Artverve | Issue 6 | Oct 2016

Art V erve on women’s art an SLWA publication

Journal 6 * Oct 2016

Performance Art Special Edition Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Marina Abramović * Bobby Baker ArtVerve’s pick of 20 influential performance artists

Art Reviews Mona Hatoum

Georgia O’Keeffe

Bouchra Khalili Nasreen Mohamedi Laura Poitras

PLUS * Books/DVD Reviews * What’s On

Melissa Budasz is an artist and curator who writes articles on her practice, collaborations and research projects. Her interests are in the history of women’s art, the narrative of women in art history and the concept of cultural ecology.

Her practice of photography, drawing and painting connects to symbolic and discursive systems such as myth, psychoanalysis and philosophy referencing nature, the female body and literature.

Rosie Campbell is a Trustee of SLWA and has a BA in Fine Art. She is an enthusiast for, and collector of women’s art. She was a director and coproprietor of research & marketing consultancy Campbell Keegan Ltd for 35+ years. She has considerable experience of research around social, cultural and creative industries and has conducted several research commissions for the Arts Council and various other DCMS bodies.

She was a member of the steering group who founded the think tank ‘Demos’.

ArtVerve

editorial team london

Editor Melissa Budasz editor@artverve.co.uk Co-editors Rosie Campbell Pia Goddard Moira Jarvis Laura Moreton-Griffiths

Contributors Melissa Budasz Rosie Campbell Leonie Cronin & Kim Thornton Pia Goddard is a fine art photographer, poet Pia Goddard and short story writer. After completing a degree Moira Jarvis in sculpture at Chelsea and an MA in Fine Art, Laura Moreton Griffiths Architecture & Critical Theory from KIAD in 1994, she worked for many years as a photojournalist and art educator. Her current practice is mainly image and text based, encompassing traditional crafting techniques. Her focuses are the tyranny of objects and the landscapes of transition: physical, emotional and imagined.

Moira Jarvis is an artist and teacher who completed an MA in painting at Wimbledon College of Art (UAL) and now works in one of the Cannizaro Park Studios. A curator for SLWA, her work explores personal and collective histories, with a strong interest in fragile ecologies.

Current concerns are waterlands and the peat fens where she grew up, their importance in terms of habitat loss, carbon release and flood defence, intermingled with their undercurrents of liminal associations of life and death.

Laura Moreton-Griffths likes telling tales.

Political stories about love and loss. Her diverse practice calls on autobiographical and cultural memories. Backwards to go forwards. Writing and making art. Drawing, painting, photography, digital collage, film and performance via a cast of characters and objects. She studied at St Martin’s School of Art (1986), Camberwell College of Arts BA (Hons) Painting (2008), and currently the Turps Correspondence Course.

Editorial Team/Credits

With thanks to Marvin Gaye Chetwynd & Sadie Coles HQ Cover photo Marvin Gaye Chetwynd The Idol (2015) Abbey Leisure Centre Barking, London Photo: Emil Charliff Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London Published online Issuu.com/artverve Designed by Melissa Budasz

@ArtVerve info@artverve.co.uk artverve.co.uk ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 2

ArtVerve comment

Ever since the feminist art movement began in the 1960s, performance art has flourished. The focus on the body, known as the ‘dematerialization of the art object’ and the rise of feminism encouraged debate about the division between the personal and political and anti-war activism. Current concerns may have shifted, but the genre has grown and celebrated in conventional museums and galleries. Our Features section on Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Bobby Baker and Marina Abramović explore three different artists ranging from Chetwynd’s performances with hand-made props and costumes using elements from folk plays, street spectacles and popular culture, to Baker’s reference of her personal life experiences, depression and mental health to Abramovic’s relationship between performer and the audience, and the limits of the mind and body. As this issue goes into publication, The Guerilla Girls: Is it even worse in Europe? has opened at the Whitechapel Gallery, revisiting their 1986 poster stating It’s Even Worse in Europe. This New York based group of unnamed women artists, writers, performers and film makers have fought discrimination for over 30 years. We pay homage to the energy, passion, discourse and humour that these extraordinary women have contributed to culture and art history. Our In Focus section celebrates the diversity of shows currently in London and New York that gives a perspective on histories of migration, activism and displacement. A packed issue with a Book/DVD section and a comprehensive guide to What’s On.

FEATURES

IN FOCUS

4 Laura Moreton-Griffiths in 32 Rosie Campbell visits the conversation with Mona Hatoum Marvin Gaye Chetwynd retrospective at Tate Modern 13 Leonie Cronin & Kim Thornton discuss Marina Abramović’s 512 Hours

17 ArtVerve interview artist Pat Cove who talks about Bobby Baker

22 ArtVerve top pick of 20 influential performance artists

Contents Page

39 Melissa Budasz visits Georgia O’Keeffe at Tate Modern 45 New York review - Moira Jarvis visits Bushra Khalili’s The Mapping Project at MoMA, New York 48 New York review - Moira Jarvis visits Laura Poitras Astro Noise at The Whitney New York

BOOKS/DVD 53 Book review Bobby Baker’s Diary Drawings 54 DVD review of Marina Abromavic’s The Artist is Present 55 Book review of Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture 56 Book review of Re-negotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London

WHAT’S ON

57 What’s On for the next 51 New York review - Melissa 6 months in London, the Budasz visits the Nasreen UK and internationally Mohamedi retrospective at The Met Breuer, New York ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 3

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd in conversation with Laura Moreton-Griffiths

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Here She Comes, commission for the Arts Council’s 70th Anniversary, rehearsal, Govanhill Baths, Glasgow, 2016 Photo: Julia Bauer. Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

“To be robust is a bit like having a giant belly and deflecting any petty problems by bouncing them off your giant belly, I would love to be like that. To be like a giant blobby bouncy castle of a giant who could dispel the problems of the world with a wobble of my belly flesh, a God of humour and good will, buoyancy and laughter.”

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

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LMG: Marvin Gaye Chetwynd is your trading name, your nom de guerre. It claims kinship with Motown singer Marvin Gaye, a son shot by his father with his own gun, and emotes irony and sorrow. And your previous name, Spartacus, evokes revolt and the protective solidarity of freed slaves. You obviously felt the need to channel these qualities and be emotionally more robust. When you were the first performance artist nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, you were told that your work needed to be more robust to meet museum audience expectation. What does robust mean to you?

MGC: Wow your question is so full, it is full of empathy and connection, I don’t think I mind the prompt to become robust, the need to become more capable. It feels like growing pains or problem solving. So I don’t think of it as a bad thing.

I am not sure I am channelling the qualities of Spartacus or Marvin Gaye's life stories. I think I am using them as shields to deflect a certain public scrutiny. I am using the life stories of these heroes to make a joke. I am not saying I am as good as them or that I want to be them.

I am saying God forbid that what happened to them happens to me. It’s a private joke for myself, for me to remember to not let that happen. To be robust is a bit like having a giant belly and deflecting any petty problems by bouncing them off your giant belly, I would love to be like that. To be like a giant blobby bouncy castle of a giant who could dispel the problems of the world with a wobble of my belly flesh, a God of humour and good will, buoyancy and laughter.

LMG: In making your work more robust, you have had to resolve the tension between your informal way of working and market expectation. You came to film as a way of extending your narrative and allowing people to experience some of the mayhem of your Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

performances without you having to be present. You also display your costumes and props in the gallery while you are not there. It is a generous solution. Increasingly you have become a filmmaker. Do you still approach each performance as unique and the film simply its documentation, or have the films become more important in their own right?

MGC: Wow, u know everything...he he...it’s as if we have already talked at length, thanks!

Yes, I can say yes to all of the above. I do think of each performance as a unique experiment and opportunity. I am trying to make the live event fun, wild and exciting, rather than trying to make a good video or film, so often the documentation is not of good quality. It’s a sacrifice. I think I take the films seriously and I balance the ability to create the film with the ability to make the crazy events happen.

It is too ambitious and it doesn’t really work in a perfect way, but it does seem to hold my attention and I am not bored of trying to achieve it.

LMG: What comes across through all of your performances is your excitement to be alive, and determination to keep going. You say that your name changes were a private joke that kept you going, and you share this drive with your participants and audience – to keep them going and to feel good in the moment. Your performances are break out, transcendental moments of irresponsibility, and mayhem; you even kidnap your audiences. Yet your narratives are radical and about contemporary anxiety and ask questions of who we are, the systems that we operate in and hold us captive. A question that runs through your work is whether or not we have a quality of morale suitable to the digital, multisensory time in which we live - and can we update or create a new morality.

Can you tell me more about this heady mix of optimism and anarchy?

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MGC: Geeze, I am not used to someone actually listening to what I say! U have totally compiled everything I am into! Yes. I am optimistic and pragmatic. I believe in a model outlined by Harold Pinter in his speech for the Nobel Prize. He described how he works in an abstract way; almost blindly, he waits for the text to fall onto the page. He is not conscious and a strategist in his creative out put. He almost describes the plays arriving as a visionary flash, not geeked/eeked out and planned. Then he describes his ability to be a fully conscious civilian, critical of the powers that be and willing to follow procedure and analyse if it is moral, correct of worth?

I like this model. I like that is allows the artist to be as free and wild as they like. Then also, there is the same person’s ability to be aware and contribute to society as a conscious adult, responsible and clear sighted.

I discussed this with my husband recently and he said Frank Zappa was another person like this - wild in his free rein of creative mayhem and then also a calm family man with a mortgage!

I was introduced to the work by De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday things, by Nils Norman. In this text the idea that people are able to shift and react in small subtle forms of rebellion and agency is made clear.

I really enjoy the idea that through human adaptability we can be excited for the future. That there will be all sorts of subtle and delicate forms taking shape that will guide the next horizon for the planet.

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Tax Haven Run By Women, Frieze Projects, Frieze Art Fair, 14 – 17 October 2010 Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

ON CONTEMPORARY FEMALE AR

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LMG: Amongst the laughter and absurdity, there is much politics in your work, including Mediterranean refugees and debt culture. I don’t believe you set out with an agenda, and imagine that as you get more involved in a project and develop your ideas, connections and associations reveal themselves; like the multiplicity of the unconscious mind, subconscious politics are present and open to interpretation. Possibly a way of being political without saying these are my politics - hiding in plain sight. It is interesting that you say you can’t have a statement, and that you pose questions mindful of the art world’s dislike of stance. How do you see the relationship between your stories and politics?

go to just the upper echelon’s parties, I want to go to all the parties.

I would say I am political. I am thrilled hearing Jeremy Corbyn speak! It is as if a spell has been broken. I have never heard a person with integrity speak from a position of authority in the UK in my lifetime. I moved away from Britain to try to find a country to live in that reflected the politics I felt. I went to live in France, and learnt about the Frac system that supports artists. I lived in Holland and was shocked by the amazing support for artists there, for example, art students could expect up to four years of financial support after leaving college. And I lived in Estonia. I then moved to Scotland. I think oddly Scotland MGC: Crumbs, I am a little unsure now. U are feels like it is close to how I feel politically. I brighter then me, perhaps u are a replicant feel Scottish people have what I think of as like the ones in Blade Runner! Maybe u are integrity and I am interested in living there. burning brightly and soon will burn out? But Oh how brightly u shall have burned! He Your questions are hard, as I do hide my he. One answer could be that I was really faith (Catholic) and my politics (Acephalous influenced by magic realism. When I went to Society). I am used to being motivated and UCL to study History and Social Anthropology, questioning through the yearning of the I did a year of Latin American History. It was politics I hold in my heart. It is hard to be very repetitive, and confusing. The amount motivated by just the art world. It is easier of the same patterns of small revolutions to be inspired by exasperation at the state that happened was totally baffling, until I of world affairs! Or feeling you should be read Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 years of brave because you can; we live in a liberated, Solitude. The flow of this novel fitted and generous society. made sense of the factual information, the repetition and the loss of sense, the insomnia LMG: Your stories literally journey to and fantasy - it all worked a spell over me and underground caves, analogous to the made me understand the essence of what workings of the subconscious mind, had happened. I decided that the cleverness visualised with a whole calamity of chaotic of magic realism was worth paying attention and interweaving imagery and events. Your to; the persuasiveness of literature rather imagery and narratives are accessible and than fact to theory; the short cut of non call to mind sci-fi movies and sitcoms of our verbal communication of the words between; childhoods and appeal to the child in us. the trust and faith of being alive; the empathy You mix the carnavalesque, antiquated and and ambiguity rather than the exposure to highbrow. Your performances are like going deadening formality that was promoting to a rave and dancing all night. Can you tell impenetrable fact. I really enjoy the idea of me more about your themes? social fluidity. I am curious. I don’t want to Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

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MG: Themes… I know I have been told that I often am promoting the rehabilitation of underdogs. I want to celebrate and share information that is neglected or not well known. For example, I have made costumes or ‘characters’ about Uglies like Jabba (Star Wars), or Snails, Mandrake Man, Nero, ‘An Arsehole’, ‘Turtle entrails’, Richard Dadd, a Witchety Grub, the Brain Bug (StarShip Troopers).

LMG: You say that you are very lucky to have given complete artistic freedom. I agree - you have a unique voice - you had a colourful, free, and exotic childhood, lived in a nudist commune in Peckham and have degrees in Anthropology and Fine Art. You must do a lot of historical and cultural research. You talk about building a frame around which your troupe of participants is enabled to contribute and be free. There must be a fine line between control and mayhem. Creating a robust narrative, visualising the costumes,

puppets and interactions, increasingly from a filmic point of view. Your working process is held in your head, held together for a short period of time and then let go. Do you formalise your research in to script or storyboard?

MGC: Wow, your questions are so good, so full. I feel as if the less I say the better! I do hold them in my head. I have learnt a lot in the process of making the series of films Hermitos Children. I have learnt that I enrage and stress anyone who has a knowledge of ‘what filming should be like’… anyone who is professional who expects storyboards and a sense of what will happen in detailed script form. I have worked out that I work well with people who for unknown reasons know what I am doing. Now, I work well with a small team: my husband Jedrek Cichosz, Jenny Sims, Adam Christensen, Marc David Jacobs, Joe Campbell & Oscar Oldershaw. They are people who I have made the performances

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, The Snail Race, Galleria Massimo de Carlo, Milan, 6 March 2008

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

ON CONTEMPORARY FEMALE ART

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with but who also work and study film. I have worked on a puppet film over four years called Vision Vertical. It was a commission by Le Consortium. It was a breakthrough for me as it is a film made to be a film (not documentation of a live event that is layered and tweaked to qualify as a 'film' in it's own right). I used the interviews in Jan Svankmeyer documentaries to make a dialogue for the the puppets, so they are really intelligent and auto-reflexive. Also, in Liverpool this year for the Biennial, I made a film with up to 73 kids and young adults. It is called Dogsy Ma Bone. Again, I used a trick of re-writing the intellectual analysis of Brecht’s work and slipped the word ‘we’ in place of Brecht and it made the most exciting script.

I was so excited about the script idea that I couldn’t sleep at night. I knew it was good, and I was working with kids who can retain information and could say lines! They trusted me to deliver an interesting project. I have had a lot of feedback about this film. People seem to really like it. I can tell it’s because I am learning in public and this film seems like a breakthrough.

LMG: If its bad its abysmal, if its good its punk.

You make props and puppets out of scrunched and pigment painted cardboard, and quick costumes - your aesthetic is informed by your impatience to get on and make and perform your ideas. In the making you manage to capture your fun and excitement.

I am interested in the political economy to something of value that doesn’t play to the usual norms of capitalist economies and production. You seem to make something out of nothing, and leave little trace, other than an indexical bum print on a wall. Early on you were captivated by Yves Klein’s early performance work Anthropologies (1960), were he used the naked female body as a brush - you paint with your own naked body. All your elements: puppets, objects, costumes, participants, dancers, all formalised through film, come together to unmistakably use the Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

language of painting - but aren’t discrete saleable objects. Your gallery must monetise your work. You also teach, and there is the Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Supporters Circle. How do you fund your projects?

MGC: Again your question is so full! It is full to the brim, like a ‘Salambo’ feast! I know the quote from the start of your question, it comes form the Dutch interview at Witte de With - it is funny! And who are the ’the Marvin Gaye Chetwynd Supporters Circle’?? I think I need to know them. I could do with loads of help! (agh agha agha Popeye Laugh). I need to live to a budget and balance my books! I believe in living by earning money through a ‘mixed economy’. It’s important to earn funds from different sources so that you are not dominated by one - from day jobs (teaching and design work), and artist fees and through sales of products, yes. I was really influenced

by Virginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own. In it, she talks about how it is essential that to be creative, unbiased and original, it is important to have no debt to the source that is funding you. I do a lot of work unpaid.

This interview, your questions I am answering without thinking - I do not get paid for the time I am spending enjoying the exchange with you. It is natural and somehow, it’s important to be generous, to have loose reins.

I fund my own projects and bring some budgets from one project to another. I find it easy to make work with low economy. It is easy to invite friends who live locally, and to make costumes from fabric out of scraps and from free cycle. Most things do not cost a lot. I also take pride that the idea can work without a huge budget behind it. I put nearly all of the income from my art back into the projects. If u were to look at the model of my small business compared to a business plan for another company that started in 2000, u would see that they perhaps ploughed the profit into the company for the first three ON CONTEMPORARY FEMALE ART

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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Here She Comes, commission for the Arts Council’s 70th Anniversary, rehearsal, Kinning Hall, Glasgow, 2016

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

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years and after that began to cream a wage that was suitable to their working hours. I have continued to put the profit back into my projects and it is 2016. I am pretty sure a lot of artists do not pay themselves. When I am paid either through commercial representation or through an institution, I will nearly always pay half back into the project. I still fail to hold my fee away from paying for production. I live in Glasgow in a Network Rail subsidised flat.

It’s £395 a month for a 3 bedroom flat. One room is my studio. I pay for nursery for my son to go to outdoor nursery in the woods. I have teaching jobs and I love them. Teaching exposes me to critical thinking. To be honest I take nearly all the work I am offered.

LMG: A recent commission The Idol, a soft play centre in Barking called on your love of problem solving and managed to blend a paid-for commission with authentic artistic practice. You didn’t want the children dictated to by sentimentality and the usual norms of public design, so working true to your practice; you connected the parents’ area with the children’s play area, decorating the walls and apparatus with monochrome pattern and imagery that collaged together the old and the new. As a motif, you placed the Dagenham Idol, a Neolithic or early Bronze Age figure in a robot suit. The imagery was collaged together and printed on to permanent wallpaper. The process was similar to the process you used for your 2014 exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ; but different - the gallery walls were lined with images and excerpts from the Canterbury Tales, blown up on a photocopier and stuck together with cellotape. You also used the technique at Studio Voltaire. The project was an interesting experiment again, with being robust, and allying your informal working methods with the rigors of public art and health and safety. You worked collaboratively with local children, the team and construction engineers. So in undertaking a commercial Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

project you successfully aligned your fresh, excitable way of working and functionality sympathetic to the demands of the project. It looks great. It must have been very satisfying.

How did that commission come about?

Was Barking hands-off or did executing that balance require lots of negotiation?

MGC: Again I love your FULL question! He he he… we are going to have to be friends!!

I think u know more what I am about than anyone I know!! I was very involved in The Idol’s coming into existence. I worked with Marijke Steedman (the CREATE London Curator) and Grace Fidler (the ‘House of Play‘ designer) through Skype. We had meetings once a week, on Tuesdays. I was very excited to get the job. It is the job that I wanted more than any other job I have ever done! More than the Turner Prize, The Softplay! I had to compete against four other artists, and then there was the phone call. Waiting to know if I had won it! I was too scared to answer in case they were telling me no! I let the phone ring and then listened to the message, but annoyingly they left no message, so I had to ring back and wait to hear, and yes I got it!

It was because I wanted to work on a project where you feel ‘useful’, where as an artist you are actually useful!

I realised I have so many skills working on that job. I am compliant and then again able to be effective. I understood I had to visit the ‘House of Play’ company in Doncaster that made the soft play structures. Once I had visited the factory I knew what the parameters were, what shapes and ambitious places I could reach, what was a reality! I loved working on the commission. I feel like it proved to me that artists can be USEFUL and now of course this is all very apparent with ‘Assembly’ winning ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 11

RY FEMALE ART

the Turner Prize. Whether artists should only MGC: I have a solo show at CCA Glasgow be useful is another question! opening Nov 11th, that is going to be a next step for Hermitos Children 3. I have two further LMG: You have many projects and parts of the work to complete for Praxes and performances taking place nationally and Bergen Assembly in October and November. internationally. This year alone you have Next year, I have a potential children’s play worked with children in Liverpool to create area commission for Fondazione Sandretto Re Dogsy Ma Bone and worked with older Rebaudengo Turin, with a show. I go on a site people in Norway to create The Elixia App, visit in two weeks. I am teaching three days at a performative futurology of channeled Rijksakademie, Amsterdam next week. And I geriatric knowledge. You are working on have a solo show at Sadie Coles HQ coming Hermitos Children 3. What next? up and there are other projects too.

LMG: Wow!

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Odd Man Out, Sadie Coles, London, inaugural performance 05 May 2011 Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

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Do you believe in Marina?

512 Hours at the Serpentine Gallery

To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition Carlos Castenada

Marina Abramović: 512 Hours (2014) Catalogue by Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Sophie O’Brien Published by Koenig Books ISBN 9783863355821

Often referred to as the goddess or grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramović explores, in a body of intensely challenging work, the relationship between performer and audience. Shamanic in her focus on the ‘now’, her work tests the limits of the body, the possibilities of the mind, and the willingness of the audience to join her in performances that push audiences to their limits of patience, and indeed, early on in her career she learnt that ‘if you leave it up to the audience they can kill you’ (1972, one audience, 72 objects and a brief for the audience to do to her whatever they felt like).

Abramović’s early performance work revealed private and intimate acts in public places in her relationship with her partner Ulay played out in a performance of bodies passing on the hour in Relation in Space (1976, Venice Biennale) brushing against each other with ever increasing harshness. The split from her lover in The Great Wall Walk (1988) on the Great Wall of China, when they meet in the middle to say goodbye. The intensely personal Thomas Lips (1975) where she pushed her body to physical extremes of self-cutting, or the meeting again of her ex-lover in The Artist is Present at MoMA (2010) where ‘moment’ is pushed beyond itself to an unbearable intensity. The moments she creates echo moments in Carlos Castenada’s journey through altered states of reality in his attempt to find truth.1 Marina Abramović

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Questions of who is looking at who, and lines between audience and performer have always been central to Abramović’s performance work, where onlookers have been persuaded to slow down to the artist’s pace in her ritualized re-presentation of the everyday, her attempt to share the journey of emotional and spiritual transformation through extreme use of her body.

On the one hand her self-presentation has been likened to the presentation of a blank canvas on which we work out the answers to the very clear questions she poses about the nature of ‘moment’. On ther other her work has been widely criticised for its own self-regarding nature, leaving audiences divided about the honesty of its intent.

ArtVerve has asked artists Kim Thornton and Leonie Cronin to share their experiences of Marina Abramović’s residency 512 Hours when they visited the Serpentine together in 2014.

Consisting of a durational performance: 10am to 6pm, 6 days a week, 64 days, 512 hours was the total time Abramović inhabited the empty gallery.

At midnight each night she released a performance video diary of the days events ...

her own body and the audience as the subject, object and medium of her work. She has explored this dynamic in numerous works and student workshops. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York 2010, Abramović sat opposite her visitors across a table Weeks before 512 Hours opened there looking directly at them at the performative was already a buzz to her impending show. event, The Artist is Present. 512 Hours was A facebook page with a countdown and billed as her most immaterial show yet. the sense that this would be a must-see performance as the artist herself would be At the Serpentine Gallery, Abramović present. Although we didn’t fall into the committed to interacting with an audience Abramovic’s followers and fans category eight hours a day over 64 days. She said we became very aware of her celebrity status it would be open-ended and during those from postings and comments on social media. hours “something may or may not happen.”

It has been documented that some visitors Since the 1970s, Abramović has been using were moved to tears, “take in the silence” she whispered to one visitor, “just be present”. 2 As performative photographers we were both familiar with Abramović’s work and keen to see a pioneer performer at work. We were excited to experience a Marina Abramović performance first hand and meet the artist.

Marina Abramović

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Throughout her long and active career she has developed her performances from an ephemeral event into recording and reproducing her work for sale, her performance practice is offered to students through workshops and recently she has set up a Marina Abramović Institute. Even though the crux of her practice is immaterial she has managed to embrace the capitalist market and, like Warhol, fund herself through creating a brand and experience. Even though she is using her aura she knows her worth.

So you should always have a product that’s not just “you.” An actress should count up her plays and movies and a model should count up her photographs and a writer should count up his words and an artist should count up his pictures so you always know exactly what you’re worth, and you don’t get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame, and your aura.3 Andy Warhol, 1975

Queuing once more inside the gallery to wait for an assistant to place us in one of three rooms we found ourselves sitting at a desk with a silent instruction to separate lentils from rice and make a note of it, a particularly pointless task, but reminiscent of pairing socks, cleaning the windows, making dinner - those never ending reoccurring domestic tasks.

Despite the lack of purpose these repetitive tasks can be calming, a kind of mindfulness, a time to think and even to create. However it soon became tiresome with all the silence and weird displacement of taking exams in a gym hall, and not being able to move so eventually we got up and moved to the central room where people standing around the edges of the room waited to be invited to stand on a large square facing one another.

Watching others being shifted into place made you feel more isolated when noone approached and invited you onto the board. Then Marina herself was in the room leading people, standing behind them placing a hand on their backs. What would it feel like to have her touch you?

Getting to the show before it opened there were already a few people milling around in an informal queue that was infused with anticipation and anxiety about getting into the gallery after reports of hour long waits and of punters being turned away. By restricting the visitors to 160 a day there was a feeling of urgency and desire to be one of the few. So how thrilling when Marina herself appeared from the gallery and shook hands with us as we were admitted into the space.

LC: I decided I wanted her to guide me, not the assistant, she was the artist and orchestrator - was she a spiritual leader too? Or was this an ironic artist statement about leaders and healers? The other participants seemed to take her in both guises some looking and watching her like she herself was the exhibit and others seemed absorbed in their own experience as if they were meditating on the essence Marina was creating.

After deciding Marina must be ignoring my pleading eyes we went into the third We entered a holding room with lockers room to watch people walking very slowly for bags and coats; there was no time limit backwards and forwards the length to staying in the show. We were being of the room in a walking meditation. disrobed of our outerwear, as we were not only to be observers but participants in this performance.

Marina Abramović

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KT: When it came to the large room of people walking slowly up and down I felt beaten. I wanted to run, zigzag, lie on the floor, disrupt the path, anything but conform to the slow deliberate pacing of the other visitors. I gave it a go but quickly gave up. Standing at the edge watching the others, and thinking how pointless it was, I suddenly heard someone next to me saying, “would you like to try?”

It was Abramović herself. I told her it was too difficult for me but she exhorted me to give it a go and said, “let’s do it together”.

So Marina held my hand and I obediently walked slowly up and down the room. After a couple of lengths she left me to continue and I completed the prescribed seven ‘up and downs’.

So why did I do this, was I star struck or does Abramović have special powers? I felt that I wanted to please her and that is the only reason I can think of for doing as she asked.

I was also trying to understand what she was actually asking us to do - meditate, slow down, or was it an experiment in her powers of control? For me, without Abramović, the work lost its interest and focus; I couldn’t be bothered to do all the tasks properly.

With her by my side I was prepared to try.

We left the gallery confused and felt like we had been used. Abramović’s intention might have been to instil mindfulness and some kind of spiritual essence but her fame as an artist and her requirement to have an audience to complete the work leaves you battling with her intention. On the video of her last diary she proclaims what a great experience it has been at the Serpentine and perhaps she can now change the world.

The institution may overshadow the work that it otherwise highlights: it becomes the spectacle, it collects the cultural capital, and the directorcurator becomes the star. 4 Hal Foster mid 1990s Nicholas Bourriaud’s theory of ‘relational aesthetics’ relates to the audience completing the work but as the audience becomes the work and the artist doesn’t exist without the work there becomes an interdependency between the two. Abramović’s 512 Hours is made to be lived through and it is certainly founded on the idea of human interactions, all part of Bourriaud’s thinking. Here the artist curates the audience, being the Queen to move the pawns and broadcast to the people.

Like a party where the host is central to the enjoyment of the occasion the party is no fun without its celebrity Abramović. But we couldn’t help wondering where Abramović would be without her audience.

References 1 Carlos Castaneda (1925-98) was a Peruvianborn American author who wrote a series of books that describe his training in shamanism, particularly a group that he called the Toltecs.

Mark Savage, BBC News entertainment reporter : bbc.com/news/entertainmentarts-27798250 2

Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Print.

3

We left feeling her more to be a self-serving publicist rather than an activist because 4 Cited in Bishop, Claire: Antagonism and the residency is ultimately all about her. Relational Aesthetics, October (Fall 2004, Abramović has become her own institution. No. 110) p.53, accessed at: teamgal.com/ production/1701/SS04October.pdf Marina Abramović

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Recollections of the artist Bobby Baker ArtVerve in conversation with Pat Cove The artist Bobby Baker has worked for over 40 years across disciplines, incorporating performance with installation, drawing and multi-media. Her gift is for subverting domesticity. Known largely for her work exploring mental illness and how people cope with difficulties, Baker celebrates this in her performances combining her professional and personal position within the world of both the arts and mental health. Baker originally studied painting at St Martins College of Art, graduating in 1971.

Bobby Baker Mad Gyms and Kitchens (2011) Š Bobby Baker Daily Life Ltd. Photo: THIS IS Studio

Early on in her career she taught in the same centre as artist Pat Cove, a community workshop for the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA).

Pat first worked in the Crèche and then went on to train for a food studies course, which led her to take over the catering for the lunch club. At this time, the ILEA financially supported new courses that were facilitated through the Institute, so the Institute ran adult education classes for the community in the area. A book was published in 1973 by ILEA entitled An Education for The Whole Community1. Pat worked for the ILEA for 8 years and the community workshop between 1974-1991.

Bobby Baker

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ArtVerve : Pat, how was Bobby Baker involved invite. It is a silver foil food tray with an image of the pre-fab on the lid. Inside the foil dish is with the workshop? the PV invite plan. She had iced the interior PC: Well, she taught leatherwork at the ILEA marking each of the rooms and the windows. community workshop, which was a facility for She iced all the family members, tiny figures, all ages to do some craft work. It had a crèche with Bobby standing at the front door. for parents to drop their young children off and provided a lunch/tea club where I was the When I went to see Edible Family in a Mobile cook. We were based in an old school called Home in Stepney, I was astonished that anyone Christopher Hatton in Holborn, London, and could make these life-sized cake people. We the whole ground floor was the Institute and took the students from the centre to see it upstairs was the area where the refugees that and the whole class went with the tutors. I fled Chile in the early 1970s were housed. was blown away by it and I told my own family When we had a special occasion we invited that we were going that very weekend to see them down and we learnt a lot about the it together. It was incredible! Each room was social and political unrest in Chile at that time. covered ceiling to floor with newspapers. The daughter was covered in pink meringues; the son was in the bathtub made of Garibaldi ArtVerve: When did you first see one of biscuits and the father in the sitting room Baker’s performances? was made with fruit cake. The baby was in its cot and was made with sponge cake, and the PC: Whilst Bobby was at the Centre I think she mother was in the kitchen and was a tailor’s got a grant to make the house which was the dummy with a teapot for her head. It was first artwork I knew about - An Edible Family here that Bobby was serving tea to visitors, in a Mobile Home (1976). The house was handing out cake from the head of the mum.

Bobby’s East End home that was provided On the last day of the show everyone was by the ACME Housing Association.2 It was invited to eat all the cake from the figures an old pre-fab and its interior was covered - when I got there the father had half a leg in newspapers. She iced the headlines eaten and the meringues were disappearing with piping and a life-sized ‘cake’ person off the daughter - it looked like they were inhabited each room inside. I still have the PV

Bobby Baker’s PV Invitation sent to Pat Cove for An Edible Family in a Mobile Home (1976)

Bobby Baker

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being dismembered, it was hilarious. Bobby was there - she had a white overall on, which she always wears in her performances, the uniform of a faceless, female domestic.

The whole event was the most fantastic experience. I think it’s the first piece of performance art I had ever seen and it was the first time I had experienced art in this way.

The 1970s saw the second wave of feminism and gender roles and the domestic were explored and aired, empowering women. As a wife and mum I could relate to it, as I am sure most people could.

(including Baker) learnt a new skill and it was fabulous. I got to learn how to etch, weave, sew – all of this fed into my own practice later on as a maker. It was an incredibly creative time. I have no idea why Bobby was teaching leatherwork, but she would have learnt different craft skills like the rest of us. I think her love of working with icing came from when she worked with the cookery writer Elizabeth David3 who had a shop in Lower Sloane Street in London that sold posh pots and pans. Elizabeth David also sold icing tubes and to show how each nozzle could ice, she got Bobby to make a plaque and on this was an example of how each icing looked ArtVerve: Do you think working at the the plaque was on the wall in the shop. I think community workshop helped inform Baker’s Bobby got quite deft at working with icing early work? and this could be how icing became her main drawing tool.

PC: Each term at the centre, all the tutors

Pat Cove This Shoe was made for Walking (1984) . Calico and Card. Courtesy of the artist.

Bobby Baker

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Two of the supermarket items that Pat Cove bought for 1p each from Bobby Baker’s ICA installation Art Supermarket (1978)

ArtVerve: In 1978 Baker installed Art Supermarket at the ICA. She hand made every object, covering them with newspaper and writing in icing on the packages and stocked them in a mock-up shop in the gallery. Each item was priced for 1p and Baker was the cashier checkout.

Being part of each installation is an integral part of the interpretation, as Marina Warner says:

These private sketches strip away the comic acting which Bobby Baker uses to present herself in performance and they reveal the work’s roots in profound and painful self-exposure. 4 Marina Warner Bobby Baker

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ArtVerve: Why do you think Baker’s work strikes a chord with so many people? Is it the accessibility being outside a ‘gallery’ setting that helps broaden her audience and the interaction we have with it?

PC: Bobby is integral to each of her installations, we the audience are moved by it in a physical way and entertained too. She is very funny. All her work is to do with domesticity, about women’s lives and what they suffer. She links domesticity with suffering, later she had depression herself. I remember seeing a performance where she picked an item up like a tea towel and would link it to a depressive state. She went around the room picking up different domestic objects that each marked different points in her depression.

ArtVerve: So the domestic objects act as triggers or catalysts for various states, transforming the banal into the sublime?

PC: Yes. Her performances are very moving as well as being incredibly funny - she makes you think about why you do the things you do, the menial daily tasks that we largely do ‘unthinking’ out of habit, upbringing or indoctrination.

ArtVerve: You are a keen follower of Baker’s work, how do you think her work has developed over the years?

PC: Not long after she left the institute she took off to do other work - the next thing was one of the kitchen performances Kitchen Show (work that went on to tour the world).

She had two rows of seats in her kitchen at her home. I went on two occasions. For an hour she would talk to us, make you a cup of tea, talk about kitchen utensils etc. She spoke to us in monologue using kitchen utensils as her props. It was subversive humour all to do

Bobby Baker

with the way that women can be tied to their kitchens. When you are domesticated by your family and children, this happens to you.

I didn’t see her for some years and then I saw her at a Southbank event when she did a performance getting into a bathtub. She was talking to the audience all the time and we didn’t realise until she got up that the tub was filled with chocolate - she was completely covered. Then an assistant came on the stage and threw hundreds and thousands all over her. Bobby looked like a chocolate ‘jazzie’ sweet. This performance was a very professional production. There were lots of men in the audience (in early performances it was mainly women) - her work is enjoyed by both sexes. She has got quite masterful at what she does, she controls the piece, and her performances are shorter and concise.

References An Education for The Whole Community Publisher ILEA (Inner London Education Autthority) 1973 ISBN 10: 0716805294 / ISBN 13: 9780716805298 1

Bobby Baker and Friends: dailylifeltd.co.uk/ previous-work/early-work/ 2

Elizabeth David CBE, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Elizabeth_David 3

Renegotiating The Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London by Kathy Battista Publisher: IB Tauris & Co Ltd ISBN: 978 1 84885 905 0 (hb) / ISBN: 978 1 84885 9616 (pb) 4

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20 INFLUENTIAL

PERFORMANCE ARTISTS The history of performance art is integral to the history of art. It has changed the shape and direction of art history over the last 100 years, and it’s time that its extensive influence is properly understood. Throughout art history, performance (think Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, early Rauschenberg, or Vito Acconci) has been the starting point for some of the most radical ideas that have changed the way we - artists and audiences - think about art... Whenever a certain school, be it Cubism, Minimalism, or conceptual art, seemed to have reached an impasse, artists have turned to performance as a way of breaking down categories and indicating new directions.

RoseLee Goldberg

http://www.theartstory.org/movement-performance-art.htm

ArtVerve has dedicated the next few pages to the most groundbreaking and revolutionary media artists, who have used performance to challenge the traditions of visual art - a search to find new art forms and new audiences with their bodies, music, dance, ritual, endurance, ‘happenings’ and ecology. During and since the 1960s, women have made up a large percentage of performance artists thriving on moments of social and racial unrest, political change and the ownership and discussion around female sexuality.

20 Influential Performance artists

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Laurie Anderson (b 1947, USA)

Born Glen Ellyn in Illinois, Anderson trained in music (violin) and sculpture and made several performance art pieces in the 1970s using the spoken word, electronic technology, dance and visual media. Famously known for her 1981 single O Superman, which reached No 2 in the UK music charts.

Pioneering in electronic music and inventing many of the devices she performs with – a talking stick, a controller than can access and replicate sounds as well as creating a tape-bow violin. Her first performance was a symphony played on automobile horns in 1969. Her most cited performance Duets on Ice (1970s) involved her playing the violin whilst wearing ice skates with the blades frozen into a block of ice. In 2003 Anderson became NASA’s first artist in residence, which inspired her performance piece The End of the Moon and in 2005 she visited Russia’s space programme and took part in the The Arts Catalyst’s Space Soon event at the Roundhouse. Anderson has collaborated with numerous musicians and composers and formed part of the team that created the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and in 2010 composed Delusion at the Vancouver Olympic Games and the Barbican Centre, London. Her exhibition, The Waters Reglitterized (2005) was the diary of her dreams recreated as works of art that include drawings, prints and high-definition video. laurieanderson.com

Anne Bean (b 1950, South Africa)

Anne Bean has a near forty-year history of performance work. She first chose to use her voice as early as her student days at Reading University in the early 70s, initially in parodic pop group Moody and the Menstruators – an iconic early music-art collaboration in which music was performed but notions of

20 Influential Performance artists

‘pop’ and ‘group’ were somehow derided.

Nowadays, based in East London she is still preoccupied with how the voice can be sculpted (inspired by Joseph Beuys adage ‘your voice is a sculpture”), and the employment of many senses and media in her work. She was, in the post-sixties era of ‘happenings and artistic freedoms, one of the first British-based women artists to flaunt the irrelevance of boundaried, especially plastic, art practice. Bean has always favoured collaborative working - in the late ‘70s and ‘80s working with the Kipper Kids and for many years subsequently, with sculptor Richard Wilson and drummer Paul Burwell (The Bow Gamelan Ensemble). In recent years she is prominently associated with PAVES Crossing Zones involving four other women artists in diverse locations and her incarnation of Chana Dubinski, an alter-ego in which she produced work subsequently exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2013. annebeanarchive.com

Tania Bruguera (b 1968, USA)

Tania Bruguera is a Cuban installation and performance artist who lives and works between New York and Havana. Her work was part of the free live art programme during the opening of Tate Modern’s new extension this summer. She is one of the world’s most well-known performance artists and has built her career on often controversial works that examine power and control – often confronting the political mechanics and history of Cuba. This includes her 2009 work performed in Havana, entitled Tatlin’s Whisper – in reference to the Russian avant garde artist Vladimir Tatlin – where she set up a stage and offered “1 minute free of censorship per speaker”. Other examples include her piece at the Tate Modern in 2008 when visitors were aggressively marshalled by mounted police in the Turbine Hall.

Hannah Ellis-Peterson Guardian 9/2/15 ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 23

Sophie Calle (b 1953, France)

Sophie Calle’s work is seen to have roots in the tradition of conceptual art because the emphasis is on the underlying idea rather than the finished object. The French writer Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay (1988) that described one project in terms of a reciprocal loss of will on the part of both pursued and pursuer. Another project, Detective (1980), consisted of Calle being followed for a day by a private detective, who had been hired (at Calle’s request) by her mother. Calle proceeded to lead the unwitting detective around parts of Paris that were particularly important for her, thereby reversing the expected position of the observed subject. Such projects, with their suggestions of intimacy, also questioned the role of the spectator, with viewers often feeling a sense of unease as they become the unwitting collaborators in these violations of privacy. The deliberately constructed and in one sense artificial nature of the documentary ‘evidence’ used in Calle’s work also questions the nature of all truths.

Tate.org.uk

VALIE EXPORT (b1959, Austria)

Brand and critical act of self-determination exporting the artist out of herself, and society’s constructs, confinement and conformity. EXPORT challenged the media and it’s manipulation of sexuality and the negative authority it has over women.

Feminist. Funny. Revealing. Literally. Out and about she made now legendary Guerrilla performances. Making Tapp-und Tast-Kino (Tap and Touch Cinema) 1968, she wore a tiny curtained movie theater around her naked torso, and invited people to reach in and touch her breasts. In what she called ‘expanded cinema’ the viewer passed through the movie screen, shifting from watcher, to intimate encounter with real skin . During Aktionshose:Genitalpanik (Action Pants: 20 Influential Performance artists

Genital Panic) 1968, EXPORT walked around a Munich art cinema wearing crotchless trousers, giving everyone in the audience a face level screening of her exposed genitals.

Screening and distributing her sexuality freely, she broke with sexual etiquette and rules of passive engagement and the female body experienced in private or with the lights out, or mediated by a screen. In the subsequent posters she is wild haired, bare foot and holding a gun, perhaps a prosthetic penis, about to shoot the viewer at whom she is looking. Role playing. Macho aggression V femininity. Still practicing today VALIE EXPORT is one of the most radical and important conceptual film and performance artists. She is professor of multimedia performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. valieexport.at

Oriana Fox (b 1978, USA)

Oriana Fox work addresses the depiction of femininity in popular culture and feminist art, juxtaposing her own lived experience with these often-contradictory representations.

Her career as an exhibiting artist began with her inclusion in the 2004 New Contemporaries exhibition at the Liverpool Biennial and The Barbican. Since then she has shown her work and performed at numerous venues worldwide. Fox also worked as an editor in the field of art publishing from 2003 to 2008 and continues to pursue self-publishing projects. She was an artist-in-residence at Triangle France in Marseille in 2007 and at Metal Culture in Southend-in-Sea in 2010.

In 2009 she was the recipient of the Art in the Archive: Living with Make Bursary, presented by the Women’s Art Library/Make and Feminist Review, which culminated in an event called Once More With Feeling at Tate Modern.

Londonmet.ac.uk ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 24

Andrea Fraser (b 1953, USA)

Attending one of Andrea Fraser’s classes at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is a tenured professor, you may be lucky enough to see her perform passages of her now legendary ‘institutional critiques’ - she only makes limited edition performances to select audiences. Academic, high school drop out, anomaly; Fraser’s practice scrutinises the political and economic structures of the art world that she is part of. She role plays male and female artists, curators, critics, dealers, collectors and gallerists, adding in to the mix, her own envy of their success; the personalities crafted from meticulous internalised and memorised speeches and interviews. In Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk 1989, she performs a museum tour guide. In Kunst muß hängen (Art Must Hang) 2001 she reenacts a 1995 drunk, homophobic and misogynistic speech by artist Martin Kippenberger. In Official Welcome 2001, as if possessed, she enacts an entire art awards ceremony, artist and acolyte, at one point playing naked, she becomes the art object.

In Untitled 2003, she films herself having sex with one of her collectors. The collector paid for the video production of the performance not the sixty minutes in a hotel room. The Edition of 5 + 2 AP cannot be shown without her consent. Fraser precisely controls how her work is viewed and distributed. art.ucla.edu/faculty/fraser.html

Rebecca Horn (b 1944, Germany)

Rebecca Horn’s first major works were a series of body-extension sculptures that she began in 1968 and produced throughout the 1970s.

The catalyst for these works was her process of recovery from a serious lung condition that she developed from working with toxic sculptural materials, which necessitated a period of convalescence at a sanatorium that lasted almost a year. During this period, she became interested in the interaction between 20 Influential Performance artists

the body and the environment – especially in processes of constriction and isolation that render the body vulnerable. She subsequently began to produce sculptures designed to be attached like prostheses to the bodies of performers. Combining soft materials such as fabric and feathers with armatures of metal and wood, these prostheses lengthen the fingers and arms, elongate the head, and encapsulate the face; in this manner, they alter such basic functions as grasping, walking and perceiving. Both the artist herself and other individuals wore many of them in performances, some of which were filmed.

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Cornelia Butler, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2007

Knowles (b 1933, USA)

Knowles is an American artist known for her installations, performances, sound-works, and publications. A member of Fluxus, the experimental avant-garde group founded in 1962, she was a pioneer in performance art, food related performance and musical collaboration. Friends with John Cage, the pair worked together on the Notations book of experimental composition, and in 1968, with the help of composer Jim Tenney, Knowles produced the first computer poem.

Knowles uses the sounds of everyday life as source material - a collaboration The Bean Sequences is a 26 minute piece of music made with beans, glasses and human mouths.

Featuring in many of her compositions, beans are not presented as some great symbol of life but as something more to do with commonality of experience, of community, of practicality. The Bean Sequences embody the principal of the Fluxus movement, where the everyday object and its role in our lives can be framed very simply as art. Frijoles Canyon (1992), is a mix of the sounds of the New Mexico landscape with noises made by rocks, ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 25

cacti, and trees. The piece, made with the help of Joshua Selman, features a rainstick and woodhens. Her ‘Event Scores’ are instructions for re-contextualising as performance the actions, ideas and objects from everyday life.

The nature of the scores themselves suggest musicality and an option to reinterpret and vary continuously the work at each performance. The Event Score for Make a Salad (1962) is the instruction - make a salad.

This event was repeated at the Tate in 2008 and again at Art Basel this year. Performers and audience worked together equally, organically to recreate a giant salad tossed in a green tarp, which, like the performance disappears with the last leaf. aknowles.com

Joan Jonas (b 1936, USA)

at the Massachusetts Institute of technology.

She is a pioneer of video and performance art, emerging in the 1960s and 70s - her early projects provided the foundation on which a lot of video and performance art were based.

She began her career as a sculptor, which led to mixing props and images in industrial or natural environments. Influenced by the East-Coast avant-garde Judson Dance Theatre environment of the 1960s her experimental productions continue to be crucial in the development of performance, video, conceptual art and theatre. Jonas has lived and worked in many countries and her influences range from the Kabuki Theatre of Japan, myths, fairy tales and literature.

Since 1968, her practice has explored ways of seeing, the rhythms of ritual, and the authority of objects and gestures.

Jonas lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada and has held professorships joanjonasvenice2015.com/artist-joan-jonas at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden artandpoliticsnow.com/2014/04/feminismKunste in Stuttgart, Germany and currently and-performance-joan-jonas-and-gina-pane

Lorraine O’Grady Won’t you help me lighten my heavy bouquet?, 1980-83/2009 Silver gelatn fber print. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2016 Lorraine O’Grady/Artsts Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA 20 Influential Performance artists

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The Neo-Naturists Subversive performance group founded

by Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie and Wilma Johnson (1980s, UK)

Naked, joyous, fun, spontaneous, shocking, titillating, funny, bohemian, natural, outdoorsy, organic, controversial, freedom, powerful, messy, a unit, unstoppable, eccentric, outrageous, shocking, out-there, radical, non-conformist, disruptive, confrontational, guerilla-style nude happenings, innocence, primitivism, tribal…

Just some of the words used to describe the Neo-Naturists who appeared, naked, in nightclubs, fountains, museums, galleries and on the streets throughout the 80s in many performances, amongst them 1982 – Flashing at the British Museum (1982) and Swimming and Walking experiment, Centre Point Fountains (1984). It’s not against the law for women to appear naked in public, and the Neo Naturists appeared in not much more than body paint, challenging perceptions of body image, challenging feminist ideals, challenging red-faced policemen. As a reaction to Thatcher’s 80s culture of everyone for themselves, money as motivating principle, and art as investment for the elite, the Neo Naturists stripped off alongside Leigh Bowery and jumped into the fray of London’s subversive club culture, re-formed in the aftermath of punk as the home of the newly formed New Romantic club scene. Amongst their collaborators and fellow artists, inhabitants of the wildly decadent club scene, were Michael Clark, Boy George, Derek Jarman, and Grayson Perry.

Their joyous, explosively celebratory use of the naked female form ran counter to the rising tide of images of perfect, commodified, sexually provocative bodies, promoted by the media. In contrast, their naked happenings promoted the notion of ‘body positive’, their performances celebrated the beauty 20 Influential Performance artists

of all bodies. Like some after echo of the flower power movements of the 60s, their spontaneous, organic events were both anarchic and gentle - a deliberately simple but overpowering response to the Thatcherite consumerist remodelling of society. Against a backdrop of very public political reaction - of ‘self’. Boundary-pushing fashion shows and decadent performance art were common club currency, and here the Neo-Naturists performed with a blatant exhibitionism tempered with whimsy, and a primitivism at the heart of much of the counter-culture of the time. In their performances ancient ritual and contemporary life met unabashed, primitive spirals and symbols on naked flesh, in a ‘consiously unfashionable’ confrontation of ‘accepted’ body image. Underlined with the unavoidable humour inherent in the naked painted body, the Neo Naturists gently but firmly challenged the conventions of society and society, subverting everything with a smile. englandgallery.com/ the-neo-naturists/ studiovoltaire.org/exhibitions/archive/nightneo-naturists/ bbc.co.uk/culture/story/20160722-thenaked-performers-who-shocked-london

Anna Mendieta (1948-85, Cuba)

Ana Mendieta is present and absent. The outline or print of her body, a personal and political space that gives material form to her loss of homeland and longing for family. She was a child refugee from Castro’s Cuba. Some say the displacement in her work foreshadows her violent death. Her husband, the minimalist sculptor, Carl Andre, told 911 his wife had “gone out the window”. Mendieta’s death of course, has nothing to do with her life or practice that was inspired by the earth’s vitality and ability to mend. An early proponent of ‘land art’, Mendieta didn’t bulldoze the land, but with empathy, joined her body with it, ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 27

sculpted, painted and performed it. Her ephemeral ‘happenings’ and silhouettes calling up a spiritual physicality. She made ‘earth-body’ sculptures in significant places and spaces, and shamanistically painted with her body, drawing on the magic of pre-colonial culture and art. Her materials were pigment and stone in its most raw, natural essence.

Mud. Twigs. Wild flowers. Fire. Gunpowder.

Blood from the abattoir. For Mendieta, blood was both symbol of male sexual violence and death; and transfiguration, menstrual blood and powerful female sexuality. Mendieta filmed or photographed everything she did.

Recently 104 of her films were found and digitised. The Mendieta estate is managed

by Galerie Lelong, New York and by Alison Jacques Gallery, London. tate.org.uk/art/artists/ana-mendieta-11167

Yoko Ono (b 1933, Japan)

Since the mid 1950s, Yoko Ono has created a vast and formidable body of artworks, films, performances publications and musical recordings, along with initiating many memorable gestures of political and social activism. In 1955 she moved to Manhattan where she met John Cage and artists such as George Brecht and la Monte Young who were associated with the Fluxus movement.

Influenced by Cage’s experimental approach to musical notation, Ono, Brecht and Young were the first to experiment with “event scores”, using the language of instruction to conceive a work conceptually. In Cut Piece 1964 Ono followed her score very closely.

She appeared on the stage wearing her best clothes and holding a pair of scissors, which she invited the audience to use to cut off pieces of her clothing. Cut Piece spoke of women’s vulnerability – in particular to the threat of invasion and violation, themes that appear elsewhere in her work.

20 Influential Performance artists

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, Cornelia Butler, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 2007

Lorraine O’Grady (b 1934, USA)

Lorraine O’Grady is an artist and critic whose installations, performances, and texts address issues of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. Born in Boston and trained at Wellesley College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an economist, literary critic and fiction writer, O’Grady had careers as a US government intelligence analyst, a translator and a rock music critic before turning her attention to the art world in 1980. The New York Times in 2006 called her “one of the most interesting American conceptual artists around.” First exhibiting at the age of 45, O’Grady, using her persona of Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, invaded art openings wearing a dress made of 180 pairs of white gloves from thrift stores, whilst beating herself with a white ‘cat-o-nine-tails’, shouting poems that spoke of the segregation of the art world that was perceived to be controlled by a few circle of friends. O’Grady often targeted the racial divides in the early 1980s art world and the second-wave feminist movement’s lack of attention to issues of race and class. She says, “the Futurist dictum that art has the power to change the world and was in part created as a critique of the racial apartheid still prevailing in the mainstream art world”.

Her performance made an entry point to WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and O’Grady was selected for the 2010 Whitney Biennial. lorraineogrady.com

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ORLAN (b 1947 France) ORLAN, born Mireille Suzanne Francette Porte, changed her name at 15 years old. She is the Professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’arts de Cergy-Pontoise and lives and works in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. She is best known for ‘carnal art’ - plastic surgery where she has transformed herself into elements from famous paintings and sculptures of women; her aim is to morph herself into the ideal female beauty, largely depicted by male artists. From 1990-95 ORLAN underwent 9 plastic surgery operations whilst she was conscious that were filmed and broadcast to institutions throughout the world. She says her work is a, “struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, nature, DNA – and God.” She also believes it is important to underline her work as a feminist artist. “All my life I came second, as men were always coming first. Not to talk about feminism would mean that I didn’t respect myself.” 1 ORLAN’s surgery includes work on her nose to look like Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Psyche, her lips to resemble Francois Boucher’s Europa and work on her eyes to look like Diana (as depicted in a 16th-century French School of Fontainebleu painting), and the forehead to be like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. orlan.eu theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/jul/01/ orlan-performance-artist-carnal-art 1 Gina Pane (1939-90, France) Pane was a Paris based Italian artist who studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Le Mans (1960-1965) and ran a studio specifically for performance art at the Pompidou Centre, Paris (1978-9). Pane was an early pioneering and influential proto-feminist artist; her late

20 Influential Performance artists

60s work places the body in nature with performances centred on ritualistic acts of self-mutilation. In 1971 Unanaestheticized Climb was a performance where she climbed barefoot on a ladder with rungs studded with sharp metal objects, stopping when she could no longer endure the pain. In Sentimental Action (1973) she takes the thorns from a bunch of roses and cuts them into her arms. The themes of suffering, death and redemption run throughout her work. She is most well known for her performance The Conditioning (1973) where she laid on a metal bedframe with burning candles underneath.

This was given further prominence when Marina Abramović recreated the piece as part of her Seven Easy Pieces (2005) at the Guggenheim in New York. www.worldwide-artbooks.com www.artandpoliticsnow.com/2014/04/ feminism-and-performance-joan-jonas-andgina-pane Carolee Schneemann (b 1939, USA) Trained as a painter and one of the most iconic figuers in performance art and the feminist art movement, Schneeman is known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. Her body became a source of art production, itself a confrontational medium with which to endorse personal liberation and counteract the oppressive social milieu.

She has never referred to the victimization of women, rather her work focuses on sexuality and female liberation - the idea that the personal is political. Her huge leap forward was in making the form of the feminine body into something other than a focus for male desire. Interior Scroll a performance Schneemann made at Women Here and Now, an exhibition of paintings accompanied by a

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series of performances, in New York 1975, whilst reading from her book, Cezanne, She Was A Great Painter (published 1976), she applied strokes of dark paint on her face and body. Holding the book in one hand, she then read from it while adopting a series of life model action poses. She then removed the apron she was wearing and slowly drew a narrow scroll of paper from her vagina and read aloud from it. She says of her work, “It’s odd because the masculine dynamic of performance – what will become performance art – does not delimit them.

They’re never called performance artists, they are media artists and they can return to sculpture and painting and reliable handwork; whereas for women if you’ve used your body you’re identified with the performative label…the feminisation of performance occurs because as a public event, the body is in explicit action and so it may still connect to traditions of male arousal, male fascination with the female body. Even as we radicalized and disrupted those traditions.”1 caroleeschneemann.com tate.org.uk/art/artworks/schneemanninterior-scroll-p13282/text-summary 1 dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/ article/21236/1/carolee-schneemann-gamechanger

Barbara T Smith (b 1931, USA)

palette - flour, rice, lipstick, toys – the sets were a forensic exploration of the huge conflicting tensions she was undergoing as a mother and emerging artist. These intimate works were at the forefront of feminism and performance art in California, and accompanied the feminist questioning of lines drawn between domestic and creative, public/private, paid and unpaid labour. Smith’s performance work embodied her interest in religion, sexuality, sensuality, spiritual awareness, and the concepts of cosmos and community. Ritual Meal (1969) - friends eating a supper of raw meat with surgical instruments, to the accompaniment of projections of a beating heart, fused Christian symbolism with the New Age concepts coming out of California. In Celebration of the Holy Squash (1971), Smith created a whole new religion out of a vegetable husk, a ‘relic’ from a communal meal. Her endurance based performances - The Fisherman IS the Fish (1972) and Nude Frieze (both 1972) consider notions of martyrdom. Using her body in one as projection screen for hours, and ducttaping herself and others naked to the wall in the other, she questioned perceptions of helplessness and power, arguing that she was not at all helpless in her most famous performance, Feed Me (1973), a performance in which the public provided her with food and other forms of sensual connection. In 1970, along with Nancy Buchanan and Chris Burden, she founded F-Space in Santa Ana, the experimental art space where many of her performances were staged.

Smith graduated from California’s Pomona College in 1953, after studying painting, art history and religion. In the mid 60s, a mother getty.edu/research/special_collections/ at home with small children, she produced, notable/bt_smith.html, frieze.com/article/ in her front room on a rented Xerox machine. barbara-t-smith her five poetry sets. Prints made with images cellprojects.org/Columbidae.ThePoetrySet. of her own body and objects from a domestic BarbaraT.Smith

20 Influential Performance artists

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Elizabeth Stephens (b 1960, USA) & Annie Sprinkle (b 1954, USA) (SexEcology)

Hannah Wilke (1940-93, USA)

Wilke who taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York, from 1974-1992, is considered to be the first feminist artist to use vaginal imagery in her work. Wilke worked with performance and installation, photography, assemblage, drawing and sculpture. Innovative and controversial throughout her life (chewing gum and terracotta vulvas) her work tackled gender, sexuality and feminism. Asserting her body as the space to comment on the history of exploitation of women in fine art and popular culture, she most poignantly continued to use her body, ravaged from the effects of lymphoma, as she was dying. Known in the 60s for her suggestive sculptures in latex and clay, the 70s was the start of her performance work, mainly through photography and video, in which she responds to the erotic representation of women in art history and popular culture by seizing control of the creation and representation of the female image. A strident voice in the feminist protests of the 70s, Wilke’s most famous work, Through the Large Glass, is a reply to Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, also known as The Large Glass, in which she dissects identity through dress - her efforts to become a male character mirroring Duchamp’s cross-dressing women, her mirror reflecting everything the other way round in a deconstruction of accepted cultural modes of gender and sexuality.

In their own words: Beth Stephens, Ph.D. is an ecosexual performance artist, filmmaker, activist and educator. Stephens’ preferred pronoun is “tree.” Tree had made artwork, performance and writing about queerness, feminism and environmentalism for over 25 years. Beth’s current focus is SexEcology, a new field of research. Dr. Stephens is the Founding Director of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab at UC Santa Cruz where she has been a Professor of Art for 22 years. Annie Sprinkle has been creating multi-media about sexuality for four decades. She was the first US porn star to earn a Ph.D. Coming out as an ecosexual in 2008 changed her life forever for the better.

Sprinkle was proud to be awarded the Artist/ Activist/Scholar Award from Performance Studies International. She is into many nature fetishes and fantasies. Together Stephens and Sprinkle are founders of the “ecosex movement, and officially added the E (for ecosexual) to GLBTQII-E in 2015. Their award winning documentary film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story has been screened internationally and can be viewed on Netflix and Itunes. Currently they are working on a new documentary film, Water Makes Us Wet. Sprinkle and Stephens are married to the Earth, Sky, Sea, Soil and many other nature entities. They performed in the Venice Biennial in 2009 and have new work landmarks.utexas.edu/video-art/hannahin Documenta 2016/17. wilke eai.org/title.htm?id=1787 sexecology.org hannahwilke.com/id27.html earthlab.ucsc.edu theEcosexuals.org

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Mona Hatoum Tate Modern

4 May - 21 August 2016

Finnish National Gallery

7 October 2016 - 26 February 2017

Rosie Campbell review

Mona Hatoum - Exhibition View (2016) Finnish National Gallery. Photo: Petri Virtanen

Introduction: Ambiguity and ‘Not Knowing’

slow and meditative consideration. It plays with you, suggesting one thing, then another.

“I love this not knowing ...” Mona Hatoum I like this intellectual load; I enjoy the sense says, in one of her performance interviews. of puzzle solving involved in teasing out The phrase just keeps on returning to me ... additional meanings, references and allusions.

So, I’m just going to head out, write about her and her fabulously rich and varied back In short, I find, again, I also like this ‘not catalogue of work, To start - excited - but knowing’. When I confront her work ... without fully knowing where the thoughts and words are heading.

A wise neuroscientist called Semir Zeki has made it his life’s work to research what Ruminating on Hatoum’s work, I am curious happens to the brain and its functioning to examine what you get, what the buzz is, as when we experience art and artefacts. One a viewer, a ‘receiver’ of her art? conclusion he suggests can be summarised thus; we get an added ‘hit’ from artworks Often the work rewards lengthy thought, Mona Hatoum

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that contain or constitute ambiguity. Our more primitive brain areas, the frontal lobes, which nearly always generate immediate responses (essentially ‘broad brush stroke’ emotions…) ‘enjoy’ the interplay between strong emotion, possible confusion, ideadeciphering, re-designating of emotion and back around again. The seesawing, or circularity of emotion/decipher and the possibility of multiple interpretations typically satisfies our minds more profoundly and creates a stronger, more memorable response to an artwork, than the more ‘simple’ yes/no style feeling we get in the face of unambiguous work.

minute - a woman walking through familiar Brixton streets. The next, menacing, painful and rebuking - she’s bare-footed, dragging her boots. Your mind can’t help skipping to a ‘ball and chain’ metaphor.

Experiencing her entire Over My Dead Body show is rather like going to a fantastic theatrical production - you get a journey through a mass of emotions.

It is an exhausting and deeply unrelaxing experience. A continuing sense of mild anxiety, I realised, emanated from the always audible electric hum from Homebound, which she describes, eloquently, as containing the The ‘brain-game’ generated by conflicting suggestions “... the confinement ambiguity is definitely an important of domesticity... ” and “... something going and positive intellectual pleasure from dreadfully wrong”.

an artist like Hatoum.

The ambiguity of safety hiding menace She is an absolute expert at teasing us with is perhaps Hatoum’s central discourse. the possibility of different, even opposing understanding her work. The cabinet full of Murano glass grenades, Natura Morta (Medical Cabinet) is a perfect and extremely beautiful example of the fight between idea, materials and realisation and is centrally ambiguous. Is it the beauty of the glass forms, (reminiscent of Xmas baubles) which is shattered by their lethal intent? Or is the reference to conflict and the ‘value’ of weapons of destruction making a mockery of aesthetic allure...?

Chapter 1: Comfort, Familiarity, Anxiety and Fear… The Big Recurring Themes.

Often, wandering through the Tate Modern show, I experienced polar emotions in quick succession while soaking in the look, feel, sound or story of an individual work. A performance piece like Hatoum’s ‘Roadworks‘ feels friendly, nostalgic and accessible. One Mona Hatoum

And it is, as she notes in almost every interview, at least partly rooted in her personal experience of exile and being torn from her childhood home in Lebanon (though she’s of Palestinian descent) and effectively ‘trapped’ in London at the outbreak of war in 1975.

Awaiting the return of peace for her return became a 15 year exile.

Now, she describes herself as ‘most content’ living somewhat nomadically, enjoying the enforced travel and periods of short- term relocation, which an international programme of shows, talks and projects generates.

Despite her almost visceral need to shatter our comfort at every moment, to transform the everyday to malevolence, humour to trauma, there is still her profound elegance, her loveliness, and the way in which she almost can’t help making visually sensual and eyeball-pleasing artifacts. I guess this is what ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 33

Mona Hatoum - Exhibition View (2016) Finnish National Gallery. Photo: Petri Virtanen

underpins her work and projects.

How impressively (and, as you’d expect, articulately) she speaks about her work and She’s sexy and sensual in person - just the long lead times and planning that go into watch the luscious journey through her own realising an idea from first thought to material body that is Corps Etranger (1994). You feel installation. embarrassed by your enforced voyeurism (amplified by the other viewer opposite you, When it works, when the original idea who you are cleverly forced to confront)… I gets carried through to the final piece, can’t believe this piece was made in 1994, it’s like magic… one of the first of its kind - the artist’s body as Mona Hatoum, Illuminations (2001, 2005) introspective document.

She is ten years older than Damien Hirst, who she occasionally and superficially reminds me of at times across her show. But where he is about pure sensation (and I would argue a lack of ambiguity) she is all about nuances and ‘deliberate misreading’...

For example, she speaks about how important her very specific choices of materials are. She is choosing for us to ‘read’ the barbed wire, the magnetic iron filings, the culinary objects, the human hair, very definitely as extra and metaphoric levels of the expressive concept.

Nothing is selected simply for its colour, texture or manipulative qualities alone.

Materials come laden with their cultural stories and past employment records.

Mona Hatoum

When Hatoum’s work is considered chronologically she has clearly soaked in both the artistic mores of the time, but always, always, her references are wider – prevailing global, political and often women’s cultural concerns are reflected, critiqued and interrogated in her output. Her earliest work (from her time in London post-Slade, in the early Thatcher years) is both more strident, argumentative and more ‘locally’ political than later work – which feels somehow transcendent, expressive of more complex multi-layered ideas – but softer and more sensual. And, not surprisingly, for an artist who always references her time, the work becomes more technologically sophisticated over the years.

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Hot Spot is magnificent, aptly described by Adrian Searle in his Guardian review as ‘… no less impressive for the fact you can imagine it decorating the lobby to Trump’s war room.’ (Scary dystopian fantasy, one hopes..!)

Chapter 2: Surrealism, Menace and the Dream World: Art World Influence Mona Hatoum is exemplary at playing the ‘knowing artist’.

Like Warhol she loves the ‘in joke’, the referential piece that bounces off our presumed knowledge and awareness of an earlier artist, work or movement.

Mona Hatoum Hot Spot (2013). Stainless steel, neon tube. 92 1/8 x 87 13/16 x 87 13/16 in.

(234 x 223 x 223 cm). © Mona Hatoum. Finnish National Gallery. Photo: Pirje Mykkänen

She has had her Pop Art moments over several decades. Though, somehow, even when she has created room-filling pieces and there are bells and whistles galore (consider Hot Spot, 2006). I never feel it’s just lazy or swanky like I do with Hirst or some of the earlier Pop Artists like Oldenburg or Lichtenstein. In fact she also does Surreal and scale-shift work brilliantly, amusingly and in such nuanced ways. And, as ever, she puts the feminist case for the dreamed/fantasy as subject matter.

Her colonisation of domestic objects - often magnified to absurd size - and ‘combining’ Mona Hatoum

pieces, as sentinels of political or pro-feminist message - amount to ambiguity writ large. I warm to her humour, which is slightly lewd and a little slapstick. I find it much more challenging than many of the predictable Freudian surreal ‘one-liner’ ideas (think Magrite or Dali...) that we have become so familiar with in the art history canon; so often characterised by male sexual obsession - naked female torsos becoming the entire male face/table base/musical instrument... the supposedly art-permitted, and therefore ‘acceptable’, face of female repression or enslavement…

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Mona Hatoum Jardin public (1993) Painted wrought iron, wax, pubic hair 82,40 x 39,50 x 49,00 cm Finnish National Gallery. Photo: Pirje Mykkänen

As well as Surrealism, Mona Hatoum talks about her inspiration from Conceptualism – which of course, along with a rigid, doctrinaire abstraction, underpinned the cultural discourse of the 70s and early 80s student art world. (The Slade was especially smitten with non-plastic art forms while she was a student there...) Some times, I found the barely visible single human hair, like a tiny scribble, or faint urine stain on a sheet of white paper rather too conceptual (or, perhaps too abstract). There’s leaving your audience to ask questions of themselves and there’s leaving them to do all the work, and I find these veer to the latter...

is both abstract and highly figurative (it incorporates film of her mother naked, much of the time); conceptual but as meatily ‘real’ as any mammoth Louise Bourgeois sculpture.

Something virtually impossible to write about, and rather pointless to depict here in still form, it has all the best Hatoum elements.

It is moving, funny and beautiful, and makes significant issue of the political backdrop (of her exile and the separation caused by war) and female relationships (there is a soundtrack in which she reads her mothers’ letters and the issue of ‘permission’ to film, and her father’s likely disapproval are aired ...)

It sounds ‘overheard’, some times whispered, By contrast, pretty much my favourite work and the layer of Arabic writing, as on a in this show is the fabulous Measures of transparent curtain, feels like you are reading Distance (1988), a film installation that something highly clandestine.

Mona Hatoum

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The whole experience is formally very “Like an old school strip club…looking through beautiful. Go to her show just for this. a keyhole..”

Chapter 3: Room Talk, Overheard.

“Entrapment.”

Because the essence of performance works, and certainly conceptual artwork lies in the experience and evoked response, I used my visit to Over My Dead Body to eavesdrop and occasionally strike conversations with other visitors and gallery staff in each room. This felt an appropriate ethnography of my visit.

Room 3 “Very Simple. Very Powerful.”

“So, even her titles have two meanings - this Light Sentence.” “... something very simple, very powerful ...”

Room 4 “A sensualist.”

I end this piece with a series of verbatim ‘overheards’ that give a flavour of each room, “..oh gosh… the face that brightens up my and are, in many cases, rather poetic, in and days. I love that line.” of themselves. “…so very beautiful… I like the black and Room 1 “Cosmic Joke.” white filming; is it colour, actually?”

“She comes in to the gallery a lot .. (the “No, I think you just see colours.” works) have been touched up, like these iron filings…. by art handlers. But she comes in “…a complete sensualist. She loves her mum a lot. Actually, she surprises us quite a bit.” … You feel like you’re washing her.”

(Gallery attendant) Room 5 “Is it about washing?”

“This is very like something by Ai Wei Wei…” “I was in Rosemary’s garden and that’s what “Is there something inside or is it just an idea it looked like ... yes, kind of brickwork paving.” of a thing…?”

“It’s a political thing; I think its soap because “I think it’s just an idea of a thing…” its like washing your hands.”

“I kept thinking of Terry Pratchett’s giant Room 6 “I literally can’t stand being in here.” turtle …It does have a feeling of being a bit of a cosmic joke.”

“Does anyone stay more than a few minutes?

Its actually quite beautiful but I want to get “I had a pair of Dr. Martens’ like that.” out before it goes around again.”

Room 2 “Entrapment.”

“We’re not expected to stay in here..!”

(Gallery attendant)

“….yes…and the abstract beauty of these visual images ... it could be a nature documentary.” “I literally can’t stand being in here – its really scary.”

“Wow, that’s up her arse…”

Room 7 “Like a map of her mind” “About surveillance.”

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Mona Hatoum Light Sentence (1992) Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris Wire mesh lockers, slow-moving motorised light bulb 198 x 185 x 490 cm Finnish National Gallery. Photo : Petri Virtane

“It’s more like an author, or a composer, like “Its lovely - I wonder if Mona Hatoum made a cabinet of things that she had on her desk.” it herself?” “ I think she can’t have children…look at this “I think she did… then again, human hair is baby…its going to be sliced.” about torture for me.”

“This looks like a map of her mind; all her Room 10 ‘Beautiful Minimalist.” crazy ideas …”

“It’s simple but because of the size. It shifts Room 8 “Vegetable Racks.” from marbles to a structure” Room 11 “ I don’t see it any more; makes me feel a bit trapped.”

“I don’t think these go together very well. The (Gallery attendant) racks look like something weird and minimal, then there’s this Hot Spot piece, which is so “This is a bit like hair again. Massive hairs.” amazing.”

Room 12 “More trapped feelings.” “… yes, look like my vegetable racks, they do. I can’t see the point of the globe, its just Room 13 “All about Palestinian History.” a world, but I suppose it means there’s war zones everywhere …”

“They are really beautiful, these carpets” “This is massive.”

Room 9 “Human hair is about torture…”

“I’m just reading they come from different regions and it’s a charity.”

“So many levels, the Arabic scarf, and as if her hair has been pulled out to make it.”

Room 14 ”I NEED A SIT DOWN.”

Mona Hatoum

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Georgia O’Keeffe

Tate Modern 6 July - 30 October 2016 Melissa Budasz review

Georgia O’Keeffe Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico / Out Back of Marie’s II (1930), Oil on canvas mounted on board, 24 1/4 x 36 1/4 (61.6 x 92.1), Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Gift of The Burnett Foundation, © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/ DACS, London

“I seem to be hunting for something of myself out there … something in myself that will give me a symbol for all this - a symbol for the sense of life I get out here” 1 Georgia O’Keeffe

It has been 23 years since I saw the first retrospective held in London at the Hayward Gallery of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. Tate Modern’s current retrospective is a much bigger and broader survey covering 60 years from the 1910s up to the late 1960s. Set chronologically over 13 rooms, it’s impossible to absorb the detail and the sheer volume in one visit - these 100 works certainly shows Georgia O’Keeffe

the breadth of O’Keeffe’s creativity. The catalogue itself is rich with articles from Susan Hiller, Griselda Pollock, Georgiana Uhlyarik and curator Tanya Barson, covering diverse aspects of O’Keeffe’s art and life from her artistic dialogue with Stieglitz (Sarah Greenough, senior curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington), Location and Dislocation (Cody Hartley, Director of the ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 39

Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986 Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 1932 Oil paint on canvas, 48 x 40 inches, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art,, Arkansas, USA Photography by Edward C. Robison III © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London

Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986 From the Faraway, Nearby (1937) Oil paint on canvas, 914 x 1019 mm The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1959 Photo: Malcom Varon © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/ DACS, London © 2015 Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource/ Scala, Florence

Georgia O’Keefee Museum) to The Abstract work, to give it value, has to be pitched Landscapes (Heike Eipeldauer and Florian against her contemporaries too, although not Steininger). fetching nearly as high value in the art market as male painters. Selling for over $44m in 2014, There is no denying the freshness and Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932) was vibrancy that O’Keeffe’s paintings convey, the most expensive painting sold by a woman they are at once knowing and seductive - this sets a precedent in a world where combined with discovery and innocence. Her women art-historically have been written out, obsession with painting the same image over ignored and uncelebrated. O’Keeffe marks again heightens this. O’Keeffe was a painter the change not just in the art market, but also of the elements in nature - flowers, rocks, in our consciousness as a painter of value. In skulls, skies that are deliciously delivered 1946 she became the first woman to earn a with a keen eye and strong contours, colour retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and plane. They are primal and sexual and in 1970 a Whitney Museum retrospective. because of the elemental subject matter by way of association - I enjoy this synesthetic So what’s not to like? I didn’t enjoy the skull transformation from the real to the magical. paintings as much as I would have liked to, the definition and tone wasn’t to my palette.

Known as the ‘mother of American I would have preferred to see the skulls as Modernism’, O’Keeffe’s work matters, at the pencil or charcoal studies. I found some of time she was painting and now. She remained her urban cityscapes of New York stark and true to her own vision, which was based claustrophobic; you sense how detached she on finding the essential, abstract forms in is from her subject matter compared to her nature. We are fortunate that we have access later works in the desert. Flat vertical lines, to her writing, interviews and documentaries often in silhouette; her painting years in New where we can see and hear her voice. Her York left me flat - the daring and vibrancy in Georgia O’Keeffe

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Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986 Oriental Poppies (1927), Oil paint on canvas, 762 x 1016 mm Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/ DACS, London

her nature works is where she really takes flight and she comes into her own. Resentful of any typecasting, taking on the New York skyscrapers as her principle subject from 19251930, she said of this time she wanted to be,

to other themes in her work. The artist and carer for the last two years of her life, Christine Taylor Patten, tell us of her simplicity and ‘oneness’ with what she felt.

Known predominantly for her flower paintings, it’s easy to see why, they have a vibrancy and life force and you sense the joy she had in painting them. They fill the frame mainly in singular form, cropped and magnified. Her flower paintings have had much over-exposure and analysis compared

O’Keeffe was a woman who did her own thing and defied the norm of the time - had an affair and then later married her mentor and lover the photographer and gallerist, Alfred Stieglitz.

Stieglitz wanted O’Keeffe to be the ‘modernist woman’ and becoming the object of his vision and photography, he sexualised O’Keeffe.

“… She felt the sensuousness in those “... so magnificently vulgar that all the forms … it was around her and this gave people who have liked what I have her power in her life to be conscious been doing would stop speaking to of those forms and colours … it comes me” 2 from inside first” 3

Georgia O’Keeffe

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Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986 Music - Pink and Blue No. 1 (1918) Oil paint on canvas 889 x 737 mm, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth. Partial and promised gift to Seattle Art Museum © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London

“O’Keeffe also played a role in this great awareness of female eroticism through her participation in the creation of Stieglitz’s nude photographs of her and through her non-objective charcoals and paintings of flowers that embody her feelings about specific relationships” 4

her canvases. There is no denying the open and bold way she looks into Stieglitz’s lens, these photos are not about adornment, and they are beautiful in their simplicity and openness - much like her artwork.

In Griselda Pollock’s essay in the catalogue, Seeing O’Keeffe Seeing, she talks of what happens when we ask the question what is the artist trying to see? As opposed to asking Stieglitz’s images of O’Keeffe sit in the gallery ‘what kind of artist is she?’ And, ‘where does next to O’Keeffe’s artwork, revealing her she fit art historically as a movement or style?’ nudity in cropped forms - torsos, hands, face, which heightens the intimacy, these “O’Keeffe’s life and work intersected are moments that feel very private. We with a new consciousness amongst see the artist as subject and lover - how women - artists and art historians alike do we read and relate to these images - that was articulated through artistic next to her paintings? That she was bold, independent, and thoroughly modern? practices and that demanded a new

kind of art history after 1970.” 5

Stieglitz exhibited these images of her and her paintings in his gallery and they Pollock goes on to say that the dominant celebrate her form as much as the forms on theme of the reception of O’Keeffe’s work Georgia O’Keeffe ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 42

Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986 Wall with Green Door (1953) Oil paint on canvas, 762 x 1226 mm National Gallery of Art, Washington, Corcoran Collection © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London

is that she is a ‘woman artist’ rather than an of one’s gender, in the world” 6 artist that is a woman. O’Keeffe is famously quoted as saying, It is O’Keeffe’s later work and shift further into abstraction that places her high up with “Men put me down as the best woman her contemporaries - Mark Rothko, Helen painter … I think I’m one of the best Frankenthaler, Barnet Newman, Josef Albers, Agnes Martin. painters” Georgia O’Keeffe

How O’Keeffe saw herself, demonstrates the shift in consciousness and how we perceive her art. Fiercely independent, living remotely, driving endless miles in search of new rocks, bones and views in the landscape, she often camped out in the desert and adapted the back seat of her car to paint, shielded from the harsh sun. Pollock goes on to say,

“… if Modernity can be characterised as giving rise to a profound challenge to this concept of ‘Woman’, the making of modern art by modernist women is a remaking of both what woman can be and how to exist beyond its definitions but not outside Georgia O’Keeffe

I love the luminous abstract paintings looking at skies and the landscape through the contours and holes of rocks and skulls burnished by the wind and bleached by the sun. Her palette is pared down and the line is simple. Her mastery comes to light, similar to her earlier minimal abstractions in charcoal in the 1910s. She returns from abstraction to figuration back to abstraction again with a unity and growth that has evolved in the way she had. In these later works there is a balance with nature and abstraction, the organic and geometric.

The abstract landscapes and various doors and windows she painted again and again minimal and inventive in their simplistic form, especially in My Last Door (1952-4) which, ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 43

Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986 Sky with Flat White Cloud (1962), Oil paint on canvas, 1524 x 2032 mm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Bequest of Georgia O’Keeffe © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/DACS, London

“… opened up O’Keeffe’s view into infinity - a compelling totality of meaning and existence” 7 The paintings in the last three rooms keep my attention the longest - the canvases are bigger, the lines fewer and her palette is restrained and this is where the flatness of her style works, especially in White Patio with Red Door (1960) and Sky With Flat White Cloud (1962) and Sky Above the Clouds III / Above the Clouds III (1963).

O’Keeffe shares her vast knowledge, her extensive travels, her nomadic existence and she gives it back to us. What is important to her becomes important to us. She defined a way to live that was intrinsic to her art; with a free independent spirit she immersed herself in this sparse landscape and dedicated her life to painting it, searching for the purest form and line. It is the feeling of expansiveness and endless horizons that are the closest she gets to taking the viewer to infinity.

Georgia O’Keeffe

References O’Keeffe’s Century by Tanya Barson, Georgia O’Keeffe Tate Modern catalogue, 2016 Publisher: Tate Enterprises Ltd 2016 ISBN 978 1 84976 371 4 (hb) ISBN 978 1 84976 403 2 (pb) 1

Art: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Cityscapes by Phoebe Hillemann, The Arts Section theartsection.com (2009) 2

Summer 2016: Seeing through Georgia’s Eyes: Christine Taylor Patten, BBC Art Series edited and presented by Alan Yentob 3

Art and the crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe, by Vivien Green Fryd, Chicago (2003) 4

Seeing O’Keeffe Seeing by Griselda Pollock Georgia O’Keeffe Tate Publication catalogue (2016) 5 & 6

The ‘Light One’: A Case Study by Georgina Uhlyark - Georgia O’Keeffe Tate Publication catalogue (2016) 7

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Bouchra Khalili The Mapping Journey Project

MoMA, New York 9 April to 10 October 2016

Moira Jarvis visits MoMA and Bouchra Khalili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–11), a series of videos that details the stories of eight individuals forced by political and economic circumstances to travel illegally.

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project (2008-2011). Eight-channel video (color, sound). Installation view, Bouchra Khalili: The Mapping Journey Project, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 9 – August 28, 2016. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fund for the Twenty First Century, 2014. © 2016 Bouchra Khalili. Digital image © 2016 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Muzikar

Bouchra Khalili (b 1975) is a MoroccanFrench artist currently based in Paris who works with video, photography, drawing and installation. Her work offers a

Bushra Khalili

critical perspective on histories of migration, territory and displacement 1 press.moma.org

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For the last ten years Khalili has worked in Marseilles, Gibraltar, Palestine, Southern Italy, Spain, Istanbul and Greece - ‘the arteries of trafficking and trade’.1 For The Mapping Journey Project each migrant, whom she met by chance, was invited to narrate their journey whilst tracing this journey with a thick marker pen on a geopolitical map of the region.

The exhibition consists of a series of videos shown on large screens, detailing the journeys which were often illegal for economic or political reasons and all took place around the Mediterranean area. Each video features one person’s voice and whilst we see their hands draw across the map, faces remain unseen.

Khalili’s earlier project The Straight Stories (2006-8) seems in many ways to prepare the ground for The Mapping Journey Project (2008-11). In The Straight Stories she focused on the Straits of Gibraltar, which she calls a labyrinth of migratory routes as it deals with migrants to Europe from the whole of Africa. In contrast, Istanbul is the main hub for people from the Middle East and Asia to reach Europe and beyond.

Agency, UNHCR, said that amongst those who had survived drowning were Syrians who had been living in Libya for many years and that most of these migrants were in fact escaping dictatorships, wars and poverty in Somalia, Eritrea, Nigeria and South Sudan.

In the winter of 2008 Bouchra went to Marseilles to begin The Mapping Journey Project. She chose Marseille because historically it has been the main transitional area in France. She wanted to find a way to describe migration journeys, to document the hidden map of those journeys often made illegally.

To make her first video she worked with a fisherman who had been asked many times for help to make the journey from Algeria to Europe. Whilst plotting his journey on the map with a marker he told his story about navigating the Mediterranean Sea to Sardinia, a journey normally of 230 kilometres but in order to avoid the radar set up in international waters, it took much longer. What interested Khalili was the way this fisherman spoke and Khalili worked with Sudanese, Iraqi, and the language he used.

Afghan people trying to produce an ‘alternative geography’.2 She is also interested in the The phrase ‘burning’ was used to imaginary representation that exists, inside our minds, alongside the physical geography. describes crossing a border illegally. It

describes the need to destroy ID cards At no point did Khalili ask questions and passports before setting off; to or actively record reasons for travel. burn a border means destroying that border metaphorically.

Her focus is to document what is happening and record an alternative In her work she too aims to burn borders. Born geography although resonances of in Morocco she has an extensive knowledge of different histories are present. the dialects of North Africa and believes that the history of colonisation is literally found in During one of the worst weeks in May 2016 the many different dialects used by people for Europe-bound migrants hoping to cross from North Africa; in the Berber words, in the the Mediterranean safely, the UN Refugee Arabic, French, and even Spanish words used Bushra Khalili

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by North Africans. Khalili is fascinated by the diversity within language; she can identify borders that have been crossed historically through listening to language and dialects.

She wants to unravel this complexity, to show how language has been colonised.

Designed by Dublin-based architects Henghan Peng,

‘... the building emerges from the landscape like a stealthy bunker, zigzagging along the contours of the rocky site in precisely hewn planes of bright Khalili was asked to take up a residency white Bethlehem limestone.’ 5 in Palestine in 2009. She was able to do this because she had recently received Oliver Wainwright Guardian 17/5/16) a French passport; with a Moroccan passport this journey would not have Initially to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Nakba (the exodus that saw 700,000 been possible.

Palestinians expelled from their homes in 1948), it is now thought of as a ‘museum From a geographical point of view without borders’6 and hopes to overcome Palestine was a challenge because the geographical and political boundaries through territories change all the time with its digital collection.

new settlements and checkpoints. But she was able to meet with geographers In The Mapping Journey Project Khalili has employed by the UN to establish a map refined her work. As we connect the sound track of the voices articulating their stories she could use.

to the visual material of the map and the Khalili then worked with a Palestinian carefully drawn journey, we begin to see an on The Mapping Journey Project 3 on his alternative geography, both physically and journey from Ramallal, a Palestinian city in metaphorically. the central West Bank, to East Jerusalem.

The status of East Jerusalem in international References law remains uncertain. For Palestinians to 1&2 press@moma.org make this journey permits are needed and as these are very difficult to get, this piece of 3&4 Bouchra Khalili (part 1 of 4) Iniva at work maps ‘alternative roads’ illegally taken to avoid the separation wall, control and Rivington Place (youTube) checkpoints. These ‘alternative roads’ 3 in 5 the Mediterranean area fascinate Khalili. She Oliver Wainwright Guardian 17/5/16 wants to establish an alternative map ‘shaped 6 by clandestine experiences and existences’. 4 Art and Design Guardian 04/05/16 North of Ramallah the new Palestinian Moma.org, Bouchra Khalili: The mapping Museum opened on 25 May 2016, the Journey project first institution dedicated to documenting Palestinian history, society and culture. Patrick Kingsley, Guardian 30/15/16

Bushra Khalili

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Laura Poitras Astro Noise Whitney Museum, New York 5 February to 1 May 2016 Moira Jarvis visits the Whitney Museum in New York to see Laura Poitras first solo museum exhibition

Laura Poitras, Installation view ANARCHIST Astro Noise (2016). Pigmented inkjet prints mounted on aluminum.

Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y. USA. Photo: Ron Amstutz

During her work in art, film and journalism, Laura Poitras (b 1964, Boston) has emerged as one of the most thoughtful and impassioned voices discussing the complex realities of the post 9/11 world. Poitras began documenting this history in the days following the events of 9/11 in 2001. From that time political and military officials put Laura Poitras

pre-emptive war, targeted killings, torture expanding the use of indefinite detention, in place, making significant changes in US policy and mass surveillance. Many Americans are not aware of the ‘war on terror’ as these strategies are collectively known and Poitras has worked to document these complexities primarily through her celebrated 9/11 ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 48

Trilogy feature length documentary films. Snowden, hits the cinema. Poitras will be The exhibition is new work by Laura Poitras, played by Melissa Leo. and builds on these themes previously explored in her films.

Throughout the installation in the The title, Astro Noise, refers to the faint background disturbance of thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang and is the name Edward Snowden gave to an encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency that he shared with Poitras in 2013. The Snowden archive partially inspired Poitras’s presentation at the Whitney.

Snowden contacted Poitras when he decided to blow the whistle on the NSA’s surveillance practices. He had at that time had exclusive access to Assange, the man who helped leak more than 250,000 confidential US State Department documents, and WikiLeaks. In 2013 Poitras travelled to Hong Kong to make a video of Snowden that would reveal his identity. She won an Oscar for Ciitzenfour in 2015, her subsequent documentary about him. In May 2016 Poitras’s latest film, Risk, was premiered in Cannes.

Whitney Museum, New York, Poitras has used narrative and documentary elements to engage viewers to actively consider their position and responsibility in this ‘war on terror’.

At the beginning of this exhibition is the installation O’Say Can You See which consists of a double video projection on a two-sided screen. One side presents a short film depicting slow-motion shots of people gazing at the unseen remains of the World Trade Centre in the days following the traumatic 9/11 attacks.

As Poitras records the aftermath on one side of the screen, we see shocked mourning faces, which prompt us to meditate on the scene that we know is before them.

The other side of the screen presents a US military video of the interrogation of two prisoners from Afghanistan, following the 9/11 attacks. The prisoners were subsequently transferred to Guantanamo.

In Risk Poitras presents her insider’s account of the WikiLeaks story. Viewers are invited “These faces capture a moment in into the room with the team of journalists, history at a crossroads”, says Poitras. activist and hackers who helped to expose “Many different paths could have been exactly how scrutinised we are by the state.

taken. Fifteen years later we’re now seeing the unintended consequences The film highlights the issue of celebrity of the choices we have made.“ and the danger of focussing on those who leak information whilst obscuring Bed Down Location is a projection of the the information itself. With this in night skies over Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan mind, Poitras leaves herself in the film - countries where the US military conducts so the audience does not forget that it ‘targeted killings’ using unmanned aircraft.

The video is shown on the ceiling of the is she who is behind the camera. gallery space and a raised platform invites Interestingly these two huge stories will visitors to lay back and gaze at skies where be amplified when Oliver Stone’s biopic, the drone wars are conducted. The effect is Laura Poitras

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chilling as we begin to feel the vulnerability of those caught up in this war zone and begin to experience what this might actually mean in terms of the safety of one’s own family.

In Disposition Matrix, Poitras has built long corridors lined with small, window-like slits, each offering a partially obscured view of a video or a classified government document. I am reminded of a niqab, the gaze of a veiled woman, or are we looking at this information from inside a tank? The slits make us peer intensely at the documentation trying to understand its complexities. The title refers to the database created by the White House and American intelligence agencies as a blueprint for tracking, capturing or killing people they suspect are enemies of the US government.

process of descrambling the collected signal.

Poitras’s use of technology is very sophisticated which is equally matched with the sophisticated technology used in the war on terror. Her work draws you in as you unpick, unravel and decipher not just the threatening world around, but the machines used for surveillance, information, security and combat.

“I’m not interested in a passive viewing experience” she says “instead I want to create an environment and narrative experience that challenges the viewer to engage emotionally, physically and intellectually. “

At the core of the exhibition, and In 2006 Poitras was placed on a secret Poitras work overall, is a belief that government watch list; consequently, primary documents and individual while travelling she was detained and lived experience provides a means by interrogated more than fifty times. which large global and historical forces can be not only understood but felt.

In the last installation, Poitras retraces the whitney.org events that led to being placed on a watch list, detailing the process she has experienced. In watching the way visitors engaged with this series of work, I can say that she has certainly Anarchist concludes this complex and succeeded in exploring this belief. immersive installation. It is a series of images that the artist has drawn from the documents provided to her by Edward Snowden, initiating References debate over mass surveillance, government secrecy and the balance between national Whitney Museum Guide Winter/Spring 2016 security and information privacy. The images are from signals collected through a top- Henry Barnes Guardian 21/5/16 secret operation run by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Laura Poitras: Astro Noise, February 5 - May the UK’s surveillance agency. From the top 1, 2016 Exhibition Guide, Whitney Museum of the Troodos Mountains on Cyprus, two of American Art antennae operating 24 hours a day intercept signals from satellites, drones, and radars in Whitney.org the Mediterranean. The stunning images in Anarchist show various stages in the

Laura Poitras

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Nasreen Mohamedi The Met Breuer, New York 18 March to 5 June 2016

Nasreen Mohamedi is given a worthy retrospective that inaugurated The Met Breuer in New York this year, an extension of the Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to modern and contemporary works. Melissa Budasz discovers her work for the first time and reflects on her visit

Nasreen Mohamedi, Untitled, ca. (1975) Ink and graphite on paper, Sikander and Hydari Collection

“I feel the need to simplify” 1 Nasreen Mohamedi Diary entry

Entering the Met Breuer and the galleries that display the work of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-90) is a rich mix of photos, drawings, diary pages and paintings. This is a beautifully curated show with a large body of work from an artist that created a richly introspective Nasreen Mohamedi

and meditative abstract art. This is the first museum retrospective of Mohamedi’s work in the USA, formerly it was at The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (2015), at the Tate Liverpool (2014) and began at the Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi (2013).

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Born in Karachi (formerly India, now Pakistan) into a Muslim family that encouraged education for women, her family later moved to Bombay (now Mumbai). Mohamedi studied fine art at 16 years old at St Martin’s (now Central St Martin’s UAL) and lived in Paris for 2 years before returning back to Mumbai, finally settling in Baroda. This exposure to European art and artists had an impact on her work, especially Minimalism, but it is her relationships with two successful Indian artists that had a greater influene on her development - M.F. Husain (19152011) who was a founding member of The Progressive Artists Group of Bombay and V.S. Gaitonde (1924-2001) regarded as one of India’s foremost abstract painters and also a member of the Bombay Group.

from international and private collections) has been put together to bring back to life her art career. She is known as a major voice in post independent India (1947) and is the first wave of Indian artists to gain recognition on the international scene. Mohamedi suffered from Huntington disease - a neuromuscular impairment that progressively diminished her physically and which took her life early (at 53).

Her roots are in Islamic traditions of abstraction 3 Michael Fitzgerald, Wall Street Journal

Mohamedi’s diaries reveal references to Nietzsche and Camus, Klee and Kandinsky, and they lean to Sufi and Zen traditions,

Mohamedi predominantly focused on “They reveal a thoughtful and intense drawing as a means to investigate what process. They have a quality of a Haiku mattered to her - in her repetitive use of or a Rumi saying” 4 grids, fluctuating lines and obsession with Vivan Sundaram light and shade. Her photography is the tool for her visual diary which feeds directly into She was widely read and travelled and her drawings. although it may never have been her intention More than 130 of Mohamedi’s to exhibit the photos she took, they become a rich source of reference for her pencil and paintings, drawings, and photographs, graphite drawings and in the later pen and as well as rarely seen diaries, are ink drawings.

brought together from collections around the world in order to trace the With such little guidance from her - in a title, evolution of her aesthetic approach date, self publication - this absence allows and the shifts in her artistic practice 2 the viewer to contemplate her work as it is; the spatial relationships, the inner dialogue and the contours of her imagination. A fine The scale is not large, this modest approach mind. adds to the intimacy when you view and read the work which is executed with precision - References 1&4 indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/art-and-culture/alines not marks and no colour, only black on life-on-the-lines-celebrating-three-decades-of-nasreenwhite. She rarely signed and dated her work, mohamedis-work/ (nor exhibited it) and refused to theorise her 2 metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2016/nasreenart, leaving it open-ended and mainly untitled. mohamedi It’s a remarkable feat that this collection (that 3wsj.com/articles/nasreen-mohamedi-at-the-met-breuerhas been collated and gathered from scholars review-1457990992 Met Breur

Nasreen Mohamedi

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ArtVerve

Book/DVD Reviews Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me (2010) won the Book of Year Award from the mental health charity Mind in 2011.

Comprising 158 images with written extracts detailing Baker’s recovery after she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in the 1990s.

The book highlights the difficult journey of 11 years when Baker produced 711 drawings - in this time she battled breast cancer as well as depression.

Diary Drawings is a visual journal of Baker’s path through illness and psychiatry that is witty and fearless.

The drawings are childlike and raw and the text cuts to the bone. An extract from Day 86 reads, Bobby Baker: Diary Drawings Mental Illness and Me

by Bobby Baker Introduction by Marina Warner Publisher: Profile Books (2010) ISBN-10: 1846683742 ISBN-13: 978-1846683749

Book & DVD Reviews

“This was an awful stay at ‘The Haven’. My key worker, probably twenty years my junior, spoke to me like I was a naughty child in relation to self harm. I spent most of the time alone in my room”.

The drawings were exhibited by the Wellcome Collection (2009) and the preface is written by Ken Arnold (Head of Programmes at the Wellcome Trust) with an introduction by Marina Warner who says, “Diaries tell the story differently; when read or looked at, as in the case of a diary in pictures like Bobby Baker’s, they reopen glimpses into lived experiences that often would have evaporated”.

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ArtVerve

Book/DVD Reviews Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (2012) is a documentary that follows Abramović as she prepares for a retrospective at MoMA in New York (2010).

The documentary begins with flashes of naked bodies on subways and trains, with huge advertisement campaigns that lead up to the excitement and anticipation of Abramović’s impending retrospective at MoMA. We see Abramović in photo shoots with horns, people running to queue for the chance to sit opposite her for 5 minutes, all cut with excerpts of her childhood experiences - she talks of her disciplined upbringing, with no love or emotion. She says she has always been asked about her work and ‘why is this art’.

The Artist is Present

by Marina Abramović Actors: Marina Abramović Ulay and Klaus Biesenbach James Franco, David Blaine Directors: Matthew Akers Studio: Dogwoof ASIN: B007VNHPUM (2012)

The DVD documents her life and performances challenging, radical, extremist, raw and political. The performers that trained with her for 2 weeks (in a kind of boot camp) prior to the 3 months at MoMA, give over their lives to her. She says, “the hardest thing to do is nothing ... there isn’t any way out”.

Both Abramović and Ulay, her ex-lover and collaborator, detail the male/female dynamic of their relationship and performances. Their epic goodbye and separation in the performance, The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk (of china) in 1988/2008 took 8 years to get permission to do - the exchanges and excerpts between them are touching and intimate to watch.

Abramović - theatrical, intense, controlling and open.

The Artist is Present is full of courage and surprise - a synopsis of Abramović’s life and art, “the audience is her lover.”

Note: Marina Abramović’s new book Walk Through Walls: A Memoir is out now, published by Fig Tree, ISBN-10: 0241235642, ISBN-13: 978-0241235645.

Book & DVD Reviews

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ArtVerve

Book/DVD Reviews In 2007 Jenni Sorkin and Connie Butler organised WACK: Art and the feminist Revolution. Now nearly ten years later Jenni Sorkin has curated Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016 with Paul Schimmel. Both in Los Angeles, these exhibitions have changed the way we think about work made by women. In the New York Times earlier this year Schimmel said that “These feminist artists broke down the hierarchies of what is considered acceptable in the world of sculpture, whether it’s the use of wire or cloth or yarns or foam or fibreglass”.

Revolution In the Making Abstract Sculpture

by Women 1947-2016

by Elizabeth Smith (Author) Anne Wagner (Author) Paul Schimmel (Editor) Publisher: Skira (2016) ISBN-10: 8857230651 ISBN-13: 978-8857230658

Book & DVD Reviews

The catalogue is lavish. Text is spare; work has been sumptuously photographed. The aim of the exhibition is to examine “the undeniable presence and emotional impact of sculpture from a women’s point of view”.

From studying the catalogue, this has been achieved.

Elizabeth A T Smith writes on process, materials and narrative describing the work of a group of artists who include Ruth Asawa, Louise Bourgeois and Louise Nevelson. Anne M Wagner writes about artists that include Eva Hesse and Hannah Wilke, noting that “in the course of the twentieth century, women set sculpture alight, reshaping the terrain so sweepingly that history is still taking account of the expansion”.

Jenni Sorkin considers preciousness as a term used to denigrate abstraction, studio-based sculpture, cast offs: reclamation and salvage, ethereal minimalism and her position that abstraction is rarely ever just about form. She also alludes to the way women use humour in their work. At the 2013 Carnegie International, Phyllida Barlow installed TIP (2013) next to Richard Serra’s permanent sculpture CARNEGIE (1985). The juxtaposition of Barlow’s chaotic installation, messy and multi coloured, against Serra’s large steel slabs, formal, austere and expensive, is very witty.

Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947-2016, Hauser Wirth and Schimmel in Los Angeles.

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ArtVerve

Book/DVD Reviews First published in 2012, Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London is worth returning to again in 2016, as it covers (and recovers art historically) a range of artists working across media in its analysis of events, happenings and documentation from well-known to lesser-known artists in 70s London - from Bobby Baker, Rose English, Anne Bean, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Mary Kelly and Silvia Ziranek to name a few.

Using the focus on the female body as the site for making and exhibiting works, Kathy Battista positions feminist art as a ‘disparate and complex entity, one that overlaps several art historical groupings and one which has evolved since its intial activites’.

Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London

by Kathy Battista Publisher: I.B.Tauris (2012) ISBN-10: 1848859619 ISBN-13: 978-1848859616

Battista investigates the prominant themes of domesticity to sexuality and uncovers events held in artists’ houses, disused spaces or in open spaces as the mainstream galleries and museums offered little support to this work at this time and how marginalised and under represented it was in archives, collections and art historically. Battista details how archiving and retaining evidence of past performances is an issue in a lot of works in the early 70s.

Referencing the feminist writing of Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker, Lisa Tickner and Marina Warner, Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London, is a rich source and range of women artists work that has been brought back into our consciousness. As Battista says, “...while there are countless books on feminist politics, there are hardly any retrospective looks at feminist art in Britain ... This book tries to address this inadequacy, by bringing things back into consciousness. These things are still relevant and floating on the surface of contemporary art practice. The book is an attempt to make visible the invisible and to give it a public life and a permanance”.

Book & DVD Reviews

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What’s On London Exhibitions Suzanne Treister: HFT The Gardener Anneley Juda Fine Art 23 Dering St, London W1S 1AW 22 September - 29 October 2016 annelyjudafineart.co.uk Aimee Parrott, Breese Little 249-253 Cambridge Heath Road, E2 6JY 30 September - 26 November 2016 breeselittle.com Bonny Camplin, Camden Arts Centre Arkwright Road, London NW3 6DG Until 8 January 2017 camdenartscentre.org Floe Edge: Contemporary Arts and Co Canada Gallery Canada House, Trafalgar Square, SW1 5BJ 30 September - 30 November 2016 canadainternational.gc.ca Aude Pariset: Greenhouses Cell Project Space 258 Cambridge heath Road, London E2 9DA 22 September - 6 November 2016 cellprojects.org Shona Illingworth: Lessons in the Landscape CGP Gallery The Gallery, Dilston Grove, SE16 2DD 13 October - 27 November 2016 cpglondon.org Tacita Dean: La Exuberance Frith Street Gallery 17-18 Golden Square, London W1F 9JJ 16 September - 17 December 2016 frithstreetgallery.com

What’s On

Candice Lin: A Body Reduced to Brilliant Colour, Gasworks 155 Vauxhall Street, London SE11 5RH Until 11 December 2016 gasworks.org.uk Fluorescent Chrysanthemum: curated by Jasia Reichardt, ICA The Mall, London SW1 5AH 4 October - 27 November 2016 ica.org.uk Mahwish Chishty Imperial War Museum Lambeth Road London SE1 6HZ 19 October 2016 - 19 March 2017 iwm.org.uk Bharti Kher The Freud Museum 20 Maresfield Gardens, London NW3 5SX 30 September - 20 November 2016 freud.org.uk Paula Rego: Dancing Ostriches Marlborough Fine Art 6, Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BY 28 September - 12 November 2016 marlboroughfineart.com Artemisia Gentileschi: Portrait of the Artist The Queen’s Gallery Buckingham Palace London SW1A 4 November 2016 - 17 April 2017 royalcollection.org.uk Kathryn Virgils: The Infinite Lightness of Being & Dione Verulam: Recent Work Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery 2a, Conway Street, London W1T6BA 5 October - 29 October 2016 rebeccahossack.com ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 57

What’s On Nancy Josephson: Heads Above Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery 28, Charlotte Street, London W1T 2NA 2 November - 26 November 2016 rebeccahossacks.com

Rest of the UK Exhibitions Liberties The Exchange Princes Street, Penzance, TR18 2NL 22 October 2016 - 7 January 2017 newlynartgallery.co.uk

Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House Serpentine Sackler Gallery West Carriage Drive, London W2 2AR 29 September - 9 October 2016 serpentinegalleries.org

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Penlee House Gallery Morrab Rd, Penzance TR18 4HE 10 September -19 November 2016 penleehouse.org.uk

Cindy Sherman & David Salle: History Portraits and Tapestry Paintings Skarstedt Gallery 8, Bennet Street, London SW1A 1RP 1 October - 26 November 2016 skarstedt.com

Kate Walters: Drawings in paint & peat from Orkney & The Western Isles Newlyn Art Gallery New Road, Penzance, TR18 5PZ 13 December 2016 - 7 January 2017 newlynartgallery.co.uk

Jamian Juliano-Villani Studio Voltaire 1a Nelson’s Row, London SW4 7JR 1 October - 11 December 2016 studiovoltaire.org

Daphne Wright: Emotional Archaeology Arnolfini 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA 21 October 2016 - 15 January 2017 arnolfini.org.uk

Turner Prize, Tate Britain Millbank, London SW1P 4RG 27 September 2016 - 2 January 2017 tate.org.uk/britain

Bridget Riley, Paintings, 1964-2015 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art 75 Belford Rd, Edinburgh EH4 3DR Until April 16 2017 nationalgalleries.org

Celia Paul: Desdemona for Hilton by Celia Victoria Miro Mayfair 14 St George’s Street, London W1S 1FE 16 September - 29 October 2016 victoria-miro.com Guerrilla Girls: Is It Even Worse in Europe?

Whitechapel Gallery 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX Until 5 March 2017 whitechapelgallery.org What’s On

Freya Pockington: Women’s Work - Women in the Rural Landscape Acorn Bank Penrith, Cumbria CA10 1SP Until 27 Nov 2016 nationaltrust.org.uk/acorn-bank Anthea Hamilton The Hepworth Wakefield Gallery Walk, Wakefield WF1 Until 19 March 2017 hepworthwakefield.org ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 58

What’s On Elisabeth Vellacott: Figures in the Landscape Kettle’s Yard at New Hall Art Collection Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, CB3 2 November 2016 - 15 January 2017 kettlesyard.co.uk Hannah Lees, Turner Contemporary Margate, CT9 1HG Until 8 January 2017 turnercontemporary.org Laura Ford: Beauty in the Beast Pallant House Chichester PO19 1TJ Until 19 February 2017 pallant.org.uk Eva Rothschild: Alternative to Power The New Art Gallery Gallery Square, Walsall WS2 8LG Until 15 January 2017 thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk Vivienne Koorland and William Kentridge: Conversations in letters and lines Fruitmarket Gallery 45 Market Street Edinburgh EH1 1DF 19 November 2016 - 19 February 2017 thefruitmarket.co.uk

Annie Garnett Spinning the Colours of Lakeland Blackwell House of Arts and Crafts, Cumbria Bowness-on-Windermere LA23 3JT Until 29 January 2017 blackwell.org.uk Sara Barker, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 1 Oozells St, Birmingham B1 2HS Until 27 November 2016 ikon-gallery.org Jane and Louise Wilson: Undead Sun: We Put the World Before You Mima, Centre Square, Middlesbrough TS1 Until 15 January 2017 visitmima.com International Exhibitions Maria Lassnig: A Painting Survey 1950-2007 Hauser & Wirth & Schimmel 901 E 3rd St, Los Angeles, California Until 31 December 2016 hauserwirth.com Nan Goldin The Ballad of Sexual Dependency MOMA 11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019 Until 12 February 2017 moma.org

Century: 100 Modern British Artists Jerwood Gallery Rock-A-Nore Rd, Hastings TN34 3DW 23 October 2016 - 8 January 2017 jerwoodgallery.org

Colette Fu: Wanderer/Wonderer: Pop-Ups National Museum of Women in the Arts 1250 New York Ave NW, Washington 14 October 2016 - 26 February 2017 nmwa.org

A Beautiful Disorder Cass Sculpture Foundation Goodwood Sculpture Park, Chichester PO18 Until 6 November 2016 sculpture.org.uk

Shahzia Sikander: Ecstasy As Sublime, Heart As Vector MAXXI Museuo Nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Via Guido Reni, 4, 00196 Rome Until 15 January 2017 fondazionemaxxi.it ArtVerve |Issue 6 |Page 59

What’s On

ArtVerve

artverve.co.uk ArtVerve • is a forum of ideas and views on contemporary women’s art • celebrates, recognises and documents contemporary women artists, current exhibitions and projects • reviews the history and legacy of women artists • is a journal written by artists for artists with intelligence, passion and a point of view • this journal is produced out of a need to communicate the talent and relevance of women artists • all articles by editors and contributors are written on a voluntary basis • is a not for profit journal usage All images other than graphic files used in the design of the journal are copyright of the original artist(s). If you wish to use the images, please contact the artist first. If the images are being posted for a blog, art site or likewise, please make sure to fully credit the artist(s) and/or provide a link so that viewers will be able to see more of the artists work. Any images of shows and/or events are copyright of the photographer. If you wish to use any images of this nature, please contact the photographer. If you wish to use any writings in this journal; interviews, articles, critiques and any other information please mail editor@artverve.co.uk. copyright and courtesy All images used in this journal are copy written to the original creator/owner. This includes any images of artwork and prints, photographs of any events and any written works featured.

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