magazines.
is an architect and writer. He directs his own architecture practice in London and is professor of architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago and director of Night School at the Architectural Association in London. He is currently cocurating the British Pavilion for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. This month in his regular column he reports back on his holidays. For further reading he suggests Against Venice (1995), by Régis Debray, Tristes Tropiques (1955), by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1997) by David Foster Wallace.
Sarah Jilani is a Turkish-British freelance writer and artist currently based in Istanbul. She is a recent graduate with an MSt in English from the University of Oxford. Her academic and arts-related writings have featured in a number of publications, including Senses of Cinema, Aesthetica and Apollo, and her artwork in Karmapolitan and The Oxonian Review. This month she reviews Deniz Gül’s B.I.M.A.B.K.R. at Galeri Manâ, Istanbul. For further reference to the themes raised in Gül’s work, she recommends reading Erik J. Zurcher’s Turkey: A Modern History (2004) or watching Turkish director Çağan Irmak’s My Father and My Son (2005), a film about the 1980 Turkish military coup d’état, narrating the experiences of an ordinary family during that period of nationalism and authoritarianism.
Dienstag Abend is a collaborative artist’s platform based in Vienna, organised by Ludwig Kittinger and Fernando Mesquita. Founded in 2009 at Kunstraum Ve.Sch, Vienna, it subsequently became an itinerant collective. Its organisers consider Dienstag Abend to be a situation, respectively composed by the local environment and/or collective mechanisms, frequently taking the form of a temporary bar or kitchen. Events themselves are driven by the idea of heterarchy, without mediation between artist and audience, to enable a more direct approach. Dienstag Abend has collaborated in recent years with many artists, some more frequently than others.
Mark Prince is an English artist and writer living in Berlin. He writes about contemporary art for various publications. This months he writes about the artistic exchange that has operated between German and American art over recent decades. Contributing Writers Joseph Akel, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Barbara Casavecchia, Jacquelyn Davis, Tom Eccles, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Sarah Jilani, Maria Lind, Daniel McClean, Terry R. Myers, Mark Prince, Morgan Quaintance, Claire Rigby, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Ed Schad, Raimar Stange, Sam Steverlynck, Ben Street, Jennifer Thatcher, Brienne Walsh, Florence Waters, Mike Watson, Iona Whittaker, Siona Wilson Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Zach Blas, Dienstag Abend, Knut Larsson, Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Wilhelm Sasnal
Knut Larsson (preceding pages)
When experimental Swedish comics artist Knut Larsson met up with David Lynch in Stockholm in 2010, Lynch dedicated a copy of his Catching the Big Fish (2006) to him in big capitals, calling him ‘KNUT the GREAT’. Akin to entering Lynch’s worlds, reading Larsson’s imagistic mythmaking feels like a hypnotising dream, or perhaps a daydream. As Larsson admits, “I sometimes write my dreams down, but I don’t remember them very often. My comics are daydreaming primarily.” In his graphic novel The City of Crocodiles (2014) from Borderline Press, Larsson envisages the waterworld to come when global warming and rising sea levels submerge and transform our planet into someplace strange. With landmasses flooded, cattle farming has been replaced by crocodile hunting, using every part of the reptiles to make into shoes,
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chess pieces, soup, burgers, ornaments and more. Stranger still are the masked cultists who tie the living beasts to their backs for ritual combat, and a siren with a crocodile tail who seduces a widower fisherman. Larsson’s speechless, soundless ‘crocotopia’ brims with eerie elegance and eloquence. Trained at film school but unable to get projects funded, Larsson turned to comics, where he felt a huge creative freedom. Over more than a decade of shorter strips and longer albums, he sees them all as “a mixture of conscious and unconscious decisions. I try to work intuitively.” There’s also a highly sensual charge to his characters, both male and female, a quality rarely found in male-created fantasies. Larsson lives above the Sven-Harrys Konstmuseum in Stockholm. Over the weekend of
24–25 May he is once again turning his home into a gallery, for his third solo exhibition, Das Unheimliche, German for ‘sinister’ and a play on ‘unhomely’. He is also putting the finishing touches to another music video, this time for Stockholm band Principe Valiente, and to his 29-minute live-action film debut, Hypnagogia: Send me the pillow that you dream on, about a narcolepsy sufferer who becomes paralysed in her sleep. For his new Strip, he has revived his loinclothed Forest Boy, who first adventured in 2008 in the Swedish anthology From the Shadow of the Northern Lights. “He died at the end, but I had to go back to him. He’s my take on Mowgli from The Jungle Book, some kind of alter ego, a sort of wild boy in the forest investigating the mysteries of life.” Larsson’s imaginary forest surely hides many more secrets.
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Art and photo credits on the cover Artwork by Wilhelm Sasnal on pages 134, 137 and 142 Photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam
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Text credits Quotations on the spine and on pages 25, 71 and 103 are from the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and first published in 1774
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Off the Record April 2014 “That’s an impressive double-jab cross combination you’ve got going,” I observe. The editor hits the hanging heavy bag before turning to his Philippe Starck free weights. As he lifts one, I see a tiny drop of sweat on his forehead and have the almost unbearable desire to wipe it off with one of the Calvin Klein Home towels that are stacked neatly next to him. “Take the Lufthansa business flight to Berlin first thing tomorrow, Gallery Girl,” he intones, his voice slurred from the anabolic steroids he’s been mainlining in recent weeks. “I need you to think about an authentic art scene. About the legacy of Kippenberger. Kippie.” “You mean the guy who drowned in a boat?” Suddenly he is angry, roid-rage coursing through him. “No! Martin Kippenberger. Three years in West Berlin in the late 70s and such genius! The club SO36! Büro Kippenberger! Oh for a Kippie in today’s flaccid artworld.” The anger has passed and he absentmindedly tugs on his black Marni shorts. I literally have no idea what he is talking about but think it’s time to make an exit, stopping only to grab my plane ticket. By the following lunchtime I am holed up in a tarte flambée restaurant in Berlin’s Schöneberg district with the trusty guide that the magazine has fixed me up with. “So, Jürgen, even this restaurant is named after an artist, the Neue Sachlichkeit photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch. It strikes me that Berlin is pretty serious about its art. Perhaps there is a search for authenticity that is lacking in other artworld cities like London, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Hong Kong, Beijing, Delhi, Dubai, oh what the fuck… like everywhere else in the whole of the artworld? Although coming to think of it, isn’t tarte flambée from Fra–” “Ja,” interjects Jürgen. “You are correct, it is a native dish. And now I give you a tour of the understated cultural authenticity of Berlin, ja?” “Super-hip!” I say as Jürgen leads me out of the restaurant and into a vintage Porsche 911. We career around a corner before Jürgen stops, leaps out and disappears. He reappears five minutes later carrying two hotdogs. “Currywurst,” he explains. We sit in silence for some time. The cheap curry powder sprinkled on ketchup masks any other tastes. “Mmm…” I intone after some time. “Who would have known that currywurst was–” “German?” Jürgen interjects. “Hold on,” I reply. “Wasn’t currywurst invented by Herta Heuwer in Berlin in 1949 after she obtained Worcestershire sauce and curry powder from British soldiers?” Jürgen stuffs his half-eaten bun in my face, the curry powder reacting badly with my Marc Jacobs Magic Marc’er eyeliner. “Fuck, that’s strong curry powder. I can’t see anything!” I yell.
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I feel myself bundled back into the car. As I begin to regain my sight, Jürgen talks about Berlin’s forthcoming biennial. “It is about history and historical becoming. Ja? There is one work installed before the fair that we look at now. It is by Andreas Angelidakis and is a wonderful arrangement of ancient Greek rugs. We show our good humour and self-reflexive nature by highlighting this work about Greek bankruptcy and total lack of moral fibre.” We look at the rugs. They are indeed lacking in any moral fibre whatsoever. I fear Jürgen might attack me with more foodstuffs. “That was great, you guys really know about understated observation and humour. There’s certainly no repressed undercurrent of violence about any of the stuff you do. Now, where next?” “And now, to a deconsecrated modernist Catholic Church! Once it was a mere religious building designed by Werner Düttmann, but now it is a gallery run by Johann König! It is a temple of conceptual sculpture! Only us Berliners could think of such a brilliant yet profound conceit!” Jürgen parks his car, gets out and strides towards the modernist form of St Agnes Church, his hands aloft. “Christ! You’ve taken over a church and put some contemporary art in it. That’s very Anita Zabludowicz.” Jürgen stops, and looks at me. “Was? Sie meinen, Sie dies bereits getan haben in London?” He starts yelling, and then attempts to wrestle a large-scale Jeppe Hein sculpture to the floor in his rage. “Jürgen! Stop!” I implore. “It’s OK! You don’t have to carry around this cultural baggage of trying to be more cool, alternative and less commercial than the rest of us! You’re part of our artworld now. Of shallow art and vapid parties. Let go of the burden of intellectual commitment!” “You’re right, Gallery Girl. I am tired of being super-hip, clever and noncommercial. But you know, as JFK said, Ich bin ein Berliner.” “But hold on, isn’t that grammatically incorrect? Doesn’t that mean…” But the last thing I see is Jürgen’s mighty fist holding a jam doughnut bearing down on my face. And then darkness. Sweet, jamflavoured darkness. Gallery Girl
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