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LIFE THROUGH ART

SUMMER 2018

SUMMERTIME ANGST Art in the Age of Uncertainty Interviews with AA Bronson Chantal Joffe Miranda July ISSUE 35 £10 €12

Nightclubbing, Bright-Light Clubbing Where does the nightclub stand, in the age of clean living and tech-enabled hookups? An extensive exhibition at Germany’s Vitra Design Museum charts the development and ever-changing aesthetics of nightlife—from 1960s design experimentation, to the rise of disco in the 1970s and the role of the club in twenty-first-century life.

Words: Rosalind Duguid

Show of the Times

Opposite Chen Wei In the Waves #1, 2013 This page, from top Akoaki The Mothership Mobile DJ booth, Detroit, 2014

Discotheque Flash Back Borgo San Dalmazzo, c 1972 Interior Design: Studio65

Nightclubbing, Bright-Light Clubbing

CLEVELAND If you ask the average tourist what brings them to Cleveland, Ohio, they will most likely cite the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a mammoth building on the waterfront which celebrates the artists who define the genre, from Chuck Berry to Black Sabbath. However, this Rust Belt city has much to experience beyond guitar music. The first edition of Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (14 July–30 September) hopes to highlight the expanse of cultural options in the city, as the sticky summer heat sets in. The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (MOCA) serves as one of the event’s main sites, with solo shows from Cyprien Gaillard, Johnny Coleman, Lin Ke, Josh Kline and Martine Syms. Lin Ke presents a new augmented and virtual reality commission, while Syms shows her existing piece An Evening with Queen White. This multi-channel video installation has a fitting music-infused edge in the form of the fictional heroine: a Motown star. For Andria Hickey, senior curator at the museum, this signifies one of the many ways that the triennial embeds itself in the city’s legacy and the wider landscape of the once-prosperous region. “Cleveland is the perfect place to learn about the history of America,” she explains. “[You can] trace the way that people settled in the Great Lakes region

Now Showing

at different points of time––from the early Western Reserve settlers to those travelling during the decades of the Great Migration, to the settlements of steel mill workers and engineers from eastern Europe and beyond.” It is a sentiment shared by Felton Thomas, Jr, who is executive director and CEO of the Cleveland Public Library, “Cleveland was a leader among cities that welcomed immigrants, with nearly a third of the population being foreign born. These communities’ influence on our architecture and infrastructure can be found throughout the city.” Fittingly, the library has invited Yinka Shonibare to celebrate this legacy with The American Library, a new iteration of his batikfabric book collections which draw out immigrant narratives that are so often overlooked. The triennial extends far beyond the familiar waterfront. Over in Ohio City, the Transformer Station hosts Stephen Willats’s multimedia installation Human Right. It was originally conceived in

Middlesbrough, England, but grapples with universal concerns of community and social responsibility. Similarly, AK Burns unveils a new sculpture project that investigates divisions and conflicts in urban communities, informed by the regeneration of the local area. With that in mind, it comes as no surprise that Ohio City has a new, booming craft beer scene. Top recommendations come from Fred Bidwell, executive director of the triennial; “If you are looking for a deep dive, favourites include Platform Brewing, Market Garden Brewery and Saucy Brew Works.” Even further afield, the Akron Art Museum presents a plethora of international artists who consider similar issues surrounding urban living, and the sociopolitical forces that define city existence. Walead Beshty presents his photographs of the abandoned Iraqi Embassy in former East Berlin; Woody De Othello exhibits his series of semi-anthropomorphic ceramics and Katrín Sigurdardóttir brings together architecture and archaeology by planting her sculptures made of Icelandic, volcanic clay around Akron and Cleveland. Placed directly in the earth, they will evolve with the natural fauna and become part of the Ohio landscape, as a permanent memento of this expansive festival’s inaugural edition. (Holly Black)

Previous pages Coco Amardeil Come Hell or High Water, 2017 This page, from top Woody De Othello Faceless Face Jug, 2016 Ceramic, underglaze, glaze and paint 122 × 79 × 40.6 cm Woody De Othello No Nose Knows, 2017 Ceramic, underglaze, glaze, latex 142 × 46 × 43 cm

ACCRA Accra is a city on the rise. The Ghanaian capital’s booming economy, bolstered by the country’s oil production and cocoa exports, has seen overseas investment, tech start-ups and a swathe of new cultural endeavours encompassing art, poetry, music, film and fashion in recent years.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY 1957, PHOTO BY NII ODZENMA

This page Serge Attukwei Clottey and GoLokal My Mother's Wardrobe, performance at Gallery 1957, 6 March 2016

Gallery 1957 is a highlight in Accra, which was founded by collector and construction entrepreneur Marwan Zakhem in 2016. It is named after the year Ghana gained independence and focuses primarily on significant West African artists including Modupeola Fadugba, Serge Attukwei Clottey and Godfried Donkor. Although the gallery might be situated in the Kempinski Hotel, within the glitzy new development of Gold Coast City that presents itself as Accra’s new downtown, Zakhem encourages tourists to explore as much as they can. “The art scene continues to flourish and there is a strong atmosphere of citywide creativity with artist-led projects, performances and community events happening,” he explains. With this broad community in mind, Zakhem was keen to make sure his gallery was relevant to the existing infrastructure, and he can rattle off a long list of other influential institutions such as the renowned Artists

Alliance gallery in the beachside neighbourhood of Labadi and Accra [dot] Alt, a multifaceted organization which coordinates the annual Chale Wote Street Art Festival (20–26 August). This Jamestown event invites over 200 local and international artists to take part in producing murals, workshops, interactive installations, film screenings, fashion shows and a whole lot of partying. The area, once described by London-based chef Zoe Adjonyoh as “Hackney Wick on steroids”, is one of the city’s oldest districts and exemplifies the opposing sides of life in Accra, with remnants of a colonial past and one of the highest rates of poverty in the city. “You’ll see difficult memories of the past written in the architecture of places such as Ussher Fort in Jamestown,” says Zakhem. “To really experience it you have to embrace both parts, old and new. Accra is a forward-moving city and one that definitely knows how to have a

Around the World in Five Art Cities

good time.” With that in mind, be sure to sample as much as possible from the abundance of food stalls, and for drinks, recommendations include JamesTown Café or the JayNii beach bar. In nearby Osu, another energetic area known for its fashion boutiques and trendy eateries, you will find ANO, which is an ambitious new arts hub. It features exhibition spaces, a library and a screening and performance area, with a programme dedicated to showcasing established and emerging talent, as well as the region’s heritage and untold histories. Fittingly, it is only a few moments from Independence Square, built to commemorate the country’s emancipation. Also known as Black Star Square, due to the motif that sits above a huge ceremonial arch and Ghana’s attribution as the “Black Star of Africa”, it features enormous modernist viewing stands and the Eternal Flame of African Liberation, lit by Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s first president. (HB)

Urara Tsuchiya

“I just find these dark things quite funny. It’s so uncomfortable for people to talk about, and people laugh because there’s nothing else they can do” Urara Tsuchiya’s soup-bowl-sized ceramic vessels are capable of inducing both laughter and revulsion. They are inhabited by groups of men, women and wild animals engaged in all kinds of lustful acts, tongues lolling, dusty and sweet as if fashioned from talcum powder and colouring chalks. Words: Rosalind Duguid

When and how did you begin to use ceramics? I did an evening class with Garnet McCulloch at the FireWorks studio in Glasgow in 2012 or 2011 to learn to throw; it was a six-week beginner’s course. I did the same course again three times. I was frustrated that I wasn’t getting any better, until I saw one of his studio holders painting their ceramics and realized you can actually paint and sculpt inside them... it took me eighteen weeks to work that out! I also went to the Ishoken ceramics school in Japan for two weeks this January, where I learned to make my own glazes, make moulds and use porcelain. The bowl has connotations of practicality, food and domesticity. Is that something you’re going for? When I first started I had this Japanese ceramic in mind, square, a bit smaller than my bowls, with a lid on top. When you flip it over, underneath is a pornographic

New Establishment

Urara Tsuchiya

Angst Underground Subcultures are complex things. So many are tightly wound up with feelings of angst and disenfranchisement: simultaneous expressions of rebellion and solidarity. Underground scenes have been as heavily marketed as they have been parodied, and they are especially attractive to teenagers. Illustration by Amina Bouajila

Today, social media means that subcultures can no longer exist as they did when beatniks or punks first stormed the scene. In recent years, a spate of articles proclaiming the death of the subculture have swept across the internet. Trends are jumped on as soon as they enter the public domain now, as hungry stylists and fashion forecasters scan social media to find out “what the kids are up to these days”—subcultures like seapunk and vaporwave seemed pretty much DOA. An optimist might argue, though, that they continue to blossom, as the “kids” continue to develop their own worlds at odds with the mainstream. Any member of a subculture might shudder at the idea that theirs can be boiled down to a single object. But here, with hindsight, we attempt that, with a by-no-means-exhaustive list of the angstiest subcultures prominent in Britain, Europe and America from the 1950s to today (better make that yesterday).

Angst Underground

MEL BYARS If You’re Anxious and You Know It, Clap Your Hands Why medicate when you can revel in your glorious angst and feel truly alive? Mel Byars finds hope in our ever-present, collective sense of doom. Illustration by Félix Decombat “I come from a working-class military family. We watch the news and read the paper and vote, so there’s always something to be upset about. I have a certain amount of angst in my back pocket.” —Pink A discussion about angst is the same as a discussion about life itself. Everyone has it unless they are dead or on a regime of tranquilizers. The question is: Why has the pharma industry developed this huge range of tranquilizers? The answer is: Because they know that you think your agita is undesirable. When someone knocks on my door, I have an angst attack. It seems real enough. I think: “Who is it? What do they want? Is it bad news? Leave me alone.” I have this reaction even when my neighbour knocks on my door, and she’s often just there to give me some cookies she’s baked. Could it be because each time a bill collector came to the front door when I was a child, my aunt, with whom I lived with my mother, would dispatch me? My instructions were to tell the collector that she wasn’t at home. They always became pissed off at me, when I had done nothing wrong. My stepfather claimed that my aunt was responsible for my being incapable of handling money wisely. What is the emotion expressed in Munch’s The Scream? If you didn’t know the name of the 1893 painting, perhaps you might think the emotion to be that of someone who has won $500 million in the lottery: sheer joy and ecstatic surprise. Robert Rosenblum, a Munch scholar, claims that a Peruvian mummy inspired the artist. The mummy’s hands held his face in a strikingly similar manner, and the item was shown at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1889. Incidentally, this was the fair that featured the new Eiffel Tower and celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Other scholars have suggested that the mummy also captured the imagination of Paul Gauguin, who realized it in

more than twenty paintings. Still others have proposed that the screaming figure and Munch himself have a mental disorder known as depersonalization, or a detachment from one’s self. The painting has made many appearances in wider culture, including episodes of Doctor Who and a novel by Philip K Dick, and has even been made into an action figure. Obviously, this gruesome image has captured the imagination of the public. Of course, the popularity of equally gruesome horror films is likewise a mystery, at least to me. People love to be frightened, especially children. Frank Baum’s Oz book series of fourteen novels calls on feelings of love and hate, one right after the other, no resting between them. The series became immensely popular after the first volume was published in 1900. I’ll provide one example from The Tin Woodman of Oz, one of the volumes. In the book, a woodman known as Nick Chopper is passionately in love with a young woman who has been captured by the Wicked Witch of the East. Every time the woodman finds her in the witch’s clutches and attempts to steal her away, the witch throws a bolt of lightning to chop off one of his body parts. The woodman takes each dismembered part to a handyman in the forest who replaces it with a tin part until his entire body has become metal. This is when Dorothy meets him. Being the feisty, can-do American, Dorothy Gale tells him that they will find his missing love, no matter what. They find that the young woman lives with a man in a cottage. The young woman’s companion has been created from all the body parts that the witch dismembered from the woodsman. The handyman saved them. And, sadly, the young woman refuses to leave. Thus, no happy ending. Children loved Frank Baum’s tales of angst. The writer of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat, said that he deliberately wanted to scare children and that his stories are

Can We Start Over Again?

“scary in the way a rollercoaster is scary… not scary like being trapped outside your house at night. It is fun scary. Kids like being scared of Doctor Who. It is just an enjoyable thrill. There is nothing wrong with a bit of adrenalin.” Angst is a good thing. Angst is in the genes of Germans, who worry much of the time. And they are disagreeable. Faust said: “Germans make everything difficult, both for themselves and everyone else.” Even today, the German economy strongly binds the good and bad. Scientists all over the place are measuring feelings. A study by psychologists at the University of California found that teenagers who worry the least are sick eight times more than those whose angst is much greater. This discovery explains my almost non-existent illnesses. However, I do game the odds with vaccines. If you don’t experience angst, then feelings are absent. It’s why taking tranquilizers is an undesirable practice. They kill your feelings, especially bad ones. Angst is part of your human beingness. It is certainly a large part of mine.

on’t D Worry, Be Angsty

Angst may have found its first expression in the pages of philosophy books, but it is the arts that have given it such a relatable aesthetic and experiential flourish. Without Munch’s The Scream, Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and Radiohead’s, well… everything, how on earth could we delve into all that is unavoidably human and painful in such glorious splendour? While angst was historically understood to describe a feeling that exists without a single, definable reason, it has taken on many different forms over the years. Now we use the word to express

Research

all manner of stresses, both trivial and earth shattering; it can describe anything from teenage gloom, writer’s block and imposter syndrome to our collective fear of World War III and the Big Rip. Here, we speak with six artists who explore angst from their point of view, variously discussing the postnatal state, fear of an unknown political future and, unexpectedly, the funny side of our mortal woes. Words: Louise Benson, Holly Black and Emily Steer

Ho Tzu Nyen TERROR & METAMORPHOSIS

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND EDOUARD MALINGUE GALLERY

“Clouds suggest elevation, yet the act of staring up at a cloud makes one feel the downward pull of gravity, of flesh and mortality.” Never has a wisp of condensed water contained more menace than in the work of Ho Tzu Nyen.

Research

Ho Tzu Nyen

Print, Paste, Protest

“It’s a referendum. If everyone says yes why should a man sitting in an office stop it happening? That’s why I do a lot of my work illegally.” Holly Black meets JR, the anonymous French artist whose huge-scale, human-driven work has taken him everywhere from the US-Mexican border to Rio’s favelas and the Academy Awards. 130

Encounters

Fierce Love

Chantal Joffe “If you look at a painting and it doesn’t make you feel something, if it doesn’t engage you in some way, there really is no point.” Chantal Joffe’s portraits of friends and acquaintances, as well as her many self-portraits, are intimate, honest and entirely human. Louise Benson meets the artist at her studio in London. 138

Encounters

Mobilizing the Masses

Nick Cave “There’s always optimism in my work. It’s about bringing things to light through colour. Through movement. It’s about activation. That’s when the healing process begins.” Margaret Carrigan heads to Chicago to meet Nick Cave, whose powerfully affirmative work cuts straight to the heart of its often hefty political subject matter. 148

Encounters

Print Matters

AA Bronson “We’d all get stoned, sit around on the floor and put it together—it was a quilting bee approach to publishing.” AA Bronson, aka the “Grandfather of Zines”, discusses magazine-making, eighties New York and his love of printed matter with Madeleine Morley. 156

Encounters

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---------------------------------------------A N G S T W I T H A C A P I T A L A In a world full of neurotics, the word “angst” has lost much of its former gravitas — employed to describe everything from the melancholic ramblings of artistes to the most trivial fears of everyday life. When, asks Henry Hitchings, did we lose the pure meaning of the term, in its most dreadful form? Illustrations: Suds McKenna ----------------------------------------------

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The word “angst” is beloved of journalists and skittish cultural commentators. It suggests the confused malaise of the intellectually restless — the apprehension that something important is missing from life, and the disquiet caused by that awareness. We’re used to reading and hearing about millennial angst, teenage angst and the special kinds of angst felt by artists or songwriters. Among artists, Edvard Munch is the quintessential angst-monger, a troubled documentarist of the inner life — hence the “infinite scream of nature” in his most famous work. There’s also Vincent van Gogh, of course, wrenching himself towards his extraordinary understanding of colour, or for that matter Mark Rothko, whose style was one of total immersion and self-sacrifice. A more droll and less painterly example is Woody Allen, or rather the prolific writer-director’s numerous on-screen alter egos. Sample line: “I was walking through the woods, thinking about Christ. If he was a carpenter, I wondered what he charged for bookshelves.” Originally the word “angst” had a more specific application. It entered English from German, and its immediate source was the works of Sigmund Freud. For Freud, Angst (with a capital A, as is the norm for German nouns) had connotations of congestion. Its root was the Latin “angustia” — usually found in its plural form “angustiae”, meaning “difficulties” or “the narrows”, a place where one is hemmed in — and when he wrote of Angst, he was picturing an oppressive anxiety that had no particular object. If the object was identifiable, he preferred to use a different word, Furcht. Freud explained this difference in his essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where he also used the term Schreck to signify the feelings we have when danger takes us by surprise. Yet the distinction he drew was not a conventional one in German, and it was not even something to which he strictly adhered. Freud liked to establish precise terminology, which he hoped wouldn’t be smudged by words’ past associations, and it was this that led him to coin specialized terms — such as the German words that were later rendered in English as fore-pleasure, superego, abreaction and counter-

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Angst with a Capital A

transference, as well as psychoanalysis itself. But Angst came with baggage. For instance, in the sixteenth century the theologian Martin Luther had linked it to the experience of childbirth, death and hellfire, and it appeared frequently in the works of Goethe, though his preferred term was Sorge. Although Freud published many of his major works before the First World War, it was in the 1920s that he became a household name. “I am considered a celebrity,” he wrote to his nephew Samuel in 1925. His feelings about this were mixed, but one of the consequences was that his terminology was adopted — by languages other than German, and in contexts often remote from the original ones. His friend Stefan Zweig was an especially ardent popularizer of his ideas, and tended to represent them in enthusiastically simplistic terms. It feels apt, then, that when Zweig in 1925 published a short fictional portrait of the paralyzing nausea caused by the guilt of adultery he gave it the title Angst. An interesting sidelight: it was Zweig who introduced Freud to Salvador Dalí, so much of whose work looks as if it was designed to illustrate Freud’s ideas. The first reference to angst in a published work in English seems to have been in Caroline Hubback’s 1922 translation of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. (The novelist George Eliot had used it in a letter in 1849, but was slipping for a moment into German, rather than seeking to introduce the word into English.) Starting in the 1940s, angst was often mentioned in English publications to do with philosophy and psychology, though it was only in the 1960s that writers began to use it without self-consciousness.

Begrebet Angest, a book that dealt with the relationship between the emotions and creativity (and was later read with interest by Edvard Munch). It is now generally known in English as The Concept of Anxiety, although the first English translation had the title The Concept of Dread. At the heart of Kierkegaard’s writing lies the question of what it is to stare into the gulf of the unknown. The sensation, he thinks, is akin to dizziness; the freedom to choose one’s course is bewildering. If you are standing on a cliff, you are afraid that you may fall, yet there is also a nagging urge to throw yourself over the edge. Kierkegaard articulated the fundamental agonies of existentialism, but it was another hundred years until it transformed from a philosophical and literary preoccupation into a cultural movement — prompting a media frenzy that made its proponents, notably Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, international figures. Angst then became a convenient term with which to convey the texture of existentialism; it summed up the purgatorial nature of humankind’s search for meaning and fear of insignificance, and eventually it would be a handy instrument for those looking to parody such afflictions. The transition is evident in the attitude about whether or not the word should be printed in italics and/or with a capital A. By the 1960s there was an inconsistency about this that suggested it was widely though not universally regarded as part of English vocabulary; in the 1970s it was common not only to eschew both the capital letter and italics, but also to use

The term gained currency through its association with existentialism. The angstiness of this school of thought could be traced back to its founding figure, the Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). In 1844 he published

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Angst with a Capital A

the word playfully, in compounds such as newsangst or (during the Vietnam War) Viet-angst. The adjective angst-ridden, which emerged in the 1960s, rocketed in popularity in the eighties and nineties, while angsty, apparently first used in 1956, surged in the run-up to the millennium. The result was a greater emphasis on the vagueness of angst, instead of the true horrors of being choked by it. It could be punningly dismissed as a symptom of perpetual adolescence — fashion victims had angst in their pants — or as middle-class boredom masquerading as pensiveness. This reflected a wider trend in which the language of psychoanalysis became the professional jargon of other kinds of therapists; soon enough it was part of the standard vocabulary of emotion and relationships, as documented endlessly in self-help books and popular magazines. Amateur scholars of those subjects (so, pretty much everyone) have come to speak blithely about the unconscious and about trauma, repression, projection and transference. People who have done no psychoanalytic reading, let alone had any relevant training, casually refer to the ego and the id, the pleasure principle, sibling rivalry, totemism, the latent content of dreams, group psychology and free association. The most pedestrian discussion of relationships and personality can involve talk of defence mechanisms, narcissism, complexes, the libido and being anally retentive. All of these are terms popularized by the profession of psychoanalysis — mainly Freud and his acolytes,

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even if many in fact originated with other thinkers such as Carl Jung or Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fliess. More to the point, all of them have specialized meanings that aren’t commonly understood. Used with the latitude of the non-specialist, this vocabulary can seem like fashionable tinsel rather than being helpfully diagnostic. Meanwhile the contemporary infatuation with irony makes angst an object of amusement: after all, it is an unironic response to a thoroughly ironic subject, namely life’s incomprehensibility. Schooled in the comedy of detachment, we scoff at the legions of adolescent diarists who fret about whether their friendships are illusory, along with every overhyped band that’s struggled to come up with appropriately self-aware material for its “difficult” second album. We laugh, too, at the miserabilism of the Smiths (and forget about their more flamboyant songs). We groan at the bedsit ballads of countless pale-faced imitators of David Bowie and at the ostentatious desolation of nu metal. We wince at the tightly wound wallflowers who populate Wes Anderson films. We shudder at the self-lacerating selfinspection of a certain kind of stand-up comic — Simon Amstell is an obvious British example. Or maybe we don’t, because we discern in Amstell or Anderson a knowingness that transmutes their particular angst into wisdom. Yet when The Lego Batman Movie, of all things, rips into the image of the angst-ridden artist, it’s clear how much of a cliché it has become. The word itself has been blunted by overuse and by frequent association with artistic self-indulgence rather than powerful art. Today angst seems almost quaint, at once overblown and inert — arguably an accessory of the more corrosive forms of masculinity, and certainly inadequate as a response to the problems of the world.

Angst with a Capital A

Elephant #35 - Summer 2018