Tobias Putrih/MOS

Tobias Putrih/MOS

wexner center for the arts

Introduction

This presentation of Tobias Putrih and MOS’s Majestic is part of Six Solos, a suite of six discrete exhibitions each featuring the work of a rising international artist. Since its inception in 1989, the Wexner Center has embraced a strong commitment to the work of younger artists engaged in pushing their practice in new directions. For many of the Six Solos artists, this marks their first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum, and for all of them, their presentation at the Wex offers a welcome chance to introduce their work to broad and diverse new audiences. Each artist has taken the center’s invitation as an incentive to broaden their scope of address and expand their already ambitious repertoire of forms and ideas. We believe that all six artists are on the cusp of greater achievement and renown, and we are particularly pleased to be able to include them in the programs and festivities marking our 21st anniversary in November 2010. As we now leave adolescence behind, we’ve undoubtedly gained a modicum of professional and institutional maturity, but Six Solos remains true to the energetic, irreverent spirit of artistic exploration and discovery that has marked the Wexner Center throughout its first two decades. That sensibility will certainly remain embedded in our DNA for years to come.

Sherri Geldin, Director Christopher Bedford, Chief Curator of Exhibitions Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University

Generous support for this project is provided

by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

COVER, OVERLEAF, AND FACING

Majestic, 2010 Site-specific installation for the Wexner Center Aluminum, plywood, foam, and mixed media Courtesy of the artists

Screening Schedule

november 9–28 screens continuously Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba Happy New Year: Memorial Project Vietnam II, 2003 Single-channel projection on DVD Dimensions variable, 15 mins., looped Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery november 29–december 26 11:15 am, 12:55 pm, 2:35 pm, 4:15 pm ( + 6 pm thu–sat) Abbas Kiarostami Shirin, 2008 Video, 92 mins.

Courtesy of MK2 december 28–january 23 tue, wed, sun: 11:15 am, 12:35 pm, 1:55 pm, 3:15 pm, 4:35 pm thu, fri, sat: 11:10 am, 12:35 pm, 2 pm, 3:25 pm, 4:50 pm, 6:15 pm Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige I Want to See, 2008 Video, 75 mins.

Courtesy of Films Boutique Distribution january 24–february 13 11:15 am, 12:55 pm, 2:35 pm, 4:15 pm ( + 6 pm thu–sat) Leslie Thornton Peggy and Fred in Hell, 1985–2010 7 video episodes, appr. 90 mins. total Courtesy of the artist

Cinema Aground Bill Horrigan

In a preparatory stage of what would become

expressive potential of moving images in the

Majestic, his project for the Wexner Center,

gallery than he is in evoking a specific physical

Tobias Putrih produced several sketches of a

space: not the public space a person occupies

wooden structure, powerfully horizontal, that

outside before entering a cinema, and not the

first reminded me of a large-scale sukkah. A

collectively experienced projected flat image on

sukkah is a modest temporary dwelling, semi-

view inside, but the viewing space in-between.

enclosed, that is built, typically using natural

As Jean-Luc Godard, among others, have argued,

materials, and inhabited by observant Jews

it’s there in that in-between space that cinema

during the annual Sukkot harvest festival. As

exists: not in the projection booth, not in the

Putrih proceeded to refine his conception of the

light beam it directs at the screen, nor in the

architectural sculpture he would build in the

projected image, but in what transpires in the

Wexner Center’s first gallery, in collaboration

middle, the collisions ensuing from a room full

with Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample from

of subjective spectatorships.

the New Haven architectural firm MOS, the

Versed in the vernaculars of classic movie

specific visual evocation of a hand-made dwelling

palaces no less than in the often-visionary

mutated into something more enigmatic and

alternative cinema constructions within the

commanding. But the structure still honors the

historic avant-garde from Frederick Kiesler to

contract to support human inhabitation and

Peter Kubelka, Putrih envisioned his project for

ritual. In the case of a sukkah, it’s a place to sleep,

the Wexner Center as a species of functional

to eat, to pray; in Putrih’s case, it’s a place for

ruin, figuratively comparing it to a “collapsed

cinema, a place where the play of cinema beckons

spaceship covered with foam sediment (or

its legions to assemble.

maybe as a sunken ship covered in shells

Putrih’s practice is made manifest in

and seaweed)…[and] in that sense watching

sculptural creations within, and adjustments to,

a movie within such a structure is more like

the built environment, and one strand of that

adventure.” Meredith, while pursuing the

practice has taken the form of constructing

limits of the design software he and his office

cinema-viewing conditions within the

were using, wrote that “it’s not like we’re just

framework of a museum or gallery space: for

making a picturesque image of a ruin, we’re

example, A Certain Tendency in Representation:

trying to use a rigorous methodology of logic/

Cineclub at Thomas Dane (2005), a project at a

rational processes but for other ends, producing

Atmospheric, the de facto Slovenian “pavilion” for

rational/constructive processes to produce

commercial gallery in London, and Venetian,

the ruin through logic…. We’re using logics/

the Venice Biennale (2007). In these and other

form.” As Meredith later described it, “this is a

projects, produced sometimes in partnership

rectangular box room with a raised floor, and

with Meredith and Sample and sometimes

two square-ish doors to move through the

autonomously, Putrih is less interested in the

cinema…. It’s rotated on the Wexner grid.”1

For Putrih and MOS, as for many artists

A cinema structure wants moving images;

working in the Wexner Center’s galleries, the

to satisfy that desire, four screening programs

building’s taunting, implacable grid has provided

reverberate within the shell of this structure run

a hard ground to resist. One of Putrih’s and

aground in the gallery.

MOS’s strategies is to conceive a “parallelogram cinema [that] mirrors the angles of the Wexner

Born in Tokyo to a Vietnamese father and a Japanese mother, largely raised in Texas and

Center,” as Meredith notes. That form “produces

graduating from American art schools, and living

this ‘slightly off’ or off-center view of the film,

in Ho Chi Minh City since 1997, Jun Nguyen-

where there is no idealized vantage point. It

Hatsushiba drew international attention in 2001

destablilizes the viewer, just a teeny bit.” It’s

with Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards

an aspiration underlying Putrih’s previous architectonic sculptural projects, both cinematic and secular. Born in Slovenia in 1972 to a family

the Complex—For the Courageous, the Curious, and the

Cowards. It visualizes an indelible hallucination,

as though literalizing a nonexistent idiom

of sculptors, Putrih came of age as an artist

about unlikely struggle and endurance: six men,

himself armed with the memories of a relatively

working in pairs, clad for swimming, endeavor

benign Socialist culture, one opening up in 1991

to advance bicycle taxis—cyclos—across the

to fuller access to the imperatives and trade-offs

ocean floor, laboring as long as they can before

of the culture of the Western art world. The clash

propelling themselves upward for air, only to

of those differences, those tectonic chafings,

sinkingly return to the task, hoping to fail better.

deeply informs his work’s skeptical mode of

Nguyen-Hatsushiba has used cyclos frequently

inquiry into differences between the ideal and

in his work, a continued urban presence as a

the achievable, between the idea and its always-

form of transport in Vietnam but regarded by

already inadequate actualization, between the

some as disquieting residue from the colonial

inevitability of the ruin and the bewildering

era, hence a mark of embarrassment within a

pathos of imagining it could ever have been (or

country (since becoming a member of the World

be) otherwise. When Argos, in Brussels, decided

Trade Organization) aiming to recalibrate itself

to mount a group exhibition in 2007 inspired by

as a twenty-first-century economic and cultural

Chris Marker’s epochal 1962 film, La jetée, there

could have been no artist more aligned in affinity

with Marker than Putrih, who designed the

contender within the global marketplace. Cyclists and cyclos return in his Happy New Year: Memorial

Project Vietnam II (2003), the work screened here.

cinema space in which the film was constantly on

A poetic rumination on North Vietnam’s Tet

view: a cheaply crafted structure in its elements

Offensive from 1968, the film is again visualized

and idioms beckoning not to a specifiable past

by Nguyen-Hatsushiba as a subaqueous eruption

and embodying no blue-print for the cinema

of carnivalesque color. Realpolitik commentary

of our successors, but hovering in their middle

set to one side, Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s project takes

tension, in the here and now (more exactly, in

to water as the only medium through which his

the where or when), a memory space understood

country’s legacy might begin to be fathomed, an

by Marker no less than by Putrih to cease to exist

opaque curtain haze suspended between colonial

once it’s pronounced as existing at all, an avowal

yoke and self-determining destiny.

of a “cinema” fated to evaporate even as its light beam pulses over our heads.

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) approaches mesmerizing spectacle

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba Happy New Year: Memorial Project Vietnam II, 2003

Abbas Kiarostami Shirin, 2008

Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige I Want to See, 2008

head-on, producing a radically distilled take

circulate within a moviegoing universe, albeit

on the notion of a reaction shot. Here, the

within an art-house satellite in that universe.

“event” to which, one by one, a hundred and

But in its secret life, it comports itself as though

fourteen women are seen to be reacting,

it were a gallery installation all along, a “what

remains completely unrevealed, not to them

if ?” proposition in extremis: what if someone

but to us. Seated in an Iranian cinema, they’re

made a movie consisting solely of faces of women

purportedly watching a film also called “Shirin,”

watching a movie? Directed by Kiarostami to

a melodramatic adaptation of a well-known

look slightly away from his camera, his actresses

Persian love story (that film doesn’t actually

(among them many well-regarded Iranian

exist, Kiarostami having produced only the

performers, plus the unexpected presence

audio track of dialogue and music, plus some

of French luminary Juliette Binoche, star of

often violent sound effects—in effect, a radio

the director’s recent Certified Copy) mark the

play). An inquiry into the poetics of spectatorship,

movement of the unseen narrative through what

Kiarostami’s project was intended to be screened

flits across the surface of each’s face: amusement,

in conventional cinemas—a real movie meant to

engagement, boredom, wonder, tear-inducing

Leslie Thornton Peggy and Fred in Hell, 1985–2010

empathy. We’re assigned to be looking at these

Fred approach this flattened spectacle like one

moviegoers as they look; in the shot/reaction shot

would any desert—they keep moving.” They

dyad, we become the event to which they react:

move across and within the ruins of twentieth-

the cinema is us.

“I’m not sure I’ll understand much, but I

century culture and consumption, channeling border radio, puzzling over film fragments,

want to see.” Thus Je Veux Voir/I Want to See (2008)

misdeciphering signs and objects, as free as Adam

is launched, either a semi-improvised fiction or

and Eve to name the brave new world as they

a slightly scripted documentary about Catherine

stumble through it. As their creator understands

Deneuve, the French actress of rare sensibility

them, their souls are kept alive by “television…

and wit. Directed by Lebanese filmmakers Joana

part of the Artificial Intelligence network. AI

Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, I Want to See was

keeps Television on all the time and so do Peggy

conceived specifically as a vehicle for Deneuve,

valued in Lebanon and in the Arab world for her

and Fred.” 2 Thornton labored on Peggy and Fred

for almost twenty-five years, interspersed with

support of human rights generally (via UNESCO)

other projects and with teaching film at Brown

and of francophone film production in that

University, and in a certain sense it was widely

region. The narrative, such as it is, hangs on the

assumed the cycle would deliberately never be

slightest of conceits: Deneuve is in Beirut for a

“completed” but merely continue in picaresque

humanitarian fund-raising gala in the evening;

fashion, on and off. But with the “Expiration”

before that, elle veut voir [she wants to see] the

episode (2008), Thornton noted, “I would say it

ravaged landscape of the country to the south,

has been a quest which began to close down after

scarred by its war with Israel in 2006. Against

9/11, when the pretense of the work’s ‘future

the caution of her handlers, a driver is arranged

tense’ (its undefined apocalypse) dissolved into a

(played by the actor Rabih Mroué), and the film

more disturbing presence and then even a past.

chronicles their day-trip (pursued by a film crew)

Peggy and Fred was set in the detritus of the Cold

to his grandmother’s village, reduced to rubble

War. In the last few episodes, the serial project

in the event. Constantly smoking cigarettes and

finds its narrative arc, ending on a note strangely

mocking the infantilizing regime of seat-belts,

optimistic, though post-human.”3

the thoroughly domesticated Deneuve and her slightly star-struck driver traverse a landscape harboring memories of what it’s witnessed.

More than just postwar, it’s a

It’s doubtful that the experience of watching Thornton’s masterpiece could ever occur in a more hauntingly wrecked viewing environment than Putrih and MOS here provide.

postapocalyptic landscape on which Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell plays out. An

elaborately experimental science fiction serial

produced between 1984 and 2008, and starring real-life siblings Janis and Donald Reading, Peggy and Fred follows the two children, sole

residents of planet earth. As Thornton describes their situation, “Every day they go out looking

for a better place to live. In the evening they come home. They go out often…. Peggy and

Bill Horrigan is the Wexner Center’s curator at large and former director of media arts.

Notes 1 These comments from Tobias Putrih and Michael Meredith, along with a subsequent remark from Meredith, come from email exchanges with Wexner Center staff.

2 The passages from Thornton originated in a grant proposal she submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1988, from which I quoted in “A Note on Peggy and Fred in Hell/Adolescent Junglebook overschrijdt Scenic Paradise,” an essay published in Mediamatic, vol. 4, #1–2, Fall 1989, pp. 65–68.

3 Thornton’s comment appears in “Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Expiration,” a program note by Steve Polta in the brochure Leslie Thornton: Tuned Always to a Shifting Ground produced by the San Francisco Cinematheque to accompany a series of the same title presented in spring 2008.

About the Artists

Six Solos Erwin Redl Megan Geckler Tobias Putrih/MOS Gustavo Godoy Katy Moran Joel Morrison

Born in Kranj, Slovenia, in 1972, Tobias Putrih

November 9, 2010–February 13, 2011

graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design

Six Solos is organized by the Wexner Center, with Chief Curator of Exhibitions Christopher Bedford as the overall curator for the series and project curator for Tobias Putrih/MOS. The film program was selected by Chris Stults, the Wexner Center’s associate curator of film/ video, and Bill Horrigan, the center’s curator at large and former director of media arts.

at the University of Ljubljana in 1997. He also studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany in 1997– 1998. Putrih first attracted international attention in the 2002 edition of the Manifesta European art biennial, held that year in Frankfurt. He represented Slovenia

at the 2007 Venice Biennale and participated in the 2010 São Paulo Biennale in autumn 2010. Other recent presentations of his work have taken place at Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris during 2010; Musée d’art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, during 2009; and the Hayward and White Cube in London, England, and Galleria Civica di Modena in Modena, Italy, during 2008. Putrih currently lives and works in Boston.

MOS, a collective of designers and architects

All exhibitions and related events at the Wexner Center for the Arts receive support from the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members, as well as from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Columbus Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. © The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts.

Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University 1871 North High Street Columbus, OH 43210-1393 wexarts.org

responsible for a growing roster of innovative spaces, is led by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample and based in New Haven, Connecticut. The collective represented the United States at the 12th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy, in fall 2010.

Frequent collaborators, artist Tobias Putrih and the design firm have previous developed projects at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Photo credits: Cover and overleaf, Sven Kahns; center panel, from top, Jay LaPrete, Kevin Fitzsimons