ArtReview Magazine, May 2010

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A Daimler Brand

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W W W. R O PA C . N E T

HANS BELLMER LOUISE BOURGEOIS Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg / Museum Berggruen Charlottenburg Schloßstraße 70 14059 Berlin

Louise Bourgeois, FRAGILE GODDESS, 2002 Privatsammlung München, © Louise Bourgeois / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2010

www.doublesexus.org




















 



























 




















  


 

April 13–May 27, 2010 Monday–Saturday 10–5 pm 18 East Seventy Ninth Street New York, NY 10075, 212-734-6300 www.acquavellagalleries.com

George Segal, Portrait of Robert and Ethel Scull, 1965, Oil on canvas, plaster, wood chair with cloth, 71¼ x 56½ x 56¼ inches, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya Art © The George and Helen Segal Foundation / Licensed by VAGA , New York, NY

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Paul McCarthy Pig Island Palazzo Citterio Milan, Via Brera 14 May 20 – July 4, 2010

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Prepare to be upstaged by your sofa: ‘objects with personality’ are on the rise

Wu Shuzai (Jiangxi, China) WuWu Shuzai (Jiangxi, China) Shuzai (Jiangxi, China) Wooden Helicopter Wu Shuzai (Jiangxi, China) Helicopter Wooden Helicopter 2010Wooden Wooden Helicopter 2010 2010 Wood, polyester woven tarp, secondhand materials 2010 woven secondhand materials Wood, woven tarp, secondhand materials PhotoWood, by Linpolyester Yi,polyester courtesy Caitarp, Studio Wood, polyester wovenCai tarp, secondhand materials Photo by Lin Yi, Yi, courtesy Studio Photo by Lin courtesy Cai Studio Photo by Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio

MAY 4–JULY 25, 2010 MAY 25, MAY4–JULY 4–JULY 25,2010 2010 INAUGURAL EXHIBITION MAY 4–JULY 25, 2010 INAUGURAL EXHIBITION INAUGURAL EXHIBITION ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM INAUGURAL EXHIBITION ROCKBUND MUSEUM ROCKBUNDART ART MUSEUM SHANGHAI ROCKBUND ART MUSEUM SHANGHAI SHANGHAI SHANGHAI www.rockbundartmuseum.org www.rockbundartmuseum.org www.rockbundartmuseum.org www.caiguoqiang.com www.rockbundartmuseum.org www.caiguoqiang.com www.caiguoqiang.com www.caiguoqiang.com

CENSORED

CURATE MORE, CENSOR LESS With gallery self-censorship, institutional critique steps out of the mere theoretical

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to renew its funding agreement with the ministry, the piece was too ‘explosive’ to remain. My objection that the consequences of removing it were potentially worse was ignored. In fact, the work was being removed as the meeting was in session. I emailed a summary of events to Ko, who was out of town and unavailable by phone, offering to support her if she chose to request that the work be reinstated. Ko forwarded my email to the French press, who promptly seized the story, gleefully highlighting the irony of a Chinese artist being censored in a Western democracy, and that ENSBA’s director, Henry-Claude Cousseau, who was then still facing criminal charges for displaying ‘works of a violent pornographic nature unacceptable for a young audience’ at CAPC Bordeaux in 2000, was himself now the censor. When ENSBA made it clear that they were not prepared to reinstate the work in its original position, I resigned from the project. By the time of the exhibition opening, Ko had mobilised a 60-person demonstration outside the gallery, while inside heavy security, the withdrawal of the opening drinks and swarms of journalists created a morbid atmosphere.

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CLARE CAROLIN

The next afternoon I ran into Ko outside the gallery, where she was supervising the work’s reinstallation in its original place. A few hours previously, Minister for Culture Frédéric Mitterrand had called her in person to apologise and inform her that Cousseau had been instructed to replace the offending work tout de suite. With the Sarkozy administration now emerging from the ugly debacle as defenders of free speech, the local left-wing press dropped the story while the right played catch-up; for their part, the international and specialist arts and industry journals ran the story as a comic farce. Most cases of institutional self-censorship pass unnoticed, and the potentially offending works remain invisible: this is the point of the exercise. The case of Le Weekend de Sept Jours was a rare instance of circumstance and an appropriate artwork combining to create a situation where censorship served not as a gag but as a mechanism through which a work of art entered the mainstream, exposing the limits of expression and amplifying current political sensitivities. For curators who opt to defend the artist rather than the institution, such situations offer the chance to test the agency of institutional critique, transforming it from an academic abstraction into a code of practice.

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SINCE MOST OF MY PROFESSIONAL LIFE as a curator has been spent at a major publicly funded arts centre in London, I am no stranger to censorship scares. Typically, the night before the press preview, senior staff home in on a key work which they declare to be at best potentially offensive, at worst downright criminal: that they will have encountered it previously – in catalogue proofs, at project meetings – is irrelevant. Imagining possible imminent reactions from press and public produces a near-hysterical response and a call for the work’s removal. But what if the perceived problem with the work is not its inappropriateness for ‘family’ audiences, or its unacceptability under local laws relating to the display of ‘obscene’ images? What if the calls for the removal of the work are coming from the very organisations and individuals who support and administer the institution? This was precisely what happened in the case of a work by Siu Lan Ko, part of Le Weekend de Sept Jours (2010), an exhibition I was invited to curate by the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts (ENSBA), Paris, in my capacity as deputy head of the curating department at the Royal College of Art. A collaboration between ENSBA, the RCA and Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, it was to be a modest exhibition by recent graduates and research students. Ko conceived a humorous new work in response to the theme: two seven-metrelong banners to hang on either side of the gallery entrance and display a text that détourned Sarkozy’s 2007 election slogan ‘travailler plus pour gagner plus’ – ‘work more to earn more’ – to read ‘work less to earn more’. ENSBA had cooperated on the work’s planning and fabrication, and had approved a catalogue featuring a convincing photomontage of it installed in situ. Within hours of the work’s installation, however, ENSBA staff informed me that representatives from the nearby Ministry of Culture had complained about the work, and that since ENSBA was shortly

Depth Perception Nicole Cohen Claire Ellen Corey Thomas Eller Cliff Evans Roland Flexner Jeff Gibson Geoff Kleem Susanna Starr Fred Tomaselli May 9–June 6

Future Tense Curated by Dede Young Through May 30

Cliff Evans H Box s Beyeler Foundation s Basel April 17–May 16

Stephan Stoyanov Gallery 29 Orchard Street, New York 10002 T: 212.343.4240 www.stephanstoyanovgallery.com

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART In this ongoing series, the real people who created the historic styles give their eyewitness testimony

NO 17:

Sonia Delaunay was born in Ukraine in 1885. She cofounded the Orphist movement with her second husband, Robert Delaunay. Influenced by Fauvism and the colour theories of the dye chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, Orphism was devoted to pure abstraction and colour relationships. Sonia outlived Robert by nearly 50 years, enjoyed an independent career and many official awards, and died in 1979. interview by MATTHEW COLLINGS

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SONIA DELAUNAY

ARTREVIEW What are the important names in art? SONIA DELAUNAY Courbet, Manet, Monet and Cézanne. After that it’s Van Gogh and Gauguin. You’d think it’s only Van Gogh and that you could leave out Gauguin. But you couldn’t have Matisse without Gauguin. And you can’t leave out Matisse. AR What’s good about Matisse? SD Colour. Accuracy. Amazing labour and stamina – all that strenuous making and unmaking and making again, stage after stage, process after process: paint the image, wash the canvas down with solvent, paint it again, wash it down. Then the end result is relaxed and charming. And maybe what is most beautiful about it is not colour so much. Of course, in Matisse colour dominates. But when you’re looking at it you’re really struck by the impressive feeling of effortlessness. And then people actually think he didn’t put any effort in! It used to drive him nuts. Picasso was always beating his chest, so people thought, ah yes, that Picasso, a true titan, but Matisse, well, he could try a bit harder. AR What was your first abstract work? SD It was a blanket. I was twenty-six. I was married to Robert Delaunay. I sewed some colour patches together when our son was born. We looked at the blanket, and it was clear it was a work with a cubist conception of space. AR What would you say that was – I mean if you didn’t use the word ‘cubist’? SD Planes. You see them as continuous but also discontinuous, and the discontinuity isn’t unpleasant or a mistake, it’s actually creating space. There’s an illusion of different planes, but at the same time you know it’s flat. AR Isn’t that what happens with patterned fabrics? SD Yes. And it’s very good that it does. It happens with Raphael, too. Nothing bad about fabrics or Raphael or Matisse – colour is a marvellous thing, it’s a tool really. You’re never saying, ‘Look at these colours, everyone!’ That would be arid. You’re expressing amazement at the world. And the way you access the world visually, if you’re an artist like me, is through colour. And through space, perception: that kind of thing. AR What do you mean by ‘perception’? SD Well, you work with how things appear, not just what they are in themselves. In fact, of course, philosophically nothing is really anything in itself, unless you’re Plato, in which case it’s only something in itself. But it’s so pure you can’t see it. And all you ever experience is the pale shadow of the real thing. Until you’ve reached a state of unity with the Platonic view of God. But everyone who hasn’t done that is still chained in the cave looking at the flickering shadows. But I’m nothing to do with that. As an artist dealing with the kind of issues I’m interested in, you’re always thinking about how one colour affects another. You put one colour next to another very consciously. It might not be the

right colour, and you have to change it. Or it might be the right one initially, the local relationship might be rather exciting, but eventually you have to change it when other colour relationships start getting established. AR And in the end, what’s the aim of all the relationships? SD What I said: you’re describing reality, like a Renaissance artist or like Damien Hirst or, you know, Picasso and those people. But in my case I’m restricting the materials and processes a bit more. Not to try and get top marks in the colour class, or the design class. Those are just categories or definitions. They’re not the aim. Colour and design are tools or materials or processes. You’ve got perception, colour, contrasts of colour, the optical processes by which a plane seems to be out of register with another plane, and yet it’s continuous with it at the same time. AR You said ‘cubist’ earlier… SD Yes, well it was the period. That was the thing in the air, in 1911, when I sewed that blanket for my new baby. It was the important visual language. Cubist space, these planes clickclacking together with a lovely snap, the surfaces having these unpredictable textures and shapes. You asked what were the important names, and I was thinking, well, what was the leadup to the moment, not so much the moment itself, my moment, but the lead-up that made it possible? I think of the Renaissance, say, as a certain comparable moment. It’s forgotten now, or misunderstood. The big thing about the Renaissance is that you’ve got this wave of art made by people who have found a way to be incredibly authoritative, but also incredibly free. I mean, that was one fucking open-minded art style! It’s a total misunderstanding to think of Cubism as a rebellion against Renaissance space. It’s really ignorant to say that kind of thing. All art is about space. And there’s plenty of ‘Cubism’ in the Renaissance, actually. But the times are always different, the sense of reality is different – technology, what it’s possible to think, the generality of thoughts and perceptions. And so the conception of space is different, because space in art is always telling you something. Where things are, where you are in relation to things, how much can be seen, what is obscured, these all become very charged questions. AR Do you think it’s a cynical time now, and that you and Robert Delaunay and Apollinaire and so on were much more poetic and spiritual? SD I can’t even begin to compute that kind of question. It isn’t realistic. I saw a good interview with Damien Hirst on Sky Arts. He listened to the questions of the interviewer, the sociologist Laurie Taylor, and thought carefully before he answered. Although there was a certain amount of having something to sell – you know, saying the thing that you know will big-up your brand and maximise your finances – what was mostly happening was that Hirst concentrated hard on trying to define what certain ideas actually meant to him, when they were put from a very different point of view. And that’s all art is. You’re concentrating on being as accurate as you can, but visually instead of with language. When I thought of Raphael earlier, I was thinking about his series of Madonna and Child paintings. When you look at them, you’re

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART overwhelmed by the effect, and it would be odd to step out of that effect and start analysing it. It would seem reductive. But that’s exactly what an artist is always doing. It’s what Raphael himself did when he was impressed by Leonardo and Michelangelo. He analysed all the different aspects that made their pictures impressive. And by studying them, he reduced them. But out of that process came his beautiful paintings of the Madonna and Child – those amazing colour glows. So every period is both cynical and sincere. It’s the same model for someone pompous in Tate Modern doing an installation as it is for noble painters 500 years ago. AR What were the colours of that blanket you sewed? SD Typical cubist ones: cool browns, yellow ochre, red-brown, black, cream. It had an objective feel about it. It wasn’t visually flabby. I think all these matters of colour and space in art, whether it’s Raphael doing a painting or Damien Hirst’s assistants doing one, are to do with rhythm. Musical rhythm, a beat, a contrast of vibrations, getting the colour right because the tone is right, and getting the contrast of tones right because the rhythm is right. But the type of materials you use, and your focus and the way you get particular rhythms and avoid other ones, or the shapes that seem right to do, where other ones seem irrelevant, well, these are the times or the aims of the age feeding in, and it’s a bit more complicated how all that works. I don’t think about that side so much, whereas I can say a lot about putting brown next to red. AR What do you think of Tracey Emin’s blankets? SD Very good, often. They’re paintings, really, much more successful in painterly terms than her actual paintings, which are more in the performance or poetry or conceptual art area, I think, like a certain take on Cy Twombly. He does these good paintings for about ten years, and then it’s all much more about a certain preciousness of atmosphere, and a cult, and the feeling of John Cage sort of blessing every smudge, and that’s not a very convincing vein of artistic expression in my view. AR What’s it like being a woman artist? SD Great. I was very successful at it. But I was also able to do everything else. I looked after my son. He became a good jazz critic. I looked after Robert. He was always getting ill and depressed, and being angry. We discussed the art we made. We criticised and analysed it, and we supported each other. I supported him a bit more than he did me, because those were simply the gender roles since time immemorial. Plus, I wasn’t so depressed as him. I kept things together when there wasn’t any wealth. I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I lost all my funding when the Russian revolution came. I had to make my own way financially for 60 years after that. I had a long time when Robert was the famous one and I wasn’t thought about. I had my work, but nobody wanted it. Then things changed, and I was celebrated, and I had a lot of money and was very happy. AR You became a designer.

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I think a Matisse is different to haute couture, ultimately, although there are similarities: with both there’s a rush, you are amazed, there’s a definite visual blast. But with design and fashion and so on, you don’t do those things in a philosophical mode

SD Yes, graphic design, fashion. I painted designs for cars. I put a lot of experience and knowledge into those things, but it’s a different type of art to the paintings I did earlier. AR Different because…? SD I think a Matisse is different to haute couture, ultimately, although there are similarities: with both there’s a rush, you are amazed, there’s a definite visual blast. But with design and fashion and so on, you don’t do those things in a philosophical mode. I might do a painting where there’s a disc format, and the colours will be partly very high contrast and partly they’ll be tonally similar. In that softer part, it’s as if the bands that make up the discs are more melded together. With the hard ones it’s as if the bands are flying apart. And the whole sense of space is based on unifying those different contrasts, creating a believable visual pulsating tension everywhere. Now, with a dress pattern, that is exactly the kind of thing that is marvellous, and the continuity with abstract art is true, and it’s right to see it and celebrate it. But speaking as someone who has worked in all these different areas, I maintain that painting is ultimately more thoughtful. I suppose it might be because the work is always talking about itself being itself. As a viewer you are always being told, as it were, that this is a painting. And that self-referencing or defining is different to fashion. The pattern in fashion is the same, and has the same delights, and something of the same self-consciousness even. But paintings are processes, and they make themselves in the process, and as a viewer you’re seeing the process, and I think that makes the visual experience of a painting have more philosophical implications than the visual experience of a pattern on a dress, or in a work of graphic design. AR Thank you, Sonia. Next month: Picasso says Malevich is a bit boring

EXHIBITIONS: DANISH ARCHITECTURE CENTRE, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY, FOTOGRAFISK CENTER, GALERIE MIKAEL ANDERSEN, GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD, HANS ALF GALLERY, MARTIN ASBÆK GALLERY, PETER LAV GALLERY, ROHDE CONTEMPORARY, NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK, V1 GALLERY AND ALL OVER TOWN

12 - 20 May 2010

COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL “DAY AND NIGHT – ALL OVER TOWN” WWW.COPENHAGENPHOTOFESTIVAL.COM FACEBOOK: COPENHAGEN PHOTO FESTIVAL

ON VIEW

GHOSTS IN THE MACHINE

In Marieta Chirulescu’s abstract admixtures of media, painting seems simultaneously alive and dead

THIS JANUARY, towards the end of my meeting with Marieta Chirulescu, we discovered a kindred fascination with borders. Not the kind that wars are fought to alter; rather the kind that bound paintings and images off from the rest of the world. For the Romanian Chirulescu, who emigrated with her family to Germany in 1992 and moved to Berlin after graduating from school in Nuremberg in 2008, the interest in borders went back to the Eastern European art and architecture books of her childhood, in which images, due to poor printing quality and techniques, were often badly reproduced, skewed and misaligned, such that a border became apparent. For me it was more a fetishisation of the secular abstraction of Robert Ryman and, say, the early chromatic panels of Brice Marden. Yet in both cases, our fascination was (and is) indirectly linked to questions of materiality, process and illusion – all of which essentially inform Chirulescu’s pictorial practice. A painter, photographer and printmaker (for lack of a better term) all rolled into one, Chirulescu gracefully blurs the distinctions that generally keep these media apart. Indeed, even when pressed, it can be hard to categorise Chirulescu’s works, and recourse must often be made to an exhibition list in order to clarify any doubts, although such clarification hardly accounts for process. Perhaps it would be more accurate to list the techniques Chirulescu is known to use: painting, photography, Photoshop

and photocopying, in no particular order. The artist, however, doesn’t seem to be interested in mere trompe l’oeil or technological legerdemain, nor does she seem to be taken by technology for the sake of technology, even if a Wade Guyton-esque appreciation of its misuse and consequent errors is apparent in her work. Rather, her indiscriminate marrying of media seems to come from a more organic and integrated place, in which said techniques are made to conspire dynamically to the ends of her unorthodox palette. Nevertheless, as already suggested, Chirulescu’s spare, quasiadministrative abstractions, which generate atmospheres ranging from a kind of tenebrous elegance to a luminous and candid sophistication, are still very much engaged in questions of materiality, process and even illusion. Take, for instance, the business with borders, a motif, so to speak, that dominated the artist’s recent solo show at Galerie Micky Schubert, in Berlin. There, works such as Off, Block and Bandit (all 2010) played with the graduating grey negative space of the photocopier (usually the byproduct of accidentally copying too large or off-kilter), shifting that void from the ƒˆ


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margins towards the middle, thereby creating a marginal centre. Meanwhile other pieces stayed within a more traditional understanding of pictorial borders, going on to frame themselves in a variety of ways. Mixed Gradiens 1.5 (2010), for example, a mounted c-print whose bright and airy interior resembled a citrus-hued Photoshop colouring palette, was contained by a thin black border, itself bounded by a fat white margin, while Jeans (2010), a small oil on canvas, consisted of a thin wash of denim-blue, full of subtle blue crosshatchings hovering on a black ground with soft black margins. Each work, and the media fluidly enlisted in the cause of its composition, is made very much on a unique and individual basis. And yet for all their particularity, these works all display a propensity both to show and dissimulate the hand of the artist: now you see it, now you don’t. Even then, though, this effect is more a byproduct of Chirulescu’s working method and sensibility than it is an end in itself. Because one thing that sets her manipulation of technology apart from that of her like-minded peers (including the aforementioned Guyton, Kelley Walker and Das Institut), is the

CHRIS SHARP

weirdly organic edge she brings to it, generated in large part by her ability to invest each work with a spectral sense of process, or even the spectral tout court. (Another way to read the border is as simply demarcating an absence, functional as a penumbral index of missing content.) Indeed, painted or not, there is something haunting about these works, as if they themselves were ‘paintings’ haunted by painting, full of a rarefied and morbid beauty, like some kind of symbolist abstraction. Incidentally, Yve-Alain Bois ends his famous essay ‘Painting: The Task of Mourning’ (1986) by quoting the Austrian writer Robert Musil: ‘If some painting is still to come, if painters are still to come, they will not come from where we expect them to.’ Paradoxically, Chirulescu’s work both fulfils and disproves this prophecy, in that where it comes from – Photoshop, the camera, the photocopier, etc – is both unexpected (by virtue of not being paint) and expected (less and less paint is being enlisted in the cause of postpainterly abstraction), at this point. But it is in using these normally removed, nonhuman media that she manages to enact a mise en abyme of the death of painting, bringing it very much to life.

Two cultures, two traditions

Left: Copper head. Found at Wunmonije Compound, Ife, Nigeria. Late 14th–early 16th century. © Karin L. Wills/Museum for African Art/ National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria. Right: Andrea del Verrocchio, Head of a woman. Charcoal, heightened with lead white, c. 1475. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

African sculptures and Italian drawings from the 12th to the 15th centuries

4 MARCH – 6 JUNE 2010

KINGDOM OF IFE

THE BP SPECIAL EXHIBITION

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Co-organised by Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, Spain and the Museum for African Art, New York, USA, in collaboration with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.

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Osang Gwon May 6 - June 5

AW77, 2009 C-print, mixed media 51.2x55.12x63 in/130x140x160 cm

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CIARAN MURPHY “ALL THAT’S AIR MELTS INTO SOLID” 8 MAY - 19 JUNE, 2010

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ON VIEW IF YOU’RE FAMILIAR with ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Japan’s one-man entertainment industry, perhaps you’ve seen Zatôichi (2003) or Hana-bi (1997). If you’re not, here’s the intro: he spent the 1970s raising laughs at some of Tokyo’s scuzzier bars before acting in TV and movies. In 1989 he directed Violent Cop, the start of a run of films so astonishingly good that he became Japan’s most celebrated auteur, culminating in a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres earlier this year. He still appears in countless TV shows, he writes fiction and poetry, and, in 1994, after a near-fatal motorbike accident, he started to paint. Now his brilliance across several media fills the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, where I’ve come to meet him and discuss egocentric cats and other urgent aesthetic issues. Kitano-san is sitting on a sofa at the top of Jean Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation, accompanied by his translator. His face is weathered and twitchy, paralysed on the right side as a result of that motorbike accident. After deep bows, I ask him how he feels about exhibiting his work publicly, given that he started painting for personal and therapeutic reasons. “Sorry”, he says, his voice like a rusty cheese grater, “I didn’t mean to make a big deal out of it”. He admits that he’s not a skilled painter, but that he has always striven to improve, even though his aim is not technical ability. What, then, is a successful picture? “My definition of a good painting”, he says, “is one that wouldn’t force the viewers to think too much, like the smiling face of a kid. Not a scheming, cheeky kind of kid who is trying to get money from the grownups, but a content and happy kid.” He wants his adult viewers to feel “ridiculous” and “childish” when they look at his pictures, he adds. So if Matisse

LIKE A DISJOINTED FERRIS WHEEL He’s Japan’s leading filmmaker, a television star and a writer of fiction and poetry. Apparently it’s not enough. Meet ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano: painter and sculptor pumping out a fresh Pollock per day, while another display suggests that in Japan fish are being bioengineered to grow with flesh of ready-made sushi, a variety of bitesize nuggets beneath their skin. An enormous, supposedly steam-powered words CRAIG BURNETT

wanted his paintings to be like armchairs for businessmen, I suggest, you would like yours to be like a Ferris wheel. “Yes, but a disjointed Ferris wheel, with missing parts.” An apt metaphor, as it turns out, for the rest of the show is a funfair, each work a joke incarnate. A Tyrannosaurus rex bares his big teeth, his skin a wild palette of reds, yellows and greens, surrounded by outlandish accounts of how he became extinct. Because he could only make ‘scissors’ in rock-paper-scissors, suggests one placard. Or because he couldn’t put his arms up when confronted by an assassin. Or he couldn’t reach his bottom to wipe his arse. There’s ‘Monsieur Pollock’, a mechanical ball that rolls around a large sheet of paper squirting pigment,

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sewing machine stitches a small circle of cloth – this bloated, Sisyphean contraption is surely a poke at the elaborate machinery that drives contemporary art, forever stitching the emperor’s new clothes. The displays mimic the didactic function of a museum, yet everything is lighthearted nonsense. I ask Kitano about the carnival atmosphere. He thought initially that the show would be mostly painting, but he had too many ideas that he couldn’t express in two dimensions, and besides, he thought it would be “funnier to make an object than a painting”. He wants adults to feel like kids, and kids to have fun, he says. “What I wouldn’t like to do is make an incomprehensible, seemingly significant object, which looks only quizzical to the viewers, giving them a hard time trying to understand the intention of the artist.” More frankfurter than Frankfurt School, then.

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ON VIEW

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Although the paintings take up relatively little space in the show, they do form its goofy heart. An obnoxious cat appears in many of the pictures, possibly a stand-in for the artist. He bathes with women, he spies on couples, he splays his legs to advertise his mighty pink balls. When I ask Kitano about the cat, he replies that he has nothing against dogs, but cats “have a stronger character and a stronger ego than dogs, and in that way the cat has more similarities to humans. Cats may be sneaking somewhere, watching you, without you knowing it.” He then tells a long story about confronting a lone pooch in the backstreets of Tokyo while a young comedian. A piece of fried chicken sat equidistant between starving artist and stray dog, neither party willing to pick it up despite their hunger. He tells the story with relish, laughing, finding something wonderful in the memory – and perhaps this is a clue to his work.

He doesn’t want to talk about the meaning of his cat. He wants the viewer to encounter it like an inexplicable gift of fate, a punchline from the heavens. Despite Kitano’s success and superstardom, failure seems to be a theme in his work – failure and self-effacement. In a recent film, Achilles and the Tortoise (2008), Kitano directed himself as a failed painter. ‘Voici le vrai travail de Takeshi Kitano’ it says above an entrance to a gallery at the Fondation. The room resembles a shooting gallery, with cutout images of Kitano in his many guises, punctuated by TVs playing excerpts from his programmes. It’s as if he is only comfortable in a mask, his identity alien even to himself. I ask him to address failure and ego by talking about Who Are You Who Is Looking at Me?! (2010), a sculpture that depicts Kitano holding his brain in the palm of his hand, examining the network of veins and nerves spooling from his open skull. He talks about being raised to be diffident, to hide his emotions. The sculpture, he says, is an image of self-censorship, “a circuitous relationship between one brain and the other brain. It might be a clichéd paradox, but I thought it might be an interesting concept, and the sculpture a way to express that.” He pauses for a few seconds, then adds that the subtitle of the work should be You Think You Know Everything, Don’t You?, before bursting into laughter. Work by Beat Takeshi Kitano is on view in Gosse de Peintre, a solo show at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, until 12 September

ON VIEW

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER

For decades, two things have been consistent in Jannis Kounellis’s dazzlingly diverse installations: a relationship to painting, and the desire to articulate universality

experimentation at the core of their practice. More than a doctrine, Arte Povera was an attitude, one that chimes today with the understated work of numerous young European artists, including Lara Favaretto, Vanessa Billy and George Henry Longly. Since then, Kounellis has shown his work in countless museums but also in churches, castles and warehouses, each time directly responding to his immediate surroundings. “A space is polarised”, he explains. “The artist has to divine its polarisation.” Consistently, in parallel with this sitespecific outlook, Kounellis has brought textures and their symbolic associations into confrontation, opposing the organic with the industrial, the barbarous with the domestic. (His early works, for example, involved steel, fire, coal, wool, beans, plants, and animals; the lexicon has progressively evolved to incorporate meat, furniture, knives, toy trains and clothes.) Yet, as Kounellis says, “making art is cyclical”, and he continuously reuses his repertoire of shapes and materials, producing pieces difficult to identify as “of a given period”. This approach has granted his work a rare sense of timelessness. In 2007, for example, the artist turned the ground floor of the Mies van der Rohe-designed Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin into a daunting metal labyrinth. While undermining the basic principles of modernist architecture and its focus on open, light-flooded spaces, Kounellis also staged an encounter with his own artistic development: works from the past five decades hung in every nook and cranny. Here, an untitled work from 1969 – consisting of a steel panel bearing the inscription ‘Libertà o Morte’ and the scrawled names of the French revolutionaries Marat and Robespierre completed by a small shelf and lit candle – felt words COLINE MILLIARD

FROM THE DOZEN LIVE HORSES he ‘installed’ in the Galleria L’Attico in 1969, to the constellations of vintage chairs crowding a hangar in the port of Jaffa in 2007, most shows punctuating the half-century-long career of Jannis Kounellis have turned around a single potent image. “An exhibition is a unique act”, says the Greek-born Italian artist when I meet him in his apartment in Rome. “It’s a statement, a categorical idea.” During the late 1960s, Kounellis was associated with Arte Povera, the radical Italian art movement that reacted to the country’s instability following the decline of the postwar ‘economic miracle’. The artists involved – including, among others, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pino Pascali and Pier Paolo Calzolari – put open-ended „€


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fittingly like the personal motto of an artist who has always resisted compromises (including, perhaps, the compromise of a signature style). Meanwhile, the burlap bags of grain (Untitled, 1969), presented at the Kunsthalle Bern in the first European survey of conceptual art, When Attitudes Become Form (1969), were in Berlin slouched against a partition. Conceived as a collection of vital textures, they looked, in this tunnel-like corridor, like an abandoned stock of wartime food provisions, compulsively gathered against some historical or fantasised conflict. Large bells, lying on wooden planks, paid a silent tribute to an entangled wool corpse loosely knitted on stretchers. Untitled (1998), with its large gunnysacks hanging off wooden stretchers, could just as well be from the late 1960s, and yet

it feels less like a repetition than a reassertion of the importance of unadulterated materials. Its flatness and verticality also underscore a crucial aspect of Kounellis’s work, one that insistently ties his diverse and context-specific art together: his relationship to painting. For Kounellis professes to see himself as a painter, albeit one who, during the 1960s, had to break free from the diktat of the canvas. It was a concern he shared not only with the Italian avantgarde, but also, across the border, with the French movement Supports/Surfaces. “Painting is not a technique”, he says, “but a linguistic intuition”. From the start, Kounellis’s installations were conceived as paintings bursting out into the third dimension, becoming tableaux, compositions in real space: at their extreme, these compositions might even be movable, changeable, as in his 1969 horses installation. It corralled into the gallery the messy reality of the horses’ existence: their smell, their shit, as well as their palpable tension, locked up in a white cube as they were for weeks on end. The link between painting, language and space can also be traced back to the artist’s Alfabeti paintings, made during the early 1960s. These large canvases are inscribed with obscure combinations of letters and numbers: “It was hermetic poetry, like Ungaretti”, says Kounellis,

Quarters of beef hung on steel panels invoke still-life painting, shortcutting art history while pointing to humanity’s core concerns: the need to be fed and the ubiquity of death

referring to Italy’s best-known modernist poet. “These paintings showed a will to sing, it was writing that one could sing. I even performed them once. It was also very much about space”, he adds, “as these canvases had the dimensions of the walls in my house”. If the artist left the Alfabeti after three years for fear of their becoming a style, they nonetheless formed a template that he was to work with throughout his career. Most of Kounellis’s pieces take the size of his walls, of a double bed, of a door. In steel, wood or cloth, these standard measurements, repeated again and again, and designed and optimised to reflect the proportions of a body, place the human dimension at the heart of his production. Kounellis’s existential sensibility shows affinities with the work of Yves Klein and Christian Boltanski, his involvement with materials echoes the practices of Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer; but it’s with his historical predecessors that the artist has developed the most fruitful dialogues. In 1989 he hung quarters of beef on steel panels in the former warehouse Espai Poblenou in Barcelona. It was a matter-of-fact display of meat, invoking in its trail still-life painting – and the work of Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon. As brutal as it was, the work felt like a logical next step in a process centuries in the making: like Kounellis’s display of horses, it advertises a shift from representation to presentation. The piece shortcuts art history while pointing to humanity’s core concerns: the need to be fed and the ubiquity of death. Over the decades, this sense of universality has allowed Kounellis’s work to be at once immediately identifiable and site-specific – a rare balance which, fittingly given his dialogue with his own predecessors, has also made him a reference point for many leading artists of subsequent generations: Paul McCarthy, for example, who acknowledges Kounellis as an influence. Perhaps most important, however, Kounellis’s wide-open approach has permitted him to continue operating with flexibility and undimmed potency, travelling light and speaking to all languages. “I’m able to go with empty hands to any country in the world and make a work in a very short time”, says Kounellis. “That’s the miracle.” Next performance: London. Work by Jannis Kounellis is on view at Ambika P3, London, until 30 May

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Eleanor Moreton, Grey Sigmund, 2009, Oil on canvas, 30 x 24cm

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MANIFESTO

by BECKY BEASLEY

Peonies BLOOM in May (A Seasonal Photograph, 2008, Berlin)

Spring ALWAYS seems undersold as a season. Even though EVERYONE is WAITING for it from late autumn onwards, in Britain we are cautioned not to store our winter clothes away until the end of May. But the end of May is the end of spring! I like to begin it as SOON as possible, on March 1st, and keep it going as LONG as possible, until May 31st. The same applies for autumn. These are the RADICAL seasons. Peonies flower in May. They are a LATE SPRING BLOOMER. I’ve been buying and photographing a bunch or two in my studio annually for the last five years. I have THREE photographs so far. I always aim to buy the last bunch available and so I MISSED the first year – I was a day late – and another year the bunch I bought didn’t open, and so that was that. While this issue is CURRENT, all the peonies will be in BLOOM. This photograph is from 2008, when I was living in Berlin and it was also late SPRING. B.B.

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FEATURE:

Af ter four decades in which

Barlow

Phyllida has been

more inf luential as a teacher than as a practising ar tist, her anarchic, spontaneous, antimonumental sculptural assemblies are finally, deser vedly, finding the limelight

WO R DS : O L I V E R B A SC I A N O P O RTR AITS : JACO B S U T TO N

…€


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FEATURE: PHYLLIDA BARLOW

IT’S LATE ON IN OUR CONVERSATION that Phyllida Barlow recalls a scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). In it the comic, in the guise of Hitler, dances with an oversize inflatable globe. Though his movement is near perfect and the object near weightless, Chaplin risks being overcome by the dwarfing nature of the prop. When I met the artist in her cramped East London studio, a similarly awkward dance was taking place: three assistants wrestling with a towering and seemingly cumbersome, partially finished work, coming at it from all angles as they stuffed fragmented polystyrene into the top. The work is destined for the Serpentine Gallery, where Barlow is having a two-person show (alongside Nairy Baghramian) this month. The exhibition forms part of a recent acceleration in the artist’s exhibiting CV, catalysed by her retirement from a 40odd-year teaching career, during which she proved an enduring influence on a generation of practitioners (most directly Rachel Whiteread and Angela de la Cruz, but also artists such as Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Conrad Shawcross and Tomoko Takahashi). Shows at Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, London’s Domo Baal and One in the Other galleries, and a solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire, which coincides with the Serpentine outing, not only mark a new stage for Barlow as a selling artist, but are also having a fundamental influence on the sixty-six-year-old’s thinking about her practice. “Is it not the case that most art produced is that which is not seen?” she asks as we approach the subject. “What does not having exhibitions do to creative people?” The last question is one that Barlow has clearly been asking herself through her work since the early 1970s, when shows weren’t so forthcoming and the financial responsibilities of raising a family steered her towards teaching, most recently at London’s Slade School. In her works – typically, but not exclusively, large scale, created through a hastily ad hoc process of bundling everyday utilitarian materials – the theme of the unfinished, the unresolved is ever-present. Which, of course, has not been without its problems. Indeed, as she discusses her output of the 1980s, Barlow describes finding herself firmly on the wrong side of the decade’s aesthetic fashions, which decreed sculpture should mimic the commodifiable object (here she cites Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach as obvious examples): “My practice is a resistance to the glamorous art object. In the period when I started this journey, the destination for art was clearly demarcated.” Being too poor and having too many familial responsibilities to commit to a fulltime practice forced Barlow to turn to cheap materials, often sourced from the rubbish tip or the street, for her sculptures. Of late, though, Barlow is enjoying a career where her works do have a gallery destination: in part due to the time she is now at liberty to dedicate to her practice, having retired from the salaried stability of education, but also down to a partial turn in art’s aesthetic fashions, away from gloss to the more prosaically and roughly made. It’s as if, through her teaching, she has inadvertently influenced a generation to pave the way for her own works’ emergence. Barlow had become used to making art objects that would sit outside the mainstream; that they increasingly sit within it is a contrast that isn’t lost on, and indeed is seemingly relished by, their maker. Barlow’s response to this potentially disruptive dichotomy lies in her mode of presentation: her use of the destination, the gallery space, as a place of experimentation that rejects the normal accepted narrative of an art object: conception → studio

…‚


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Barlow’s works never entirely find their final resting place in the world, least of all in the gallery space

FEATURE: PHYLLIDA BARLOW

realisation → gallery install. Instead works are frequently made within the exhibition space, with very little predetermined design. Consequently, they are not only site-specific, but also particular to the constraints of their build, be those limitations of time or labour. And more important still, they outwardly declare these restrictions in their evidently pragmatic rearrangement of materials. As if to confirm this, Barlow notes that she was rather taken with the way a delivery firm had stacked up the elements for her Hide (2010) installation in Basel (where it was eventually installed as part of a group exhibition curated by Berlin-based independent space Silberkuppe); and I get the impression she is only half joking when she says she was tempted to abandon plans for a full-scale recreation of a petrol station shell, preferring the unintentional sculptural amalgamation of the material pile instead. In the end, of course, she stuck to her original plan. Though her works aren’t predetermined in form, Barlow gives her assistants very specific instructions on the application of the materials, tasking them to mimic simple actions of making. “I ask them just to use one gesture and to never go back over it. It doesn’t matter how it ends up; I say just put it on as if it’s a job which has got to be done in the shortest possible time.” The result being that physical labour – including the personal discrepancies of each individual labourer – is always very evident in Barlow’s work, and that another commonsense idea of art – the artist/genius as sole author of a work – is destabilised in the viewer’s mind. While Hide is possibly one of the least abstract projects the artist has ever undertaken, it is true to the sense that, in an almost ghostlike way, Barlow’s works never entirely find their final resting place in the world, least of all the gallery space. Indeed, the spontaneous logic of their making decrees that when they leave the gallery many of those works are as quickly destroyed as they were assembled, existing only as a trace – in the memories of an audience and the photographs that document their presence. Perversely, however, it was the resurrection of works of art that led Barlow to this notion of the temporary. In 1976 she gave new life to a stack of discarded paintings on framed canvas: Shedmesh, exhibited at London’s Camden Arts Centre, consisted of stretchers hammered together to form a cube just under two metres each side, from which she hung the separated and bedraggled canvases. Barlow puts the impermanence of the works down to the manner in which she sees exhibitions as theatrical expression and the works as transient props. Consequently the studio becomes a rehearsal space in which she and the assistants ‘practise’ their actions, and the gallery the stage upon which the real drama happens. “Initially the audience is myself”, she says. “How I’m physically negotiating

the space is often more important than the object itself. They are obstacles to be navigated, protagonists that I feel I’m encountering. The private view consequently comes as a terrible shock, because here are all these people who are there to use the space. It feels extraordinary that the audience are being allowed on the stage and are somehow grabbing the script from me!” In talking about her daily motivations, Barlow mentions the navigation of litter in the street that might sit in the same place for days; the shrinelike quality of abandoned roadworks; and, omnipresent in the area surrounding her studio, building site defences. Her use of DIY, construction and packaging materials again reflects this, but there’s more at play. “Making from lightweight, disposable things pastiches the monument or the monumental. The latter has this heroic, macho thing that I’m attracted to, but which conversely I couldn’t possibly do myself”, she explains. “So there’s this idea of playing the monumental game but with these crap materials, and because they are crap materials, you can mess around with them, tilting them or balancing them: forcing them do nonmonumental things. It’s both comic and grimly authoritarian, and that’s my relationship to sculpture”. Work by Phyllida Barlow is on view as part of a two-person show, Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow, at the Serpentine Gallery, London, from 3 May to 13 June; in Bluff, a solo show at Studio Voltaire, London, through 29 May; and in Swamp, an installation at V22, London, from 19 June to 22 August

WORKS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) Hide, 2010 (three installation views, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel), five-sculpture installation, mixed media, dimensions variable Untitled (Monument), 2009, mixed media, dimensions variable Shedmesh, 1976 (installation view, Camden Arts Centre, London), painting stretchers, canvas, upholstery foam, 270 x 270 x 270 cm Split, 2010 (installation view, Bergen Kunsthall), timber, plaster, paint, 300 x 360 x 180 cm all works courtesy the artist


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……

FEATURE:

Is there any thing that can’t be counterfeited using St yrofoam and paint? IN HIS STUDIO – a light-filled workshop and pristine viewing space tucked away in a converted industrial building in Springfield, Massachusetts – Tom Friedman is having a Styrofoam moment. It’s not his first: the forty-five-year-old American artist’s fascination with extruded polystyrene goes back at least as far as a 12cm-high untitled self-portrait carved from the stuff in 1996, with frequent recidivism since. What’s different this time around is that Friedman, in making the body of skewed quotidian counterfeits that’s about to go on show at Stephen Friedman (no relation) in London, is only using Styrofoam. Oh, and paint. Not that you’d know it. In Friedman’s hands, Styrofoam looks nothing like Styrofoam, and paint frequently behaves nothing like paint. On one wall in the artist’s viewing space, for instance, is Untitled (Paper Towel) (2010), which replicates the paper-towel dispenser in the studio building. It looks close to real, if a little cartoonish; but the sheet of sanitary paper hanging out of it? That’s solidified paint: acrylic painted on plastic and peeled off, just like the clear plastic six-pack holder amid the wild tangle of Styrofoam forgeries – a half-peeled banana, a marshmallow on a stick, a gavel, olives, a beer can, a pizza slice glistening with grease – in Untitled (Bouquet) (2010), which sits on a plinth of untreated Styrofoam. (Friedman points out a tiny strip of faked corrugated cardboard in this crackerjack assembly, which bursts out of what looks like a glazed earthenware jar, but isn’t. The cardboard took him a week to make, by gluing minuscule sections together, he says; I hadn’t noticed it.) Elsewhere, in Untitled (Bat) (2010), a ‘plant pot’ full of ‘soil’ (and containing one small ‘green shoot’) rests at an impossibly precipitous angle atop a ‘baseball bat’, which in turn sits on some ‘torn cardboard’ (out of which another ‘shoot’ seems to be growing) dotted with ‘toothpicks’, a ‘pencil’, an ‘eraser’… Friedman, who uses the word ‘alchemy’ repeatedly when discussing his methods, isn’t making any secret of what these works are made from. When I spoke to him, he was planning to title his London show Styrofoam and Paint, and part of what runs through the mind when looking at its contents is a pleasurable confusion of properties, a complex of refutations based on self-evident gaps between knowledge and appearance. It’s a short course in cognitive dissonance: we know how Styrofoam and paint are supposed to perform, how gravity works and that balloons can’t be pierced by knives without popping (see Untitled (Bouquet) again). We might wonder, additionally, at the mind that would fashion a trompe l’oeil rectangle of plywood out of layers of Styrofoam, paint it so that it simulates wood and then obscure that dissimulation with a thin coat of whitewash to suggest a tentative Robert Ryman. The materials may be simple; the gaming is involved and fringed with comedy; and the mental associations become pleasurably complex and convoluted. Attached to the white painting is a piece of ‘twine’, made from plaiting fine, rolled-out lengths of dry paint and hung in an arc from Styrofoam ‘nails’. This is, says Friedman, “a wry smile”. It figures.

…†


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To m Friedman,

If you’re

master of transforming mundane materials, the answer is a resounding ‘no’. But is there more to his ar t than technical magic? WO R DS : M A RTI N H E R B E RT

FEATURE: TOM FRIEDMAN

This kind of systemic-but-screwball, creativity-sparking thinking – the greatest limitation of materials, the greatest freedom of subject matter; the most painstaking methods to make the most insignificant objects – is broadly typical of Friedman, as his 20-yearsurvey show, currently at Stockholm’s Magasin 3, demonstrates. So, too, is the sense of restless progression. Friedman, arriving at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a maker of Thomas Hart Benton-style drawings, had a eureka moment when he emptied his studio, painted it white and rebooted. One of the show’s oldest works, Untitled (1990) – a toilet roll unrolled fully, the cardboard removed and the paper rolled back up into an immaculately tight cylinder – reflects the circular logic that animated his first mature work; another piece from the same year, featuring two identically wrinkled sheets of paper (just try it), marked him as an artist capable of running boggling, slow-burning, labour-intensive changes on the simplest materials. (And one influenced, he’d said, as much by Andy Kaufman’s deceptive comedy of ‘downplay’ as by other art.) “I began by limiting myself as much as I could”, Friedman remembers. “To begin as an artist – there’s no canon in this culture, and a million ways of progressing. So where do you start? I began to think about simplicity. You have a material; you transform the material; you present the material. As I started working through that, I noticed I was able to break down those ideas in thinking about simplicity more and more, so that it unfolded into some idea of complexity.” (As the 1990s progressed, works such as Untitled, 1995, a frozen starburst constructed of thousands of toothpicks, made this evolution apparent.) “And then”, Friedman continues, “the complexity started to evolve into ideas of systems getting so †ˆ


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complex, like a bug in a computer program” – see, for example, Cloud (1998), countless .6cm dowels of powder-blue polystyrene connected at right angles to form a continuous, cumulus-shaped loop – “that the logic got screwed up. And that led into ideas of fantasy, and dream”. Enter the horror and sci-fi scenarios bracketed by works like Untitled (2000), which depicts the artist’s torn-apart body in construction paper, resting on a paper pool of blood, and the comical grotesquerie of Green Demon (2008), the towering figure that greets visitors to Friedman’s Stockholm show. Depicting a demon from Tibetan tantric imagery, it’s made from green string, extruded foam, pencils, fluff, painted balls and more. Behind it, on the institution’s wall, is the phrase ‘Humans Suck’ (Original Sin, 2008). Friedman originally sketched the phrase rapidly in balloon lettering, then painstakingly copied it in black yarn around black nails. Elsewhere in the show: a tiny figure pursued by a giant fly (Monster Fly, 2008); a collage of hideous body parts (Monster Collage, 2008); a photocollage of a giant hole in a verdant landscape made by a massive falling man (Untitled, 1996); a construction-paper sculpture of Friedman facing the wall entitled Nobody (2002); and a figure in aluminium foil, in the same pose, entitled Hollow Man Offering Nothing to No One (2008). First attempt at a theory on Friedman: he’s far more at home in his head than in his body, and there’s a certain amount of anxiety in his art about human corporeality’s flaws and failings. There are lots of hygiene issues in his work, from pieces using toilet roll, soap and toothpicks to the exhibition of a small sphere of his own shit on a plinth in 1992. (At one show, someone sat on

“ A lot of my thinking is about: what can you do with that brief bit of attention the viewer is giving you? ”

FEATURE: TOM FRIEDMAN

the infinitesimal poop-globe; fortunately, Friedman had a spare.) A 1990 photograph features him blowing a spit bubble; the only geometrically perfect form, the artist later commented, the human body can make. Then there’s the menacing of the body by monsters. There’s I’m Not Myself (2008), a collage in which Friedman has screwed up pictures of his own face, distorting them into queasy reliefs. One might start to read things into this, and a physiological basis in his technically immersive artmaking (Friedman didn’t hire an assistant until 2002). Such armchair psychology may be fine as far as it goes, but it’s not how Friedman sees or talks about his work, despite his affirmation that, in recent years, he’s wanted to privilege poetics in his art over airless closed-system thinking. If his art has a consistent ‘subject’, it’s the process of reception. “Someone wakes up in the morning”, he says, “they brush their teeth, they talk with their partner, they go to work, someone invites them to the museum after work, they have a drink and a conversation and go in, and there’s, like, a culmination of all their history up to that moment. So a lot of my thinking is about: what can you do with that brief bit of attention the viewer is giving you?” Often this has involved surprise: the degree to which a material can be transformed (sometimes in the most unlikely of ways, as in a couple of Friedman’s most famous works: a sheet of paper which the artist claimed to have stared at for a thousand hours, and a plinth wherein a circle of airspace above it had supposedly been cursed by a witch). †€


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Friedman is uncommonly aware of and inspired by the gallery situation: when he switched gallerists to Gagosian a few years ago, he says it was because, to an extent, he makes his work with dealers and venues in mind, and wanted to see how his intimate, mostly small-scale art would evolve in the vast hangars of GoGo’s empire. It led to the ‘monsters’ works and, later, to his leaving Gagosian to return to Stephen Friedman, with whom he’d worked previously. Primarily, you intuit, his art has morphed as a function of keeping himself interested, which may well account for his sensitivity to, and desire to make maximum use of, the viewer’s own brief span of attention. (Friedman – Tom, that is – is easily bored, he’s the first to admit; he used to meditate but doesn’t any more; distractions include watching Family Guy and making music.) So the changes go on. The finale of his Magasin 3 show, a new installation entitled Up in the Air (2010), in which countless Styrofoam forgeries of everyday objects hang from the ceiling, heralds Friedman’s current one-medium-for-many-subjects shapeshift. Among its contents: a miniature USS Enterprise, a dictionary, a dinky Duchamp urinal, a giant screw, an album by ‘Tom Friedman’, a giant cigar, a rifle, a cock and balls, a FedEx box, a big burger, everything gravitating towards a similar scale, a similar importance. For Friedman, though, it’s all about the form. “It’s a systems piece. I had an arena, and anything, within a certain framework, can go in. It started with my wanting to somehow convey everything, not limit things to a category. Music, politics, spirituality: you can subdivide those categories, and then figure out how to represent those subdivided categories.” Here’s the rub, and perhaps the instruction. Friedman’s latest Styrofoam art feels like a vast, tessellated, loosely conflicted portrait of mainstream American culture, the good and bad mixed acceptingly together, fashioned from an emphatically American sculptural material (Styrofoam was synthesised in Dow Chemical’s Michigan labs in the 1940s). And it suggests – along with those aforementioned, culturally specific hygiene concerns, a potential subsector of a larger picture – that the ultimate subject of Friedman’s poetics may be his country, its bedrock textures and materials and how they might reach some kind of apotheosis. As an artist, to aim consciously for that is most likely to miss by a mile; if Friedman hits it dead-on, it’s perhaps because he was thinking about something else all along. Work by Tom Friedman is on view at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, as part of a two-person show, Tom Friedman and Steve Wolfe, until 29 May. Friedman’s Up in the Air is at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall through 6 June

WORKS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) Untitled (Cinder Block), 2010, Styrofoam and acrylic paint, 84 x 66 x 36 cm Untitled (Mutilated Self-Portrait), 2000, construction paper, 30 x 290 x 305 cm Untitled (Bouquet), 2010, Styrofoam and acrylic paint, 84 x 66 x 36 cm Untitled (Paper Towel Dispenser), 2010, Styrofoam and acrylic paint, 61 x 28 x 38 cm Untitled (Bat), 2010, Styrofoam and acrylic paint, 104 x 53 x 53 cm Green Demon, 2008, mixed media, 231 x 109 x 92 cm all works © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London


 

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u

FEATURE:

Conceptually rigorous, seductive and

R.H. Q u a y t m a n ’s

unbounded,

paintings and silkscreens ref lect upon the many ways IN A RADIO INTERVIEW in 1964, Frank Stella voiced a simple wish for

his art: “All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion”. A modest goal, no doubt, if at odds with the combative rhetoric surrounding his work: here was an artist, after all, who had finally driven the last of the Old World ghosts from American painting, eliminating space, image, symbol, emotion and all the rest, leaving a simplicity so simple it could only be expressed as a tautology. “What you see is what you see”, he said next. It was the quip that would be heard round the world. R.H. Quaytman has applied herself with peculiar diligence to the task of disproving it, rerouting the direct line between seeing and understanding via strange loops and byways. Her work takes place within a history of similar critiques aimed at the irresistible target of High Modernism’s audacious self-confidence. It also suggests a way forward from this melancholy occupation, which has proven both generative and limiting for painting after the perceived end of the modern project. In her pursuit, the artist follows idiosyncratic but strict procedures. Shows are designated as ‘chapters’, suggesting an elaboration of themes in sequence; individual works function dialogically within the framework of each exhibition. Works are made either by silk-screening images onto gessoed wooden panels or rendering abstract pictograms by hand with an industrial paint called spinel black. Many paintings document features of the spaces in which they’re shown, deriving subject matter from the architectural, historical or financial details of their exhibition site; others borrow motifs from Op art. Often, Quaytman presents multiple versions of a motif, subjecting the same image to various photomechanical or digital interventions: rephotographing her own paintings under nonstandard light conditions; overlapping multiple silkscreens to achieve unusual colouristic effects; or stretching, cropping, inverting and layering source images in Photoshop. If the tradition of geometric painting that Quaytman gestures towards

††


OQBSFBT

in which we look at ar t – and ask us to use them all at once WO R DS : ROG E R W H IT E

was best represented by a grid (all of its points reassuringly visible in one glance), then her work’s emblem is the picture-within-apicture: a recursive set of nested images, each modifying – framing, illuminating, sometimes obscuring – the next. For an artist who recently directed a gallery (the threeyear cooperative project Orchard, on New York’s Lower East Side), this attention to the role of setting is no coincidence. In Chapter 12: iamb, her 2008 exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York, Quaytman staged an encounter between a painting (a dense, optically active grid) and a lamp (a utilitarian office model), and presented the results as a visual essay on the vagaries of spectatorship. The lamp affixed its beam on the painting, creating a blown-out miniature sunspot on the surface of the image. The variations in the resulting works – differences in illumination, cropping and palette – seemed to model the viewer’s shifting perception of the work of art: from a foil for pure retinal stimulation, to a quotidian decorative object, to an elegy for the end of painting. Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 (2009), her exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, resurrected motifs from abstract paintings in the museum’s collection, reproduced a manifesto published by the institute in 1948 and proudly adopted its palette from the garish pink of the museum’s signage. But for all the strategies of conceptual art that organise Quaytman’s practice, just a few moments in the presence of the works themselves suggests another, contradictory interpretation: the artist is making unique, highly crafted aesthetic objects, visually seductive enough to turn Daniel Buren’s green stripes pale. This reading comes down, in large part, to the history of Quaytman’s

To view these works is to be made aware of the grossly disparate mental activities we conventionally group under the heading ‘ looking at art’

FEATURE: R.H. QUAYTMAN

materials. Silk-screening made its appearance in the art of Rauschenberg and Warhol as a bracing bit of nonart rudeness, ripped from the world of commercial printing to signify speed, iterability and impersonality. But as digital output processes have reset the goalposts for transgressive antipainting, the silkscreen is now positively redolent of care and intimacy – in 2010 it’s practically an Old World technique. Even the ‘diamond dust’ that occasionally appears in both Quaytman’s work and Warhol’s has been recast from a cheeky evocation of glitz to a sober memento of the physicality of images. These and other clues (like the queasy discord between moiré and pixelation produced when Quaytman’s more optical works are viewed as jpegs) suggest that the formal qualities of these paintings are meant to do more than allegorise an outmoded symbolic system. In the current Whitney Biennial, Quaytman presents a suite of paintings that move along similarly self-divided lines. The twin centres of Distracting Distance, Chapter 16 (2010) are two images of the artist K8 Hardy, posing nude with a cigarette in the gallery in which the works are installed. The tableau repeats Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun (1961): Hardy is framed by one of the Whitney’s signature trapezoidal windows; in one of the two works, the same low leather bench that sits in the centre of the gallery protrudes from the right edge of the image. Elsewhere in the room, panels screened with tight radial lines mimic the receding plane of the window glass. Here one has to remark on the very rarefied context in which these details are interpretable and significant. The art-institutional framework that Quaytman limns – its rules and mythos, the history

of its internal debates – is not so much an object of critique as a magic circle in which paintings are made to speak again; what happens when the work steps outside its own conceptual boundaries is an open question. For now, to view these works is to be made aware of the grossly disparate mental activities we conventionally group under the heading ‘looking at art’: responding to optical phenomena, positioning our bodies in relation to objects in space, imagining other places and times, interpreting narratives and speculating on intentions. Leaping from one to another (for example, reconciling a meditation on Hopper, gender and sitespecificity with the adjacent painting that creates the experience of physical vertigo induced by two overlapping grids) feels like being reprogrammed for a new kind of viewing – one based on the exhilarating prospect that what you see is rarely what you see.

WORKS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 (Black & White Arrow Screen with Edge), 2009, oil, silkscreen, gesso on wood, 82 x 51 cm Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 (Diagonal Pink), 2009, silkscreen, gesso on wood, 82 x 133 cm Exhibition Guide, Chapter 15 (Vertical Pink Gradation), 2009, silkscreen, gesso on wood, 51 x 82 cm all works courtesy the artist and Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York


OQBSFBT

‡

China Guardian 2010 Spring Auction Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, Porcelain, Jade and Works of Art Chinese Oil Painting and Sculpture, Rare Books and Manuscripts Preview: May 12-14, 2010 Auction: May 15-18, 2010 Venue: Beijing International Hotel Conference Center ( 9 Jianguomennei St., Beijing )

Stamps and Coins Preview: May 6-7, 2010 Auction: May 8-12, 2010 Venue: Beijing International Hotel ( 9 Jianguomennei St., Beijing )

Zhou Chunya BLOOMING STORIES oil on canvas 200×250cm

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Listings Museums and Galleries UNITED STATES, NEW YORK ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES 18 East 79th Street New York, NY 10075 T +1 (212) 734 6300 Open Mon–Sat 10–5 [email protected] acquavellagalleries.com Robert & Ethel Scull: Portrait of a Collection 13 Apr - 27 May CHAMBERS FINE ARTS 522 West 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 T +1 (212) 414 1169 Open Tues- Sat 10-6 Chambersfineart.com Things: New Works by Guo Hongwei 3 Apr – 15 May DOOSAN GALLERY 533 West 25th Street NewYork, NY 10001 [email protected] Open Tue–Sat 10–6 Osang Gwon 6 May- 5 Jun THE PACE GALLERY 32 East 57th Street New York T +1 (212) 421 3292 Tue–Sat 9:30–6 pacewildenstein.com Fiona Rae: Special Fear! 2 Apr - 1 May Antoni Tàpies: Recent Paintings and Works on Paper 7 May- 12 Jun THE PACE GALLERY 545 West 22nd Street New York T +1 (212) 989 4258 pacewildenstein.com Kiki Smith: Lodestar 30 Apr- 19 Jun THE PACE GALLERY 534 West 25th Street T +1 (212) 929 7000 open Tue–Sat 10–6 pacewildenstein.com Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive to 10 Apr Joel Shapiro: New Work 16 Apr- 15 May Carsten Nicolai: Moiré 21 May- 25 June

UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON ALBEMARLE GALLERY 49 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4JR. T +44 (0)20 7499 1616. albemarlegallery.com Bill Scott and Peter Welford to 13 May. Pablo Atchugarry 20 May - 19 Jun ALEXIA GOETHE GALLERY 7 Dover Street London, W1S 4LD T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 alexiagoethegallery.com Valérie Jolly: Infra-Thin to 14 May ALMA ENTERPRISES GALLERY 38 Glasshill Street London, SE1 0QR almaenterprises.com David M Price 29 May - 11 Jul HALCYON GALLERY 24 Bruton Street London W1J 6QQ T +44 (0)20 659 7640 halcyongallery.com Mitch Griffiths The Promised Land 29 Apr – 6 Jun HAUNCH OF VENISON 6 Burlington Gardens London W1S 3ET United Kingdom T+44(0)20 7495 5050 Open Mon - Fri 10 - 6, Sat 10 - 5 [email protected] Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980’s to 26 Jun JERWOOD VISUAL ARTS Jerwood Space, 171 Union St, London SE1 0LN T. 01372 462190 [email protected] jerwoodvisualarts.org Open Mon-Fri 10–5, Sat & Sun 10–3 Jerwood Contemporary Painters to 30 May MUMMERY AND SCHNELLE 83 Great Titchfield Street London, W1W 6RH mummeryschnelle.com [email protected] Graeme Todd 15 Apr – 22 May

PILAR CORRIAS GALLERY 54 Eastcastle Street London, W1W 8EF T +44 (0)20 7323 7000 [email protected] pilarcorrias.com Leigh Ledare 16 Apr – 5 Jun

JOHN HANSARD GALLERY University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ T +44 (0)23 8059 2158 [email protected] Dawn breakers 27 Apr – 19 Jun

SALON CONTEMPORARY 82 Westbourne Grove, Notting Hill, London W2 5RT ‘Best of the UK’: Class of 2009 to 30 May

ISENDYOUTHIS.COM Lamper Head, Conworthy, Totnes T +44 (0)1364 653 208 Art slideshow, artist portfolio gallery guide, exhibition guide & artist directory

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY 25-28 Old Burlington Street London W1S 3AN T +44 (0) 20 7494 1434 [email protected] Tom Friedman and Steve Wolfe 22 Apr – 29 May STUART SHAVE MODERN ART 23/25 Eastcastle Street London W1W 8DF T +44 (0)20 7299 7950 [email protected] Nigel Cooke 30 Apr – 29 May TIMOTHY TAYLOR GALLERY 15 Carlos Place London W1K 2EX T +44 (0)20 7409 3344 timothytaylorgallery.com Agnes Martin to 21 May WILKINSON GALLERY 50-58 Vyner Street, London, E2 9DQ. T +44 20 8980 2662. [email protected] wilkinsongallery.com Ged Quinn- Somebody’s Coming That Hates Us 20 May – 27 Jun UNITED KINGDOM BALTIC CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART Gateshead Quays South Shore Road Gateshead, NE8 3BA T +44 (0)191 478 1810 [email protected] RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE The Things That Happen When Falling in Love 2 Apr- 20 Jun

OPUS GALLERY West Avenue, Gosforth Newcastle, NE3 4ES opus-art.com T +44(0)191 213 0295 Fresh Cream to 15 May TATE LIVERPOOL Albert Dock, Liverpool, L3 4BB T +44 (0)1517 027 400 tate.org.uk/liverpool Picasso: Peace and Freedom 21 May -30 Aug AUSTRIA GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 ropac.net Imi Knoebel (new space) to 15 May Wings, the Wings in Contemporary Art to 15 May Farhad Moshiri 22 May to Jun MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, MuseumsQuartier, Museumsplatz 1, A-1070 Wien mumok.at Changing Channels Kunst und Fernsehen to 6 Jun KUNSTHALLE WEIN halle 1, halle 2 Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien GALERIE HUBERT WINTER Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 galeriewinter.at Michael Kidner RA Dreams of the world Order 1960s from 29 Apr

BELGIUM

GERMANY

GALERIE ALMINE RECH 20 Rue de l’Abbaye B-1050 Brussels T +32 26 485 684 alminerech.com Franz West to 22 May

6TH BERLIN BIENNALE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststr. 69, 10117 Berlin T: +49 30 2434590 berlinbiennale.de

GALERIE BARONIANFRANCEY 2 rue Isidore Verheyden 1050 Brussels T +32 25 12 9295 baronianfrancey.com Lionel Esteve to 29 May GALERIE RODOLPHE JANSSEN 35, rue de Livourne 1050 Brussels T +32-2-538 08 18 galerierodolphejanssen.com Kendel Geers to 29 May THINK.21 Rue du Mail 21 Brussels 1050 T +32 2 537 87 03 think21gallery.com Stephan Balleux to 10 May TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY Verlatstraat 23-25 2000 Antwerp T +32 (0)3 257 14 17 timvanlaeregallery.com Nicolas Provost to 5 Jun XAVIER HUFKENS Rue Saint-Georges 6–8 1050 Brussels T +32 2 6396730 xavierhufkens.com David Altmejd to 29 May ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 B-2000 Antwerp T +32 32 161 626 zeno-x.com “Works on Paper” (group show) to Jun 5 NETHERLANDS GRIMM FINE ART Keizersgracht 82 1015 CT Amsterdam T +31 (0)20 422 7227 grimmfineart.com Ciaran Murphy 8 May - 19 Jun

DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 20 2093 deutsche-guggenheim.de Wangechi Mutu to 13 Jun FACTORY-ART GALLERY Mommsenstrasse 27 10551 Berlin factory-art.com T +49(0)30.31809794 Reanato Meneghetti: “Looking Beyond X-Rays” GALERIJA GREGOR PODNAR BERLIN Lindenstrasse 35 D-10969 Berlin KOCH OBERHUBER WOLFF Brunnenstrasse 9, D-10119 Berlin T +49 (0)30 311 66 770 [email protected] Open Wed-Sun 12-6 Tobias Zielony to-4 Jun KUNST- UND AUSSTELLUNGSHALLE DER BUNDESREPUBLIK DEUTSCHLAND GMBH Museum Mile Bonn Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 4 D-53113 Bonn T +49 (0)228 9171 200 bundeskunsthalle.de Liam Gillick Ein langer Spaziergang... Zwei kurze Stege... to 8 Aug SWITZERLAND DARA GAOLLOPIN [email protected] Hoverboard GALERIE BERTRAND & GRUNER 16, rue du Simplon 1207 Geneva T +41 227 005 151 bertrand-gruner.com Something Left Undone (Group Show) to 5 Jun

KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH Limmatstrasse 270 CH-8005 Zürich Rosemarie Trockel Verflüssigung der Mutter 8 May - 15 Aug MIGROSMUSEUM für gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 Postfach 1766 CH-8005 Zürich migrosmuseum.ch While Bodies Get Mirrored to 30 May GREECE ART ATHINA art-athina.gr 13–16 May FRISSIRAS MUSEUM 3 Monis Asteriou Plaka, Athens T +30 2103 234678 or +30 2103 316027 frissirasmuseum.com Grzegorz Wnek to 30 Sep ITALY ALFONSO ARTIACO Piazza dei Martiri 58 80121 Naples T+39 0814976072 alfonsoartiaco.com Ann Veronica Janssens GALLERIA CONTINUA Via del Castello, 11 53037 San Gimignano T+39 0577 94 31 34 galleriacontinua.com Chen Zhen/Berlinde de Bruyckere/Luca Pancrazzi/ Arcangolo Sassolino/Nedko Solakov to May 15 GALLERIA DELLO SCUDO Via Scudo di Francia 2 37121 Verona T +39 045 59 01 44 galleriadelloscudo.com Gianni Dessì to 27 May GALLERIA MASSIMO MININI Via Apollonio 68 25128 Brescia T +39 030 363034 galleriaminini.it GALLERIA LORCAN O’NEILL Via degli Orti D’Alibert, 1 00165 Rome T +39 06 68 892 980 lorcanoneill.com

GALLERIA NAZIONALE D’ARTE MODERNA, ROMA Viale delle Belle Arti, 131 00196 Roma, Italia DONNA: FEMINIST AVANTGARDE OF THE 1970s from Sammlung Verbund, Vienna to 16 May GALLERIA PACK Foro Bonaparte, 60 20121 Milan T +39 02 86 996 395 galleriapack.com Alberto Di Fabio 4 May - 11 Sep ENEL CONTEMPORANEA enelcontemporanea.com The 4th Enel Contemporanea Award 2010 FONDAZIONE NICOLA TRUSSARDI Paul McCarthy - Pig Island 20 May to 4 Jul Palazzo Citterio Via Brera 14 fondazionenicolatrussardi.com MAXXI- MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO Via Guido Reni, 4A 00196 Rome T +39 06 32101829 maxxi.beniculturali.it Opening 30 May RICCARDO CRESPI via Mellerio n° 1 20123 Milano T +39 02 89072491 riccardocrespi.com Natura e Destino - Group show to 8 May VILLA GIULIA VERBANIA Corso Zanitello 8 Verbania T +39 0323 557691 craavillagiulia.com Masbedo to 30 May FRANCE FONDATION CARTIER 261 Boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris T +33 1 42 18 56 50 fondation.cartier.com Beat Takeshi Kitano to 12 Sep

LISTINGS: MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES

GALERIE ALMINE RECH 19, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris Tel +33 1 45 83 71 90 galeriealminerech.com Barbara Kasten/Matthias Bitzer 6 May - 22 Jun GALLERIA CONTINUA Le Moulin (Paris) 46, rue de la Ferté Gaucher 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel Seine-et-Marne T +33 1 64 20 39 50 galleriacontinua.com Sphères 2009 to 30 May GALERIE LAURENT GODIN 5, rue du Grenier St Lazare 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 71 10 66 laurentgodin.com Vincent Olinet 1 Apr - 15 May GALERIE OLIVIER HOUG 45 Quai Rambaud 69002 Lyon T +33 4 78 42 98 50 olivierhoug.com David Hevel to 19 May GALERIE LELONG PARIS 13, rue de Téhéran 75008 Paris T +33 1 45 63 13 19 Open Tues–Fri 10:30–6 Sat 2–6:30 galerie-lelong.com Richard Serra to 15 May GALERIE EMMANUEL PERROTIN 76, rue de Turenne 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 16 79 79 galerieperrotin.com Peter Coffin, Daniel Arsham to 7 May Peter Zimmerman 15 May - 30 Jul GALERIE THADDAEUS ROPAC 7, rue Debelleyme 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 72 99 00 ropac.net George Baselitz to 29 May

MYRVOLD > MYWORLD PIA MYRVOLD 15 rue Sambre et Meuse 75010 Paris T +33607968552 by appointment pia-myrvold.com Galerie Nielsen Skagen, Denmark 21 May - 11 Jun SPAIN CAC MALAGA C/ Alemania, s/n 29001-Málaga T +34 952 12 00 55 cacmalaga.org GALERIA ELBA BENITEZ San Lorenzo 11 28004 Madrid T +34 91 308 0468 elbabenitez.com

CASA TRIANGULO Rua Paes de Araujo 77 04531-090 São Paulo T +55 11 31675621 casatriangulo.com GALERIA NARA ROESLER Avenida Europa 655 01449-001 São Paulo t +55 11 3063 2344 nararoesler.com.br GALERIA LEME Rua Agostinho Cantu, 88 05501.010 São Paulo T +55 11 3814.8184 galerialeme.com LUCIANA BRITO GALERIA Rua Gomes de Carvalho, 842, Vila Olímpia, São Paulo T+ 55.11.3842.0634 lucianabritogaleria.com.br

GALERIA HELGA DE ALVEAR c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 28012 Madrid T +34 91 468 0506 helgadealvear.com Jane &Louise Wilson/ Callum Innes to 22 May

GALERIE VERMELHO Rua Minas Gerais, 350 01244-010 São Paulo T+ 55 11 3257-2033 galeriavermelho.com.br

LABORAL CENTRO DE ARTE Y CREACION INDUSTRIAL Los Prados, 121 33394 Gijón T +34 985 133 431 Open Wed–Mon 12–8 laboralcentrodearte.org

CARBON 12 DUBAI A1 Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Warehouse d37 Dubai T +971 50 464 4 392 carbon12dubai.com info@ carbon12dubai.com Skype: carbon12knf Twitter: carbon12artgallery Open Sun–Thu 12–7 Sara Rahbar- Recent works “Whatever we had to lose we lost, and in the moonless sky we marched” to 20 Apr

MUSAC – MUSEO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO CASTILLA Y LEON Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 24008 León T +34 987 09 00 00 musac.es Educando el Saber to 6 Jun BRAZIL GALERIA FORTES VILACA Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500 05416-001 São Paulol T +55 11 3032 7066 fortesvilaca.com.br Efrain Almeida to Jun 19 GALERIA LUISA STRINA Rua Oscar Freire 502 01426-000 São Paulo/SP T +55 11 3088 2417 galerialuisastrina.com.br Edgard de Souuza to 22 May

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

SHARJAH FOUNDATION P.O. Box 19989, Sharjah United Arab Emirates Open Sat–Thu 8–8, Fri 4–8 T +971 6 568 5050 sharjahart.org Tarek Al Ghoussein: A Retrospective Works from 2001–2010 to 13 May

HONG KONG 10 CHANCERY LANE GALLERY G/F, 10 Chancery Lane, SoHo, Central, Hong Kong T +852 2810 0065 Open Tue – Sat 10– 6 [email protected] 10chancerylanegallery.com “Fragments” by Serge Clément and Hannah Bertram 22 Apr - 15 May Solo exhibition by Li Wei 20 May - 12 Jun THE BIRCH FOUNDATION ArtisTree, 1/F Cornwall House, TaiKoo Place, Island East, Hong Kong T +852 2810 0065/852 6280 2309 [email protected] Open 10am – 8pm thebirchfoundation.com Hope & Glory - A Conceptual Circus Conceived by Simon Birch to 30 May JAPAN SCAI THE BATHHOUSE Kashiwayu-Ato, 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku, Tokyo 110-0001, Japan T +81-3-3821-1144 scaithebathhouse.com Anish Kapoor to 19 Jun TAIWAN TAISHIN BANK FOUNDATION FOR ARTS AND CULTURE 15Fl., No.118, Sec. 4, Ren-ai Rd., 106 Taipei T +886 (2) 3707 6955 Open Tue–Sun 9-5 [email protected] taishinart.org.tw The 8th Taishin Arts Award Exhibition to 6 Jun

CHINA OV GALLERY 19C Shaoxing lu, Shanghai,China,20002 Tel: +8621 5465 7768 [email protected] ovgallery.com


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Rear View May

Reviews Books The Strip On the Town Off the Record


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REVIEWS:

UK Richard Hamilton Modern Moral Matters Art’s involvement in political realities, and an artist’s relationship to political commitment, are almost always complicated matters. An engagement with politics that seems for the moment urgent and alive suddenly fades as the political situation around it changes, and those critical moments when commitment seems most pressing can leave an artwork looking distant and stranded once the crisis passes. In this particular moment, the political world has never seemed so confused and in crisis, so it makes the Serpentine’s focused presentation of Richard Hamilton’s ‘political’ works all the more interesting. Hamilton, the now much-revered elder statesman of British postwar art, godfather of Pop art and the key British interlocutor of the legacy of Duchamp, has always had a view of industrial society expansive enough to allow the political world into the terms of ‘pop’ culture. Modern Moral Matters (an extension of Hamilton’s 2008 Inverleith House show, Protest Pictures) traces an arc from Hamilton’s strangely comic Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland (1964), via the iconic Mick Jagger drugs-bust image, Swingeing London (1968–72), through the works focusing on the civil and military conflict in Northern Ireland and Thatcher’s Britain, ending up with works that deal with the Middle East – from the first Gulf War (War Games, 1991–2010) to the Blair-Bush Iraq War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What’s at stake, then, is the question of whether an artwork depends on its political moment for its meaning and power, or conversely, whether it can communicate its historical moment into the future, from the past. Retrospection is a strange process: I don’t have any personal sense of who Hugh Gaitskell was, apart from what I remember from my political history books: leader of the Labour party during the 1950s and early 60s, notorious for committing Labour to maintaining Britain’s nuclear arsenal. But it’s Hamilton’s quirky rendering of Gaitskell, monster-coloured, mask-faced and bug-eyed, which drills a tunnel through the intervening years, so that we might actually care about who this strange face was, and what he once did. Similarly, though counterculture mythos endures about the 1967 drugs raid in which Jagger and Pop art dealer Robert Fraser were arrested, it’s Hamilton’s coolly inquisitive working up of the press image, of their faces hidden by handcuffed hands, that keeps us looking. Hamilton’s interest in serials and multiples means that while there is a well-known key version of Swingeing London, the handcuff picked out in chrome, there are many other versions – screenprints, collages, etchings – that repeat and modify the source, as if the sense of the event could not be digested in the first instance. Moreover, it’s Hamilton’s technologist interest in different formal techniques and media that reclaims the event for posterity, not because we ‘get’ the significance of Jagger and Fraser’s arrest (end of the libertarian 1960s, beginning of the conservative backlash), but simply because it memorialises it, makes it strange and refuses to let it fade. But while memorialisation suggests moral or political outrage in its inception, it can only communicate a partial trace of that outrage into the future. That’s why Treatment Room (1983–4), Hamilton’s response to the Britain of the Thatcher years, remains a chilling summary of the depth of disillusion in the early years of Thatcher’s aggressive regime, and is Hamilton’s most enduring political work. It’s not that the piece doesn’t take political sides – it was hard not to – but that in presenting the matriarchal/dominatrix countenance of ‘Thatch’ on a monitor above the bed of an operating theatre, the sound turned off as she mouths preelection promises and stern assurances, it manages to crystallise the sense of this neoliberal warrior’s implacable hostility towards us, the people, but also the desire for a ‘return to order’ that drew many to her. It’s not outrage or polemical opposition that drives the work, but an icy, uncanny materialisation of the reality of the time, regardless of our opinion of it: Britain was broken, and she was going to ‘cure’ us – whether we wanted to be the patient, or not. In this sense, Hamilton’s vision anticipates the full spectacularisation of politics that now dominates. We have become spectators to politics, seeing, watching, aware of ourselves witnessing the course of events, but incapable of affecting it. Yet the paradox is that Hamilton’s detached, sardonic eye saw better those times in which people were more involved in political life, when the tension between partisanship and a laconic fascination with the mediated spectacle of public life could be played out more acutely in his art. But as we near the present day, Hamilton’s more recent forays – in his photo-cartoon of Tony Blair as gunslinger in Shock and Awe (2007–8), or in Maps of Palestine (2009–10), seem only to offer us polemical platitudes of a very orthodox kind – ‘Blair is bad!’, ‘look what the Israelis are doing!’ By seeming so much more angry or urgent, these works miss the strangest development of political life today – that such gestures of political protest and engagement have themselves become part of the spectacle of an otherwise entirely passive political culture. J.J. Charlesworth

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Serpentine Gallery, London 3 March – 25 April


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REVIEWS: UK

Florian Hecker

Chisenhale Gallery, London 12 February – 28 March

Artist and musician Florian Hecker’s solo show at Chisenhale, his first in a UK public institution, is by turns an auditory pleasure and an assault. Commissioned by Chisenhale and Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery, Hecker’s new installation of soundworks continues his investigations into the physicality of sound. Totalling just under half an hour and played in sequence around the space, the compositions feature some spoken words, the odd tune, tones, frequencies, pulses and white noise – the sound perhaps best suited to this clinical gallery space. I visited twice: the first time I wanted to flee, the second time I was lulled into staying put. These reactions provide a key to understanding Hecker’s work, predicated on the idea of auditory reception being defined by variables as simple as one’s position in a space. The show comprises four works. Magnitude Estimation (2010) consists of two loudspeakers positioned at opposite ends of the cavernous gallery space, each simultaneously transmitting the same voice as it announces the loudness values of various sounds. The voice – flat and impersonal, yet like most automated readers recognisably female – reads statements such as “81 dBA sound pressure level”, but the information is skewed by harsh, screechy noises that crackle from the speakers. The doubling of the sound and the positioning of the speakers posits the sonic space between as a defined physical space where sounds meet and clash. This idea of sound in space and as space is one of the exhibition’s ongoing refrains. Auditory Scene (5 Fold) (2010), for example, features five speakers suspended from the ceiling in a wavelike formation. A frenetic sequence of tones is emitted, ranging from high to low, which is echoed in the formal organisation of the speakers. The viewer can almost see these sounds rising and falling, faster or slower, depending on where she is standing in the gallery. The triumph of the show is 2 x 3 Channel (2009). Two three-channel pieces are played simultaneously, one clockwise, the other anticlockwise, around three speakers located in the middle of the ceiling. The viewer/listener’s position in the gallery defines which strain takes auditory precedence. At just under 20 minutes, the work is most like a composition, encompassing related movements and similar rhythms and sounds repeated throughout. At certain points, something approximating a fairground tune is heard, before spiralling off into a digression of buzzing sounds and singing crystal. At moments when the composition reaches a fever-pitch of layered zipping noises, the sound feels densely physical, and the body’s response to it purely visceral. It becomes a total environment, and moving around the space yields no respite. Attempting to transcribe the sound in language, I found myself unable to think outside of the sound itself, and resorted instead to visual notations, graph lines and scribbles that seemed most closely to describe it. Background noise it ain’t, but the pockets of space created by sound are strangely inviting, and the sense that one’s insides are being hollowed out to better receive it is pleasantly intuitive. It’s the thing-ness of noise that Hecker is immersed in; by the time the work is over, you imagine you are seeing the particles in space throbbing. Laura Allsop

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REVIEWS: UK

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Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London 27 February – 23 May

It’s difficult to know how to react to a roomful of exotic birds playing rock ‘n’ roll instruments – the last and most memorable part of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s commission for the Barbican Curve. The institution shrewdly released a promo of the bird orchestra on YouTube, no doubt aiming for the mass audience of wackypet fans rather than avant-garde composers. The clip emphasises the cuteness and apparent precocious nature of these pretty zebra finches, but here in the artificially lit white-walled corridor of the Curve, it all seems a bit cruel – more laboratory than aviary. A disclaimer at the bottom of the press release states that the birds are on loan from Animal Actors and that their welfare has been reviewed by the ‘relevant authorities’, but it’s clear from anxious questions to the invigilator that not all visitors are reassured. Mostly, people mill about expectantly, observing the various activities of the finches as they drink water from a cymbal or peck at seeds casually strewn over electric guitars, their movements translated into musical notes by microphones and amplifiers. Meanwhile, the birds are also making their own much more melodic chirping noises, either unaware of the connection between their movements and the unbirdlike sounds they are triggering, or else just trying to make themselves heard above the din. The combined effect is as discordant and random as a preconcert warm-up at the Barbican Hall, next door. Music nerds would have noticed that the Gibson guitars are the Les Paul models favoured by such rock legends as Jimmy Page and Keith Richards, further underlining the ironic disconnect between the extraordinary potential of these instruments and the sad reality that these birds will never play Stairway to Heaven or (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Boursier-Mougenot trained as a composer for the Pascal Rambert theatre company, and clearly references work by John Cage, La Monte Young and Fluxus artists. He has made music with vacuum cleaners and, as with an underwhelming example in the first half of the Curve, by making sounds from video signals. But while the transition from stage to gallery might have elevated his artistic reputation, the results here are not totally convincing. In the Curve, there seems little benefit in being able to move around the installation; it only creates anticipation for something more exciting to happen. Over the past couple of years, the Curve has overturned the physical disadvantage of its awkward shape to host highly experimental site-specific commissions, often surpassing the shows at the Barbican’s main art gallery and becoming a destination in its own right. Boursier-Mougenot’s contribution is a rare disappointment in this inspired programme. Jennifer Thatcher


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REVIEWS: UK

If the comparison didn’t seem iniquitous, one might call Raven Row the all-you-can-eat-restaurant of art galleries: certainly, Alex Sainsbury’s elegantly appointed nonprofit delivers exhibitions to outlast all appetites. The previous show, a Harun Farocki retrospective, included around 30 frequently feature-length films; A History of Irritated Material, too, virtually invites you to camp out at the venue. A six-part portmanteau affair primarily organised by Danish curator/critic Lars Bang Larsen, it incorporates reconstructed historical shows, microlibraries of videos, storehouses of documents and more, under A History of Irritated Material the sign of ‘politics, alienation and the archive’. One section alone, the latest version of Marco Scotini’s pugnacious collation of antiauthoritarian documentaries, Disobedience, An Ongoing Video Archive, is 16 hours long. Such unbridgeable excess conceals an implicit permission: you’re never going to see it all, so feel free to pick and choose. Here, going against the grain takes many forms. In a clutch of interviews by Suely Rolnik with those who knew Lygia Clark, the experiences Rolnik’s interviewees had with the Brazilian artist’s work feel like secret knowledge. Tropicália singer Jards Macalé describes Clark’s work, which came to involve direct interactions between artist and viewer such as breath exercises and transversal massage, as inspiring a positively LSDlike trip (and one that improved his music). Drugs as resistance also gets a look-in upstairs, in extraordinarily sophisticated Day-Glo posters and historical ephemera by Swedish graphic artist and Situationist Sture Johannesson. Some relate to Johannesson’s three-year ‘psychedelic salon’ Cannabis Gallery, in Mälmo; one pictures the Royal Palace in Stockholm and invites its audience to ‘turn on the institutions’. If this work is gleaming yet antiquated evidence of a new image/text-based project, A Cut in the Groin (2009), drawing on Johannesson’s orphanage childhood and evidences of compulsory sterilisation programmes in Sweden, underlines than not all hippies became complacent yuppies. Elsewhere, revived installations by Moscow-based artists’ group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics suggest dissension narrated through symbolic poetics. The punchy-yet-oblique Amber Room (1991) features three giant balloons painted with schematic smiling faces, referring to Kolobok, a character in a Russian folktale who constantly runs away. Surrounding them are almost-identical shrinelike arrangements: photographs of icons angled sideways into illegibility and privileging the Western innovation of perspective, and, sitting on plates on cushion-topped shelves, apples that are again decorated with smiling Kolobok-esque faces. More direct, perhaps, is the resurrection the collective Group Material, via extracts or remakes of exhibitions from 1980, 1987 and 1995: by the last, Market, the collective were simply presenting evidences of the consumer world – home shopping channel footage and hypnotism videos, for instance – as self-indicting. This being Raven Row, matters don’t stop here. A further historical dimension, and intimation of how art engages the mainstream, comes via Ad Reinhardt’s lushly forbidding abstract prints and incisive cartoons for the magazines Soviet Russia Today and PM. The synoptic point, though, has already been made, pulling together the show’s potentially sketchy extremities: dissent, operating in diverse registers, goes East and West, North and South, back in time and forward into the future. We can talk about the weirdness (and pleasure) of seeing all this underwritten by the scion of a supermarket empire if you like; but in terms of underwriting the fashionable category of the archival with some kind of revelatory political heft, Irritated Material is undeniable. Martin Herbert „
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Raven Row, London 25 February – 2 May

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REVIEWS: UK

Misty Boundaries Fades and Dissolves

FormContent, London 25 February – 28 March

The fragment is perhaps best visualised as a ripped scrap of paper – furry and translucent at its edges, the fibres torn and soft. These frayed edges are the most fragile parts of the scrap – the tear that points back to an original, larger whole. Misty Boundaries Fades and Dissolves, curated by Daniella Saul, attempted the difficult task of encouraging an abstract visualisation of history – as layer upon layer of these fragments – using works from the 1980s to the present day. The way we see the past is contingent on the way we see the present, and this can change at any moment. Or put another way, the way that we understand the 1980s depends on who is in the room at the time. Misty Boundaries… was presented as three fortnightly chapters – three temporal layers – and took its name from a 2009 film included in the second: James Richards’s monochromatic images of smoke, bubbles and window light fading in and out Each part contained an element of Eva Weinmayr’s project I Wonder What the Silence Was About (2010), investigating the disappearance from the artworld, in 2001, of the collaborative duo Art in Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks). “Have you tried Googling them?” asks one of the interviewees in a film. (I had.) “What happens?” (Well, not a lot.) Weinmayr’s obvious blending of fact and fiction – as well as the use of actors in the films – puts everything about Art in Ruins under suspicion. Trawling through Google is tantamount to finding yourself among ruins, in a sea of useless fragments. Are we in ruins or are they? Speculation, say Art in Ruins, may be more productive than answers. In the second week, Stewart Home shredded a copy of his book Down and Out in Shoreditch and Hoxton (2004), while George Barber layered filmic scraps from advertising, film and television so that the soundtracks bleed over each other, creating the kind of ominous mixed messages that we have become so used to processing. The most successful layering was that of two artists connected by their use of collage and images of women: Linder and Clunie Reid. Linder’s self-portraits in collaboration with the photographer Christine Birrer from the 1981 SheShe series were shown first. In one image Linder’s eyes are wrapped in bandages, while in another she appears to be tearing off a fragment of her face to reveal another beneath – possibilities for presenting complex images of oneself. Clunie Reid’s larger, rougher works filled a wall for the second week. Reid’s blown-up collages trade in a horrorlike aesthetic: a liquid pupil bleeds from an eye; a skull cackles from between the legs of a young female celebrity photographed, à la Britney, wearing a skirt but no knickers as she alights from a car; a headline screams that Kerry Katona ‘can’t take any more suffering’. In the final week, Linder’s work was hung on top of Reid’s, temporally condensing the two eras and their respective visions of the feminine. What happened to the potential, glimpsed in Linder’s work, for harnessing one’s own image? The young women on Reid’s wall appear to have no control over their own images: bodily and emotional obscenity seems their only mode of (dubious) protest. There remains, however, a possibility that from these fragments one might better build an understanding of how this could have happened. Laura McLean-Ferris

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REVIEWS: UK

Art Sheffield 2010 Life: A User’s Manual

Various venues, Sheffield 6 March – 1 May

One doesn’t see too many exhibitions that come with a hefty reading list. I’m sure the inclusion of one on Art Sheffield’s website is in the spirit of benign academia, yet for the reviewer, now programmed to project art theory on any given work, it feels like heavy baggage to carry round the streets of Sheffield. The curators of Life: A User’s Manual – named from the Georges Perec novel – are Netherlands-based Frederique Bergholtz and Annie Fletcher, and they have taken ‘affect’ as the catalyst for their multivenue jamboree. The press material breathlessly quotes from secondary papers by Jörg Heiser, Brian Massumi and Sarah Ahmed. My head’s in a spin and I haven’t even started on Spinoza. So what’s one to do? Give some kind of simplistic résumé of how slippery affect has touched art theory before moving on to the stuff itself? Or perhaps just give the artists credit, and hope the works explain themselves? It starts off so well, too. The Millennium Gallery, Sheffield’s major space, has a cohesive group exhibition of works which appear preoccupied with the babble of language and the limits of its translation. Katarina Zdjelar’s Shoum (2009) sees the struggle of two Serbian musicians as they translate the Tears for Fears song Shout (1985) into their native tongue. The film refutes the supposed unifying power of pop, crystallised when one of the furrowed-brow protagonists mumbles, “Damn English”. This whole lost-in-translation vibe continues in Imogen Stidworthy’s excellent – and beautifully shot – film Barrabackslarrbang (2009). Various talking heads demonstrate back slang, a form of colloquialism that developed in British minority and working-class communities to resist those in authority. The language causes a rupture in linguistic orthodoxy, the limit-pushing nature of which sounds poetic, but additionally sits on the edge of madness. As mad as the idea of translating Tears for Fears into Serbian. The intermittent cacophony coming from Haroon Mirza’s installation of the audible elements from other artists’ work (Guy Sherwin’s 16mm film Cycles, 1972/1977, and Jeremy Deller’s video rushes from Memory Bucket, 2003), plus a slowly submerging and short-circuiting keyboard, nullifies any meaning, the works’ original communication strategies lost to blunt machinic noise. The obliteration of meaning curatorially highlighted in the works links the idea of art as a friction to the everyday, enabling subjective escape from incumbent hierarchies which enables the viewer – ‘life’s user’ – to affect a different way of living. All that, and without a reading list, either. Things get a little more problematic in the other venues. Coincidently, both Haegue Yang at S1 Artspace and Nina Canell at Bloc incorporate dry ice into their installations, and the superficiality of its effect, together with the various ad hoc set pieces and props they incorporate into their unrelated installations, leave scant inroads into the works. With attempted sensory assault, both installations’ seeming aim is the same disorienting experience that the mangling of communication at the Millenium Gallery succeeds in, but ultimately here staging triumphs over content. Life: A User’s Manual undoubtedly coerces the works into the curators’ overarching essay and at times feels like an assignment for the viewer. Yet for the most part, thankfully, the artists hold their own. Oliver Basciano

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REVIEWS: UK

Martin Soto Climent A Long Chapter One

Sorcha Dallas, Edinburgh 26 February – 1 April

The Equation of Desire (2010) is an extensive selection of photographs Martin Soto Climent has made by photographing yearbooks dating from 1959 to 1972. By carefully overlapping or curling pages, Climent creates photographs which show images emerging from and receding into smooth recesses and folds, bending the flat plane which pictorial conventions have tended to equate with a certain vantage point. The inclusion of eyes and bodies, political violence and emaciated persons with the occasionally repeated character or recognisable face make this a particularly rich work: a web of gazes, otherness and historical moments. The work evokes longstanding discussions about photography, torn between the absent living subjects and the present apparatus in which desire is ideologically being constructed. But the sense of desire evoked by Climent relates to representational practices that cross the arts. Here I’m thinking of Jacques Rancière’s readings of films, such as Godard’s montage Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988–98), where a certain meeting between words and pictures can bestow upon a single image a paradoxical weight of meaning (the religiosity of which Rancière is attempting to expose). Here it is not just interesting that Climent’s photographs, though without words, seem to invest these old photographs with an unfamiliar weight of meaning, but also that Climent’s sculptural work has previously been likened to ‘fragments of poetry’ or to Chekhov’s ‘jewel-like images’. This is a textbook (or, literally, ‘picture book’) response to desire, in the range of ideas it marks, but it may bring with it some of the dusty problems of a textbook. After the period covered by the yearbooks Climent has sourced, there was, in the AngloAmerican world, at least, a dramatic explosion of photographic practices exploring subcultures and alternative sexual practices. And considering this, The Equation of Desire also seems to regurgitate relatively normative positions without significantly questioning them. In light of Climent’s broader practice, however, where sculptural pieces are carefully yet contingently made from found materials, my reading of The Equation of Desire seems uncomfortably heavy. In contrast, the sculptures exhibited in the same space, Sugar Skull and My Heart (2007 and 2010), are light, mobile forms comprising balanced coathangers and/or glass objects. In another room, a globe appears surrounded by a cloudlike expanse of white sugar in an installation called A Sweet Silly Idea (2010). Here I think this question of weight is crucial. How much weight does or should The Equation of Desire carry, and what of A Sweet Silly Idea? This ambitious project is to be continued into 2011, and with its development I think we, and Climent, need to think carefully about the connections and disparities his practice seems to entail. Deleuze once commented that the beauty of Godard’s practice was that it strove not for a ‘correct’ image, but just for an image. How might Climent’s practice still maintain ‘correct’ images, images that confirm dominant positions; and in light of Rancière’s recent insights, does the ambiguity of just an image really constitute an alternative or another convention? James Clegg


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REVIEWS:

USA Marina Abramovic The Artist Is Present

Museum of Modern Art, New York 14 March – 31 May

For Marina Abramovic’s retrospective The Artist Is Present, the artist really is present, every day and every hour the museum is open, until the exhibition closes. She and a volunteer spectator sit at opposite ends of a humble wood table and simply gaze at each other in complete silence, faces glistening with sweat. While the spectator may sit for as long as desired before being replaced by another, Abramovic remains. Bathed in four diffuse spotlights in a large square demarcated space in the museum’s atrium, The Artist Is Present (2010) transcends its quotidian trappings. It is just as provocative as – if not more so than – Abramovic’s earlier work on display in the museum’s sixth floor. Its simplicity belies its phenomenological implications, a subject–object relation distilled here to a bare minimum: two performers perceived, both by each other and by dozens of surrounding spectators, as merely objects in space — subjugated and depersonalised. The Artist Is Present is an accessible and surprisingly radical introduction to Abramovic’s oeuvre. In every which way, the MoMA retrospective both reinscribes and reanimates a brand of performance-art cliché that she has come to represent. It’s all here, nearly four decades of work documented, played back and re-performed: a plethora of bouncing breasts and flopping penises, screaming, shouting, face-slapping, nakedness — all freaky-deaky shit that retains a delightful incongruity despite MoMA’s institutional framework. Unsurprisingly, decorum dictates: video documentation and photographs are arranged in chronological order and contextualised by wall texts; the array of knives, chains and guns from Rhythm O (1974) are neatly ordered on a table like precious relics; with a rectangular section of the wall cut out, revealing two performers seated back-to-back with their hair tied together, the re-performance of Relation in Time (1977) is here disconcertingly framed like a painting. Lost within the excess of ephemera, the re-performance of Imponderabilia (1977) goes almost unnoticed. The two naked performers, standing face-to-face only inches apart from each other, are hidden to the side of the gallery rather than prominently centre stage like its earlier iteration. Despite attempts to aestheticise its messiness, much of Abramovic’s practice retains a timeless vitality, particularly the pieces that lack the heavy nationalism evident in much of her later work. Abramovic’s solo work from 1969 to 1975 and her collaborations with Ulay exorcise political and gender identity through a simple emphasis on the body — an object and threshold of perception that encounters both itself and its other. Narrowly squeezing between the two nude performers of Imponderabilia — grazing their fleshy protrusions and perhaps even making eye contact – the MoMA visitor is made acutely aware of the body’s volatile position. But perhaps most important, the visitor is also made acutely aware of the vital difference between presentation and representation, live performance and its ancillary documentation. The Artist Is Present troubles both. While it suggests a porous line between these dichotomies, I would rather argue that The Artist Is Present and the various reperformances suggest otherwise — that the presence of a live body, in the flesh, is irreplaceable. David Everitt Howe

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REVIEWS: USA

Skin Fruit: Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection

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New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York 3 March – 6 June

Dakis Joannou has helped set the agenda in a highly visible part of the artworld by virtue of the sheer volume of his buying – Jeff Koons, who curated this selection from the Athens-based collector’s holdings, notes in the show’s catalogue that ‘what makes this collection special is its vastness’ – and by his frequent collaborations with dealers such as Jeffrey Deitch and curators such as Nancy Spector, Nicolas Bourriaud and the New Museum’s own Massimiliano Gioni. It comes as no surprise, then, that the 83 works on view here hew to critical tropes familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of what goes on today: ironic appropriation, the madness of a consumption-choked culture – of which much in this overly crowded exhibition is exemplary – and a corollary sense of spiritual want. Within these broad and overlapping thematic subsets, Joannou’s taste runs, it seems, to the gooey and the grand. Take as emblematic Terence Koh’s Untitled (Chocolate Mountains) (2006), two monolithic masses covered with flaking icing which dominate the museum’s fifth-floor galleries; Ashley Bickerton’s F.O.B. (1993), a torso consisting solely of rolls of fat; and Urs Fischer’s 2009 painting Noodle, in which a face dissolves into postatomic glop. The show also features the requisite dose of épater le bourgeois caca and cum: among other practitioners of this school, Paul McCarthy, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, and Dan Colen, the last represented by a painting reading ‘holy shit’ backwards – although its inclusion might be a sly joke. Much of this comes off as puerile and old hat. There are few artists here who are not frequently featured in local galleries. The fey aesthetic of decay and the tendency to grandiosity which suffuse the exhibition were the driving spirits behind two recent New Museum exhibitions: After Nature and Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty, both curated by Gioni. The pity is that with strong works by Cady Noland, who is not enough seen, and Kiki Smith, who usually comes off as overly precious, this show hints at but fails to develop a history of issues such as alienation, isolation and identity in the art of the last 30 years that stands apart from the one that issues from the highly revered Robert Gober, who is included here, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who is not. Also left unexplored is Koons’s role as an artistic influence during the same period and, more intimately, as an inspiration to Joannou, with whom he is, reportedly, good friends. His One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (1985), a lone basketball floating in a fish tank, and the single piece of his on view here, was apparently the purchase which inspired Joannou’s grand passion for collecting; and it’s possible, given the other works on display, to interpret Koons’s piece as a metaphor for the individual lost in a culture which privileges the consumable over the spiritual and the superficiality of fame over the satisfactions of hard work. But the show, which resembles a cross section drawn from a warehouse, displays much of the former and little of the latter. Joshua Mack
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REVIEWS: USA

Graham Anderson/Caitlin Keogh and Alisa Baremboym/Thomas Torres Cordova

179 Canal, New York 12 March – 4 April

For one of the two collaborative projects at 179 Canal, Thomas Torres Cordova and Alisa Baremboym have configured a conversation that hinges on turning the volume of structuralism up and down. Torres’s work is the most married to this approach. His iterations of glass are weighted with inflections of the body as both passive and active agent in relation to a material that is rife with contradictions. On a shattered safety windshield leaning on the wall, he has sandblasted, at eye-level, a pale single-point-perspective image of assembly-line labour; one has to move about the piece to make out the image, and what registers with visceral force are the spider-web breaks across the surface of the piece. The ultimate effect is one of pushand-pull between the beauty of the material and imagery, and the implied trauma of impact. Elsewhere a short video loops on a tall pane of glass held obliquely in place by the floor and ceiling of the gallery. In the video, weathered hands gently assemble the balsawood components of a model plane; one has to sit on the floor to get the best view. In both pieces, the bodies of the subjects depicted, as well as the viewers’ own, are implicated in narratives that are intertwined with those of science and industry as well as labour and instrumentality. Baremboym has set up and photographed slightly stiff and shrouded anthropomorphic figures cloaked in textiles that gesture towards the Slavic style of her Russian heritage, though they could equally allude to Middle Eastern garb. Startlingly, the visages have been left blank and gaping black. Baremboym floats the photographs inside fabric whose pattern constitutes a repeat of her centralised image. Through these formal as well as conceptual framing devices, Baremboym pins a group of cultural references together, flattening them into a shallow pile so that cultural relativity is extruded and we are subtly muscled into considering our own specific relationship to these signifiers around which she plots her narrative points. Working as a team, Caitlin Keogh and Graham Anderson have dispersed in their half of the gallery a series of props that cultivate a dialogue between design objects and the environment in which they exist. Modelling their practice after such workshops as the Bauhaus and the Weiner Werkstatte, Anderson and Keogh have created such items as screens, a painted mirror and a pillow plopped in a corner of the gallery. The best passages in their work are the most abstract and the ones that loosen the relationship between form and content, most notably Splash Curtains (2010), a set of gauzy drapes sprinkled with slightly goofy biomorphic blobs rendered in marker. All of the works exhibit a lo-fi-ness that at once refreshes and amplifies what is clearly a collective consideration of aesthetic and cultural speeds. T.J. Carlin

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REVIEWS: USA

It is tempting to say that Carol Bove’s show at Kimmerich’s new space in New York is, quite simply, beautiful, and leave it at that. It would not be wrong, either, to state as much, though it likely would be to leave it at that, not only because a show like this, with its conceptual underpinnings (Bove became known for her acute arrangements of historically symbolic items, such as touchstone books and photographs from the 1960s) and manifest attention to detail (no arrangement of things in a gallery has ever been more ‘acute’ than they are here) is after so much more than any mere pronouncement on what can count as beautiful, or perhaps ‘tasteful’, today, but also because one gets the sense that this is exactly what such beauty, or perhaps ‘taste’, is being asked to do – that is, to compel us not to go too far with any kind of enquiry. Consider the first piece one encounters, an untitled sculpture that consists of a found object — a leaded-red bloom of twisted, rusted metal layered with sunbaked and caked-on insulating foam – held aloft on a custom-made steel museum stand, itself standing on a concrete-capped open lattice of polished bronze. This syntax, of object, stand, cap and shaft, is repeated elsewhere in the show, such as in Shell Sculpture, The Oracle and Empathicalism (all 2010), and some of its parts are left out in others, for example in the small tabletop items that make up La Traversée Difficile (2008–10), or in Touch Tree (2008). The power of such displays would seem to warrant a whole dialogue on ‘the power of display’, except to engage in such a dialogue would seem somehow passé. “That’s so early-1990s”, we might say, not as an indictment of the work, but rather of our own problematic proximity to such onetime urgent concerns, now too far away to enlist but not far enough to historicise or recuperate. Bove is very good at staging these kinds of suspensions, and now some of her work is opening up to what we might as well call the ‘structural logic’ (I’ll risk the passé reference) that subtends them. The two untitled works of peacock feathers on linen supports hint at it: one is encased in Plexiglas, the other is not; the former is roughly half the size of the latter; and the two are hung back-to-back on opposite sides of the gallery’s dividing wall. These oppositions between open and closed, back and front, tactile and optical, when combined with the peacock feather’s natural status as an information-bearing signal, begin to show us, to put it plainly, how things become images. Such is the function, I suspect, of Bove’s pair of Harlequin sculptures too: eightfoot-tall and four-foot-wide open Plexiglas boxes covered by pristine sheet metal grates. The pieces stand as both thresholds and obstacles whose particular material arrangement appears to collapse three dimensions into two. Again, things become image, and again, it does not pay to delve too deeply into the latter. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Carol Bove

Kimmerich, New York 5 March – 1 May

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REVIEWS: USA

Judy Ledgerwood Chromophilia

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Five years ago, Judy Ledgerwood stopped painting before reaching the edge of her canvases, leaving white borders of varying regularity that make her paintings (as she has remarked) less like objects and more like walls themselves: stable if not permanent architectural structures that enable even the most weighty application of paint to look momentary. In this her work brings to mind John Wesley, master of not only the white-bordered painting-as-a-box but also the blissful heaviness that surprisingly can 1301PE, Los Angeles be found in absolute lightness – as well as, of course, his killer colours. Weight, in Ledgerwood’s work, is 20 March – 24 April as psychological as it is material: various thicknesses of oil paint (or in one instance, encaustic), vibrant and deliberately clashing colours, and aggressively intricate patterns come together in eye-boggling combinations that simultaneously catch and release her imagery as if it were rays of light moving across a room. Ledgerwood has pulled out all the stops in this exhibition, taking advantage of the gallery’s two floors to move us through the ‘story’ of her work, a narrative supported by the formal mainstays of modernist abstraction yet driven by an unrelenting, even badass attitude. Six of Ledgerwood’s small paintings (each 38 x 38 x 5 cm) fill the first floor of the gallery. Most have been given walls of their own, and they need them, as no one is like any of the others, even though most of them use her now-signature four-part ‘floral’ arrangement made from fat strokes of paint that circle back to where they started. Each of these expansive paintings has an irregularly painted overall shape that pushes the white edge of the canvas against the surrounding wall so that the painted image itself acts as if it were in motion: for example, Hot Sun Cool Shade (all works 2010) looks to be slipping off its right edge, while Tangerine Sun and Summer Sea sticks to its centre by holding onto a ring built from frostinglike deposits of candy-coloured paint. An unapologetically over-the-top wall painting crowds the irregular space at the top of the stairs. Called One Voice (For Patti Smith), it surrounds a set of seven ceramic vessels that Ledgerwood recently produced in Mexico. After the intensifying contraction of the small paintings, the expansive collision of pattern and colour, as well as the domestic context of usevalue and visual pleasure, reinforces Ledgerwood’s commitment to the diversity of both physical and pictorial space in her work. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the three large paintings that bring the exhibition to a riotous yet rigorous climax. Painted as if they were cloths draped on the wall-like white surface of their tall canvases, the patterns of Monster Love, Tequila Sunrise and Magenta in A Minor could almost be waving in the wind, if not for the drips of paint that re-attach them pictorially to their bottom edges. Their colour combinations simultaneously make everything vibrate in our eyes, demonstrating that when it comes to creating movement in stillness, Ledgerwood is at the top of her game. Terry R. Myers

REVIEWS: USA

Tim Berresheim Phoenix – The Guilty Pleasure

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Patrick Painter Inc, Santa Monica 20 February – 3 April

Tim Berresheim occupies photographic territory somewhere between the analytic practices of Bernd and Hilla Becher and the legacy of German artists such as Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen, the ones who do their best to throw a kink into any machine, muss up any system and retain their wanton ability to be rude in their work. Berresheim turns the set conditions of the Bechers’s serials and sequences into a mad carnival, riving them with garish colours, wicked horror-movie lighting, strange sets and his favourite prop: human hair. Disembodied wigs are employed and hang like animist spiritual objects among furniture and indoor plants in theatre sets used repeatedly from different angles. The hair also flows through Berresheim’s pigment prints, easily recognisable as hair but also easily standing in for a brushstroke or the gesture of a hand. One earlier but telling series is Berresheim’s Condition Platinum (Tidiness) Wig II (2008), nine Diasec prints, each of a different wig in front of different backdrops, with an assortment of seashells positioned at the bottom. The impression is that these are ‘shells’ of portraits, missing humans that wouldn’t matter even if present. The portrait is drained of its nature as a record of a person and a personality, and posited as just a trope that can be deployed according to whatever fashion is available at the moment. They lack the gentle humanism of the Bechers’s towers and mills, with the inherent sense of discovery they offer. Instead the work of Thomas Ruff comes to mind here – yes, these are portraits, but they are photographs first. All of Berresheim’s work has this mechanical baseline, no matter how beautiful the prints can be or no matter how wilfully ugly the photographs are. Berresheim’s new pigment prints push this studied cynicism even further. They are in the direct spirit of Oehlen’s computer paintings, where a program issues wild, twisting compositions, and Oehlen intervenes occasionally with a spray can. Berresheim, however, makes no such interventions. Printed on wood, the generated paintings are not really abstract at all but are actually easily recognisable patterns of rainbows, ribbons, hair and wire. The compositions coil tight, then burst at times into long lush passages of colour and dynamism. Admittedly some of the prints are so lovely and animated that one is tempted to take Berresheim at his word and simply view the works in Guilty Pleasure as so many unapologetic and unironic returns to a time when beauty was neither studied nor involved in an incessant semiotic unpacking. However, one must not be too hasty. These computer prints, slick and repeatable, are limited in their liveliness by both the cold mechanics of the enterprise and the memory of Berresheim’s earlier work. They ultimately suggest that one is capable of only so much disruption and unruliness in the analytic tidiness of the modern world. Ed Schad
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REVIEWS:

Europe When one thinks of modern sculpture, many different paradigms come to mind – the readymade, the mobile, the monolith and so on. Perhaps the last one to do so is the tradition of semifigurative sculptures begun by the Italian artist Medardo Rosso. But it is from the lineage Rosso established that Hans Josephsohn’s sculptures evolve. As a consequence, for more than half a century Josephsohn has occupied a niche that it has been all too easy to overlook. Zurich-based since the late 1930s, Josephsohn for many years remained something of a local phenomenon. Retrospective exhibitions at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 2002 and Frankfurt’s MMK in 2008 have changed that. At the same time, inclusion in group exhibitions such as The Third Mind (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2007) and Visible Invisible: Against the Security of the Real (Parasol Unit, London, 2009) have served to situate his work within a more speculative contemporary framework, a gambit extended by his current flurry of exhibitions with Hauser & Wirth. The present exhibition is curated by Swiss architect Peter Märkli, who has been in dialogue with Josephsohn for more than three decades. To date, they have collaborated on two large projects: La Congiunta, in the Swiss Alps, and Kesselhaus Josephsohn, in St Gallen, both of which are devoted to Josephsohn’s sculptures. For the present collaboration, Märkli has made a selection of old and recent works. The sculptures have been sensitively – if somewhat conservatively – placed by Märkli around Hauser & Wirth’s industrial gallery space in Zurich. From a distance, the mottled surfaces of the most recent sculptures lend them the appearance of being constantly in a state of movement. Rather than a static solution, it’s as if the current state of the sculpture is only transitory. Move in closer to them, though, and this reading is overturned: the sheer heaviness of the brass mass makes the configurations feel definitive, and the heavily worked, roughly hewn surfaces – with their panoply of trowel strokes – become more static. Untitled (1994) is a case in point. The sculpture demands that the beholder slowly negotiate a way around it, as the edges of each trowel stroke carefully construct the surface. Already pregnant with meaning because of their figurative leanings, this surface serves to push the sculpture’s emotive dimension even further. The high-relief wall-mounted sculptures featured in the exhibition recall those of an artist who later reworked Rosso’s feel for surface: Henri Matisse, and particularly his Back Series (1908–31). There is a way the human form struggles to emerge against the background that recalls Matisse’s own ongoing struggle between figure and ground. Josephsohn’s Untitled (2005) is particularly effective in this regard. Two earlier portrait-format high-reliefs, Untitled (1978) and Untitled (1979–81), play with the same language but with a hint more figuration. A much earlier series of low-reliefs strikes a marked contrast with the high-relief sculptures: they feel far too simplistic in the relationship they establish between form and ground. In both Untitled (1950) and Untitled (1952–3), there is no play between the two, and thus no formal tension established. To see Josephsohn exhibited at a leading commercial gallery, one that exhibits sculptors such as Isa Genzken, does indeed lend them a sense of contemporaneity. This soon dissipates, however: for even though the more recent works are the most powerful and thus proof of his continued vitality, Josephsohn is a sculptor who is truly out of sync with the present – but his works are no less compelling for being so. Alex Coles

Josephsohn

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Hauser & Wirth, Zurich 27 March – 29 May

REVIEWS: EUROPE

Wolf von Kries Echantillons sans Valeur

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La Ferme du Buisson, Marne-la-Vallée 20 February – 2 May

Wolf von Kries’s first solo exhibition in France is almost too good to be true. I say almost because it both is and isn’t. Working in a bygone tradition inaugurated by the likes of Gabriel Orozco and Francis Alÿs in the early 1990s – that of the wandering troubadour conceptualist whose slight urban interventions are the transformative stuff of understated, epic poetry – von Kries, a Berlin-based German artist who studied in France, is a kind of rambling romantic, and a literary one at that. Which is to say that his work is as rich in personality and narrative as it is humble in materials and peripatetic circumstance, and as demonstrated by this exhibition, this can be at once a strength and a weakness. With the exception of three videos and a few smaller works, Echantillons sans Valeur (Samples of No Value) is largely an ethical, onsite affair – ethical because most of what goes into it comes from La Ferme du Buisson’s environs. Von Kries has turned a space in the art centre into a laboratorylike studio – which itself becomes the work Study Room (2010) – and taken two weeks to develop this economic and extremely well installed show. Many works consist of recycled materials, such as Chaises Musicales (Musical Chairs, 2010), which comprise found broken chairs that the artist has repaired; Sphère Geodésique (2010), a spherical geodesic armature meticulously constructed from rolled-up scraps of newspaper and hung from the rafters in the main space; and Chaîne Chinoise (Chinese Chain, 2003–), a chain of paper detritus – the first segment originally found on a street in Beijing – strung together with paperclips and then hung, corner to corner, across a room. If such fundamentally well-intentioned pieces tread dangerously close to the anecdotal, they are redeemed in part by the painstaking labour – here a substitute for craft – that engendered them, while other works, such as White Noise (2008–), a series of images of white walls photographed all over the world and then projected on a white wall, are less available to redemption via labour. Ironically, it feels like these works rely a bit too much on the personality of the artist and his peregrinations, ultimately smacking of manufactured serendipity. Von Kries is at his best here when he tends towards self-transcendence, albeit without entirely forfeiting his peripatetic impulse, and moves into more idiosyncratic territory. Take for instance the film installation Ondes (Mayday) (Waves, 2008), which consists of a large projection of rain on water, conjoined with a collection of canned preserves – all expired on 30 April 2008 – irregularly arranged in an archipelagolike fashion on the floor in front of the screen. A work of coruscating beauty, it does not seem particularly indebted to the artist’s narrative, and despite the gathering of cans intrinsic to its composition, it can’t be reduced to a mere reflection on labour, and puts up a healthy resistance to anecdote. None of this should take away from the artist’s highly developed sensibility (which, it should be stated, is formally and conceptually informed by one of the best-kept secrets in France: the work of Jean-Luc Moulène). Von Kries certainly has a way with materials, craft and spatial organisation, not to mention a keen eye for the overlooked and a rare capacity for poetry. Any tendency towards self-indulgence notwithstanding, he’s put together a thoroughly compelling and textured exhibition, and more will surely follow. Chris Sharp
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REVIEWS: EUROPE

It is awfully decent, in a way, of some of the art market’s most dematerialised artists – or indeed hypermaterialised ones, whose artistic processes might encompass vast geographical territories – to provide attractive objects at some stage of their processes in order to give their galleries something to sell. And none are more decent than Francis Alÿs. The Belgium-born artist, based in Mexico City since the 1980s, has developed a twin-track career, creating works that sit comfortably in museum settings while busying himself also with interventions requiring large numbers of people and amounts of resources to create Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin projects of a large, though nonetheless temporary, Le Temps de Sommeil 26 February – 23 May nature. Alÿs’s potency derives from his taking what a former generation of performance artists might call ‘relics’ of performances and bestowing on them equal status with his original actions. In the 1990s he began creating walks, actions performed on foot through various international cities, which owed a debt to earlier performance work by the likes of Chris Burden and Vito Acconci (though Alÿs is as likely to feed off Land Art as prey on angsty urban dérive). Sometimes one incarnation of a project stresses the lyric (such as 1995’s The Leak, in which the artist crossed Ghent with a can dripping blue paint) while a later version might seem more directly charged (in 2005 the artist let out a thin stream of green paint in Jerusalem as he walked the route of the territorial line drawn on a map of Israel after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war). But alongside bold performative projects and their audiovisual collateral, Alÿs also paints, creating in particular a longrunning series of miniatures, begun in 1995 and mounting to 111 images in its current IMMA incarnation (a similar number will appear at the artist’s Tate Modern retrospective this summer). These are displayed in conjunction with a series of postcards describing the artist’s projects (achieved, planned and dreamed), as well as axioms that have informed actions. The paintings and drawings operate as something of an earthing device, one that conducts the current of the artworld safely – in Alÿs’s case, into an account in order to fund larger geographical projects. But they also offer an intriguing, intimate entrée to the more ‘convivial’ spaces of his chunkier projects. These little images all feature a ground of slightly parched Venetian red, onto which tiny luminous green veduta-like lozenges are painted, and upon which small scenes – featuring human figures or animals, often in conjunction with ropes, wires or ladders – are applied via transfers. The sensation of frailty, of looming danger, suggested by the small size is reinforced with images that feel like inscrutable but always affecting parables. Occasionally there is a broad gag (one picture features a dog looking up and barking at a tree, while in a twin tree a bird sits unaccosted). But more often the images – for example, an undated one in which a naked contortionist appears to hold a mirror in order to examine his own anus – are poised beyond epigrammatic paraphrase. Luke Clancy

Francis Alÿs

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REVIEWS: EUROPE

Oleg Kulik Deep into Russia

Galleria Pack, Milan 16 February – 17 April

In the 1990s Oleg Kulik mounted a slew of high-profile international exhibitions: from Deitch Projects in New York to Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam, he explored his animal alter ego in performances where he willingly turned himself into a dog-man. His recent show at Galleria Pack is billed as a gallery retrospective, one that houses documentation of past performances alongside newer works. The show, therefore, demonstrates the Ukrainian’s continual and total dedication not only to bridging the nature-vs.-culture dichotomy but, furthermore, to expunging any cultural gap whatsoever between humans and animals. Fittingly then, Deep into Russia opens with an image of a cow’s backside emblazoned on a curtain hanging over the gallery entrance. Once inside the venue, the viewer is enmeshed in a cacophony of sound, photographs, video installations and several platforms – provisional stages that form a labyrinth of multimedia works. Atop a makeshift scaffolding/photographic darkroom, the artist presents several small-scale photographs that show him copulating with various animals. On a wall nearby, meanwhile, is the provocative documentary image of I Can Not Keep Silence Anymore (1996) – a performance that featured Kulik-as-mad-dog barking at the European Parliament in Strasbourg to protest the killing of English cows in relation to mad cow disease. The tone of the exhibition changes in another section of the gallery. Standing on top of a platform, the viewer is surrounded by projections showcasing the artist’s attitude to the worlds of art, mass culture and entertainment in the form of a well-known performance, given at Tate Modern, entitled Armadillo for Your Show (2003). Here, in what is an oasis of calm compared to the chaotic surroundings in the first section of the show, one can be transfixed by images of Kulik as a human disco ball or consider the conceptual aspect of the performance through the artist’s critique of the ‘limitations’ of what he perceives are the standards of contemporary art (restrictions he associates with the corrosive makeup of civilisation). Either way, the piece demonstrates Kulik’s development, reflecting his evolution from ardent man-dog performances to the more elusive, yet rational, man-armadillo. Underneath this platform is a video installation titled System of Coordinates (2003). Shown on two flat screens, the footage depicts an old man attempting to physically seduce a young woman. Both are naked in about three inches of water inside a transparent container in Kulik’s studio. A band is playing, and amid all this commotion a TV interview takes place – along with several photo sessions where everyone is taking pictures of each other. Artists and models mix roles to the point that they are indistinguishable from each other, creating a situation that allows viewers to imagine a variety of ‘endings’. Ultimately, though, the most imaginative ending in the exhibition occurs in the last room, with Humming Bird (2003). The work is a large-scale c-print that shows numerous stuffed hummingbirds and portrays Kulik, who has been Photoshopped naked onto one of them, as if he were literally comforting the dead bird or, more symbolically, flying ever deeper into his vision of contemporary Russia. Andrew Smaldone

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REVIEWS: USA

Judy Ledgerwood Chromophilia

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Five years ago, Judy Ledgerwood stopped painting before reaching the edge of her canvases, leaving white borders of varying regularity that make her paintings (as she has remarked) less like objects and more like walls themselves: stable if not permanent architectural structures that enable even the most weighty application of paint to look momentary. In this her work brings to mind John Wesley, master of not only the white-bordered painting-as-a-box but also the blissful heaviness that surprisingly can 1301PE, Los Angeles be found in absolute lightness – as well as, of course, his killer colours. Weight, in Ledgerwood’s work, is 20 March – 24 April as psychological as it is material: various thicknesses of oil paint (or in one instance, encaustic), vibrant and deliberately clashing colours, and aggressively intricate patterns come together in eye-boggling combinations that simultaneously catch and release her imagery as if it were rays of light moving across a room. Ledgerwood has pulled out all the stops in this exhibition, taking advantage of the gallery’s two floors to move us through the ‘story’ of her work, a narrative supported by the formal mainstays of modernist abstraction yet driven by an unrelenting, even badass attitude. Six of Ledgerwood’s small paintings (each 38 x 38 x 5 cm) fill the first floor of the gallery. Most have been given walls of their own, and they need them, as no one is like any of the others, even though most of them use her now-signature four-part ‘floral’ arrangement made from fat strokes of paint that circle back to where they started. Each of these expansive paintings has an irregularly painted overall shape that pushes the white edge of the canvas against the surrounding wall so that the painted image itself acts as if it were in motion: for example, Hot Sun Cool Shade (all works 2010) looks to be slipping off its right edge, while Tangerine Sun and Summer Sea sticks to its centre by holding onto a ring built from frostinglike deposits of candy-coloured paint. An unapologetically over-the-top wall painting crowds the irregular space at the top of the stairs. Called One Voice (For Patti Smith), it surrounds a set of seven ceramic vessels that Ledgerwood recently produced in Mexico. After the intensifying contraction of the small paintings, the expansive collision of pattern and colour, as well as the domestic context of usevalue and visual pleasure, reinforces Ledgerwood’s commitment to the diversity of both physical and pictorial space in her work. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the three large paintings that bring the exhibition to a riotous yet rigorous climax. Painted as if they were cloths draped on the wall-like white surface of their tall canvases, the patterns of Monster Love, Tequila Sunrise and Magenta in A Minor could almost be waving in the wind, if not for the drips of paint that re-attach them pictorially to their bottom edges. Their colour combinations simultaneously make everything vibrate in our eyes, demonstrating that when it comes to creating movement in stillness, Ledgerwood is at the top of her game. Terry R. Myers

REVIEWS: EUROPE

Stand at the threshold of Slawomir Elsner’s first Swiss solo show and you might think you are entering an exhibition of photographs. It’s soon apparent, however, that what the Polish-born, German-based artist offers is a mastery of realist drawing, wherein the visible stroke does not dissolve into a merely hyperrealist conceit. From one drawing to another, a regular and controlled hatching produces images of empty spaces, devoid of the slightest trace of a living human being. The only person around turns out to be the one faced with this emptiness – the spectator – who, as the show’s title suggests, might accordingly consider herself ‘on stage’. One’s thoughts start to ‘occupy’ these architectural spaces; they are at once familiar because recognisable, and strange because abandoned, deserted, isolated: an invitation to step into nowhere. Or perhaps to arrive somewhere, but too late: this creased sheet, this night scene, this lonely bed, this staircase leading to the floor above, this neon-lit hallway, all suggest moments that have just happened. Positioning the viewer to face the void might also be a way of figuring the infinitely recessive condition of the artist faced with the blank page: which path to take, and what to find? How to overcome this anxiety, facing nothing, to make something of it? As the French novelist Morgan Sportès one wrote, ‘Strange is the equilibrium that emerges between the blank page, the typewriter, the body, the mind – a secret osmosis, a game of communicating vessels, alchemy.’ As a counterpoint to these black-and-white scenes, which seem torn from the real (given that they undoubtedly borrow their framing from that of random snapshots), drawings of an equivalent accomplishment present portraits in colour, or more exactly, self-portraits – photographed in mirrors and obscured by the burst of a flash. While the face is blurred and made unrecognisable in the abstract brightness of this sudden and cold light, the body remains clearly visible, naked, exposed to anyone who wants to look at it. After the fashion of those exhibitionist images that are now everywhere on the net, Elsner’s drawings declare (through such humble means as pencil drawing) the need to turn oneself into a form of spectacle. But if flash, digital photography and the diffusion of images through the web are now synonymous with immediacy, the artist tells the same On Stage stories using drawing, a craft that dilates time a thousandfold. Elsner therefore works in resistance to a technology that reduces the diffusion of cultural attitudes and customs to a trivialising relativity. This denunciation affirms itself also by the physical production of a drawing, made on a real support, and which goes against the digital (and therefore virtual) codes of the Internet photograph. Between anonymous black-and-white places, and portraits of self-portraits in vivid colours, it becomes impossible to access any reality other than that of our own projections, making Elsner’s show a disturbing arena of reversals that offer little comfort. Karine Tissot

Slawomir Elsner

Nicola von Senger, Zurich 20 March – 30 April

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REVIEWS: TOKYO

Thailand’s marquee filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, is approvingly described as a ‘magical realist’, ‘cultural modernist’ and ‘hypernaturalist’ by Western commentators, but as ‘boring’ and ‘unwanted’ at home. (Thai officials went so far as to censor one of his milder works, 2006’s Syndromes and a Century.) This exhibition, in a converted bathhouse, presents works from the larger Primitive (2009) series. Alongside two giclee photographs, an artist’s book and supporting film, the centrepiece is the ten-minute Phantoms of Nabua, which confirms his status as new Thai cinema’s best representative, but more interestingly generates SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo urgency for his deeper placement within the context of 12 March – 17 April contemporary Thai (and Eastern) art. With Weerasethakul, everything begins as a story. The Primitive series draws on his own memories: a firefly entering a room, his father’s death, a dead brother’s immolated body and a subsequent search for his reincarnated form (the identifying sign: a small black mark behind the ear). This tale is told in the opening pages of the artist’s book Cujo, also on show. If these memories invite quick, easily shelved (and forgotten) explanations via labels like ‘Buddhism’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘Eastern philosophy’, the work itself absorbs and transcends such categorisations, presenting elemental images and abstracted actions that echo Eastern mysticism but are really adjuncts to Weerasethakul’s personal and intuitive symbology. Phantoms of Nabua, meanwhile, is spectacularly projected onto the large wall at the back of the old bath area. The scene: it is twilight, and lightning – faked, a special effect – is projected onto a screen in a field. Young men kick a fiery ball between themselves until it connects with the screen, setting it ablaze; the projected image, with nothing to land on, becomes a raw beam of light sputtering from the projector. The beam occasionally catches the rising smoke, allowing glimpses of the lightning, but the images are more imagined than real. Ghostly projections, known but unseen: this is prototypical Weerasethakul, an adroit and moving détournement. Beyond visual tricks and mystic imagery, Phantoms allegorises subjective memories of a specific location: Nabua, a village in the northern Thai province of Nakhon Phanom, which supposedly harboured Communist insurgents from the 1960s to 80s and consequently faced state-initiated reprisals, often savage. Weerasethakul wants to mark these types of spaces: hidden, but rich in personal memory and mythology. His retellings and reinterpretations are often sensational and perverse, their focus on life’s embedded fictions gifting them with a profoundly romantic quality. But Weerasethakul is equally concerned with embedding fiction into lived experience and documenting that process too, as is shown by the supporting film Sud Vikal (Vampire) (2008): here Weerasethakul and cast hunt for a mythical bloodsucking bird – which may, or may not, exist – in jungle bordering Burma. The filmmaker’s Eastern imagery might provoke accusations of overextended self-reflexiveness or overfamiliarity with Western alterity; he seems to view his homeland through the lens of the anthropologist or with a foreigner’s gaze. But that gaze (or affected gaze) does not tarnish his accuracy, which arises because his works are situated deeply in personal space and time, making no attempts at objectivity but rather inviting rivers of memory to flow back upon themselves. Cameron Allan McKean

Apichatpong Weerasethakul Native Land

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REVIEWS: BRISBANE

The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6)

Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane 5 December – 5 April

Since the early 1990s, the Queensland Art Gallery has allied its collecting policies with a wider Australian trend towards identifying with Asia rather than with Europe, a strategic move that has seen the construction of a significant collection situating Australian contemporary art within the context of its geographical region. The showpiece of this strategy is the Asia Pacific Triennial, an in-house affair curated by Queensland Art Gallery staff and located across two adjacent venues. As its organisers are at pains to point out, the APT distinguishes itself from a plethora of international biennials and triennials not only through its focus on a particular region but also on its eschewal of star curators and overarching themes. In this sixth APT, the curators offer us a foothold among the disparate works of more than 100 artists, filmmakers and musicians through their emphasis on collective and collaborative practices. Another feature is the APT’s customary disregard for art canons, which this year sees the inclusion of Iranian animation alongside Vanuatuan ritual sculpture and a revelatory survey of Pacific reggae. However, the underlying principle that binds this and previous APTs is an interest in cultural shifts – particularly the experience of diaspora – and many of the works in APT6 inhabit the fertile terrain where local tradition meets global consumer culture. Thukral and Tagra’s nouveau-baroque living room, Escape! For a Dream Land (2009), for example, serves up its observations of Indian urban development and the impact of mass emigration with a generous helping of kitsch. People Holding Flowers (2007), a 400-piece soft sculpture by Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu, meanwhile, melds Pop and Chinese folk art to draw analogies between mass consumerism and communism. The most rewarding works in APT6 employ cultural synthesis as a catalyst for reinvention, such as Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos’s extraordinary graphic novel Polyfantastica (2006). Integrating Polynesian storytelling traditions with a wild fusion of manga, science fiction and fantasy, Enos constructs his own mythology to tell apocalyptic tales of environmental destruction and global warfare. Works such as this epitomise the APT’s characteristic mix of earnestness and exuberance. Queensland Art Gallery excels in presenting contemporary art as audience-friendly spectacle, and APT6 steers a determinedly upbeat course through often sober subject matter. This is underlined by the prominence of its education programme, Kids’ APT, which attracts hordes of enthusiastic children to participate in artist-designed activities located throughout the gallery spaces. A welcome escape from the hubbub is provided by Runa Islam’s lyrical 16mm film First Day of Spring (2005), a slow tracking shot of a group of Bangladeshi rickshaw drivers at rest under a canopy of trees. The film originated out of the artist’s desire to reconnect with a home she had returned to after many years abroad, and in its quiet simplicity it speaks volumes about the conflicting feelings of dislocation and belonging so typical of our itinerant era. This tension provides a fitting refrain for an exhibition that posits Australia as a contemporary art hub in a region that actually pays it very little attention. Perhaps it is this subtext that provides APT6 with its most compelling narrative of shifting cultural identity – a nation ill at ease in its geographic location, forever wavering between an allegiance to its distant British colonial heritage and a desire to find affinities with its diverse neighbours. Jacqueline Doughty

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Books COMMUNISM has in recent years become curiously fashionable. At first it was a certain aesthetic

ostalgie that seized artists among the ruins of (especially) Eastern European infrastructure; something of that retro-futurist allure animates exhibitions such as the recent Star City: The Future Under Communism (2010), at Nottingham Contemporary. But the current ‘hauntological’ return of communism is more urgent and complex than a mere archaeology of the Cold War sublime. Recent writings by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zižek, and last year’s conference On the Idea of Communism, at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in London, suggest that there is life still in the Communist hypothesis, if not in its twentieth-century implementations. If nothing else, the very notions of communal political action and an alternative to capitalism seem suddenly more pressing. Boris Groys’s short, dense book is a timely intervention in present debates about the legacy of communism. In four closely argued chapters, drawing on philosophical writings from Plato to Hegel – and, alarmingly, a treatise on linguistics by Joseph Stalin – Groys demonstrates that far from being a monolithic worldview or simple antipode of Capital, communism is a programme of rigorous contradiction, a political philosophy based purely on paradox. Western critiques of the Soviet Union used to routinely insist that it was a state founded and run on the basis of a quasi-religious dogma; in fact, what communism shares with Christianity is exactly the refusal of ‘one-sided’ thinking. Like Jesus and the Trinity – or like modern art, which depends on being partly not-art – it is a doctrine consciously riven with internal oppositions. To think dialectically, under communism, meant being fully apprised of, and in a sense ready to accept, the capitalist alternative.

The Communist Postscript

It’s this (only partly exaggerated and ironic) argument that allows Groys to sketch a damning portrait of the Western left’s botched understanding of communism and capitalism alike. In fact, he writes, the analysis of the latter is entirely predetermined by the historical errors perpetrated while critiquing the former. For decades, the liberal left caricatured the USSR as a rationalistic, machinic entity that brooked no contradiction, and consequently came to see all forms of power in the same skewed light. For Groys, the dialectical truth is rather that both systems are inherently arrayed against themselves; this was, after all, Marx’s starting point: that capitalism was moving inexorably towards its own undoing. It’s in forgetting this basic (and logical) position that contemporary philosophy, spooked by the merest hint of totalising thinking, has privileged difference rather than contradiction, and valued mere localised subversion above the wholesale reconstruction of society. Communism, by contrast, is for Groys a form of metanoia: a theological-rhetorical term that denotes a total renovation of one’s thinking. It’s precisely this sort of imaginative leap that seems strictly unthinkable today: as a number of writers from Fredric Jameson onwards have quipped, it seems easier now to imagine the end of the world than to conceive of the end of capitalism. And yet, the obverse has already occurred. In a bravura refutation of Western triumphalism about ‘victory’ in the Cold War, Groys argues that the final collapse of the Soviet Union was brought about by a deliberate decision on the part of those in power; at the limit of the Communist experiment, they embraced its ‘opposite’ as the next historically necessary step. The Communist Postscript asks us to imagine what it would mean today to pass through the mirror of capitalist self-regard and imagine ourselves politically elsewhere. In case it needs saying, Groys’s book is in no way a defence of actually existing repression, torture and mass murder. ‘Communism’ here stands for a philosophical logic that prevailed in the Soviet Union but is not reducible, despite Groys’s liberal quoting of Stalin, to its vicious state apparatus. But there is a perversity to The Communist Postscript that will be familiar to readers of Groys’s last book, Art Power (2008), which argues among other things that art criticism is the purest form of avant-garde writing because, after all, nobody reads it. The present book is a provocative addition to Groys’s brilliantly paradoxical body of work, and deserves to be read in a suitably contrary frame of mind. Brian Dillon ‚
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By Boris Groys Verso, £12.99 (hardcover)

JUST AS CLASS-A DRUGS lead to illumination, recessions and depressions and other disasters bring folks round to appreciation of the Situationist International. Our own politically disconnected, aesthetically rudderless time, for example, has taken to Guy Debord and Co. with febrile gusto – at least as evidenced by a spate of newly founded artist collectives and a suddenly viral mode for relational art. Of course, the Situationists were on about much more than mere artistic discovery. Theirs was an approach that inhaled deeply of Rimbaud’s pipe dream: ‘We must change life’ – adding, into the bargain, ‘the supersession of philosophy, the realisation of art, the abolition of politics, and the fall of the spectacle-commodity economy’. It makes one dizzy just to think about it. One arena of ‘everyday life’ to which the Situationists applied themselves with a freak’s zeal was architecture and its revolutionary defects; by which, of course, these nonarchitects meant its entire modern history and development. Many of the documents and images that constituted the Situationists’ architectural ‘practice’ are included in Tom McDonough’s The Situationists and the City. A highly readable and well-organised compendium that is likely to be fingered for some time, it lays out neatly the movement’s visionary take on the city (read Paris) ‘as the primary site of alienation in modern society’. Virulently opposed to what – to this day – has come down as the unquestioned genius of International Style Modernism, Debord, Asger Jorn, Constant and others condemned what André Breton called the ‘rationality and coldness’ of functionalist architecture. Behind Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation apartment block, the Situationists spied conformity and the hairy hand of advanced capitalism. But what did they want? ‘Architecture must become thrilling’, Debord and Jacques Fillon wrote in a brief magazine entry titled ‘Summary 1954’. For the purposes of their wildly utopian, synthetic revolution, nothing less would do. Texts such as Debord’s ‘Theory of the Dérive’ (1958) and Constant’s ‘unitary urbanism’ lecture (1960) provide exhibits A and B of the heights of intoxication summoned up by the Situationists’ Hegelian dope. A mere dose (and a general strike) further, and café table abstractions were transformed into soixante-huitard graffiti like: ‘Be realistic, demand the impossible.’ Constant, for example, adopting the addictively urgent prose style of manifesto writing, concluded his formulation of New Babylon — the Situationists’ futuristic, ‘imaginary’ city — with the uncompromising thought: ‘I have excluded everything that prevents a city from becoming a work of art’, leaving ‘free time’ (thanks automation!) and widespread ‘creativity’ in its wake. Debord, for his part, advocated endlessly for the ‘poeticisation of urban civilization’. In McDonough’s own words, what he was after was something akin to an urban themepark that was open 24/7 – ‘festival spaces where individuals and social classes could become conscious of themselves for the first time as subjects, or rather, as fully human’. Castles in the air have had more solid foundations.

The Situationists and the City

Of course, what was in the air then were possibilities beyond our own jaded imaginings, and some of the Situationists’ burning observations turn out, years hence, to have been astoundingly gimlet-eyed. As McDonough makes clear, that is their claim to historical importance: not their theorising about architecture, per se, but their generalist’s autopsy of an increasingly atomised, functionalist discipline. After all, what would you rather dream about: Corbu’s ‘machines for living’ or ‘an architecture of disorientation’. Pass the pipe. Christian Viveros-Fauné

Edited by Tom McDonough Verso, £14.99/$26.95 (softcover)

REVIEWS: BOOKS

IT’S NO SECRET that in our postbubble world there’s a general shout of ‘out with the old and in with the new’. Not that anyone seems certain about what that ‘new’ might be, or whether it’s going to be any different from the old. It’s the same in the artworld: here, similar kinds of dreaming expresses itself either in fascination with societal (re)construction projects focused on the environment, community and pedagogy, or in a fetishistic raking over the ashes of modernist dystopias and Situationist utopias in search of flameproof pointers as to the kind of hell we’re going to end up in. Accordingly, ArtReview thought it would have a quick look at what some actual experts in futurology have to say about what our brave new world will be like. Experts such as William J. Mitchell, influential professor of architecture and media arts and sciences at MIT, where he also directs the institute’s Smart Cities research group. Or as The Guardian rather ploddingly described him a few years ago, ‘the world’s leading guru of how city life has changed in the age of wireless communication’. On the face of it, Reinventing the Automobile attempts to do exactly what it says on the cover. It’s made more lush and urgent, though, by the suggestion that the car of the future can lead directly to a certain kind of benevolent, clean-living, socially responsible urban life (this study is emphatically about the automobile as a benefit to cities – which will be home to the vast majority of the world’s population and 80 percent of its wealth by 2030). Because what Barack Obama is to universal healthcare, Mitchell and his chums will be to universal car ownership.* At least, that’s what their sponsors hope.

Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century

By William J. Mitchell, Christopher E. Borroni-Bird and Lawrence D. Burns, MIT Press, £16.95/$21.95 (hardcover)

Their ‘reinvention’ involves four steps: reengineering automobile ‘DNA’ with a focus on electronic power (tossing the engine and the need to house it) and wireless communication (tossing driver error and thus a load of bulky safety features); connecting that automobile to an ‘Internet of things’ (making the car more like a mobile phone); using that to connect it to smart grids (enhancing the car’s green credentials); and controlling traffic by managing the market for parking, road use, etc (making money). The combined result is the CityCar: a collapsible, battery-powered, drive-by-wire bubble whose steering wheel has been replaced by a joystick, because passengers (who recline while they travel and are automatically brought upright as their vehicle folds to park) are going to be only interested in social networking, online gaming, appand upgrade-buying, and the other joys of the stick. If this sounds like something that would fit perfectly into the world of floating fatties from Wall-E (2008), that’s because the CityCar is, like that world, evolved out of a solid belief in the benefits of rampant consumerism (a word that, in this book, happily stands in for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’). The CityCar, the authors boast, can be customised ‘much like today’s personal computers or sneakers’. ‘Sounds, for example, can be electronically generated by the electricdrive system to match the person’s mood while accelerating, like ringtones for mobile phones.’ What the future wants from its cars is ‘style, status and an emotional response’. In other words, everything that our future fatties, living behind a wall of avatars and both real and virtual prostheses, will personally lack. If that’s depressing, it’s got nothing on the bizarre set of quasi-religious beliefs (presented, of course, as ‘facts’ and not to be reinvented) that underlie this study. Firstly, that ‘personal mobility’ (anything to avoid a term that might suggest ambulation) became a ‘basic human need’ from the moment ‘our ancestors walked out of Africa’ (at times this study seems exclusively to relate to Southern California); secondly, that privately owned automobiles (as opposed to, say, efficient public transport systems) are an unchallenged necessity of democratic urban living; and finally, that ‘there is a universal desire to own an automobile as soon as it becomes affordable’. You could argue that this weirdness is explained by the fact that Mitchell’s coauthors are current (Borroni-Bird) and only-recently-ex (Burns) employees of General Motors, and therefore have to keep the faith. But there’s really no excusing this kind of shit. Mark Rappolt *Offer limited to rich people. Check with your bank manager for details. Poor people need not apply. „
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BE NICE… documents Stefan Kalmár’s and Daniel Pies’s four-year stints (2005–9) as director and

curator respectively of the Kunstverein Munich. What have they learned from the experience? And what does it look like in pictures? Here’s a taste of what you’ll find: Andy Warhol’s Sleep (1963), Bridgend teen suicides, Mark E. Smith, appetite suppressants, radio music requests made during the Panama invasion, a neo-naturist manifesto, William S. Burroughs’s target practice, Playboy’s New Sexual Lifestyles (1973), Ang Lee and Nazi milk. Given that our dynamic duo (Kalmar has since taken his talents to Artists Space in New York) are curators to their cores, it’s no surprise that their publication is principally an arrangement of the contributions of others: chiefly artists who have provided a range of visual contributions, with written texts and other paper works (among them a bumper sticker from Jeremy Deller that reads ‘Brian Epstein Died for You’ and a T.J. Wilcox postcard or two) included as inserts. The result is an experience that approximates reading a version of Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s children’s book The Jolly Postman (1986) – which contained removable letters from fairytale characters tucked inside envelopes within the book – albeit one designed for international arttheory types. Looking back over 30 or so exhibitions, Kalmar and Pies turn up one or two core thematic strands that have blossomed very fully during their creative reign. Kalmar, lest we forget, along with Michael Bracewell and Ian White, co-organised the 1970s/80s British-underground exhibition The Secret Public (2006), and so it’s understandable that there is an ongoing interest in the period – one that stretches through many of the works included here – as well as an interest in art within protest culture, or defined by particular social or artistic locales such as the Lower East Side and particular areas of London. When this works, the musical flow of the visual and textual language is highly nuanced and complex – particularly in the deployment of ‘the virus’ as metaphor that extends throughout these decades. Deep in one essay there is a brief reference to General Idea’s Glamour issue of FILE magazine: the idea that the art of glamour is mimicry. It’s a neat concept that allows us to connect the behaviour of viruses and infiltrate-the-system protest-art strategies with the vacuous ‘dead’ glamour we associate with Andy Warhol and Co.

Be Nice Share Everything Have Fun

There are many such ideas that spring up, given close attention, in this book. But perhaps the real issue is this: who is going to give it this close attention, aside from someone like me? And like many books that pass this desk, Be Nice… begs some further questions: is it intended for a reader or for a viewer? Or is it simply a historical document to be ‘on record’, filed away in some massive art archive like the lost ark? In the book’s final essay, Stuart Bailey proposes that when he curates images, what results is a ‘provincial arrangement of a very particular graphic Esperanto’. Given that the book also includes Lawrence Weiner’s Aphorism (1984), which consists of the text ‘Learn to Read Art’, it’s tempting to wonder whether or not we are looking at the development of a sophisticated language, then, that evolves in response to the act of looking at art. At the beginning of his essay, Bailey quotes the Polish polymath Stefan Themerson, who emphasises that of all the ‘great’ inventions – geometry, Esperanto, religion – none have done any better at changing the world than ‘good manners’. Be Nice Share Everything Have Fun might have the ironic ring of Bill and Ted’s life rule – ‘be excellent to each other’ – or Monty Python’s conclusion to their Meaning of Life (1983): “Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat […] and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations”. But in the context of this book’s emphasis on social justice, on neighbourliness, organisations, collectives, community and the family, perhaps, ultimately, it simply proves Themerson right. Laura McLean-Ferris

Edited by Stefan Kalmár & Daniel Pies Kunstverein München, £39.50 (softcover)

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Tuesday, April 06, 2010 18:19 Subject: off the record Date: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 18:18 From: [email protected] To: Conversation: off the record

So there I am, loafing around ArtReview towers, wearing my little nude dress with a moss-green cardigan to ward off unnecessary attention from the horny-handed design team, when the editor strolls over and says: “GG, you’re always writing about commercial galleries and art fairs. But as a magazine, we’re more than that. Tell me – what is the future for biennials?” I ignore the fact that he is wearing a silk foulard and ironed jeans and immediately take to my Albini 1958 floating pedestal desk and pen these thoughts. Well, as all my readers know, there used to be two biennials, Venice and São Paulo, but the only people to visit São Paulo were people on freebie junkets from the London-based governmental arts funding organisation who my lawyer won’t let me spell out. And even then, these hardy corduroy-wearing souls would reemerge two weeks later having spent the entire time researching whether the caipirinhas were better at the Fasano Hotel or at the Astor, so the actual existence of the São Paulo Biennial was never verified. But now biennials are everywhere – places like Liverpool, where art never even happened, and Bergen, which up until last year was a town entirely dreamed up by Ryanair’s marketing department. Biennials are great because they provide jobs for all those curators pouring out of curator college with their half-baked ideas badly pieced together from ArtReview’s recent article on Jacques Rancière. They also provide a year-round circuit of holidaying – Tirana one day, Saigon the next, Sante Fe the day after that, before everyone ends up feeling confused and crying into their oysters, Bill Murray-style, in Whitstable. It also means that these so-called curators can leave cryptic Facebook messages that simply say something like ‘JFK’ to signify they are at the Whitney Biennial or ‘FUK’ to signify they are in Liverpool. Between biennials, curators get sad and lonely because they have no social lives external to that provided by biennials. Luckily art fair organisers have stepped into the breach, and during art fairs they provide small fetid side rooms where curators can sit and debate biennials with each other. This is because the art fair organisers don’t want the curators to walk around the actual fair dressed in their big lace-up boots and American Apparel long johns looking like perverts, as this would scare the collectors. So for example at this year’s Armory the organisers found a small ‘lounge’ space behind the toilets and held talks like ‘The World Is Not Enough: The Future of Biennials’. Then they herded all the curators and their even more unsettling friends, the art historians, in there and locked the door for the duration of the fair. Obviously no normal people were allowed in, but apparently audiences were treated to curators coming up with more crazy and meaningless titles before moaning that no one had any money any more, so they couldn’t fly to China to pick 20 random artists to illustrate their crazy and meaningless biennial title. This means the terrible retrograde step of having to work with local artists, which all curators are taught on their very first day at curator school is an awful faux pas on the same grotesque level as doing a straightforward show about a midcareer painter. So what’s my conclusion? Well, it’s true, the little nude dress is not as slimming as the little black dress, but it looks like becoming as much of a wardrobe staple and it works really well if you combine with red lips and drunk-as-a-skunk cheeks. As for biennials – they’re here to stay. Somebody book me on the next Emirates flight to Liverpool! GG

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