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LUCERNE: 18.04.09 – 04.07.09
I WROTE DOWN SOME OF MY THOUGHTS
LIU DING

BEIJING: 09.05.09 – 12.07.09


CHEN HUI CREAMY STRAWBERRY
L/B I‘M REAL

ART40BASEL
10.06.09 – 14.06.09
HALL 2.1 / BOOTH P5
ART UNLIMITED: LI DAFANG

53RD VENICE BIENNALE


07.06.09 – 22.11.09
LIU DING: CHINESE PAVILION
ANATOLY SHURAVLEV: RUSSIAN PAVILION

Beijing: 104, Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang, Chaoyang District, PRC-100015 Beijing/China
Lucerne: Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne/Switzerland
galerie@galerieursmeile.com, www.galerieursmeile.com

Liu Ding, “Descriptive, Narrative, Descriptive, Narrative“ 2009 wood, porcelain, 84 x 36 x 38 cm


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Design †

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David Mazzucchelli
‘It’s just a matter of paying attention.’ It becomes clear that these words of advice, from the
nature-loving Japanese sculptress Hana to her strictly urbane lover Asterios, are also being
suggested to the readers of David Mazzucchelli’s full-length solo debut. In the footsteps
of North American auteurs David Lapham and Seth or Frenchmen Moebius and Bilal,
Mazzucchelli is another former artist who started as an illustrator of other people’s stories,
from Frank Miller’s Daredevil (1986) to Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1994), and gradually
found his own voice by writing short pieces, before achieving a long-form breakthrough.
Great graphic novels don’t happen overnight, and Mazzucchelli took some nine
years to craft his 344-page Asterios Polyp (2009). Our eponymous leading man is a

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prickly, stiff, self-important ‘paper architect’ lauded for his designs, none of which have
been constructed. Framed by acts of God, from its opening lightning bolt, which destroys
Asterios’s apartment block, to its potentially equally dramatic finale, his story unravels

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between flashbacks, to his family roots, his dying father and his romance with Hana, and
the present-day chapters as he rebuilds his shattered ego by working as a small-town auto
mechanic, a world away from his former highbrow milieu. From here he reevaluates his
EVA ROTHSCHILD unfulfilled career and his broken relationship with the woman he loved. These scenes are
intercut with philosophical ruminations, even a variation on Orpheus and Eurydice, and
>QBOFQ>FKRSBBK symbolistic vignettes in which he communes with Ignazio Polyp, his twin brother, whose
LJJFPPFLK— LKALK death (or was it prenatal murder?) still haunts Asterios constantly.
€‡
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TTT’Q>QB’LOD’RH visual style, balloon shape and dialogue font. So Asterios holds forth in emphatic sans
S>LQEP@EFIAÁPCLOB?LAFKD
serif capitals inside rectangular blocks, while Hana’s softer voice is evoked through a
P@RIMQROBPLCQBKPBBJ cursive upper-and-lower case within curvaceous bubbles. When the couple first meet at a
QLPQOBQ@EIFHBA>OH— party, they are drawn in different styles, Asterios all outlined cylinders, spheres and other
RKIFHBIVPMFABOTB?P>OLRKA Aristotelian forms, Hana a carved statuette in textured volume. As the two of them talk,
>KBUEF?FQFLKPM>@B’EBV they take on each other’s distinct visual register,
>OB>IPLQLR@EBA—ELTBSBO—
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QOF@HBOVOBI>QBAQLTBFDEQ they revert to their individual styles. Similarly, the
>KA?>I>K@B’B@BKQTLOHP book’s palettes of purple and a second colour shift
E>SBPBBK>?I>@HIB>QEBO to suit the setting and mood. Yet for all these ludic,
>KADLIABKJBQ>IERI>ELLM allusive techniques, Mazzucchelli makes them
@LSBOBAFKQ>PPBIP>MMB>OQL
ELSBOFKQEB>FORK>FABA—
serve his prime purpose: to reflect on how one
>KA@R?BP>KAA>OHDELPQIV man comes to terms with what is worth ‘paying
CLOJP¨QOBBPLOCFKDBOP attention’ to.
¨QE>QPBBJQLCIL>QGRPQ
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PFQLKFQ’ QFP—LC@LROPB—
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the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, New York,

SHERRIE LEVINE
FPKÁQQE>Q>QVMBLCJ>DF@Ÿ from 2 June
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words PAUL GRAVETT QFJBKLT— BSFKBÁP@OB>QFLKP>OBO>OBIV
RKFKQBOBPQFKD’OQBSFBT

€„ OQBSFBT
Visual Column
No. 6

WALKING IN MY MIND
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The sixth in a series of visual columns, ª‡‡‡«—JLOBBUMILO>QFLKPLC?FW>OOB
by artist DEAN HUGHES FPI>KAIFCBCOLJE>OIBPSBOV>KA
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ARTVILNIUS 09
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TOPICS

CREATIVE
DESTRUCTION
Does a government bailout of
UK arts organisations make any It was the creative industries’ apparent contribution to
the economy that provided the justification for big increases
economic sense? in public funding for the arts. While this fantasy is becoming
increasing difficult to sustain in the face of economic realities,
it doesn’t deter our public servants, who seem to want to stick
‘THE REAL CHALLENGE for the arts sector is not to ask stubbornly to what’s left of the mantra; Forgan insists that
“What is the government going to do to help us?” but “What ‘showing that we can make a real contribution in even the most
can we do to help the country weather and recover from difficult of times will be the best case we can make for continued
this downturn?”’ You might wonder why Liz Forgan, newly public investment in the arts’.
appointed chair of Arts Council England, felt it necessary to But what exactly is the ‘real contribution’ of the arts? And
go for this ‘JFK moment’ in a recent speech announcing new how exactly is spending on the arts an ‘investment’? Rehashing
funding to help arts organisations survive the recession. After the pseudo-language of the arts as economic value doesn’t
all, the stakes were £40 million of extra cash for the arts – not help make sense of the current problems of the real economy,
exactly ‘a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, while exaggerating the ability of the creative sector to assist in
poverty, disease and war itself’. economic recovery clouds the relationship between culture and
But Forgan’s exhortation to serve the country at least prosperity. In reality, our current political class and its cultural
throws up a few questions about the current vision (or lack of ) policymakers continue to hold on to the dream of the ‘creative
for publicly funded arts in Britain. Still lurking in there is that odd economy’ for the simple reason that they long ago abandoned

words J.J. CHARLESWORTH

assumption that the funded art sector can somehow contribute any pretence of being able to influence the development of the
to assisting the country out of recession, whereas it is becoming real, productive economy. The Conservatives, now gleefully
more than clear that the arts, and visual art particularly, are waiting for Gordon Brown’s administration to expire, seem to
very much dependent on the health of the broader economy to have no better ideas about how to revitalise Britain’s economy,
thrive. The art market, for example, is never really a generator instead looking to convince us of the need to accept more
of wealth (except in the narrow sense of the wealth it generates austerity and cuts in public spending.
for artists and gallerists) but exists because of wealth generated Unfortunately, it is in the real economy, not the ‘creative’
elsewhere. Yet since our current government came to power one, that these problems need to be addressed. Rather than
12 years ago, it has been unshakeably convinced that what being thankful for a few extra quid from the Arts Council to keep
came to be known as the creative industries could be a major us going in the depths of the downturn, the arts sector, like the
contributor to the British economy. This was the fantasy of rest of us, should be calling our politicians to account for why
the ‘postindustrial’ economy that New Labour pinned its our economy has tanked so spectacularly on their watch, and
policy hopes on – that and a quiet acceptance of the financial what they propose to do about it. Perhaps Forgan and others
sector’s very real contribution to the national wealth. That New need to recall another part of JFK’s inaugural: ‘Together let us
Labour’s tenure coincides with what (in retrospect) turned out explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the
to be the decade of the credit bubble is instructive: much of the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.’ …The arts
‘creative industries’ – advertising, design, marketing, fashion – and commerce.
thrived on the back of the credit boom, both through providing
services to the financial sector, and through the broader growth
in consumer spending. Seen through New Labour’s rose-tinted
spectacles as a distinct economic sector, they appear to be
contributing billions to the economy.

۠ OQBSFBT
EUROPE

MCDERMOTT &
Paris MCGOUGH

COLJIBCQ“
LPB]KB V@EB—EBJBD>LFKQ—€ˆˆ‡—TLLA— —€€U€€@J—ÛQEB>OQFPQ—@LROQBPV>IIBOF  —PIL˜ @BOJLQQ® @LRDE—E>Q>LLIJ —‡„…—€ˆˆ‡—LFILKIFKBK—€ˆUƒ€@J—
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Our national academician Marc Fumaroli makes a determined
>IBOFB
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stand, in a 600-page book, against a French state in which >OFP
‘a substantial part of its civil servants have passed on to ‚
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postmodernism – to say things elegantly’. Extremely attached TTT’ABKLFOJLKQ’@LJ
to ‘defending French cultural heritage’, the academician strives
>SFA @BOJLQQ>KABQBO
to distinguish ‘modern art, heroic art… and contemporary art,
@LRDEJBQAROFKDQEB
which no longer fights against anything’ and which ‘tends to ‡†ˆPFKBTLOH—Q>HFKD

MOMENTUM
destroy the necessary conditions for a pleasant life’. A marvellous QEBFOMI>@BFK>RKFSBOPB
formula that I have just stuck on my fridge. LC>OQPQ>OPPR@E>P
RIF>K
Dinosaurs like Fumaroli are becoming an endangered @EK>?BI—
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NORDIC BIENNIAL species. The role of cultural politics in France (since Malraux
at least, in the 1950s) is to tirelessly educate the public on its
>PNRF>Q>KAKAV>OELI’
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LPP—€‡RDRPQ¨†@QL?BO own era. This is how an elite group of enlightened civil servants TLOHPFK>S>OFBQVLCJBAF>
TTT’JLJBKQRJ’KL installed Jeff Koons in the Château de Versailles last autumn. >KAPQVIBPTEFIB?>PBAFK
This exhibition (a staggering success) was controversial: not >TLOIALCA>KAVFPEDLQEF@
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because public money was supporting contemporary art, not
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QEBOBÁPPLJR@ECRKAFKDQE>Q French; the controversy concerned the fact that he is certainly >POBQOLFI?BOQ®BLODBP
FQJ>HBPQEBJI>WV’RQ>OB not the artist most in need of public money. LOQEB@OBBMVELJLPBUR>I
QEBVQORBŸEB@RO>QLOPLC >PP>PPFKP OFKQ>KA O
Sarkozy is not a man of culture, except when it is
QEFPVB>OÁPLOAF@FBKKF>I FAATELHBBMMLMMFKDLRQ
successful. His way of being modern means ‘work more to earn FKF>JLKAPOBLOBSBO
E>SBAB@FABAQLQ>@HIBQEFP
MOB@LK@BMQFLKEB>A¦LKTFQE more’, his most famous slogan. Art, literature: how much will ª‡…«QLAOLMP@LOMFLKP
>SLROBA>QFLKP—>MOLDO>JJB it bring in? His mockery of the seventeenth-century novel La ALTKMBLMIBÁPPEFOQP’
CB>QROFKDQEBTLOHLC Princesse de Clèves launched an incredible series of protest EBTLOHPFKQEFPPELT
>OQFPQPCOLJQEBQO>AFQFLK>I MOLJFPBQLBUMILOBCFIJ>P
demonstrations, and even a badge with ‘I read La Princesse de
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Clèves’ written across it. @RIQRO>I@LKP@FLRPKBPP>KA—
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ÁP>QBIIFQBPÁªBOIFK— LKALK for culture in France. The ambition of La Force de l’Art 02, @BOJLQQ® @LRDECLRKAFK
>KABTLOH«’BIAFKQEB the second showing of a triennial organised by the Minister QEBCFIJPLCQEB‡ƒˆP>KA
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of Culture, is to ‘offer a stage for contemporary creation and
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artists in France’. In this fishbowl of light at the Grand Palais, >KAFKQLPLJBQEFKDQE>Q—FK
@>MFQ>ILCPIL—>Q LJBKQRJ
RKPQE>II>KA>IIBOFƒ— one can see, among other works, Anita Molinero’s burnt bins, QEBFOE>KAP—@>K>MMB>OJLOB
QEBBUEF?FQFLKTFII@LKPFABO Giraud and Siboni’s dancing black cube, Wang Du’s giant kebab, ?FW>OOBIV>OQFCF@F>IQE>K
@LK@BMQPLCC>FOKBPPQEOLRDE Alain Bublex’s fictive town, Le Gentil Garçon’s igloo, Fayçal >KBMFPLABLCQ>OOBH’
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Baghriche’s ghost flags, Pascal Convert’s stele of broken glass
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and Virginie Yassef’s pterosaur scratch (a veiled message to
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Fumaroli?). Philippe Rahm, the exhibition’s designer, proposes

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>RO> @ B>K¦BOOFP a ‘white unfolded cube’ from which works flow out like objects
in a landscape. Their tectonic force of deformation allows them
to create their own spaces in hills and valleys according to their
dimension and weight. Now there’s something to leave Fumaroli
aghast. But the bold knights of the state take their mission
seriously, the proof being that 60 (60!) ‘mediators’, every
talkative one of them wearing a blue T-shirt, explain absolutely
everything to a trusting public.

words MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

ˆ OQBSFBT
EUROPE / USA

GLENN BROWN
LKA>WFLKB>KAOBQQLB
B?>RABKDL—ROFK
KQFI‚@QL?BO
New York
‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.’ In April, President
TTT’CLKAPOO’LOD Obama at long last forced the resignation of Rick Wagoner, the CEO of
General Motors, who took the helm of this former industrial powerhouse in
CVLRJFPPBAIBKKOLTKÁP
2000 and has, since 2004, racked up losses of $82 billion. Wagoner was not, of
JFA@>OBBOOBQOLPMB@QFSB¥
@LJB?>@HPELT>Q>QB course, solely responsible. By the time he arrived, decades of lousy decisions
FSBOMLLIB>OIFBOQEFPVB>O— had crippled the company – industry analyst John A. Casesa noted that GM
QEBKEBOBÁPVLRO@E>K@BQL ‘lost its way in the 70s but… didn’t know it until 20 years late’ – and he was
J>HB>JBKAP’ >K>DFKDQL left to work with many of the executives and board members responsible for
MOLAR@BM>FKQFKDPQE>Q>OB
these choices. That Wagoner had spent his entire career at GM suggests just
?LQEMEVPF@>IIVBKQF@FKD>KA
@LK@BMQR>IIVI>SFPE—OLTKÁP how blindingly insular its culture was.
@E>OJIFBPFKEFP>?FIFQVQL Much of the country seems to have worked in similar ways, from the

IBKKOLTK—K>BPQEBPF>—€ˆˆ—LFILKM>KBI—ˆ„U†@J’BKKFBLIIB@QFLK—>K@LRSBO’ÛQEB>OQFPQ’LROQBPVLKA>WFLKB>KAOBQQLBB?>RABKDL—ROFK
CRPB?LOOLTFKDPCOLJ?LQE>OQ interlocking boards of our investment firms to our cultural institutions.
EFPQLOV>KAMLMRI>O@RIQROB Where Wall Street – abetted by lax management – hitched the economy to
FKQLPLJBPLOQLCPQO>KDBIV
a Ponzi scheme of ever-increasing home values, the latter invested major
@LEBOBKQ?>??IBLCM>FKQ’
OQBSFBT capital in grandiose new buildings dedicated to increasingly large audiences.
The equivalent of the gas-guzzling clunkers that finally sunk GM, they have
saddled museums with enormous fixed costs while not, judging by the endless
criticism MoMA has endured, satisfying public demands for how art should
be presented or experienced.
Ill-positioned for leaner times, institutions are now laying off staff,
reducing programming or, in the case of Massachusetts’s Brandeis University,
selling off nonproductive assets such as the Rose Art Museum. These moves
resemble the plant closings and division restructurings GM undertook during
its relentless slide. And to extend the analogy, while core businesses are
slashed, executive perks remain: curatorial travel budgets may have vanished,
yet a roster of patrons and museum directors still found the funds to traipse
through the recent Dubai art fair.
Those effecting such policies are the very same people who championed
the model of big buildings and biennial hopping. Their thinking is not only as
insular as, but directly derives from, that of the business world. The trustees
of our institutions form a wide but tight-knit

JIRI KOVANDA
circle, from the financial advisor J. Ezra Merkin
(disgraced in the Madoff affair), who sat on the
boards of, and invested money for, NYU and
Yeshiva University, to Kathy Fuld, a major patron KAOBT OBMP—BTLOH
and vice-chairman of MoMA, and incidentally also €…
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wife of former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard TTT’>KAOBTHOBMP’@LJ
Fuld.
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neither were Rick Wagoner’s. But expecting them CB>QROBPJFKFJ>IFKQBOSBKQFLKPPR@E>P
to develop the new models necessary for advancing PQ>OFKD>QMBLMIBLO™>@@FABKQ>IIVÁ
our cultural institutions, and our culture, may be QLR@EFKDQEBJ¨KLQ>JLSBJBKQQE>Q
VLRBK@LRKQBOQLLLCQBKFKQEBBPQ’
like leaving GM in the hands that killed it. >PQQFJBTBP>TEFJT>P>QQEB>SFA
L?BOQPLRKA>QFLKFK LKALKAROFKD
words JOSHUA MACK I>PQVB>OÁPOFBWBOQ>FO—TEBOB
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>THT>OAKBPP’OQBSFBT

€ OQBSFBT
COLJIBCQ“RF@FAB—O>KHFBB>OAOLMªPQFII«—‡…ƒ—AFOP’>RILRDEBOQV>KA>IQBOL?FKPLK—SFABL—@LILRO—PLRKA—ˆJFK€ƒPB@—MOLAR@BA?VAFQAB >KABAQ>OB@LOAP—MELQL“>RILRDEBOQV—ÛQEB

Los Angeles
While New York’s story is that of money, Los
Angeles’s is one of lifestyle. This oft-derided
concept has as much to do with how others see
the city’s myth of sunny beaches and apocalyptic
weather as it does with the ways we see ourselves.
While Bret Easton Ellis looked at one aspect of
lifestyle, that of the wealthy and morally dubious,
even our tougher observers, writers such as John
Fante and Charles Bukowski, are as much about
how they chose to live their lives as the work that
reflected these choices.
These choices define and are defined by LA,
and artists, always the canaries in the coal mine,
are still choosing to live here. Even now, with the

MOMA
fledgling market scrambling in, and with galleries
closing, cutting staff or just switching to cheaper
digs, the artists are still here. In many ways, the
LLHFKD>Q RPF@“ collapse has returned much of the influence to
FAB€ them (and perhaps the critics); with no money to
>OQFPQP˜ >VBO>HBPª>IC>HBP«—‡„‚—TLLA@RQ—>OQFPQÁPMOLLC—€U€ˆ@J—DFCQLC>RIB@HJ>K—ÛQEB>OQFPQ¥—BTLOH


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be made, there’s nothing to lose.
TTT’JLJ>’LOD
The gallery neighbourhood having the
EB€ˆˆ†BUEF?FQFLK LLHFKD
>Q RPF@BUMILOBAQEBBT
most difficulties with shifts and changes in LA
is Chinatown, yet the last set of major openings
WAYNE THIEBAUD
LOHP@BKBFKQEB‡„ˆP>KA brought out an army of artists in support of one TBBQP®OB>QP
B>OIV…ˆP—>KAT>PCFIIBA
another. Openings by Henry Taylor, Candice Lin, LOQLKFJLK RPBRJ—>P>ABK>
TFQEJBILAFLRPIVJFKA¦
and Erik Frydenbourg attracted the kind of people €„
RKB¨€LSBJ?BO
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who prove that LA is still an artist’s town, and a TTT’KLOQLKPFJLK’LOD
JFDEQ>PPL@F>QBTFQEQE>Q
BO>’ROKLSBOQEB@>PPBQQB¦ vibrant one at that. QO>KABAPLJBTEBOB?BQTBBKBUMOBPPFLKFPJ
Q>MBQLQEFPPRJJBOÁPFAB Lifestyle and money are not mutually >KALM>OQ—JBOF@>K>VKBEFB?>RAÁP
€—ELTBSBO—>KAQEFKDP
exclusive, however, and for every Bukowski, there’s JLPQC>JLRPTLOHP¨PF@HIVM>FKQFKDPLC
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PARROTTA CONTEM PORARY ART
AUGUSTENSTRASSE 87– 89

TIM M RAUTERT »KOORDINATEN«


ANDREAS UEBELE »SCHRIFT IM RAUM«
JUNE 13 – JULY 24, 2009

BERLIN
PARROTTA PROJECT SPACE
BRUNNENSTRASSE 178 –179

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MAY 30 – JUNE 13, 2009

WWW.PARROTTA.DE
TIMM RAUTERT
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DESIGN

Over at the Fendi space, Raw-Edges (who are Israeli


designers Shay Alkalay and Yael Mer) confirmed their

ZEALOTS
reputation for intelligent, counterintuitive design with chairs
upholstered in pleated Tyvek (DuPont’s polyethylene paper
synthesis), which they filled with quick-setting foam to create a
sort of giant-origami-water-balloon effect. (The pair produced
a quiet moment of poetry elsewhere in Milan, with a tiny
installation of interlocked rotating paper trees that magically
grew out of a pile of papers at Spazio Rossana Orlandi).
Other neocrafty thrills at Fendi came from Studio
Glithero, who impregnated ceramic vases with photosensitive
Two exhibitions at this year’s chemicals, strapped wildflower sprigs to the side, then skewered
them on an apparatus resembling a doner kebab, the grill
Milan Furniture Fair showcase, replaced by a UV lightbulb. The rotating exposure left the vases
in thrilling fashion, the age-old embellished with spriggy blueprints expressing the haphazard
energy of bursts of sunlight.
man vs. machine design debate Senseware took its title from a term describing new
materials cool enough to induce brainfreeze – from light-
transmitting concrete to nanofibres with a diameter 1/7500th
THERE IS WAR in design heaven – or at least a rift behind the thickness of a human hair – which were transformed for
the vitrines in Milan. This year’s most exciting presentations this show by architects, flower designers, artists and industrial
at the Salone del Mobile mustered along two technical axes. producers. Fukitorimushi – Panasonic’s robotic floor cleaner
Along the first were designers whose shtick fell into the modern that resembled the disembodied, nappy-clad bottom of a
craftsy template – ‘It took fourteen years to source an artisan crawling baby – stole hearts as it polished the parquet. Above
who could still splice authentic Swiss shingling, but alas by then it floated the unbowed expanse of Jun Aoki’s six-metre-long,
the urushi lacquer master had passed away’. From the other ultralightweight hollow cantilever beam made from a new
came conversation peppered with references to CNC milling, carbon fibre material stronger than steel.
Selective Laser Sintering and nano-level fibre treatment. “Like a stone of the Stone Age or paper in the paper age,
It was one more battle in the old man vs. machine struggle, today’s artificial fibres stimulate our new creativity”, curator
and there were zealots in both camps who believed they held Hara explained, emphasising his desire to bring Japanese
the key to loveliness and higher purpose. As to loveliness: any technology into the practice of creative minds outside his
fool, regardless of whether he’s working with a laser cutter or country. “In using this Senseware, we’re entering a new field of
chip of flint, can make hideous, pointless designs (and indeed, creation; I wanted the world to contribute to it.”
many did). Higher purpose is another matter, since in the Senseware may generate a new field of creation in
current design climate the concept pretty much boils down to functional terms, but it still tickled the old-school aesthetic
sustainability and environmental friendliness. The hand-of- sensibilities with Makoto Azuma’s sunken moss garden, which

words HETTIE JUDAH

man axis considers this home territory. In these days of craft ran through the centre of the exhibition space like a spiritual
chic, anything involving artisans carries a misty aura of makers anchor. Sure, it was planted in biodegradable polylactic acid
living at one with materials, recuperating what they can and not fibre mats, but the installation was there to provide a natural
overburdening the world with mass-produced goods. balance and harmony that had little to do with its precocious
The new-technology camp possesses a fighting rejoinder. material underlay.
It is they who use the materials and methodology most fit for The idea of split sensibilities in the design world is
the job, and computer-controlled manufacture is not only driven by a fear that as we embrace the new, we forget and
perfectly adapted to small production numbers but also allows denigrate the old. There is concern that computer design
designs to be sent electronically for manufacture in situ, rather programs are producing a generation that lacks respect for the
than shipped over as finished objects. Thus Ponoko, a custom laws of physics and forgets that just because something looks
manufacturing company in New Zealand, commissioned good onscreen doesn’t mean it’s necessarily fit for production
a plywood shelf unit for its collection from designer Steve outside of Second Life. It may not have been the intention of
Watson in London. It arrived as nothing heavier than the email either show, but both Craftpunk and Senseware demonstrated
attachment that provided the template for individual laser-cut the exciting potential of that creative point where the two sides
batches to be popped out each time the piece is ordered. are reconciled, and where new techniques and materials can
The two camps provided the inspiration for a pair of both inspire and serve.
shows, each with its share of thrills: Craft Punk, a live-makers’
workshop produced by Fendi in collaboration with Design
Miami; and Senseware, Kenya Hara’s new-materials-meet-
creative-ideas display at the Triennale Design Museum.

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prometeogallery di Ida Pisani

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REGINA JOSÉ
GALINDO
5 3 ° Ve n i c e B i e n n a l
Pabellón de la Urgencia
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‘T he Fear Society’
cur ated by Jota Castr o

JUNE 8-13, 2009


VOLTA 5 Basel - Booth F3

JULY 2009
prometeogaller y di Ida Pisani
Regina José Galindo

MILAN - Via G. Ventura 3 /


20134 Milan / Italy
t/f +39 02 2692 4450 /
Tuesday - Saturday / 11.00 am - 2.00 pm / 3.00 am - 7.00 pm

LUCCA - Via degli Asili, 14 / 55100 Lucca / Italy


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t/f +39 0583 495552 / Tuesday - Saturday / 11.00 am - 2.00 pm
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‚€ OQBSFBT
AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

In this ongoing series, the real people who created the


historic styles give their eyewitness testimony

NO 9:
RUBENS

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Sir Peter Paul Rubens (28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a baroque genius
who worked for several courts in Italy before setting up a workshop in Antwerp.
He painted Counter-Reformation altarpieces as well as portraits, landscapes
and mythological and allegorical subjects. He was knighted twice: by Philip IV
of Spain in 1624 and Charles I of England in 1620.
interview by MATTHEW COLLINGS

‚‚ OQBSFBT
ARTREVIEW It’s great to meet you. You are fantastic. I pretty anything by me is wholly by me, and there’s a whole system of
much worship you. I think the first thing the contemporary prices I had where the more something was by me, the more you
artworld ought to be told about, so they really get an appropriate paid, because of the relative rarity. But at the same time you’ve
feeling of awe about it, and they aren’t allowed just to go on got to remember that everything started with something by me
complacently assuming you’re someone from the past that Glenn that was very much by me: the initial rough sketches that I’d
Brown or John Currin is wittily ‘influenced’ by, is the whole do to show the clients. Skill is always connected to expression
Rubens skill thing, the incredible mastery of it all. and sensibility. Those oil sketches still survive, they’re full of
autographic energy, the sincere me in the raw form. But how
SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS Actually, I think Glenn Brown is ‘insincere’ are the major workshop productions, which could
rather witty about me. Or at least about the kind of thing I stand be huge, or multipart – one project incorporated 25 paintings,
for, which is a tradition of art that no longer exists in your time, all very big, allegorising the reign of some queen or other? And
because society isn’t set up in the same way – so the workshop every one of those projects is so amazingly complex and detailed
system that formed me, and that I did so much to advance, doesn’t but broad and beautifully designed at the same time, and frankly
exist any more. Movies and photography have pushed art further built like a brick shithouse if you’re talking about structure: I
away from the centre of society, so it no longer has a function. mean that stuff is architecturally staggering, the sheer solidity
Or at least its functions have become esoteric. Philosophising and strength of it. And that’s all my sensibility and my skill. And
is really the main one. But on the other hand there’s no agreed then there are the skills of those who hired me, the heads of the
overarching discipline that all the different artistic lunges at various orders of the Counter-Reformation, and the courtiers of
philosophical profundity have to answer to – so it’s a pretty open European royalty, and their ability to think in complex allegorical
matter as to what ‘philosophy’ might mean in a contemporary terms and to make all that literary cleverness work in the context
art context. I like John Currin, too. I think he can be surprisingly of the painter’s studio. And then my own skills that are not all that
sophisticated about colour. He knows what it is. Of course, that’s different to any other artist of my era, honed since childhood,
a side issue with him. His main thing is something else. I don’t skills of drawing, handling of paint, the ability to compose
know what you’d call it. Certainly not ‘mastery’ – that would be dynamically: these are deployed in a way that’s very confusing
a ridiculous anachronism. Plus he sometimes churns the work for your time, in that they’re so developed and competent that
out. So you get a good show at Gagosian in New York with a people seeing them in museums, say, don’t even really see them
pornographic theme and then soon afterwards a show with a as skills. They just think they’re looking at subjects: classical
similar theme at Sadie Coles in London, but now it’s not worth nudes, cherubs, kings, angels, a horse or a candle and a bottle of
looking at, even though the PR for it is all about trumpeting the wine.
same virtues that made an impact at Gagosian. He’s just doing
the stuff without thinking. Where was I?
In your time people aren’t tuned
AR What Currin is good at?
into ideas in the same way –
SIR PPR Yes, he makes you look and at the same time think
about your looking. China plates, smiling women, their vaginas
not their heat, only their vague
and mouths, the patterns on the plates, the placing of key hot
sights within a single rectangle – he really is some kind of genius
fallout – your time sees angels
at arrangement. A genius in a comic mode: comic philosophy. The
paint handling is part of the joke: a reference to what an educated
and nymphs and redeeming
audience knows is supposed to be important about Courbet, say,
or a Flemish master from the century before mine, rather than
saviours in old art in museums,
a real tapping into those skills. I don’t object to the looseness of
the use of terms in gallery promo-talk. Everyone’s got something
but it’s all just a vague generality
to sell, after all. We all have to live. But it’s useful to think about
them seriously sometimes. Earlier you satirised the lazy use of AR Philistines!
the word ‘influence’, for example. The way influence works is
certainly complicated. There are so many questions. And levels. SIR PPR Well, it would have been different for Picasso, who
would think about the inner mechanics of the painting. So you’ve
AR What about skill? got skills and expression, but also general cultural ideas, the big
transitions over time in how people think. Modernism demands
SIR PPR Well, what was it for me? This changeable approach a very advanced level of looking and thinking about art, which
to form in the different stages of my career, Roman Renaissance- postmodernism has gradually relaxed. The audience in my time
influenced, then Venetian Renaissance. But also the use of other wouldn’t have thought about the inner mechanics either, but
peoples’ skills, the assistants I used, who were themselves often about the subject matter; they’d have exclaimed at how lifelike
extremely skilful – very advanced artists with independent I’d made a scene, and how beautiful or terrifying or elevating it
careers. And for certain big projects I had every artist in Antwerp was, because they were already tuned into the subjects as ideas.
– where I lived, in a self-designed Italianate palace full of classical In your time people aren’t tuned into the ideas in the same way
statuary – working for me. And after a certain point hardly – not to their heat, only to their vague fallout, the vague moral
AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

implications of the former hierarchical structure of society that of the past is that he wants to be compared to them. But the
religious art in my time allegorised – your time sees angels and difference between him and Glenn Brown and John Currin is not
nymphs and redeeming saviours in old art in museums, but it’s really that he’s like Rembrandt, or like me, but that he’s not being
all just a vague generality. That’s the general audience going ironic. He’s sincere about flesh, about surfaces, about the pose of
round the National Gallery, feeling a bit glazed over and tired the model, and he genuinely sees himself as a sort of continuation
when they come across a room full of my stuff. ‘Skill’ is pretty of the greatness of the past. But the continuum he inhabits is a
much a negative for them, because that’s all they see, and there’s bit more indebted to Cubism than his audience – which is often
no hardwiring to things they’re personally involved with. And visually lazy and conservative – realises.
then there’s the art milieu in your time: for this crowd ‘skill’ can
mean anything. It’s a different world for you and Glenn than it AR Wow, it’s so great having you really here to talk about these
was for me: simplified in many ways, not least in the changed things. What was it like being a diplomat and halting the war
relationship to buyers and patrons. But also more complicated, between Spain and England for two years?
in the opening up of ordinary peoples’ expectations of art, and
their understanding that it’s somehow got to be responsive to SIR PPR Very interesting. I also liked being guided around the
their inner psychic makeup – and they’re not a handful of bigwigs, King of Spain’s art collection by Velázquez. I loved marrying a
but everyone, the general audience, those very same tourists sixteen-year-old when I was very old, too.
lurching up to pictures in the National Gallery. So skill for Glenn
– well, he’s expressing the moment by giving some original lively AR It must have been awful dying of gout. I didn’t even know you
electricity of his own to something that the sensibility of the could die from it. What is it, anyway? What about landscapes?
moment actually finds rather dead. You practically invented them – you’re so clever. Do you like
anything in art now besides Glenn Brown? What about Cecily
AR What about Jenny Saville and Lucian Freud? Art historians Brown?
love to say they’re just like you, because they paint fleshy nudes
and they’re full of sincerity. It makes me fume!

SIR PPR Yes, you fuster away, don’t you, but I don’t see the
It’s good that you can have a woman doing
problem. You want people to be careful what they say and put a
hold on the streaming mindless bullshit, but I don’t see the harm
brush strokes. I like modernist abstract
in it. In my work painterliness is never anything to do with the
pastiness that you find in Freud and Saville, but a sort of cookery
painting, which is mostly the realm of men.
to do with layers of paint that are liquidised to different degrees
and used transparently or opaquely in the aim of certain effects,
It’s good for a woman to do it
and also there is a constant drive to both merge and separate,
so as a viewer you are manipulated to almost believe that flesh
is like air, for example, that they might be interchangeable and SIR PPR I think she’s good, yes. It’s good that you can have a
that everything is in a state of flux. It’s not just that you can’t see woman doing brush strokes. I like modernist abstract painting,
how illusions are done. There’s something about the way texture which is mostly the realm of men. It’s good for a woman to do it.
works, how figurative forms appear to emerge from a mere She deserves her reputation.
disturbance of texture, a tiger formed from a mist. Of course
drawing and colour are operating, too. Looking at it happening, AR What do you think is the best thing about her?
looking at all that great difference in The Drunken Silenus, for
example: grass, metal, flesh, fur, eyes – a guy buggering a fat guy, SIR PPR Mark making – the energy – I like her big brushes, she
and a nymph suckling a baby and masturbating it at the same has them specially made, maybe, I don’t know. I saw some in a
time – it’s very important to the narrative metaphor with all its photo in a German magazine the other day. They made me want
poetry and philosophy that you’re visually confounded and you to paint again. But really what I want to do is direct Hollywood
can’t see how the loose wisps of paint are causing such an illusion movies.
of solidity. Suckling fat nymphs, animals, drunken men, fat gods,
the glinting eyes of fat mad classical beings, vegetation sprouting AR Where are you off to right now?
everywhere, it’s part of the vibe of sexy menacing delicious
strangeness that the handling should be melting and subtle. With SIR PPR The opera. I like huge, magnificent, mighty things.
Freud and Saville, they’re more like inheritors of Modernism’s
truth-to-materials ethos, where it’s important that you do see AR OK, let’s call it a day.
how it’s done: lively plastering. Only with them, Modernism’s
visual purity is distorted in the service of populism. I find it great SIR PPR Ciao.
the way he’s such a YBA sensationalist, showing everyone the
fannies of aristocratic ladies who believe art is important, and Next month: Rembrandt – the eyes really do follow you round
she’s saying all sorts of things about fatness: she’s saying it’s a the room
feminist issue, it’s an art issue, and she’s saying it’s delicious and
also it’s disgusting. And what Freud is saying about the artists

‚„ OQBSFBT
ON VIEW

I’M NOT AN
IT IS, I THINK, FAIR to say that Per Kirkeby does
not like talking about his work. In fact he opens our
interview with those very words: “I don’t like talking
about my work.” Which is a shame, really, because
that work isn’t just deeply compelling but intensely

INTELLECTUAL!
articulate, and because Kirkeby talks about other
people’s work – that of Delacroix, Picasso, his
dear, dead friend, Poul Gernes – cleverly and with
compassion. But that’s artists for you.
If you don’t know Kirkeby – pronounced
KYER-ke-boo – then you soon will. Seventy now,
and the unchallenged grand old man of Danish art,
his paintings and smaller sculptures go on show
at Tate Modern this month. An air of myth clings
to these, as to him. Trained as an arctic geologist, Per Kirkeby may like to boast about shooting
Kirkeby still goes on field trips to Greenland. On the
parquet floor of his drawing room in a grand suburb
polar bears, but he doesn’t like talking about
of Copenhagen – a working-class boy, he grew up his work. So when ArtReview went to visit him,
on a housing estate nearby – is a polar-bear skin, its
teeth bared in taxidermic rage. “I had an incident he wasn’t having any fun at all
with one of these once”, says Kirkeby, a small, neat,
rather beautiful man who draws obsessively as he blackboard didn’t belong to Beuys”, he says.
speaks. “You can’t believe how fast they move, like “Adepts have spent the past 40 years saving it from
a cat. I said to my assistant, ‘Maybe you should deal him. I use these works to doodle around, to teach
with this’, but he had just a pistol. The only way you – but to teach myself, not others. There’s nothing
can kill a polar bear with a pistol is by shooting it didactic about what I do.”
in the eye, so he did.” Pause. “The left eye.” Joseph The night before, I saw another blackboard
Beuys? Ha! like this, at a gallery where Kirkeby is arranging
Actually, Kirkeby knew Beuys and, it is fair a show of Gernes’s work. That blackboard had
to say, doesn’t much like talking about him either. a yellow hut chalked on it, and what looked like
There is a history here. During the early 1960s, a a green snake. These forms have a pedigree in
degree in geology and a field trip to Narssak under Kirkeby’s art, as has the blackboard.

words CHARLES DARWENT

his belt, the young art student joined Copenhagen’s Both Kirkeby and Gernes worked on
Eks-Skolen – a loose band of the fervently avant- squares of Masonite – the MDF of its day – in
garde, grouped around Poul Gernes. In 1966, the mid-1960s, although in different ways. Taking
Beuys came to address them; Kirkeby did a couple up the Beuysian cross, Gernes brought colour
of performances with him. It was the man he to the masses by painting his Masonite squares
called Uncle Poul who really fell under Beuys’s with Pantone stripes and posting them off around
spell, though, and not in a good way. The German, Denmark. By contrast, Kirkeby used his squares to
Kirkeby says, was “fatal” to Gernes, infecting him meditate on the art unfolding around him. The Tate
with a “mixture of Steiner-esque global philosophy show will include some of his earliest Masonite
and radical politics… Poul became very ayatollah pieces, stuck with Pop-ish bits of wallpaper and
then”, he recalls. “He developed this belief in A- decal cartoons. Not long after, the squares turned
artists and B-artists that I found nasty. I had, and black, graphic and MDF, which is how they have
have, a strong belief that just one work of art, just stayed for 40 years now.
one form, carries value.” The two men fell out, Poul As to their derivation from Beuys, you
accusing Per of class treachery. might see Kirkeby as omnivorous rather than
Which makes a couple of things about the cannibalistic. He is fond of the word ‘shit’, and
room we’re sitting in surprising. One is a work that, perhaps, is apt. In the past he has written of
propped against the wall of the studio next door, the impossibility of seeing art other than through
a modern extension to Kirkeby’s neoclassical ‘historical spectacles’, the histories in question
villa. The work is a square of MDF, matte black being various and intertwined: his own, culture’s,
with chalky-looking graffiti that includes the half- the history of art. Every Kirkeby is the digested sum >IA¦>OF>QFLK —‡†‡—
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erased words ‘chaos reigns’. Which is to say that of all previous Kirkebys, and, with luck, something ÛQEB>OQFPQ’LROQBPV
it is possible to mistake it for a work by Beuys, a more. Knowing of the artist’s geologist alter ego, OFS>QB@LIIB@QFLK¥>IBOFB
F@E>BIBOKBO—BOIFK—
suggestion Kirkeby receives with a wince. “The critics have seen his canvases as geological, their LILDKB>KABTLOH

ƒ‚ OQBSFBT
forbidden art, so I studied them closely.” Encoded
in the canvas is a fallen tumbler, Kirkeby code for
the still lifes he likes to slip into his landscapes.
Which is to say that this canvas, as yet unnamed,
seems a deeply literary work; a suggestion that
wipes the Pre-Raphaelite smile off Kirkeby’s face.
“I’m an intuitive artist, not an intellectual”,
he says, drawing furiously. “I’m not a sculptor, not a
writer: I’m a painter. ‘Collapse’ is a key word for me
– my paintings have to collapse. What do they say?
‘You have to kill your darlings’, to get rid of the things
you love. It’s like with the first Grien – I thought,
‘I’m going to do something I’d never do – paint a
horse!’ I mean, a horse: come on. And yet it comes
out as a Kirkeby. I’d really like to do a monochrome
red painting, but I don’t have permission for that.
I’d like to paint figures, a naked woman. What is
it that prevents me? I don’t know. I would like it,
but the painting wouldn’t like it.” He stops to weigh
his sketch, one of the tree stumps that recur in his
work. “This I can control, more or less”, he says.
“What I can’t control” – he jabs a thumb over his
shoulder, to the crisp beds of clipped box outside
– “is that that gets greener and greener, and I hate
green. That I can’t control. And it’s shit.”
Now, let’s consider the word. ‘Shit’, in
Kirkeby’s book, seems to be a broad synonym for
disorder, that chaotic half of any artist’s working
life. Another odd thing about his library is that
there is a late Poul Gernes hanging in it, behind the
chair where Kirkeby draws. “That’s full of shit, too”,
he says, pointing over his shoulder. “Emotional shit.
So were Poul’s stripes. You know, Barnett Newman
used to stand in front of his stripes and say, ‘I want
emotional excess’. The question is how.”
And that, maybe, is what makes Kirkeby
extraordinary. It is common to lump his canvases
under the generic (and Germanic) heading of New
Painting, alongside those of his contemporaries
Baselitz and Polke. All three men are represented
by the German gallerist Michael Werner, and it is,
perhaps, in Werner’s interest that this should be so.
encrusted surfaces and half-erased forms eroded A little internal competition never hurt. But it is
strata. (“People like literal answers”, Kirkeby also not quite the whole truth. Unlike the other two
grimaces at this.) Shit – great, beautiful, visceral, men – perhaps more Danishly – Kirkeby seems on
Freudian shit – is probably a better analogy. an endless quest for modesty: the hut from which
Take the large canvas, 3 x 4.5 metres, palaces derive, a way of reconciling the obduracy of
hanging on the wall of Kirkeby’s Copenhagen green, ruptured friendships, childhood and old age.
studio. (He also paints on the island of Læsø and in If anything, his nearest artistic relation is another
what a friend calls “a small castle” in Italy.) This is Werner painter, the younger Peter Doig. “The
both new and not, having taken a year of the artist’s problem is, you’re never free”, Kirkeby says, his
time so far. The canvas is also old in the things it unstoppable pencil sketching tree rings, tree bark,
does: we’ve seen its horses in earlier takes on Hans root. “I wake up in the morning and I think, ‘I’ve
Baldung Grien’s woodcut Stallion and Kicking got the solution’. All the time I’m getting dressed,
Mare with Wild Horses (1534). Grien seems an I’m thinking about what it is, how it’s going to work.
odd place for Kirkeby to start from, but then he has Then I get to the studio and there is no solution.”
always relished the shock of the old: “In the 1960s
in London, the Tate was my museum”, he beams. Per Kirkeby is on show at Tate Modern, London,
“Rossetti and Burne-Jones were the ultimate from 17 June to 6 September
The NETWORK
A new permanent glass installation by

MICHAEL PETRY
For the IVY Restaurant
private room

Petry is represented by
Westbrook Gallery, London
www.westbrookgallery.com
Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York
www.sundaramtagore.com
Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery,
Houston
ON VIEW

CAUGHT
“WHEN I WAS A KID in school, I used to entertain
myself by seeing how quickly I could run down
the stairs”, Zilvinas Kempinas recalls. “But then
I became curious about which leg went first. And
so the next time I decided to pay attention to this
particular ‘problem’. I almost broke my neck.”

ON TAPE
Kempinas is trying to explain the impulse
that led him to create Tube, a 26-metre horizontal
walk-through cylinder made primarily of parallel
strips of videotape stretched lengthways across
the space, for his exhibition in the Lithuanian
Pavilion at this summer’s Venice Biennale. And
the story of his near-fatal childhood accident is
designed to illustrate the fact that he learned an
important lesson: to trust his instincts. “I realised
Zilvinas Kempinas’s exploration of videotape that sometimes analytical process can affect your
as a sculptural medium has won him speed and can even be harmful. It’s good to turn off
your knowledgeable reasoning sometimes in order
many admirers, and as he prepares to show to become more open to things that lie beyond the

a monumental work in Venice, ArtReview reach of our intelligence.”


Magnetic tape is a frequent component of
caught up with him to find out why he can’t Kempinas’s work (in fact, it might be described as
his signature material), and he is best known for
simply leave his tape in the videocassettes creating sculptures such as Flying Tape (2004–7),
in which floating loops of tape are kept swooping
like everybody else and spinning by fans – a display you might
almost describe as a sort of lyrical minimalism.
The effect is part science, part voodoo: the dark,
shimmering loops of tape hover in a ghostly way,
and it is impossible while watching them not to feel
somewhat anxious that, in the context of the fragile
ecosystems the artist creates, they’re just about to
flutter down to the floor. Incremental changes on
such minimal work create dramatic effects; the
simple doubling of Double O (2008), for example,
in which two touching tape loops are held together
by two facing fans, immediately brings to mind
the fragility of relationships, while in Lemniscate
(2008) two fans support a length of tape looped
into the mathematical symbol for infinity.
Kempinas employs tape to a variety of
ends: creating shimmering columns recalling
Fred Sandback, or hanging hundreds of lengths
of tape in front of lightboxes so that they fizz like
television’s white noise, or even pulled taught,
in mathematically precise stripes, like glossy,

sculptural Bridget Riley paintings.


Kempinas developed Tube during a recent
residency at Atelier Calder, the house and studios
of Alexander Calder in rural Saché, France, a period
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that he describes as a “dream exile” (although he
LKQBJMLO>OVOQBKQOB— admits that it was “extremely difficult to stay in
FIKFRP«—J>DKBQF@Q>MB—
MIVTLLA—AFJBKPFLKPS>OF>?IB the French meadows for six months after living
C>@FKDM>DB“R?B—€ˆˆ† in Manhattan for a decade”). He was eager to use
ªFKPQ>II>QFLKSFBT—QBIFBO the enormous space provided by Calder’s studio,
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MIVTLLA—AFJBKPFLKPS>OF>?IB and the assistance provided by the residency, to

Ġ OQBSFBT

its full potential, creating Tube and some other waterfall. The shimmery surface of tape, blowing
large-scale works that could not have been made in light breezes and breaths, constantly rippling,
otherwise, including Tripods (2008), an outdoor reflects light in a similar way to water, another
installation of crisscrossing aluminium rods that feature of the material that might be seen to make
was installed in a field next to the Atelier, set off by it particularly appropriate to Venice. “Water and
the intertwining clumps of trees nearby. light are two elements we always associate with
For Venice the work will be transported to the Venice”, says Kempinas. “I am hoping to use natural
Scuola Grande della Misericordia in Cannaregio. light coming through the windows. The sun moves
Begun in the sixteenth century by a young Jacopo around, and the light is always different. I would
Sansovino, the building was never finished, due to like to save this natural passage of daytime, since
a lack of funds, which creates a suitably limbo-like it would change the space and my piece along with
atmosphere for Kempinas’s immersive sculpture. it; every time you come here, it would be a slightly
“Videotape is an old-fashioned data carrier which different atmosphere inside.”
is about to become obsolete”, the artist points out. Kempinas tells me that one of the most
“Ironically it was designed to preserve moments common questions people ask him concerns what
of time, but it’s doomed to vanish itself as a media, is recorded on the tape he uses. “Sometimes I say
overtaken by new technologies.” The medium that it has everything you could possibly imagine
itself, then, is a crumbling, unfinished palace of on it. But then later I say it’s blank, and people do
technological dreams. not seem to be disappointed either”, he says, before

words LAURA MCLEAN-FERRIS

While Tube, and many of Kempinas’s adding, “I guess it doesn’t really matter after all.”
other sculptures, contain mathematically precise Perhaps the best answer to that oft-posed question
elements – here circles, squares and lines – the would be to say that what plays on the tape is the
shimmering, otherworldly effects of light on dark imagination. Like the television, which the title of
tape is intrinsic to the experience of the work. In the sculpture brings to mind, it might be that this
a recent sculpture shown in Bolzano as part of last tube of tape plays images to the eye.
year’s Manifesta 7, lengths of tape were hung high
from a factory roof around a skylight, both blocking Zilvinas Kempinas, Tube, is on show at the
the passage of light from the ceiling and activating Lithuanian Pavilion at the 53rd International Art
it, creating the impression of a cascading black Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 7 June – 22 November
ON VIEW

WHEN MARK LEWIS FOUND OUT that Liam


Gillick’s project for this year’s Venice Biennale
involved reviving a 1950s project to replace the
bombast of the Nazi-era German Pavilion with a
modernist building, an idea occurred to him. The
Canadian Pavilion, neighbour to the German, was
built during the 1950s, to a modernist design. The
German, a tall cavernous space, is the perfect venue
for projecting films, whereas the smaller, hard-
edged Canadian lodge might be ideal for Gillick’s
utopian models and interventions. One email later,
and Lewis had proposed a swap.
Lewis made the proposal lightheartedly, but
it underlines some of the pitfalls that come with the
privileges of the Biennale gig. History looms like
an immovable Cyclops, its avid eye the judgement
of your peers. The artist has to negotiate national
mythologies and unyielding pavilions. Do you make
a splash with something unusual or grandiose,
risking bathos? Or do you assemble some recent
work to create an exhibition representative of why
you were chosen in the first place? Mark Lewis
chose the latter route, producing a group of four
new films, all in the short looped format that is his
signature. He has made more than 30 since 1995.
Lewis’s films share formal characteristics
that originate in a set of rules within which he works.
First, a film should be based on a single take and
therefore short. A commercial reel gives you about
four minutes of film, and so most of his films were
four minutes or under before he started working in
HD, which has the capacity for much longer takes.

LOOP DREAMS
Not surprisingly, he has started to break his own
rules, but he still keeps the films short and, with a
few exceptions, silent. While he considers his work
distinct from cinema, titles such as Downtown
Tilt, Zoom and Pan (2005) and Spadina: Reverse
Dolly, Zoom, Nude (2006) indicate how important
the formal language of filmmaking is to his work.
Despite this immersion in cinema, he considers
galleries places for looking and thinking, without Cinematic and photographic, durational but
the messy intrusion of noise. A Lewis film sits
happily on the sharp edge of the fence of pictorial timeless, Mark Lewis’s work wilfully
tradition, somewhere between dream and
documentary. Thus places and memories usually
defies categorisation. Which we took as a
stir in him a desire to make a film. challenge
Cold Morning, the work that lends its title
to the Venice exhibition, depicts a homeless man
bundled up against the grip of a Toronto winter. He
rises and starts to organise his few belongings, then
shifts around, seeming to make his bed – a couple
of sleeping bags – and sort his few belongings. In
the foreground, two pigeons warm themselves
on a steaming grate. Someone turns up with a
bag of food; the homeless man handles the bag
awkwardly, as if he’s not quite sure what to do with
it. Cars and pedestrians rush past unresponsively.
He brings some stuff to a bin at the roadside. A
woman, glowing warmly in a golden winter coat,

„€ OQBSFBT
kicks a couple of chunks of detritus down the vent composition could spread like a ripple, infinitely,
where the pigeons were warming themselves, and into space. As in a Lewis film, the viewer perceives
the loops ends. a loop and a sense of events co-existing outside any
Cold Morning is straight photography: Lewis binding narrative.
set up a stationary camera and shot the events that Lewis plays with the importance of these
unfolded in front of the lens. This is unusual for framing devices in TD Centre, 54th Floor, a film
the artist. Most of his films involve the recreation that depicts a creepily slow walk along the windows
of something he witnessed, a process that reflects of a modernist tower in Toronto, the camera
the influence of his friend and mentor Jeff Wall. pointed down to the antlike traffic far, far below. As
Indeed, when Lewis came across the man who the camera moves along the floor, one is as aware
would become the subject of Cold Morning, while of the window frames as of the vertiginous view.
shooting a large-scale production nearby, he The frames keep changing, and yet the picture,
happened to be writing an essay about Wall. In it because of the extreme perspective, changes very
Lewis argues that there is an important absence little as cars zip up and down the roads, pausing at
of hierarchy in Wall’s work, and in photography in the intersection. TD Centre, 54th Floor is a kind
general. A snapshot, in other words, is the equal to of pictorial sublime about the terror of continuity,
a complicated, layered production. The fact that he the vertigo of the never-ending picture. When the
was making this argument while making his film camera hits the wall, an obvious physical border,
eased the discomfort he felt about making a more it has nowhere left to go to look for a new picture,
straightforward piece of street photography. so it retreats, slowly, like some dozy machine. The
Meanwhile, not far away, he was in the camera settles between window frames and takes
middle of the more intricate production of Nathan in the traffic, then the loop starts again.
Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night Skate, also for Without a narrative to determine how a film
Venice. For this film, he hired a bunch of people to begins and ends, a moving picture could become,
skate leisurely around this Toronto landmark while theoretically, an endless unfolding of events – an
he set up a camera on skates, with motion-control illustration of Zeno’s paradox. Compared to a
technology, moving it around as if it were another still photograph, films admit change, and yet if we
skater. He then took the footage to Los Angeles, make time the frame in Lewis’s work, then film is
where he set to work suturing this background to a unchanging, looping continuously from start to
foreground he shot in a studio: two actors skating on finish to start again until those very terms fade
a rotating turntable – an inner loop – performing a away. The man in Cold Morning repeatedly wakes
kind of courtship on ice. He fused these two with an up and makes his bed, the character or camera in
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outmoded cinematic conceit, the rear projection, a TD Centre roams the 54th floor looking down,
PFKDIB¦P@OBBKMOLGB@QFLK—‚JFK€†PB@— technique he had used before in Rear Projection seeking a picture, and the couple in Nathan Phillips
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The film, on one level, is a genre scene, In repetition lies the desire to do something better,
familiar to most Canadians, but it also addresses to exist more fully in time. The looped film tries
some fundamental issues about pictorial art: to outmanoeuvre transcendence, to be instead a
illusion, borders and frames, how the viewer hymn to immanence.
negotiates subject matter and background or Lewis uses rear projection to startling effect
setting, and the tensions between what is essential in The Fight, the fourth work that he will show in
and what supplemental to a picture. The skating Venice. The content is based on something Lewis
couple in the foreground is clearly the focus of the witnessed: a heated episode of argy-bargy that
work, or seems to be, but one is just as likely to never explodes into full-scale violence. Lewis shot
consider the sense of pictorial displacement. The the background of The Fight in Vienna, and the
illusion of the setting is at once convincing and a foreground – a group of actors pushing each other
flagrant bit of artifice. around – in the studio. On the one hand the film
A fruitful context for this work is Hendrick captures a social condition observable anywhere in
Avercamp’s A Winter Scene with Skaters Near the world: people fighting, seemingly about nothing,
a Castle (c. 1608), a small tondo in London’s without beginning or end. But these squabblers
words CRAIG BURNETT National Gallery, and one of Lewis’s favourite also enact the agon of the Lewis mode: the moving
paintings. Countless skaters stretch into the picture longs to become a stable composition or
distance, their bodies and the horizon made soft narrative, but is suspended forever in anticipation
and pale by the milky haze of winter chill. In the of an event or an ending.
centre of the painting, a couple loses their balance, By the way, Gillick said no thanks.
and others around them seem to reach out with
concern. The decentred composition creates an Cold Morning is on show as part of the 53rd
almost cinematic flow of time, and the circular International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale,
shape accentuates this absence of focus, as if the in the Canadian Pavilion, 7 June – 22 November
Hall 2.1 Stand K4

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FEATURE:

A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, WHILE I WAS TALKING


TO STEVE MCQUEEN ABOUT QUEEN AND
COUNTRY (2007–), HIS RUN OF STAMPS
FEATURING THE FACES OF BRITISH SERVICEMEN
KILLED IN THE IRAQ WAR, HE MENTIONED IN
PASSING THAT HE WAS WORKING ON A FILM
ABOUT BOBBY SANDS. I PICTURED A
DOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE ICONIC IRA HUNGER
STRIKER, NOT THE FEATURE FILM THAT WOULD
CONSEQUENTLY MAKE MCQUEEN THE
ONLY PERSON ON THE PLANET TO HAVE BEEN
AWARDED BOTH THE TURNER PRIZE AND
THE CAMERA D’OR (FOR BEST FIRST FEATURE
AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL).
words MARTIN HERBERT portrait JUERGEN TELLER

…‚ OQBSFBT
FEATURE: STEVE MCQUEEN

I COULDN’T SEE HIM USING DIALOGUE – speech, or even sound, had


troubled his short films only intermittently until then, and aside from
a lengthy centrepiece exchange between Sands and a priest, Hunger
(2008) is powered predominantly by images and actions – and
generally the project sounded like a body-swerve, the act of a wilfully
moving target. I was half-right, I think. Hunger put McQueen in a place
where it is genuinely hard to categorise him. (Admittedly the projects
that immediately preceded it, the politicised philately of Queen and
Country and a stark, unflinching film of a dead horse attracting flies,
Running Thunder, 2007, hadn’t hurt that process either.) But the
diversity of such works feels, in retrospect, deliberate: it leads a viewer
to ask what ideas and issues might bind them together.
We had talked a lot about death that day: about its increased
presence in McQueen’s work since the 30-minute Caribs’ Leap/
Western Deep (2002) – his first film for cinema presentation – with
its narrative of seventeenth-century Grenadian suicides in protest
against French occupiers and exploration of brutal Johannesburg gold
mines: its shots of black workers, of open caskets in funeral parlours.
We talked about cultural attitudes and unhealthy squeamishness in
the face of extinction. When that film is taken alongside Hunger and
Queen and Country, however, the terms of discussion naturally shift
somewhat. What these works share, it’s apparent, is a controlled fury
– expressed through austere and concentrated images and scenarios
– at the mortal price of empire-building. Does that, then, make
McQueen a capital-P political artist? Not exactly, for it’s possible too
to argue that geopolitical strife merely presents, writ large, the broad
power dynamics and, at its most fatalistic, a sense of the inevitability
of human conflict that have run through all his work. And it’s possible,
further, to suggest that how McQueen treats these dynamics speaks
more consistently of an artistic than an antagonistic mindset, or
a fusion of both for tactical reasons: because overtly espousing a
It speaks volumes about
specific position is a way of asking to be classified and contained.
This is the artist, remember, who announced himself with Bear
McQueen’s refusal
to play to received ideas
(1993), a film in which he and another naked black man are engaged
in some sort of ambiguous combat-cum-mating-ritual. They spar,
they smile, they approach each other, they grapple, they spring
back. The body, here, is slippery; a potential site of more than one
thing, sex or pain or both. (It’s worth noting that McQueen, in his
gender-fucking with regard to the machismo of black male identity,
has located a kindred spirit in the English musician Tricky, who has
intermittently dressed in drag; in 2001, McQueen made Girls, Tricky,
a film of the singer recording a vocal track whose lyrics revolve around
absent fathers, urban pressure and crime, the vocalist’s body shaking
as if possessed while he sings.) Six years after Bear, in Cold Breath
(1999), McQueen again returned to the question of male sexuality,
and the intersection of sex and pain, via an 18-minute film of the artist
fingering his nipple: restlessly tweaking it, rubbing it, strumming it,
pinching it, lubricating it with spit. The male nipple, seen close up, is
a strange, near useless, vestigial thing. Held in view, it starts to look
disturbingly like an eye.
In the red-tinted, faintly nightmarish Charlotte (2004), there’s
a close-up of an eye that doesn’t look like an eye, after a while – or
behave much like one. It’s Charlotte Rampling’s eye, and McQueen is
poking it with an outstretched finger. Rampling’s aged eyelid doesn’t
spring back: it wrinkles and puckers in an alien fashion. This is an act
of distant, exploratory tenderness and of veiled aggression all at once,

…„ OQBSFBT
Steve McQueen:
The reluctant subject
Towards the end of our meeting, Steve McQueen suggests that I let you know that he
is a “reluctant interviewee”. He even prefaces his request with a “please”.
During the past 12 months or so, he’s been subjected to countless interrogations
while promoting his first feature film, the award-winning Hunger (2008). So while
on the one hand I’m sympathetic towards an artist who suggests an obvious truth
– that his work speaks for itself – on the other I’m now wondering precisely how bad
a job I did. But on further reflection, McQueen’s request throws up some intriguing
questions, perhaps the kind of questions I’ve been trying to ask him during the
course of the interview, but never actually managed to articulate. They begin with
something basic, almost existential: why do people like me interview artists like
McQueen? Why do people like you want to know what artists have to say when they
ought to be saying it through their works? Do I want to connect my experiences
as a viewer with his experiences as an artist, and hope that the latter in some way
validates the former? In conjunction with that thought, does he, I eventually ask,
have some message in mind that he wants his audience to take away from his work?
“No. They have to make their own minds up”, is his definitive answer. I wonder, then,
what he feels when he looks back over his work? Does he ever think about some
linear procession that leads to the construction of an ‘oeuvre’, an output that might
eventually take the place of a ‘real person’ when we refer to Steve McQueen (in the
way we refer to a Picasso or a Turner and have a particular image in mind)? Does he
look back over previous works while making works now? “No. I’m not interested”,
he says firmly. “I’m not thinking about yesterday.” That said, he does concede that
his work is produced after long periods of gestation. “[Today] I’m thinking about a
question I had five years ago”, he says, “and only now it’s been answered. In a way,
I’m in 2004 right now.”
an argument for the potential obliquity of power Ahhh… there’s the catch. Even if he is working five years behind the times,
relations. (Rampling, you have to remember, I, as a viewer, am behind him. There’s a lag between what’s on his mind and what
played Lucia Atherton in Liliana Cavani’s 1974 film works of his I’ve got on my mind. Without wanting to drop into Bret Easton Ellis-
The Night Porter, a concentration-camp survivor style musings about the impossibility of anyone ever ‘knowing’ anyone else, and the
engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with a consequent ridiculousness of interviewing artists, I can’t help feeling that a pair of
former SS officer. It’s hard to think that McQueen, McQueen’s more intimate works, Bear (1993; in which McQueen and another naked
so versed in cinema, doesn’t intend the reference.) man feel each other out in an erotically charged wrestling match) and Charlotte
Later, one of the most indelible shots in Hunger (2004; in which McQueen’s finger extends to poke and feel Charlotte Rampling’s
will be the lingering view of Bobby Sands’s face eyeball and lid), somehow speak of the difficulty and ambiguity of similar relations.
after he has been brutally beaten by guards. He And yet despite that, and the fact that he’s never deployed the animal-pickling,
looks beatific in his martyrdom, as he will when bed-unmaking and diamond-encrusting sensationalism that has marked out the
he dies; but he also, unless I’m projecting wildly, traditional route British artists take towards gaining a wider audience for their
looks virtually postorgasmic. It’s an extraordinarily work, McQueen remains an artist whose output manages to work its way deep into
uneasy image, hard to parse or reduce to language,
and speaks volumes about McQueen’s refusal to
be glib about the body, to play to received ideas.
Towards the end, his camera again closes in on a single, when Gillen, a prisoner, stretches shaking fingers through bars to
quivering, almost inhuman eye: that of Sands, as he struggles to focus touch an unknowingly liberated bluebottle, for example, is a reminder
on a visitor while in the terminal stages of starvation. Hunger, here of how much McQueen’s art is about exploratory tactility, how one
and elsewhere, is concerned with the physical corpus as the last line thing touches another. This is less the act of someone diving into
of defence, and with the external conditions that would drive a person the relative mainstream – although it’s debatable how mainstream
to its fundamental act: like Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep, it involves arthouse cinema is – than of an artist challenging himself to reframe
throwing the body away, letting it degrade into nothingness, as a his core concerns for a larger audience.
final act of defiance. The essential subject of the film’s centrepiece The same might be said of Queen and Country, of course. That
dialogue between Sands and a Catholic priest is the ethical dimension work’s potential circulatory nature was, he says, crucial to him (even if
of suicide. It also contains, however, Sands’s reminiscence of putting it hasn’t come to fruition, being lengthily deadlocked in Parliament
a pony out of its misery by drowning it. Think back to Running after the Royal Mail refused to print the stamps), and McQueen’s
Thunder, along with the crossover points between McQueen’s art and move into cinema feels like another testing of his ideas’ prospective
moviemaking practice adumbrated above, and you begin to sense reach. Warhol, clearly, has been some kind of model for him not only
how much of his artistic practice McQueen poured into this film. It in aesthetic terms (Cold Breath, monochromatic and fixed-position,
could almost be sliced up into four-minute sections and shown as and extended over 18 minutes into alternating oases of boredom
semiabstract passages in galleries; a grimly lyrical moment in Hunger and affect, could almost have been Andy’s; Girls, Tricky harks back
FEATURE: STEVE MCQUEEN

place for his films (though already the latter venue


felt more appropriate for Matthew Barney, even if he
wasn’t stealing too many customers from the local
multiplex). Today, the high-grade cinematic polish of,
say, Daria Martin’s or Sarah Morris’s films is less of a
surprise, and more a reflection of yet another melted
boundary between expressive forms. Julian Schnabel,
of course, has made prizewinning cinema (following
a stumbling beginning), but the key distinction
to Warhol’s footage of the Velvet Underground rehearsing) but in between Schnabel’s expansion into tiered seating and McQueen’s is
terms of a sense of audience. Yet the tension in McQueen’s practice that outside of bravura, the former’s art has little to do with his films.
comes from the impression that while on the one hand he wants to Whereas McQueen’s work shows a virtually unprecedented (though
speak to an expanding public, on the other he’s hugely wary of being some might want to insert Larry Clark’s name here) adaptation of a
possessed by it. Things aren’t said out loud in his work. His films are, visual syntax developed for galleries into the realm of cinema, and a
on the face of it, clear and compressed and describable: two men cinema that isn’t limited to an art audience.
fight; a house falls down (Deadpan; 1997), McQueen’s 1997 tribute to
Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr (1928) with the humour turned grim
and grey; a man rolls an oil drum down Manhattan’s streets (Drumroll;
1998); a horse lies dead. But meaning is enacted between them, not
quite within them, not on the surface. Absorbed in a kind of power
relation with the artist, you work for it. You might work, too, because
it’s not in McQueen’s interests to spell it out, to see that Hunger is a
film about the Maze Prison, but also about Guantánamo Bay.
I began by suggesting that McQueen is in a strange, uncharted
place now, a place he’s mostly carved out by and for himself. Back
in the early 1990s, when he started exhibiting, the sophistication of
his films was something of a shock: artists back then famously didn’t
know how to wield video cameras, never mind cine cameras, and the
presiding aesthetic was sloppy and handheld. I remember, at the turn
of the 2000s, being slightly surprised to hear Anri Sala say that he
saw little distinction between the gallery and the cinema as an apt

…† OQBSFBT
Steve McQueen:
The reluctant subject
the public consciousness. On reflection, this paragraph could equally have started
with, ‘And yet, because of his understanding of that’.
Just look at a work that has ostensibly had the slowest creep in McQueen’s
series of five-year plans. Back in 2003, the Imperial War Museum’s Art Commissions
Committee invited McQueen to be the official war artist in Iraq. In 2007 the museum
exhibited Queen and Country, a series of wooden drawers housing 98 stamps, each
featuring a portrait of a different member of the armed forces who had died in combat.

McQueen is in a The real artwork, McQueen declared, would be to have the stamps produced and
circulated by the Royal Mail. The Royal Mail’s declining of this request provoked a
national debate, and while discussions about the production of the stamps continue,

strange, uncharted the artwork, a determined McQueen animatedly says, is ongoing. In one interview,
given at the time, McQueen suggested that it might be possible to view the media
coverage, and the debates the project helped to foreground, as an extension of the

place now, a place work. “It had an impression on the work, absolutely, because of course one couldn’t
foresee that. There is an ongoing debate about it, so the work changes – the way one
looks at it today is obviously different from the way one looked at it yesterday. To

carved out by have an artwork on the front of newspapers, where it wasn’t about how much it cost,
was kind of interesting.”
It’s a ‘kind of interesting’ that has extended to Hunger. “Everyone can tell a

and for himself story, but not everyone has a notion of Western contemporary art, that’s for sure”,
McQueen says when explaining that the use of narrative and a desire to explore it
as a tool was the biggest difference between making a feature film and an artwork.
“Hunger became an object”, he says, slipping back into a more traditionally ‘artistic’
mode of speech. “It became a thermometer to test the climate of what was going on
in the UK, in Ireland and particularly in Belfast at this time.”
What comes across, above all else, during our conversation is that McQueen
What this reflects, of course, is a larger is a skilled craftsman with an extremely refined knowledge of his media, and an
historical moment wherein art is, finally, able to approach that’s as intensely focused as the work he produces. “Sound can give you
transfer itself into larger spheres of circulation texture – you can’t feel it [texture, on film]”, he says, as we discuss what for me is
without sacrificing its integrity. If one side of the the extremely tactile, almost sculptural nature of some of his videoworks. “With
contemporary shift in lens-based media is its architecture, sound will give you the depth and width of a room. It’s about using
wholehearted migration onto YouTube – so that what you have, to do what you have to do.”
Ryan Trecartin or Keren Cytter or Kalup Linzy I wonder if he feels that what he ‘has to do’ in Venice, the most hyped-up display
or whoever has no problem in using multiple in the artworld calendar, is different from the contexts of his other exhibitions. It’s
outlets for the same film – then McQueen’s an honour, he admits. But “I’m not going to shine my shoes just to go to the Venice
arc figures a parallel balancing act between the Biennale”, he says laughing, before adding, with an engaging flourish of nonchalance,
gallery and the screening room. (It’s the kind of “I won’t be wearing a suit and tie… I’ve got my path and I’m going to walk along it.”
fluid interpenetration that a younger generation Mark Rappolt
increasingly takes for granted, and flagging it
makes me feel old; I mention it for the benefit
of everyone who’s my age or older. Even so, you
have to wonder if McQueen sees that as his key achievement thus far.
I doubt it. If he’s pleased with his progress, it might well be because
WORKS
he has, so far, faultlessly played the game on his own terms, while (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
inventing a few new rules of his own. Because of that, he’s in a position
Bear, 1993, 16mm b/w film transferred to video, 10 min 35 sec. © the artist.
where his art says what he wants it to without expiring in obviousness; Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris
where it serves conscience while retaining openness, where the first
Charlotte, 2004, 16mm film projection, 5 min 42 sec, looped. © the artist.
image we saw of McQueen – as a nimble fighter squaring up in Bear Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris
– still feels like the right one. And because of that, too, he can be
Queen and Country, 2007– (installation view, Central Library, Manchester), commissioned by the Imperial War
enough of a known and venerated quantity to be representing Britain Museum and the Manchester International Festival. © the artist.
at the Venice Biennale, and yet at the time of writing, I, for one, have Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris

virtually no idea of what to expect. Now name me three other artists Running Thunder, 2007, 16mm film, 11 min 41 sec, looped.© the artist.
who fit that description. Or even just one. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris

Hunger, 2008. Courtesy Film4, Channel 4 and Pathé


Work by Steve McQueen, commissioned by the British Council, is
on show as part of the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice
Biennale, in the British Pavilion, from 7 June to 22 November

OQBSFBT …‡
FEATURE:

JUST WHO IS THE


THERE WAS A DINNER IN NEW YORK recently honouring Bruce Nauman
and held as a benefit for the American Academy in Rome. Would
he be there? Nauman lives in Galisteo, New Mexico, with his wife,
painter Susan Rothenberg. He raises horses and patches fences. It

MAN BEHIND THE


seemed perfectly ironic, appropriate to Nauman’s work – given
his forthcoming exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale – that as I
prepared to write about him, this artist, known for staying hidden,

MASK? AS BRUCE
whose gallery was unable to provide information on the exhibition,
whose curator preferred not to give away many details of what would
be shown, could literally be crossing my path. It could be a Nauman
performance piece: you can’t find out anything about it, and then, in a

NAUMAN, ONE
million-to-one chance encounter, you bump right into it.
I wonder who the man is behind the mask. Nauman’s work has
often dealt with the question of personae – how we present ourselves
to the world, and what the distance is between inside and outside. A

OF AMERICA’S MOST
1970 Nauman text in 21 numbered aphorisms, titled Withdrawal as an
Art Form, includes the following: ‘This is my mask of fidelity to truth
and life’, ‘This is to cover the mask of pain and desire’, ‘This is to mask

ADMIRED AND
the cover of need for human companionship’. The series ends, with a
cry of frustration, in all caps: ‘PEOPLE DIE OF EXPOSURE’. Now
again, the artist was fleeing exposure in regard to the nature of his
upcoming exhibition.

ENIGMATIC ARTISTS,
Nauman is no stranger to Venice. He won a Golden Lion
at the 1999 Venice Biennale and has exhibited work in five other
Biennale years, in venues apart from the national pavilions. In 2007
he displayed fountains made of concave face masks that spewed

MAKES HIS DEBUT


water into industrial work sinks. The 2009 Biennale, however, will be
remembered as the Bruce Nauman year, at least in the United States,
which has chosen Nauman to be its official representative. This

IN THE US NATIONAL
has an interesting overtone for an artist of Nauman’s abrasiveness,
as the choice emanates from the State Department’s Federal
Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, although it was
Carlos Basualdo and Michael R. Taylor, the curators, respectively, for

PAVILION, CAN
contemporary and modern art at the Philadephia Museum of Art,
who proposed an exhibition of his work.
“Nauman has fundamentally altered our conception of artistic
practice and identity”, states Taylor. The curators praise the artist’s

HE STILL SURPRISE
radical nature and, wary of the antiquated elitism implied by national
pavilions, will extend Nauman’s exhibition to two universities, chosen
both to stimulate academic discourse on Nauman’s work and make it

THE ARTWORLD
more accessible to students. The Università Iuav di Venezia teaches
architecture, urban planning and design. The Università Ca’ Foscari
includes the Palazzo Foscari, built on the Grand Canal by Doge
Foscari in 1452; begun as a school of business, it has expanded to

IN VENICE?
include literature and philosophy.
Speaking to Basualdo, I learned that “Nauman liked the idea
that you have to walk, maybe get lost, to see the show. In a city where
people come to be seen – but which is also very full of secrets – we hope
words VINCENT KATZ that ideas of isolation and exposure, public and private, will come to the
fore.” Basualdo, one of the curators selected by Francesco Bonami to
curate a section of the Arsenale in 2003, has returned to Venice every
year since then to teach. It was he who proposed the two universities
that will house segments of Nauman’s exhibition. “Venice is a city in
which the negotiation of public and private is historically important”,
he said. “The city will tell us something about Nauman’s work, and
vice versa.” The three installations, comprising 30 works, are organised
according to what Basualdo calls three ‘threads’: “heads to hands”
“space to sound” and “neons to fountains”. Each site will combine the
three threads, so each venue will provide a complete statement of

†€ OQBSFBT
Nauman has been known to tell
curators to turn up the volume,
engendering a feeling of giddiness
when one enters the presence
of his video and audio pieces
FEATURE: BRUCE NAUMAN

The clowns scream, “No! No!” or they tell an inane story, “Pete and
Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off; who was left? Repeat.
Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence…” They become increasingly
frustrated and obnoxious. The psychology is violent, as it is in the
video Violent Incident (1986), which shows different couples abusing
each other. If you laugh at these videos, what does that say about you?
The viewer is implicated, becoming a willing or unwilling accomplice
in the artist’s provocations.
We finally meet at the dinner honouring Nauman, as well as
soprano Jessye Norman and architect Thom Mayne. Nauman is
disarmingly accessible, friendly, down to earth. He explains Rothenberg
couldn’t join him, as they were not able to get someone to look after
their horses. He sometimes does not go to his exhibitions, he explains.
When I ask if he has been to Venice to prepare for this, he says yes,
but there seems to be some hesitation. He is more enthusiastic when
speaking of his desire to move beyond the pavilion format.
Nauman’s work thrives on openness. This is an initiating
principle – he does not start with materials but rather with an idea,
after which he finds the medium to most efficiently embody that
idea. Likewise, he often sets himself a task – setting a corner for a
fence – and then plays that out, many times surprising himself by the
result. In one early piece, he decided to put his body simultaneously in
contact with a floor and wall in as many ways as possible. Only later,
on hearing people’s reactions to this, did he realise that some of the
positions provoked strong emotional responses in his audience.
the themes of the exhibition. There will not be many works on paper, It is not surprising, then, that he would want to spread his work
but expect a generous selection of sound- and videowork, especially throughout Venice. First, it gets it out of the exclusive and somewhat
at Iuav, which does not have the conditions for paper pieces. It will repressive Giardini atmosphere. It also forces the viewer to walk, to
not be a comprehensive survey, yet it will include work from 1967 to take his or her body through the pathways necessary to arrive at the
the present. One of the features will be a new sound installation, a off-campus locations. This, in turn, will lead to insights and discoveries
piece so large it cannot fit into the pavilion; it will be installed in two on the way, unplanned mysteries that will only be apparent to a
versions (English and Italian) in the two off-site venues. There will be particular viewer on a particular day.
a new incarnation of a performance piece from 1970, recreated by two After dessert, Robert Storr presented Nauman with an award,
students in Venice from Nauman’s original instructions. and Nauman stepped up to the mic. He told of visiting Rome when
Nauman is that rare artist whose work is seminal while remaining the Sistine Chapel was being cleaned. He was allowed to go up on
fiercely independent. He has worked with Meredith Monk, Richard the scaffold and touch the section yet to be cleaned. “And you could
Serra and Merce Cunningham, among others, but is not part of any see the brush marks, places where he had changed something with a
movement or group. His practice can be seen as a bridge between scalpel.” Then he choked up and stepped off the stage. In that glimpse,
the openness of John Cage and conceptuality of Sol LeWitt, and we could see the real man behind the mask, and it was impressive.
the impurity of later artists, such as Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley,
who expose personal and cultural neuroses in their work. Nauman’s Work by Bruce Nauman is on show as part of the 53rd International Art
early films and videos share a quirky elegance with William Wegman’s Exhibition, Venice Biennale, in the US Pavilion, 7 June – 22 November.
early videowork, but his scatological neons and violent videos from Artist Rooms: Bruce Nauman is at Tramway, Glasgow, until 31 May
the 1980s encapsulate a dysfunctional insanity that is far darker. Most
of all, Nauman is known for his technical diversity; he has worked in
photography, film, video, drawing, neon, installation, performance,
audio, sculpture, choosing the medium to fit the inquiry he sets WORKS
(IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
himself.
Analysing Nauman’s work as critique or social commentary Think, 1993, mixed media, dimensions variable. Gift of Werner and Elaine Dannheisser.
Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York.
only takes one so far. There is an undeniable visceral thrill one feels © 2009 the artist / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
in the presence of his work, particularly the video and audio pieces.
Smoke Rings (Model for Underground Tunnels), 1979, mixed media, dimensions variable.
Nauman has been known to tell curators to turn up the volume, Photo: Philippe Migeat, Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY,
engendering a feeling of giddiness when one enters the presence Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
© 2009 the artist / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
of these pieces. The memory I have of Nauman’s video installation
Clown Torture (1987) was of precisely that kind of delight. It was at The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967, neon,
150 x 140 x 5 cm. Collection Philadelphia Museum of Art.
the Nauman retrospective organised by the Walker Art Center and © 2009 the artist / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
installed by Robert Storr at MoMA in 1995. In Clown Torture, as in
Untitled (Hand Circle), 1996, bronze, silver solder, copper, 67 x 7 x 13 cm. Collection Artist Rooms:
many Nauman works, the audio is very loud. Five projections are seen Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, acquired jointly through the d’Offay Donation, with assistance from
simultaneously, two of them on monitors that are not right side up. National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008

OQBSFBT †ƒ
FEATURE:

THE INTERNATIONAL ART RAGNAR KJARTANSSON


Icelandic Pavilion

EXHIBITION AT THE In Daniel Birnbaum’s often


sombre 2008 Turin Triennial,
with its focus on themes of

VENICE BIENNALE IS
melancholy, Ragnar Kjartansson
brought a welcome relief of
drama, colour and theatricality.
Dressed as a matinee idol and

THE WORLD’S LONGEST-


accompanied by a muffled group
of musicians set up in front
of a shining purple curtain,

RUNNING ART EXHIBITION.


the artist sung the phrase
“Sorrow conquers happiness”
over and over and over. Pop
star, performer and incurable

HERE THE BIENNALE’S


romantic, this artist can equally
provoke tears and giggles with his
tragicomic energy and appetite
for endurance. For the Venice

ARTISTIC DIRECTOR,
Biennale, Kjartansson will
transform part of the Icelandic
Pavilion into a studio, and every
day for six months will paint a

DANIEL BIRNBAUM,
model – a young man wearing a
bathing suit – standing in front
of a Venetian canal backdrop.
This marathon undertaking will

DESCRIBES HIS VISION


undoubtedly approach spiritual
and artistic revelation and
boredom in similar measure.
Laura McLean-Ferris

FOR THE EXHIBITION,


WHILE ARTREVIEW LOOKS
FORWARD TO SOME OF
THE HIGHLIGHTS OF
THE NATIONAL PAVILIONS
†† OQBSFBT
DANIEL BIRNBAUM
interview by AXEL LAPP

Axel Lapp: Is it a burden to curate a show with such a long


tradition?

Daniel Birnbaum: It is very special and not like a museum show


at all. It is also privileged because of all the attention it receives.
If you are writing or curating, you do want to reach an audience,
FABRICE GYGI and this is also why the artists are so attracted to the Biennale and
Swiss Pavilion are responding so positively. We have invited well-known and
very young artists, and all are extremely motivated, which is not a
Fabrice Gygi’s world is not a place given in a world so full of big events, art fairs, museum shows and
in which to get comfortable. biennials. It is the place where the artworld meets – and it is not
His dystopian environments only about numbers, but about quality.
have included Scene (2000), a
fenced-in, utilitarian leisure AL: So what will the exhibition be like?
space with a stage, food trolleys hardwood floor for bedding and
and music pumped in through DB: The Venice Biennale has developed into the largest exhibition a space for communal bathing
sentry-like speakers, but no soul. of contemporary art. We now have 77 nations participating, and designed to make you feel far
Or Tribunal (1999), a campsite lots of sideshows by regions and foundations that want to gain from touchy-feely. In Polling
in military colours – camouflage- visibility. The board and president of the Biennale have therefore Station (2001), a voting booth
green, hazard-orange – with a asked me not to involve other curators and not to divide the show was positioned behind bars,
into sections, as it was done before. while at the São Paulo biennial
That does not mean, of course, that in 2002, Gygi raised a piece of
it is monolithic – it is articulated into nightmare architecture – a 45-
zones and in different parts – but foot watchtower – to overshadow
that it is one exhibition. I have a small the exhibition. While he now
group of correspondents helping me works with industrial elements
– Hu Fang from China, Savita Apte such as wood, steel and plastic,
from India, Tom Eccles and Maria his original medium was skin
Finders – and I have Jochen Volz, a (his own, which he covered in
great young producer and curator who tattoos as an adolescent), and his
normally works in Brazil, with whom I early practice took the form of
am organising the exhibition. extreme performance exploring
rebellion and identity. Paranoia
AL: So the correspondents make sure and a sense of oppression from
it is a global show, appropriate to the sinister and controlling hidden
global appeal of Venice? forces might be said to be the
Swiss artist’s true materials, in
DB: Anything else would be rather a work that is both politicised and
surprise. ‘Global’ can mean so many poetically nonspecific. One of
different things. Of course you can two artists showing work in the
never cover every nation and every Swiss Pavilion (the other is Silvia
region. I am more informed about Bächli), Gygi looks set to darken
German or Scandinavian art or, the Venice sunshine.
through my work with Artforum, about Skye Sherwin
American art. I am not an expert in
African, Chinese or Indian art, and
therefore it is good to rely on people
who are. In the end, the exhibition
evolves from subjective decisions, and
those, I guess, are mine. This show is
not an objective take on where we >?OF@BVDF—QLLI>O—€ˆˆ‚—IB>QEBO—
JBQ>I—OLMBP—†ˆU†ˆU‚ˆ@J’
are in art today, it is subjective – and ELQL“QEB>OQFPQ’LROQBPVQEB>OQFPQ
FEATURE: VENICE BIENNALE

the subjects are me and Jochen Volz. It is an exhibition with the Franziska & Lois
DORIT MARGREITER, title Making Worlds, or rather, with the whole translation chain Weinberger describe themselves
FRANZISKA & LOIS of Making Worlds, Fare Mondi, Bantin Duniyan, Weltenmachen, as fieldworkers, a term that
WEINBERGER, ELKE Construire des Mondes, Fazer Mundos… could be taken literally: the great
KRYSTUFEK outdoors is the natural habitat
Austrian Pavilion AL: Is there a more specific theme to the show? for these partners-in-art. For
more than three decades they
DB: It is, of course, very general; have explored the clash between
what art piece could not fit under organic and man-made worlds in
it? But I am quite happy with it as astutely political work that takes
it is – in these different languages the garden as a metaphor for
which somehow capture, or rather society. An installation at Venice
hint at, the possibilities – because will offer insight into their
in the end it is not about dictating practice since 1977.
that the artists illustrate a theme, Elke Krystufek has used
it is about giving them a vehicle striptease and masturbation in
or a tool to work with. I would like performances and videoworks,
to emphasise that the Biennale and created hundreds of self-
can be a site for production and portraits: photographs and
experimentation rather than just a paintings of her naked and posed
place for artists being shown. This with museological artefacts,
is nothing particularly revolutionary. perhaps, or with genitalia
Biennials all over the world have obliterating her face. For her
been understood as production contribution to the Austrian
sites, but to me it is important, pavilion, however, she looks set
since so many things can be done to skewer exoticism, with a new
better by a museum than by the painting installation entitled
Venice Biennale – not only getting TABOU TABOO, referencing,
loans because of climate problems, variously, the origins of the
but there are other logistic and word ‘taboo’, Gaugin’s Polynesia
Masterminded by the feminist financial restrictions, and the spaces are also not easy. One can try and Freud’s Totem and Taboo
video-artist VALIE EXPORT and neutralise them with exhibition architecture, but we wanted (1913): incendiary material
and curator Silvia Eiblmayr, to avoid this, and rather have the artists create their own sense when addressing the issue of a
the Austrian Pavilion promises of space. If we have to build a box, we do it, but it is the artists’ specifically female gaze.
art that’s not afraid to assert a decision to create their own spaces. Skye Sherwin
political position. Four artists We have slightly reduced the available space in the
have been commissioned to Arsenale and instead have the Garden of the Virgins, which is very
produce exhibitions which will beautiful, at the very end, beyond where Utopia Station happened.
end up exploring radical ecology, So nobody has seen that space yet. William Forsythe is working
gender and image manipulation. in a very romantic and beautiful old storage building, and Nikhil
How real and imaginary Chopra is doing his performance installation in a tower. We have
architecture shape up to the gardens with interventions by Miranda July, Lara Favaretto and
one another is the central Koo Jeong-A – it is an open-air exhibition space. I like to push that
preoccupation of Dorit aspect of the Biennale. We are doing a parade with Arto Lindsay,
Margreiter, whose project, titled who has worked a lot with visual artists but is more a musician, a
simply Pavilion, is a surreal producer, and now wants to do this moving sculptural piece.
black-and-white film addressing
the Austrian Pavilion itself, AL: Are these performances only happening during the opening
created by Josef Hoffmann in week or will they be continuous throughout the duration?
1934, as a utopian space for art.
DB: Arto’s performance happens only once, but there will be
other performances and also poetry readings. Yet this Biennale will
not become a performance festival or a poetry slam. It is first an
exhibition, and if I say that there will be a painterly aspect to it, QEFPM>DB“
IHB OVPQRCBH—LLJMLPFQFLK—€ˆˆ‡—
people will say, ‘Oh, so you returned to painting’. But I don’t think >@OVIF@LK@>KS>P—ˆˆUˆˆ@J’ELQL“
RBBIIFKDBO¥LQL BRQKBO’LROQBPVQEB
you have to return to painting. I think painting can be a step ahead >OQFPQ
and can be an interesting tool. Thus we show works by artists C>@FKDM>DB“
who have close links to painterly tradition but are not necessarily JFIV
>@FO—Q>WFLKB—€ˆˆ†¨‡—MOLMLP>I
CLOBKF@BS>MLOBQQLPQLMP—AFDFQ>I
painters. MELQLDO>ME’Û>KA@LROQBPVQEB>OQFPQ

‡ˆ OQBSFBT
ELMGREEN & DRAGSET
Danish and Nordic Pavilions

Danish and Norwegian artist-


collaborators Elmgreen &
Dragset are renowned for their
witty plays on artworld foibles,
which take in fashion, design
and architecture. Riffing on
Donald Judd, they’ve deposited
a mock Prada store in the Texas
desert (Prada Marfa, 2005), and
during last year’s Frieze Art Fair,
they turned London’s Victoria
Miro Gallery into an abandoned
disco for Too Late, a work that
seemed to signal the end of the
art party. They’ve addressed
serious historic subjects, too,
adding a delicate sensitivity to MIDDLE EAST Jerusalem and the West Bank.
the stridently political National Palestine c/o Venice, UAE Of course, domestic troubles
Memorial for the Homosexual Pavilion, Adach (Abu Dhabi) – funding issues, conceptual
Victims of the Nazi Regime, disputes, indeed the very notion
unveiled in Berlin in 2008, Historically a Eurocentric, of identity-representation
with Kiss, a film of a gay couple colonial enterprise, the Venice through art – can make
kissing, which can be watched Biennale has more than its share undertaking a national pavilion
through a hole in the tomblike of thorny geopolitical issues problematic. It’s a shame in
concrete block of the memorial. to navigate. However loose the terms of the wider Middle East
As curators of the Danish and system of national representation that Lebanon – whose art scene
Nordic pavilions in Venice this is becoming – and having a Brit is flourishing – will not be having
year, with a show entitled The represent Germany is a sign a display. Instead, other more
Collectors, they’re bringing of this – the Biennale must stable elements are making their
together work by a broad range of nevertheless tread softly when presence known: the UAE is
artists, including Terence Koh, it comes to disputed territories. hosting a pavilion, and the Abu
Sturtevant, Maurizio Cattelan Palestine, for example, is getting Dhabi-based Adach, under the
and Tom of Finland, and its first showcase this summer, helm of Catherine David, will
arranging it within the shared after previous failed attempts. also be in town. According to
pavilions, transforming them This year Palestine c/o Venice, a UAE Pavilion commissioner
into what sounds like the ideal collateral event of the Biennale, Lamees Hamdan, the two
home for an urbane sugar daddy, promises a thorough look at projects, though separate, are
replete with pool and beautiful artmaking and the role of the ‘mutually supportive’, promoting
young hustlers lounging about. artist in this troubled region. Six art not just in the Emirates but
Rubbing intriguingly against artists, including Emily Jacir, the region as a whole. Despite
the grain, The Collectors looks winner of the Hugo Boss Prize in reports of financial collapse at
set to highlight the relationship 2008 and a Golden Lion Award home, Hamdan is probably right
between the market and the at the 2007 Biennale, are taking when she says the UAE is still
Biennale, especially in a time the bull by the horns, showing the most secure hub for art in
of recession, while opening up works addressing – to quote their the Middle East. And the work of
dialogues around the psychology fighting curator statement – both exhibiting artist Lamya Gargash
of ownership – both of art objects the ‘concept of biennales’ and offers a refreshingly dissident
and people. Skye Sherwin ‘marginality via the structural look at the UAE’s potentially
geography of the refugee camp, passé culture of architectural
and… the colonialist socio- vanity, documenting the
spatial reconfiguration of urban country’s one-star hotels.
centres’. And to ensure that Laura Allsop
territory-bound Palestinians can
see the works as well, duplicates
are being shown concurrently in
LIAM GILLICK
German Pavilion

ARTREVIEW: Details of your


project for Venice are under
wraps, but what were your first
thoughts about how to deal with
the novel situation of being the
first nonresident, non-German
artist to represent Germany?

LIAM GILLICK: I don’t think


that Steve McQueen thinks he is
representing Britain. This is one
of the strange things about this
situation. Suddenly I am in the
position of an excessive degree
of representation. Normally we
think of the German artist as
a choice, not a representation.
But one of the problems I have
to deal with is this shift from
a nomination, as it were, to a
near symbolic presence. The
effect of this has been whatever
you might correctly call the
art equivalent of mood swings.
Radically differing thoughts
about how to approach things.
JOHN WESLEY (1930–), has placed an American Doubt. Irritation. Delusion.
Fondazione Prada (at Fondazione everyman, a balding character All the things I don’t really
Giorgio Cini, Isola di San Giorgio named Dagwood, in all manner want and that get in the way of
Maggiore) of bedroom intimacies with his finding a way to be productive.
wife and a harem of geishas, Kasper König, director of the
John Wesley seems a pertinent who appear as both scornful Museum Ludwig, has been a
choice on the part of curator goddesses and slaves to his wish little critical of my confession
Germano Celant for the fulfilment. There’s also a touch of that I have found it difficult. He
Fondazione Prada’s presentation mythological orgy in the animals is from an immediate Postwar
in Venice. The octogenarian that enter the action: in one generation for whom it seems,
American painter packs more painting bulls hover over pillows; from what he says, that this is a
than 40 years of elegantly erotic in another a fleshy Donald Duck straightforward thing. In some
art, which, though long admired has sprouted a human leg. The ways this is very encouraging.
in certain circles, is overdue survey exhibition will trace However, it does not make the
a wider European audience. Wesley’s work from the 1960s up anxiety any less real.
Since an early admiring review to the present. Skye Sherwin
by Donald Judd, Wesley has AR: Perhaps it’s possible not to
been grouped under the Pop notice that one is representing
umbrella, making hyperstylised one’s country until that boundary
paintings in which colour is as is transgressed by someone else.
flat and bold as that of a Brillo But can one be productive in
box, and a hard black line recalls this situation by ignoring it, or
comic-strip cells. Yet while the instead by being hypersensitive
influence of advertising’s bright to it? Most Venice biennial
visuals is plain, his works riff presentations have nothing to do
on a singular obsession: sex. His with Venice, or the institution of
Bumsteads series, borrowing the Biennale. A hundred years
characters from the long-running
LEKBPIBV—LLAFDEQ—‡‡†—>@OVIF@LK ago the futurists wanted to
@>KS>P—„ˆU€€@J’LROQBPVOBABOF@HP
newspaper comic strip Blondie ®OBFPBO>IIBOV—BTLOH demolish Venice!

‡€ OQBSFBT
FEATURE: VENICE BIENNALE

LG: I know, I know. Well, AL: Could you explain that a bit more?
I think that you have to MAPPING THE STUDIO
remember that the curator, DB: I have been in Italy a lot recently, because I did an exhibition François Pinault Foundation,
Nicolaus Schafhausen, has a lot in Turin, and I met many interesting young Italian artists and also Punta della Dogana & Palazzo
of autonomy to make his own some who everybody already knows. I am thus very happy to Grassi
decision about the artist. In this involve Michelangelo Pistoletto, who has not been in the Biennale
case I think the critique of the for many years. His is a huge space full of mirrors that reflect Bruce Nauman will be the focus
institution of the Biennale is via each other infinitely, and at some point he will destroy them. It of not a little attention in Venice,
choosing me to try and work with is about breaking and creating very baroque forms of reflection. what with representing the
this building. One thing is for Wolfgang Tillmans is also someone I have not invented. His works US and all. Now the recently
sure. I am not going to cover the are everywhere, but surprisingly enough he has never been in refurbished Punta della Dogana,
facade or turn it into a discursive Venice or in Documenta. Besides being the key portraitist of his which will house Pinault’s
café – Tobias Rehberger will do a generation and also being seen as someone very close to a certain (growing) stellar collection, is
much better job in the newly social energy and youthful lifestyles, he has a strong interest in pure weighing in with its inaugural
functioned Italian Pavilion. image-making, the technical and the alchemical. André Cadere is show, Mapping the Studio, which
The question in the end for me another artist I am very interested in. He had this slightly parasitic takes its cue from Nauman’s 2001
has come down, surprisingly mode of operation where he would enter other peoples’ shows videowork of the same name (in
enough, to strange questions with his sticks. He walked through big exhibitions and would leave which the locus of Nauman’s
that are quite alien to my normal a striped stick, which I am sure must have irritated Daniel Buren. artistic production is presented
methodology. ‘Who speaks?’ Now his sticks have become precious objects, and they are also as an enchanted place once the
‘Who do they speak to, and under painterly and very beautiful, mathematically serious – stretching lights are out). The show, which
what restrictions or notional the history of painterly abstraction or minimal painting. However, encompasses both the Punta
freedoms?’ I realised that the if I am pushed to define it, I would probably not be able to. It is della Dogana and the Palazzo
building itself is not the problem. more of an atmospheric thing, and it is a show with a strong visual Grassi, includes work ruminating
It all comes down to modes impact – and the painterly aspect is just my attempt to say a few on the magic of the studio by a
of address. At the beginning I things about that. cluster of iconic artists, including
thought it might be possible to There is also another thread in the exhibition – work that Sigmar Polke, Robert Gober
‘turn off’ the building and then has to do with urbanistic thinking. We are showing Yona Friedman, and Cindy Sherman, as well as
get on with something else. who was active as an architect in the 1950s in Israel but then works by younger talents Adel
Maybe a science-fiction series, became more of a thinker and writer, reflecting on how we could Abdessemed and Matthew Day
which I initially titled Trick live together. Perhaps it is utopian in the most classical sense, Jackson. Laura Allsop
City, once I had gone through almost old-fashioned.
the whole Greek alphabet
combined with the word Stadt. AL: Why do you include these
But this is not a moment to deploy historical figures? Do you think they are
projection in such a speculative underrated or really relevant today?
way. I am going to keep the final
manifestation of the exhibition DB: I want to give the exhibition a
open as long as possible and make certain historical dimension without
the final decisions in the last turning it into a historical exhibition.
days before the opening. This Art is not like most of the pop music
has become my method in this industry or sports, where every three
case. A desire to suspend the years a new generation is taking over.
moment of exhibition rather than Artists do not necessarily have their
project a sequence of speculative breakthrough when they are young;
scenarios. Interview by some become very important later or
J.J. Charlesworth even retroactively. Someone like Rirkrit
Tiravanija is obviously influenced by
Gordon Matta-Clark, who becomes
important for an exhibition today
because he is actively reread.

AL: Are you figuring out what art


can be or how art can influence our
interaction?

DB: Why is it that we tend to think


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that it is either social, political, engaged
ÛKAOB>
BJLIL art or that it is about colours and the
FEATURE: VENICE BIENNALE

return to painting? It sounds almost reactionary. I do not have a zoo, within a landscape of neon
MARTIN BOYCE systematic theory, but it is interesting to think about how the vegetation, assembled from
Scottish Pavilion Russian avant-garde was really both. Rodchenko or Malevich did bleak strip lights. Frames of
not create pure platonic forms, but also socialist dreams of a future beds and benches are ripped of
Martin Boyce creates society. It sounds nostalgic if I say we have to return to such things, their innards and left as metal
mindscapes of arch middle-class because probably we cannot. But to answer your question, yes, I’m skeletons for ghostly bottoms,
paranoia or Romantic gloom very interested in art that tries to renegotiate possibilities of being even if Boyce’s world isn’t exactly
from what might otherwise together in the world and looking at objects together in situations. a place where it’s easy to kick
be the most dully utilitarian The central pavilion of the Biennale, previously known as back and relax. No Reflections,
of objects. In his early work the Italian Pavilion, will function in a very different way, and we his exhibition at this year’s
he addressed utopian-minded are building some practical facilities, like an educational space by Biennale, is taking place in
modernist design items that Massimo Bartolini, a bookstore by Rirkrit Tiravanija and a café by the fifteenth-century Palazzo
have turned into objects of Tobias Rehberger. Now, because we are not asking Tiravanija to Pisani. Amid the faded opulence,
bourgeois lust over the years: introduce social life into the white pristine space but to make a Boyce will pursue a conflation
an Eames chair wedged beneath functioning bookstore, does this mean we are closing that chapter? of nature and design, with tens
a doorhandle, for example, I hope they will work. The reality games they have been engaged of thousands of ‘dead’ paper
transformed into a totem of with are actually pushed into reality itself. leaves, concrete blocks and metal
anxiety with a simple defensive furniture giving the impression
gesture, or hung from a Calder- AL: These new spaces are not just for this one show, but are more that the ‘outside world has
like mobile, no longer practical permanent. somehow blown inside’.
furniture for all, but an eerie Skye Sherwin
art object. There are Boyce’s DB: They are not forever, but we will see how they work and
trademark ventilation grilles how the audience interacts. This has to do with the agenda of the
bearing spine-tingling warnings: current president of the Biennale, who wants to emphasise more
‘fearview’, ‘undead’, or ‘over permanent activities that will change our perception of the Venice
your shoulder’. More recently, Biennale as a whole. All the different biennials (art, architecture,
wire mesh fences have divided theatre, dance, film) together could form a multidisciplinary
people and objects, like those academy. This could be great for Venice and create synergies
found in a park, a prison or a between the artforms. I was asked to be part of this development,
and even though that does not mean
that I will have a full-time job in Venice, TERESA MARGOLLES
I will be there regularly. Mexican Pavilion

Teresa Margolles uses water to


delight, calm and horrify. The
artist has created bubbles that
float around museum foyers
enticing children to chase and
pop them. Their parents recoil in
horror, however, when they read
the labels on the walls advising
that the bubbles are created
from water that has been used
to wash corpses who came to a
violent end. Though the water
has been purified, the memory
that we imagine these molecules
might have – the bloody flesh they
have touched – implicates, soils
and disgusts. The artist has also
used sheets and clothes that once
covered corpses as dramatic yet
minimalist objects that bring her
mourning for the loss of life in
her home country to the forefront
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OLGBHQB vKPQBO—€ˆˆ…«—@LK@OBQB
>KA?O>PP—ƒˆˆUƒˆˆ@J’ Laura McLean-Ferris
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‡‚ OQBSFBT
FEATURE:

BY ORDER OF MARINA ABRAMOVIC,


VISITORS TO THE WHITWORTH GALLERY
DURING THIS SUMMER’S MANCHESTER
INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL (MIF) MUST NOT
ONLY TURN THEIR MOBILE PHONES OFF,
BUT SURRENDER THEM ENTIRELY.
words JAMES WESTCOTT

NO CALLS, NO TEXTING, NO PHOTOS and no Twittering allowed; there the audience in Manchester defies the contemporary orthodoxy of
must be no distractions from and no mediations of what visitors are making no demands upon art audiences and allowing them total free
about to witness. They must also sign a contract stating that they will interpretive reign. For many it may even be a relief to be told exactly
remain in the gallery for four hours. No one may leave. how to behave.
At this year’s MIF, Abramović, one of a tiny number of her And what will Abramović’s bootcamp-trained public see
(1970s) generation of performance artists still working in the live once inside? Obsessive, repetitive actions by the likes of Yingmei
arena, is curating a group show of 13 long-durational works by her Duan, Eunhye Hwang and Amanda Coogan, who all studied with
former students and better-known young artists such as Terence Koh Abramović at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig,
and Jordan Wolfson. In addition to the already stated contractual Germany. American artist Jamie Isenstein embedding her body into
obligations, Abramović believes that a twitchy, demanding specially made pieces of furniture or home decor. Maybe something
contemporary audience will not sacrifice its freedom and precious porcine from Irish artist Kira O’Reilly, who provoked outrage in the
time – committing four monotasking hours to watching performances UK’s moral-majority newspaper the Daily Mail recently for ‘hugging a
in which very little might happen – without some specialist training. In dead pig’ onstage – and in a public gallery, at the taxpayers’ expense!
an antechamber to the galleries, she will put visitors through a series No doubt something highly cerebral, and possibly acted out by other
of exercises meant to relax the body and hone concentration. This will people, from New York-based conceptualist Wolfson.
probably involve a lot of shaking and flailing of limbs to free up the The big question, though, is whether the public will see signs of
flow of blood, frantic rubbing of the hair to release static electricity a rejuvenation in performance art based on duration and endurance
from the brain, vocal exercises bordering on primal screaming and – the kind that Abramović and peers Chris Burden and Vito Acconci
calmer activities, such as prolonged eye contact with strangers or pioneered, but which fell out of vogue before most of the performers
wearing ear muffs and blindfolds to block out external stimuli – and at the Whitworth were even born. But Abramović has been carrying
thus reactivate the senses. the torch since the 1970s, constantly finding new ways not just to
“Life is too fast”, Abramović says. “I will try to take away the disturb audiences with extreme physical acts – such as her classic
worries of life and bring the public to a kind of empty, pure state. I want Thomas Lips (1975), in which she (while naked, of course) ate a kilo of
to make sure they are in the right condition to see the work.” Born in honey, drank a bottle of red wine, then cut a five-pointed star on her
1946 in Belgrade and having grown up in Tito’s communist Yugoslavia, belly, whipped herself and finally lay on a cross made of ice – but also
Abramović has an only semi-ironic attachment to authoritarian to create situations of almost overwhelming empathy in spaces that
gestures in her art. Her strict regulation and even indoctrination of she tries to condition with her prolonged presence.

‡† OQBSFBT
At the beginning of the 1980s, Abramović and Ulay (German
artist Frank Uwe Laysiepen, her partner in life and performance for 13
years) retreated into the Australian desert to live with Aboriginals, and
developed ideas of duration, presence and stillness that gave them
reasons to continue performing just as their peers in performance
art were turning to material-based practices. Throughout the 1980s
Abramović and Ulay embarked on a series of gruelling performances
called Nightsea Crossing, in which they sat opposite each other for
seven hours at a time locked in a static gaze. Between 1981 and 1986
they repeated this traumatic and extremely painful feat (the cramp
was almost intolerable) 90 times in 22 venues around the world,
confronting audiences with an immovable tableau vivant.
When Abramović split with Ulay in 1988, she began trying to
find ways to include audiences in the experience of endurance and
concentration rather than just confronting them with it. In a little-known
performance called Escape (1998), in a former prison in Melbourne,
members of the public were strapped onto chairs and blindfolded
by mock prison guards in an attempt at enforced meditation. In the
2002 performance House with the Ocean View, Abramović lived up
on three platforms in a New York gallery for 12 days without eating
or speaking (the audience also had to remain silent). Her sustenance
came in the form of prolonged eye contact with members of the
public and the palpable sense of empathy for her in her ordeal. The
gallery became a kind of chapel, and people returned every day and
sat there for hours at a time – myself included. It was like what they
say about fishing: the time spent there didn’t eat out of your life; it just
added to it.
Abramović’s soldier-like perseverance in performance art over
the decades has always had two aspects: one looking forward to ever-
new possibilities for the medium – her project in Manchester being
the latest attempt at this – and one looking back, fighting to enshrine
performance in the history of visual art in the twentieth century.
Seven Easy Pieces, performed over seven days in the rotunda
of New York’s Guggenheim in 2005, was Abramović’s effort to
find a solution to the problem of preserving and re-presenting the
inherently ephemeral and transient medium of performance. She re-
performed – for seven hours at a time – classic pieces by her peers,
such as Acconci’s Seedbed (1972), in which he lay under a ramp in a
New York gallery, masturbating and miked-up so that his muttering
was relayed to people walking above him, and Joseph Beuys’s How
to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), in which he slathered honey
and gold leaf over his head, held a dead hare under his arm and
silently ‘explained’ the pictures in a gallery in Düsseldorf. As her re-
performances stretched deep into the night, Abramović again created
an audience-community in the space, with a sense of shared and
sharpened awareness of the deliciously suspended present moment.
But her biggest achievement with Seven Easy Pieces was to suggest a
new way for institutions both to preserve the history of performance
art and to keep it alive, and that was to treat performances like musical
scores that can be re-performed by other artists, with sufficient
institutional backing, full permission of the original artist or their
estate and thorough curatorial guidance. “If you put performance in
this historical context”, Abramović says, “finally it might be accepted
as mainstream art. It’s a huge responsibility not to fail.”
Abramović is now preparing for a retrospective at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York in 2010, in which she will again employ
re-performance to breathe life into old work. As well as photographic
and video documentation of her work since the 1970s, carefully
selected actors and artists will actually perform it right there in the
FEATURE: MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Abramovic lived up on three platforms in a New York gallery


for 12 days without eating or speaking, her only
sustenance prolonged eye contact with members of the public

OQBSFBT ˆ
“ Life is too fast. I will try to take away the worries of life and bring
the public to a kind of empty, pure state”
FEATURE: MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Performa, the ‘visual art performance’ biennial (note the hybrid title)
directed by the performance art historian RoseLee Goldberg.
Meanwhile Abramović is continuing to focus on an
unfashionable and more elemental strain of performance art, one that
demands unadulterated and unmediated presence and a commitment
galleries, all day every day. Meanwhile, for the full three months of to duration. As our lives become ever more crowded with content,
the exhibition (though not at night), Abramović herself will inhabit with endless options and with ways of micromanaging our time and
a series of platforms fixed high up on one of the enormous walls of exploiting it to the full, this might be just the moment that artists and
MoMA’s towering atrium. audiences get interested in giving it up completely and seeing what
The retrospective, pointedly called The Artist Is Present, is happens. Abramović is setting up a foundation in upstate New York
curated by Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA’s new department that will be devoted to such work. To see if performance will come full
of media and performance art, which deals with live performance as circle and return to its fundaments of time and presence, Abramović
well as sound and video. Partly as a result of ongoing symposia among will just have to wait. Something she’s pretty good at.
artists, historians and curators, in which Abramović is a major presence,
the department recently embarked on a series of exhibitions that Marina Abramović Presents… will take place from 3 to 19 July at the
attempt to give the material history of performance its due. The cage Whitworth Art Gallery as part of the Manchester International
that Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh lived in – without Festival. Abramović will receive an award at the Florence Biennale,
speaking, reading or, indeed, doing anything at all – for one year, from 5–13 December, and will have a retrospective, The Artist Is Present, at
30 September 1978 to 29 September 1979, was recently on display MoMA, New York, in 2010
at MoMA. Hsieh undertook a series of such One Year Performances
through the 1980s – including never going indoors for one year, and
punching a time clock every hour for one year. Recognising him as the
undisputed king of endurance, Abramović is dedicating her exhibition WORKS
(IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE)
in Manchester to Hsieh.
While Abramović’s work to gain institutional acceptance for Marina Abramović, Thomas Lips, 1975, in Seven Easy Pieces, Guggenheim, New York, 2005.
Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
the slippery genre of performance art has had impressive results, her
influence on artists working in the live arena today is still unresolved. Melati Suryodarmo, Father I’m Ready, 2006, lambda print on Kodak Endura matt photo paper/Aludibond,
60 x 90 cm, edition of 7. © the artist
Outside of Manchester this summer, there aren’t many artists around
who seek to emulate her work with long duration, and with the Marina Abramović performing Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 1965, in Seven Easy
Pieces, Guggenheim, New York, 2005. Photo: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
necessary ferocious concentration and immediate physical encounters
– the fundamental ingredients of Abramović’s classical conception of Jamie Isenstein, Armchair, 2006, mixed media, dimensions variable.
Courtesy Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin
performance art. It’s as if Abramović and her generation achieved
everything possible with their bodies, doing it all so you didn’t have Yingmei Duan, Yingmei in Wonderland, 2008, performance installation from Positionen 1970-2008, Darmstadt.
Photo: Ursula Teicher-Maier
to. Intensive and legible physical commitment has not been a core
feature of art in the live arena at least since the early 1990s, when Nico Vascellari, Cuckoo (Vestizione), 2008, performance still. Photo: Ale Zuek Simonetti.
Courtesy Monitor Gallery, Rome
relational aesthetics, for example, might ask nothing more demanding
of artists and their audiences than to sit around and have a meal. More Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View, 2002. Photo: Steven P. Harris.
Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
widespread now among performance artists (though the title hardly
fits any more) are activities that blend photography, video, music, Marina Abramović performing The Conditioning, first action of Gina Pane’s Self-Portrait(s), 1973, in Seven Easy
Pieces, Guggenheim, New York, 2005. Photos: Attilio Maranzano. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
dance, theatre (or at least character acting) or social encounters into
some kind of live situation. The presence of the artists themselves Marina Abramović, Escape, 1998. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

might not matter at all. This is the flourishing mode of live art that we’re
likely to see more of this November in New York in the third edition of

OQBSFBT ˆ
1st - 4th October 2009
NewcastleGateshead The Sage Gateshead
June 9–14, 2009
Open Hours
Art Fair
Tuesday to Saturday 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Sunday 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Opening Reception
Monday, June 8
5 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Burgweg 15, CH-4058 Basel
T +41 61 692 20 21
info@liste.ch, www.liste.ch
A project in the
workshop community Warteck pp

64 Galleries from 24 Countries new at LISTE*


Austria: Andreas Huber, Vienna. Layr Wuestenhagen, Vienna. Mezzanin, Vienna Belgium:
*Office Baroque, Antwerp Brazil: *A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro Czech Republic: hunt
kastner, Prague Denmark: Christina Wilson, Copenhagen France: Chez Valentin, Paris. Cortex
Athletico, Bordeaux. *Lucile Corty, Paris. Cosmic, Paris. schleicher+lange, Paris Germany:
*Circus, Berlin. *Croy Nielsen, Berlin. *Tanya Leighton, Berlin. Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt.
Peres Projects, Berlin/Los Angeles. schnittraum/lutz becker, Cologne. Micky Schubert, Berlin.
*Sommer & Kohl, Berlin. Van Horn, Dusseldorf. Michael Wiesehöfer, Cologne Great Britain:
Ancient & Modern, London. Laura Bartlett, London. Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. Dicksmith, London.
doggerfisher, Edinburgh. Carl Freedman, London. IBID Projects, London Greece: *Loraini
Alimantiri Gazonrouge, Athens. The Breeder, Athens Holland: *Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam.
Diana Stigter, Amsterdam. Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam. Zinger, Amsterdam Hungary:
*Kisterem, Budapest Italy: Klerkx, Milano. Francesca Minini, Milano. Monitor, Rome Japan:
hiromiyoshii, Tokyo. magical Artroom, Tokyo Lithuania: *Tulips & Roses, Vilnius Mexico:
Proyectos Monclova, Mexico D.F. Myto, Mexico D.F New Zealand: Michael Lett, Auckland
Norway: *Lautom, Oslo Poland: lokal 30, Warsaw Romania: *Andreiana Mihail, Bucharest.
Plan B, Cluj/Berlin Spain: NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona Sweden: Elastic, Malmö Switzer-
land: *BolteLang, Zurich. Evergreene, Geneva. Freymond-Guth, Zurich. Groeflin Maag, Zurich For further information:
Turkey: Rodeo, Istanbul USA: *Dispatch, New York. Foxy Production, New York. *James
Fuentes, New York. *Harris Lieberman, New York. David Kordansky, Los Angeles. Mesler&Hug, e: info@ngartfair.com www.thesagegateshead.org
Los Angeles. Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles. Wallspace, New York

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ArtReview 119

Reviews June Part 1.indd 119 5/5/09 11:14:57


REVIEWS:

UK
Ashley Bickerton White Cube Hoxton Square, London
Recent Wurg 3 April – 9 May

Yes, ‘recent wurg’. What? I don’t know, maybe he has a speech impediment. Yes, I’m googling it
now. OK, ‘Camp Wurg’ is one of the homes of the Dustbelcher ogres in World of Warcraft.
On the face of it, that doesn’t seem very helpful, but I dare to think that Bickerton might
like that. The Warcraft reference, not the unhelpfulness (although who knows?). Because there’s
certainly something more than a little ogre-like about the inhabitants of the works on show here.
Particularly the sculpture Flower Pot (all works 2009), in which four Shrek-heads are partially
submerged in a pot of resin ‘water’, a variety of brightly coloured flowering plants sprouting
Medusa-like from their heads and modern rubbish (food wrappers, plastic bottles, etc) floating
around them in the tank. The funny thing about it is that, while the work on show here tackles the
themes of money (coins decorate the frames of many of Bickerton’s paintings), sex, power, nature
and nurture, and their good and bad sides, Bickerton doesn’t appear preachy; there’s a degree of
ambivalence in his work that makes you think he’s having too much fun to be truly sermonising.
To use an analogy from the kind of popular culture into which Bickerton’s work so seamlessly fits,
while there may be a side of him that’s a bit Lisa Simpson campaigning to save the planet, there’s
another that’s tyrant industrialist Mr Burns arguing that a three-eyed fish produced as a result
of the effluent leached from a nuclear power station is ‘evolution’. Perhaps this is best summed
up in a pair of paintings: The Alley, which depicts some form of sordid boys’ night out (ahhh…
‘wurg’ – perhaps he was drunk?), and Bed, a bunch of dreamy naked females beatifically asleep
on a bed littered with money. Although Kid, an asexual tropical Marilyn Manson rendered in a
vaguely Gaugin-esque manner, might make the point just as well.
Talking of pot and plants, as I was earlier, there’s no denying that the work on show here
is reminiscent of the kind of ‘surf culture’ you expect to find gracing the walls of an Amsterdam
coffee shop, next to a series of plastic bongs and Bob Marley posters. But – amazingly – that
doesn’t really matter. With carved Indonesian-style frames (which have the look of some sort
of postindustrial handicraft driftwood) surrounding almost frighteningly colourful oil-painted
digital prints that seem to articulate some kind of strange future island vernacular (Bickerton lives
in Bali) that sci-fi comic 2000 AD’s green-skinned editor Tharg the Mighty might be familiar with
from holidays back home on Quaxxann. And even if Tharg means nothing to you, it’s important
to note that there’s a study of both the alien and of alienation going on here, presented across
the paintings, via the ‘adventures’ of a blue man clad in a Picasso-style striped shirt, as some sort
of Hogarthian narrative. Albeit not necessarily a moral one.
I’m too young to remember Bickerton’s first coming, as part of the Neo-Geo movement
during the mid-1980s, but I hope he’s in line for a second. The enduring thought on leaving this
show was ‘Why don’t more people make crazy stuff like this?’ Back in the 1970s music reviewers
could get away with writing album reviews that consisted of phrases like “Fuck me” and very
little else, collect their paycheques and buy more drugs. There’s something about Bickerton’s
work that makes me wish that contemporary art reviewers could take the same approach (of
course minus the drugs, OF COURSE), because in this instance, seeing a weird blue man in Red
Scooter puttering along a beachfront in a scooter-cum-palanquin with his multicoloured family,
bongos and a few coconuts strapped on board, “fuck me” might say it best. Mark Rappolt

Red Scooter, 2009, oil and acrylic paint and digital print on
archival canvas in carved wood artist frame, inlaid with coconut,
mother of pearl and coins, 224 x 183 x 20 cm (incl. frame).
Photo: Koes Kanardi. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London

120 ArtReview

Reviews June Part 1.indd 120 7/5/09 09:59:51


Reviews June Part 1.indd 121 5/5/09 11:22:40
reviews: UK

Andrei Molodkin Orel Art UK, London


Liquid Modernity 23 April – 12 June

This may be Andrei Molodkin’s first solo show in London, but he comes here with a reputation. Looking like a member of
Bauhaus (the band, not the school) who’s wandered into a time machine and found himself 20 years in the future, the Russian
artist arrives surrounded by suitably Gothic tales of his plans to render bodies for their oil and to buy blood ‘on the black
market’ (according to the Evening Standard’s shocktastic trailer for this show) to mix with the oil that will fill his version of the
Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 220–190 BC ) at the Russian Pavilion in this summer’s Venice Biennale. So when you enter
this exhibition and find a slew of explanatory wall text explaining how he’s going to fuck with ‘the system’, and spelling out
(very precisely) the resonance his work has with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), you can start to think that it might not be
just Molodkin’s trademark material – oil (used to fill various clear acrylic structures) – that’s a bit crude.
The centrepiece of this show, Untitled (all works 2009), consists of two cagelike cubes, one light (electric, Dan Flavin-
esque) and one dark (with oil drooled into a plastic grid from a number of barrels), and a hissing soundtrack of the compressors
and pumps that keep the flow flowing. There it all is, two cages of capitalist exchange, the transformation of darkness into
light, an aesthetic celebration of their oppositional qualities and a questioning of modernist visions of progress, advancement,
purity and utopia. Like Molodkin’s work as a whole, it seems to be both celebrating and critiquing the lifeblood-like power of
oil. Not least because the ‘refinement’ of crude, messy oil into controlled, valuable art, puts art’s transformative properties in
much the same bracket as the energy system and commodities market.
Around the corner is Das Kapital, the title of Marx’s famous book, spelled out (three times) in acrylic and half-filled with
oil. Off you trot to muse over empty words, oil as capital, oil as the only thing that gives the insubstantial words any substance,
etc, etc. But the feeling you’re left with is the fact that recent events such as, say, the Iraq War or Russia and Ukraine’s ongoing
gas disputes are more powerful and more shocking demonstrations of the point Molodkin’s trying to make. That he’s tackling
something so real, so blatant and so obvious that it needs no metaphorical description to bring it’s unniceties to our attention.
Mark Rappolt

Untitled, 2009, fluorescent tubes


and acrylic tubes filled with
crude oil, 202 x 188 x 139 cm.
Courtesy Orel Art UK, London

122 ArtReview

Reviews June last spread.indd 122 5/5/09 14:48:29


reviews: UK

Liliane Lijn, The Power Game, 1974.


Photo: Cliff Evans. Courtesy the
artist and Riflemaker Gallery, London

The early conceptual art of the late


1960s and the 70s was anything but
a homogeneous phenomenon. Flat
Time House in Southeast London,
home of the late John Latham, is
now dedicated to contextualising the
too-often marginalised oeuvre of this
maverick philosopher-artist. Inside
Flat Time House, London
Out Show, subtitled Some performed
sculpture made in London 1968–74, Inside Outside Show 16 April – 10 May
revisits a ‘conceptual’ art that sought
to rethink the terms of the art object
beyond the narrow precepts of a then-still-dominant modernist formalism, and assembles work by Latham with that of a
younger group of artists who emerged in the early 1970s – work by Bruce McLean, Barry Flanagan and Liliane Lijn, along
with a film about the groundbreaking A Course, which ran at St Martins School of Art between 1969 and 1973, where Latham
had previously taught.
Most striking is Latham’s Sculpture of the First Second of the Year 1973 (1973), a corridor divided by successive white
curtains; on either side, in the spaces between the curtains, are opposing, identical text-cards. The lefthand card asks, ‘So
what can you say to be going on?’, while the righthand one responds, ‘So what can you say to have gone on?’ This repeats as
one advances through the curtains, and through the unchanging repetition you begin to notice how the experience of static
physical space is modulated not only by our movement in time, but by our perception of time as a changing event; nothing
much is ‘going on’ except our reading of the repeating questions of what is going on; the piece brilliantly materialises Latham’s
lifelong metaphysical investigation of reality as ‘event’ rather than object matter.
Latham’s theoretical preoccupations presaged the development of other text and event-based approaches to
artmaking, and the other works operate in this space: Bruce McLean’s comic photo-sequence Pose Work for Plinths (1970)
has the artist ludicrously propping himself up or draping himself on three white plinths. As with Barry Flanagan’s photo
series Grass (1967–8), which purports to document patches of Hampstead Heath where couples have been cavorting, it is
the nature of what counts as ‘sculpture’ which is here thrown into question, using performance and time-based strategies to
dissolve the narrow terms of attention prescribed in modernist sculpture.
The two videos, meanwhile, turn on the encounter between text and society: Lijn’s The Power Game (1974) records
the performance of an invented card game in which words are played against each other based on how ‘powerful’ they seem.
Performed during a festival in support of Chilean democracy, The Power Game satirises the anything-but-neutral function of
language as a tool of ideology and propaganda. And the remarkable The Locked Room (1972) documents the students of the
A Course as they are let into the studio, to be confronted with strict instructions on how to proceed: no speaking, no drawing,
no leaving the studio space except to fetch tools to work on the block of polystyrene each is given to work with. It’s queasily
sadistic and, now, geekishly retro – like watching Big Brother crossed with an Open University broadcast. But the course was
in fact much loved by its students, the arbitrary and explicit rules helping to reveal the covert ideology behind the ‘common
sense’ of the traditional artschool system. Today, with conceptual art providing the easy license of so much contemporary
work, it’s important to be reminded of a moment when that breadth still had to be fought for. J.J. Charlesworth

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Merlin Carpenter Simon Lee Gallery, London


The Opening 1 – 25 April

Merlin Carpenter’s wheeze of arriving at his own private view, mingling with the guests, then pulling out a thick brush and a
pot of black paint and dashing off mardy text paintings on a series of installed blank canvases has been repeated too many
times to be considered laudably seat-of-the-pants. Instead, with every incarnation, The Opening seems to be sucked further
into its hollow core. This is a performance based on well-rehearsed clichés and truisms – about artworld duplicity, the fact that
every big shot is really only a catamite to the Man. You go to one of Carpenter’s Opening shows expecting bad language,
and he doesn’t disappoint, the word ‘cunts’ scrawled provocatively on the canvas nearest the gallery window. Next up is the
obligatory dig at whichever dealer he happens to be showing with – in this instance ‘Simon Lee utter swine’ (which seems
rather less barbed than ‘Relax, it’s only a crap Reena Spaulings show’, produced for his New York gallery in 2007). Finally,
there’s bound to be some badinage about the worlds of art and high finance, served here by the teenager-level political
insight ‘Banks are bad’.
Of course what Carpenter’s canvases, like every other painting in every other gallery, are really saying is ‘Please buy
me’, and he highlights the issue by subtitling these works Intrinsic Value. His joke about bad banks, even in these straitened
times, gains traction from the fact that antagonism is as much a come-on in the artworld as sycophancy – in fact the two
are often hard to tell apart. This is a show, then, that grimaces at the whole sordid, hypocritical business of producing, selling
and collecting art, the stereotype of the artist-genius and – since Carpenter seems forever branded an ex-assistant of
Martin Kippenberger – the terrible burden of influence. And if you think such a position lets the viewer off the hook, just try
pondering how these works fit into a painterly tradition, or the economy of Carpenter’s brushwork, or that these are really
rather nice stretchers covered with excellent linen. It’s a blisteringly quick ride to pseud’s corner.
What soon irks is the lack of panache, mischief or fun in evidence. That Carpenter feels ensnared by the system is
one thing; that he is unable to find much of a direction for his bad-boy routine smacks of imaginative paucity on his part and
increasing indulgence on that of his dealers. How safe it all seems, and condescending. Scrawled on the last painting you
come to is the phrase ‘Stop art’. Carpenter dropped his brush before finishing the final ‘t’, but of course that’s all part of the
pose. Carpenter can’t go on, he’ll go on. Like the good boy he really is. Martin Coomer
The Opening, 2009
(installation view).
Courtesy Simon Lee
Gallery, London

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Pflanze, 2008–9, mixed


media, 52 x 32 x 33 cm.
Courtesy Vilma Gold,
London

Synonymous with a kind of suburban petit-bourgeois


homemaking, garden sculptures are popular items at
the huge flea markets set up at the German-Polish
border. They come in all sizes and shapes: busts, putti,
fantastical beasts, Greek goddesses and column
capitals. These symbols of social ambition become
in Thomas Helbig’s hands an extraordinary formal
lexicon, one that provides the basis of his sculptural
practice. The artist tears apart the garden ornaments
and reconfigures their pieces as monstrous creations at
great odds with the sense of the idyllic and the pastoral
to which they once alluded, albeit crudely. In Eden (all
works 2008–9) a beheaded torso emerges from an
upright fish body, the fin of which has been replaced by
a dangling cobra head. In Pflanze, a chubby leg rides
on thick cloth folds; all the elements are glued together
by magnificent, plastic-foam faeces blooming from
underneath. There is no bucolic otherworld anymore,
just grotesque heaps of broken aspirations.
Whatever these hollow morsels may have
signified in the past is drawn out by Helbig’s frenetic
compilation. In his sculptures, representation collapses.
Figurative junk gives birth to biomorphic abstraction;
composition takes over and components act as
expressive brushstrokes. In Eva, the precarious balance
of an upside-down lock of hair unsettles the sturdy base
of a baroque bust, pulling the whole sculpture upward.
All the sculptures are stained with glossy black lacquer,
looking burnt, as if the artist had polished off his works
with a blowtorch. These pieces encapsulate a feeling
of anger and violence verging on the sadistic, but that
Thomas Helbig doesn’t prevent a certain sense of beauty seeping
Vilma Gold, London through. In Helbig’s practice, kitsch is redeemed by
Viper in Bosom 22 March – 17 May its very destruction.
The large series of paintings on wood that
completes the exhibition is more muted in tone, and
forms a quiet counterpoint to the convoluted sculptural assemblages. Executed on found framed panels, these works’ simple
shapes have the appeasing, almost meditation-inducing quality of Abstract Expressionism’s best examples, their pale colour
fields embracing the spiritual like a Newman or a Motherwell. Yet as in Helbig’s sculptures, the figurative is never far away. In
Hinterglasbild a pair of blue eyes surfaces from the background, nodding at the portrait the painting may have been. Prequel’s
white circle is a pallid hole sucking in the dark winged figure of an absurd cable car. In Braunesfenster an oblong silhouette
evokes a sea mammal cruising on a milky ocean.
Helbig’s work calls on simple, almost primal feelings: peacefulness, worry, anger. His works on paper, all entitled Viper
in Bosom, punctuate the installation like an angst-ridden chorus. The arrangements of misty graphite shapes have something
of the automatic drawing, but it’s hard to believe that their subtle composition is owed only to chance. These are made-to-be-
indecipherable pictograms. Their discreet presence, as well as their title, reinforces the unease emanating from the sculptures.
Yet, as in most of Helbig’s production, the Viper in Bosom drawings hint at more than they reveal: the exhibition is a giant-size
Rorschach test, mirroring visitors’ own projections. Coline Milliard

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John Strutton’s charged offerings can make the most strident political poster appear a bit thin on commitment. He employs
modes of protest – the badge, campaign handout, placard and stage – to give form to a sputtering, hybridised stream
of sketchbook doodles and zine-style commentary on topics as diverse as Specials lyrics and corn-dolly mythology.
Autobiographical details, the nutter’s rant and Wiki whispers all appear to play a part in this characteristically dense display
of harsh, funny and oddly desirable art objects and artefacts at Domo Baal. It’s a ludicrously inconclusive, fortuitously topical
spectacle – bristling with pre-demo energy around the time of the G-20 summit in London this spring – which, over and
above the inferences to class struggles and failed ideologies, most powerfully describes the tortuous process of mobilising
heart and mind to express belief.
‘Offerings’ might sound a bit vague, but is an entirely suitable word to describe what Strutton makes, customises,
writes and sings about, for there is a totemic quality to his perhaps defensively peekaboo arrangement of this stuff as art: a
clusterfuck assembly of ideas punctuated by acts of homage and irreverence to the great, the evil and the overlooked. This
particular outing of Strutton’s developing collection of paintings, customised guitars and Dad’s Army jumble comes with a
day-of-reckoning-type theme. The exhibition’s title, Donderslag, translates from the Dutch as ‘thunderclap’ and refers to a
1654 gunpowder explosion that destroyed most of Delft – at the time home to many of the Golden Age painters. The notion
of a cull of cultural clutter might sit oddly with this one-man museum, but the sentiment of reception to change bleeds into
the surrounding urban landscape like alcopops over a dry student
population.
John Strutton Domo Baal, London Watercolours on stilts, propped in groups against the walls,
dominate the main gallery – not unified but inextricably linked by
Donderslag 27 March – 9 May
the same graphic, painterly hand. It is often easier to recognise
particular Strutton stylistics (Cold War typography, Blake album-
cover figuration) than place the motley crew of real and fictional
characters they describe: from Colonel Sanders to ‘Cobby Bobbler
the Potato Bomber’. Painted drumskins cover an entire wall like
giant badges pledging allegiance to God knows what. It might be
bat dentists, for all the urgent symbology suggests, but the group
feels rather real and relevant. The wooden objects in the fireplace
underneath are actually hat lasts nicked from the Kangol factory
that unceremoniously dispensed with Strutton’s father’s services
after 40 years’ hard graft.
I wonder how the space next door will appear without
the drum kit and instruments left over from the private-view
performance of Strutton’s band Arthur Brick – a bit like the token
museological room always slotted into the posthumous artist-
survey, perhaps. The success, however, of his infectious, decidedly
masculine iconography lies in the palpable devotion to the magpie
randomness of web browsing and channel hopping, or to the
associative malady of a day’s events. One is left with a strong sense
of symptom over message – despite the shouty schoolboy laments
and cheeky customisation of history’s menu – as a result of not always
being able to tune in to the vast array of channels on Strutton’s pop-
cultural dial. Rebecca Geldard

Drumskins, 2008–, watercolour and


acrylic on drumskin. Courtesy
the artist and Domo Baal, London

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Modern Art Oxford


Transmission Interrupted 18 April – 21 June

Political art so often shouts too loudly. Like most political poems, it knows where it’s going long
before it gets there, so there is no element of real surprise or genuine imaginative engagement.
This choice new group show at Modern Art Oxford, which exhibits works by 14 young artists from
around the world, is quiet and nuanced by comparison. This is political art as it should be made,
wheedlingly purposeful, skilful, quietly memorable.
Take Timeline: Romanian Culture from 500BC Until Today (1997–) by Lia Perjovschi, for
example. This piece runs riot around the walls of one of the first-floor galleries, a kind of crazy,
seething mass of scribbled notations on 40 sheets of paper, randomly placed photographs and
incomprehensible crowdings-in of information. It makes you laugh out loud to see it, because it
mocks the kinds of absurdities that historians and cultural commentators indulge in all the time,
the rapid, pat analysis of the complexities of national history. Another equally engaging piece is an
assemblage by Michael Rakowitz of objects displayed on a long, curving table called The Invisible
Enemy Should Not Exist (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series) (2007). Rakowitz has remade a selection
from the thousands of objects that went missing – and remain missing – from the National Museum
of Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Except that he has made them out of trash – Middle Eastern product
packaging, sheets of newspapers, glue. They are all solemnly displayed chronologically, as they
might be in the British Museum. They are a powerful reminder of absent, priceless things, remade
out of rubbish.
We impose meanings from outside when we deal with cultures other than our own. What
do we make of Mircea Cantor’s Monument for the End of the World (2006)? Once again, this piece
works its way with us through humour. A tabletop display shows us what resembles a scale model of
something that looks somewhat akin to Machu Picchu. Wooden blocks stand in for built structures
– yes, it is a kind of scale model. Tiers of steps ascend to nothing more meaningful than a wind
chime gently stirring in the breeze, and suspended in the air by the arm of a crane. It has all the
trappings, and all the strange atmosphere, of a sequestered place of hidden ritual, but its meaning is
completely opaque to us, if not absurd. Once again, we are forced to stand on the outside and look
in, abandoning our clever games of cultural appropriation even before we begin.
Downstairs, one entire gallery
is occupied by the giant hulk of a
blackened, burnt-out car – except that
it has been made in terracotta by Adel
Abdessemed. This object, which out in
the street would create a frisson of fear,
has been tamed into a monumental
piece for a museum of modern art.
Some trace of a street war has been
pleasingly aestheticised. No one need
worry any more. Michael Glover

Jem Cohen, NYC Weights and Measures,


2006, film still. Courtesy the artist

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USA
New Museum, New York
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus 4 April – 5 July

If the New Museum’s The Generational: Younger Than Jesus were to have a theme song, it would have to be
borrowed from the Monkees. No one familiar with those mock-ominous opening bars and accompanying
lyrics could fail to hum “Here we come…” when confronted by an exhibition dedicated to nothing more than the
presentation of an international array of artists who had to meet only one selection criterion: knowing how to
operate an iPod (that is, being thirty-three years old or younger). The purpose, as the show’s title announces, is
to frame a ‘generation’, and in particular, the one that takes the suffix ‘Y’. As the curators argue, up till now these
kids have been regarded by savvy marketers (often Generation Y members themselves) as nothing more than
a prized consumer demographic. Now, The Generational states, it’s time to see what the kids can do.
Too often such generational thinking involves drawing lines in the sand that divide ‘them’ (warmongers)
from ‘us’ (innocents) – remember the 1960s mantra: ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’. Thankfully, then, what one
does not see in The Generational are explicit images of war and strife, even though most of the 50 included
artists only began making art in earnest during the past decade, which, we barely need reminding, has been
marred by terrible acts of war and violence. Some works hint at this violence, of course, but only obliquely.
Stephen G. Rhodes’s sculptural installation Interregnum Repetition Restoration (Upholstered) (2008) subjects
the trappings of the office of the US presidency to a type of emasculating deflation (note the flaccid flagpoles).
Stanca (2006), a 17-second video by Ciprian Muresan (one of the more promising artists in the exhibition)
shows nothing more than a young boy pulling his index finger across his throat. Is the gesture meant for us? Or
does he mean it for another, as if ordering a hit? It is impossible to know.
One could argue that the lack of overt political or activist statements should be credited to the curators,
who likely pruned such adolescent sproutings from their selections. But Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory,
the listing of 500 artists (compiled by a network of 150 curators, critics and educators) from which the 50
elect were ultimately chosen, reveals that this generation really is interested only in matters mostly local to its
own ethno- and techno-cultural concerns. Between the exhibition and the directory, I’m certain the latter will
prove to be the more enduring public offering, not only because it will become the young artist’s credential,
but also because it distils the larger cross-section of contemporary artists consumed by their own unremitting
contemporaneity.
How then to approach the many artists who forge so many returns – some self-consciously, some not – to
the strategies of previous generations? Tauba Auerbach is certainly one of the better artists working today, but
in the context of The Generational, I feel forced to ask whether her easy melding of Lawrence Weiner, Bridget
Riley and ‘the Pictures Generation’ is taking their lessons in a new direction or simply one more example of the
mashup – currently accepted without reflection as our time’s self-justifying aesthetic ‘move’. The same second-
guessing goes for LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of herself and her family, which, though strong, perhaps
do nothing more than recast Nan Goldin through the lens of race and class. Many others artists, such as Kitty
Kraus (minimalist lightboxes), Adriana Lara (discarded banana peel as critical intervention) and Elad Lassry
(Richard Prince-style photographic appropriations) simply confuse quotation and technique for imagination.
Other artists do move in new directions, and here I have to mention Marc Essen, at the age of twenty-
three one of the youngest artists in the show, and likely the most technically astute: Essen’s contribution to
Younger Than Jesus is a simple videogame, Flywrench (2007), which recalls early favourites such as Asteroids
(1979) and Battlezone (1980). It’s hard to explain the feeling of playing a videogame in a museum, though it’s
much less of an affront than one might suspect. I’m tempted to see it as equivalent to that moment when
Warhol picked up a Super 8 camera and began shooting film, an act which both set Warhol apart from his
contemporaries and opened up new horizons for those who would come later. It’s a simple gesture, but one
with serious repercussions, and so, like Warhol, Essen may belong to generations yet to come.
Jonathan T.D. Neil
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, 2009
(installation view). Photo: Benoit Pailley.
Courtesy New Museum, New York

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Those who miss the Studio Museum’s survey of Kalup Linzy’s work over the past
seven years could do worse than browse his videos on YouTube. They’ll miss the
comprehensiveness of If It Don’t Fit, the first museum show devoted to the thirty-
one-year-old African-American video artist and performer, but they’ll catch
instalments of one of his largest endeavours, Da Churen (2003–5), a spoof of
a black family melodrama. They’ll also see various parts of his pop video series,
SweetBerry Sonnet (2008), including Asshole, which is performed by one of his
drag personas, Taiwan, who fouls the vanilla sentiment of chart soul with her coarse
black street slang (“Asshole! Asshole! Whhhyyy did you do this to meeeeee!”);
and Chewing Gum, in which Linzy animates a multitude of personae, and which,
like a lot of his efforts in the music video line, maybe isn’t as parodic as it first seems.
Glancing over all this, they’ll notice that, having already scored appearances at the
Kitchen and MoMA in New York, and with a documentary forthcoming from the
Art Production Fund, Linzy is making headway.
It’ll feel about right catching up on Linzy on YouTube, since a lot of his work is
reminiscent of that web-genre of the lip-synced cover-song video. As a boy, Linzy
passed through church choirs in Florida, soon growing his talent into party shtick
for family and friends; the next thing was inevitably some species of performance,
but what? It would be interesting to know if he contemplated the cabaret drag
scene, as the route he took, carrying his performing through art college and into
the galleries, seems like a journey through hostile territory. Film and video may
have broadened the feel of what is deemed valid in a gallery, yet still, those works
which do find their way inside conform to a type: they contribute to the amorphous,
quasi-academic chatter that lends art its status, and/or they encourage certain
forms of attention. The show’s curator, Thomas J. Lax, supplies a good essay in the
catalogue, yet one isn’t convinced that Linzy can carry (or that he even wants to) all
the theoretical baggage Lax ascribes to
him. And one tends to drink in Linzy’s
spoofs with distracted pleasure, not Kalup Linzy Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
sharpened concentration. Often Linzy
simply comes over as a performer with
If It Don’t Fit 2 April – 28 June
a performer’s failings – a dogged belief
that he can play any role whatsoever,
and some weak jokes (eg, his retooling
of Otis Reddings (Sittin’ on) The Dock
of the Bay, 1968, to create Edge of My
Couch, 2008). Just as often, however,
he balances his performances so finely
between parody and sincerity; and
the unruly sexuality of his personae
so overpowers the cardboard roles he
finds for them; and indeed the presence
of soaps and pop videos feels so fresh
in the galleries… that Linzy looks – as
he might put it himself – like one red
hot mama. Morgan Falconer

Conversations wit de Churen III:


Da Young and Da Mess, 2005, digital
video, colour, sound, 16 min 56 sec,
edition of 5. Courtesy Studio Museum
in Harlem, New York

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Tacita Dean Marian Goodman Gallery, New York


2–29 April

Urdolmen II, 2009,


blackboard paint,
fibre-based print,
224 x 446 cm.
© the artist.
Courtesy Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York & Paris

Tacita Dean has always dealt with imponderables that resist translation into word and image, like faith, memory and longing.
Here she turns to an arc of associative Romanticism running through German culture, from Goethe to Joseph Beuys and
W.G. Sebald.
Goethe is evoked in Fernweh (2008) – the title references Goethe’s concept of longing for the distant and exotic
– an enormous photogravure depicting a fantastic landscape of karsts and sand dunes based, in part, on rock formations
described in his Italian Journey (1816–7). Beuys’s spirit appears in the film Darmstädter Werkblock (2007), which examines the
tattered burlap and stained carpet, now slated for replacement, in the seven galleries that house and give their name to his
magnum opus in the Hessisches Landesmuseum. (For copyright reasons, Dean was forbidden to film the installation itself.)
Sebald lurks behind Michael Hamburger (2007), a film about a poet and apple farmer who appears in his book The Rings of
Saturn (1998).
An intricate web of allusions connects these works. Where wall and floor stand in for Beuys’s sculpture and, in their
shabbiness, for the passage of time, Hamburger’s loving descriptions of the skins and flavours of the heirloom fruit he raises in
his Suffolk garden become a meditation on history – including his own as a refugee from Nazi Germany – nature, continuity
and innovation. Fernweh is scrawled with the names of rock clusters like the Devil’s Toes and God’s Fingers, suggesting the
mythic power landscape exercises on the imagination, a mystique perverted in more recent German history.
Dean’s method of spinning the observation of small details into complex associations resembles Sebald’s, much as her
finding mystery in the ordinary reflects Beuys’s aesthetic. The dates 1787 and 2008, also written onto Fernweh, refer to the
years Goethe wrote, and Dean read, his text. Such parallels suggest that these pieces are, for Dean, both considerations of
her art and homages to her masters. But the autobiographical cuts deeper: Fernweh also bears a dedication to her son, and it
is difficult not to think of the natural formations she highlights in terms of the rheumatoid arthritis she suffers, especially as she
has drawn hands and feet in the past. Her exploration of time and decay, and her keen attention to details like Hamburger’s
wrinkled skin and the faded burlap in Darmstadt seem, then, to bespeak a sensitivity derived from deeply private and complex
experience.
Dean’s allusions can be obtuse, and several pieces in the show – three large, overpainted photographs of dolmen
– have a compositional stolidness to match. A series of nineteenth-century photographs of gnarled trees – also overpainted –
betray a deadening preciosity. In contrast, her films are so visually rich and their composition so perfect that they pull meaning
from the ordinary and transform the deeply personal into the universal as only the greatest poetry can. Joshua Mack

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Nathaniel Mellors Lombard-Freid Projects, New York


Giantbum 17 April – 16 May

The mainstream British press could hardly have dreamed up a better emblem of its problems with the Tate Triennial than
Nathaniel Mellors’s animatronic heads, a bug-eyed, bloodless trio prone to chanting and singing of liberty and escape: all
language games and mock-seriousness, hiding much and (supposedly) signifying nothing. Yet given that Mellors’s practice
considers no less volatile an art than rhetoric, and that his heads share the visage of the born-again, fear-mongering Father
from his multimedia installation Giantbum, one could also take the conservative response as a sobering justification for his
preoccupations. This irony has surely not, at the very least, been lost upon the wry Mr Mellors.
The British artist has pared down Giantbum for his first US solo exhibition, at Lombard-Freid. Gone is the triennial’s
carpeted, coiled structure that eased viewers from one stage to the next, like bits of digested refuse through an intestinal tract.
In its place is a sparse main-gallery installation – of two projected performances and the chorus of the heads – that seems
more budgetarily than conceptually derived but does effectively shift greater focus to the scatologies and word trickeries of
Mellors’s script. In a rehearsal video, shot in an East London school, Steadicam operators share screen time with a cast of
trained actors who perform the hardships of a 100-plus group of explorers who accidentally wandered into the mouth of a
giant in 1213 AD. In a climate of dipping morale and growing hunger, the Father returns from a solo expedition to its bowels,
professing to have encountered the ‘contraceptive’ gatekeepers of the poop-chute of the beast (aka God) and extolling the
merits of coprophagia, a progressive form of cannibalism entailing consumption of one’s own shit to self-regenerative effect.
Dissent from the leader of the group, a blonde gamine known as Sir Boss, sets in play a familiar allegorical battle between
reason and theology, with susceptible underling Truthcurator flipping parties with each argumentative lunge and parry. As
the father boils over in a sermon-like speech, the group quickly follows suit, and by the time Sir Boss and the Truthcurator
decide to debunk him, via name-calling and ‘narrative fragmentation’, he and his followers have already departed, seeking
purification in God’s upper stomach.
The accompanying projection finds the three main characters costumed and alone in a Victorian music hall, a historical
venue for popular entertainment that solidifies the bridge between the script and many of the contemporary cultural and
political archetypes Mellors targets, from the right-wing rhetorician who here takes absurdist form as the ‘biopolitico-
theologician’ Father, stuffed to the hilt with tautologies, to the contemporary appropriation artist, an uroboros of ideological
nostalgia who, like the shit-eating self-regenerators, departs further from reality with each circuit. Even the logician gets
her comeuppance, as Sir Boss grows increasingly agitated in observing that, despite her mastery of analytical reasoning,
she is unable to account for her party’s intractable situation. Mellors has previously discussed the importance of building a
‘contemporary vernacular’, and while Giantbum at times risks being overwhelmed by its many fictive and parodic conventions,
an unwavering playfulness and suspicion of most things – himself not excluded – gives rise to an artwork far greater than the
sum of its parts. Tyler Coburn

Giantbum Video Installation


(Theater), 2008, video still,
33 min. Courtesy the artist
and Lombard-Freid Projects,
New York

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H.M., 2009, c-type print,


76 x 76 cm, edition 2 of 5
+ 2 AP. Courtesy 1301.PE,
Los Angeles

Kerry Tribe is known for curiously probing the hazy


limits of human perception, existence, memory
and their phenomenological intersections. In past
film and video projects, she has asked hired actors
to recount the memories of her family, meditated
on the life narratives of the elderly, staged a talk
show featuring UFO witnesses and recreated
multiple versions of her own experience of a near
car accident. Each of these undertakings has
resulted in artwork (be it time-based, text-based
or photographic) that hovers between fact and
fiction, leaving it to the viewer to draw parameters
around the two. In a sophisticated and confident
move, Tribe applies this logic to the objectivity of
science in her recent exhibition and film installation,
both titled H.M.
H.M. is arguably the most straightforward
of Tribe’s investigations into memory, perhaps
Kerry Tribe 1301PE, Los Angeles
because it is rooted in an important and well- H.M. 14 March – 25 April
documented scientific case. The two-channel,
quasi-documentary film presents the story of
Patient H.M., a man whose experimental brain surgery in 1953 left him without the ability to process
and store long-term memories. The severity of his amnesia — only a 20-second recall — made H.M.
an ideal subject for ongoing neuropsychological study at MIT, where many of these film’s scenes
take place. Equally heartwarming and heartbreaking, H.M.’s story unfolds through the intimate
narration of one of the patient’s closest doctors, fragments of interviews, historical photographs,
‘on-location’ footage, stock footage, animation, flashes of text and a recurring soundtrack. This
single film is run through two side-by-side film projectors, and there is a carefully choreographed
20-second delay between the two channels of projection that subtly mimics H.M.’s cognitive lapses
while weaving in the formal dynamics of repeating images and overlapping sound. Throughout
the gallery, related photographs depict a portrait of the patient and certain bits of memory-testing
equipment as they appear in the film (in addition to some striking drawings and letterpress prints
that recall associated instruments and activities). But at the end of the film, the viewer learns that
H.M. was never photographed or filmed, and that Tribe’s work is in fact a kind of dramatisation.
It is this weighty plot-twist that ties H.M. to Tribe’s ongoing project of using film to
simultaneously reveal and fill in the gaps created by reality, or more specifically, linear time. But
unlike Tribe’s previous work, H.M. seems freed of hoary philosophical pretensions — the kind that
encumber her 2002 video Here and Elsewhere, in which film critic Peter Wollen asks his ten-year-old
daughter to describe, among other things, her existence in terms of space and time — and is allowed
to exist as a theoretical text through simpler formal terms. The film is almost clinical in its approach
towards such abstract ideas as anonymity, identity, amnesia, recollection and history. And when the
existential puzzle that is the human condition becomes a fixed and quantifiable thing, we can carry
on with ignorant (or amnesiac) bliss. Catherine Taft

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“ It’s the end, the end of the 70s/It’s the


end, the end of the century”, cried the
Ramones in 1980. And as Tom Lawson
spoke at the Glasgow International in
2006, ‘So I was looking at painting as a
strategy, and I thought of each painting
as analogous to a very fast song by the
Ramones…’

End-of–the-1970s and end-of-the-


century angst are realised by a cool critic
in Thomas Lawson’s current exhibition
of paintings, his first commercial solo
in many years. This reckoning for a
painter better known for his essays than
his art might be a way for the gallery
to familiarise their client base with a
new artist than an actual corrective
for the history books, but it serves the
same purpose. These paintings cover
the same time that Lawson’s seminal Thomas Lawson David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
essay ‘Last Exit: Painting’ was written 1977–1987 28 March – 2 May
(theoretically while listening to the
Ramones in 1981), the same time that
the painting wars of the late 1970s and
80s were being waged, with Douglas Crimp’s Pictures artists duelling each other as well as neoexpressionist
apologists like Rene Ricard and his gang of painters. Lawson weighed in with something nuanced, a defence
that fell into neither category, though went more towards Crimp. His examples haven’t fared historically as well
as Crimp’s or Ricard’s gangs, but history has a way of rewriting itself. And is probably in the act of doing so right
now with the Metropolitan Museum’s survey The Pictures Generation, in which Lawson is included.
This reassessment of Lawson is a specifically necessary one for Los Angeles, where Lawson has lived
and, since the early 1990s, served as the Dean of School of Art at CalArts. The show offers the kind of
alternative that ‘Last Exit: Painting’ did between the Pictures artists, with their concentration on photography,
and the neoexpressionist obsession with painting. Hardheaded and thoughtful, yet still done with a punk rock
and painterly awareness, Thomas Lawson: 1977–1987 is the successful synthesis of an either/or debate capturing
the spirit of the age in utero, of a generation of artists who were shaking a minimalist hangover and returning
to the politics of representation. Rather than just re-presenting Pop, those artists, as Richard Prince has said,
‘turned the lie back on itself’.
Lawson’s exhibition pulls together images from pop culture, with grim titles relating to their origins (like
Teen Star Has Cancer, 1981, and Shot for a Bike, 1981), as well as a smattering of studies taken from advertisements
and a series of altered postcards. Painting is still not intellectually fashionable, and appropriation was (and still
is, in some ways) a hotly contested issue, but Lawson, with one part Pop enjoyment and paint, and another the Shot for a Bike, 1981,
oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm.
distance to astutely critique both, offers artists a potential route that has yet to be fully realised. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
Courtesy David Kordansky
Andrew Berardini Gallery, Los Angeles

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Maureen Gallace Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles


New Paintings 21 March – 23 May

Maureen Gallace lives out repetition and monastic habits in her work. For more than 15 years she has painted
a limited set of themes – the windowless sheds or houses, seascapes, winter bridges and lakefronts of New
England. The paintings are pared down to a series of brushstrokes, border on the abstract, and have almost no
human presence. Her devotion to a firm set of conditions has drawn comparisons to figures like Agnes Martin
or Donald Judd, artists who searched for poetry among the limited.
Gallace skirts sentimentality so dangerously in her work that the typical critical dance has been to
separate her paintings from those found in tourist shops or Sunday studios. Writers focus on how Gallace’s
work distances itself from easy pleasures and postcard landscapes, how her houses avoid sappy ideas of home
and how ultimately her work dwells in repeated anonymous forms found in minimalism or in the documentary
photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Some even suspect that Gallace is critiquing the very work her work
recalls, bridging, as Roberta Smith said, the ‘unlikely overlap between Fairfield Porter (or early Edward Hopper)
and Allan McCollum’.
Gallace, however, is too deft in her pursuits to find much value in these claims. For instance in Marfa,
TX, June (all works 2008), Gallace acknowledges and also toys with her comparison to minimalism. In the
work, the viewer finds her anonymous house, set back in a landscape, but Gallace has abandoned her snowy,
creamy whites, greys and greens for Southwestern dirt and O’Keeffe pinks. On one hand Gallace pursues an
association with Judd by painting a work in Marfa, yet she momentarily breaks her rigorous relationship with
winter moods and New England, the stalwart commitment to a set of forms that drew the comparison to Judd
in the first place.
Gallace’s career is an accumulation of such small moves and minute variations. For instance, another
work, September Sunset, if viewed in isolation, might seem derivative, easily confused for a small version of an
Impressionist seascape. Viewed in relation to the entirety of her work, however, this simple scene takes on the
anonymity of her houses, and the sunset becomes just another form of poetic repetition. How strange it is
that Gallace can paint a sunset, the most metaphoric of subjects, and render it mute, neither transcendent nor
romantic, a subject, simply put, and straightforward.
It seems almost perverse to like painting of such simple resonance and colloquial impulse, and perhaps
what Gallace does best is ask the viewer to consider the conditions by which they value a work of art. The
paintings are seductive and tender, yet call out for a considered, deeper reading that includes these quiet
landscapes among the last 50 years of
art history. That tiny landscapes can
force such a critical look, that it seems
like a necessity to critically manoeuvre
Gallace among Martin and Judd, is
in a way a testament to their value, a
certification that they are more than
they seem. Ed Schad

September Sunset, 2008, oil on panel,


23 x 31 cm. Courtesy the artist
and Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles

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Untitled, 2008, urethane resin, mixed


media, wood, 239 x 113 x 4 cm. Photo:
Gene Ogami. Courtesy Susanne Vielmetter
Los Angeles Projects

The fundamentally alchemical nature of artmaking is


crudely explicit in the work of Jedediah Caesar. His
process, in most cases, appears to go something like
this: find a bunch of stuff (fence posts, pipes, bits of
metal, plastic jugs, rolls of carpet, chunks of foam,
fabrics, crates, pegboard, cardboard, tree branches,
pine cones, seed pods and so on), dump it in a box,
fill the box with resin and cut the resulting block into
cross sections — a little like using gelatin or aspic to
transform a fruit salad into a sliced terrine. With the
stroke of an industrial band saw, however, something
magical happens: the act of trash collection yields a
crop of objects distinguished by a sort of geological
elegance, objects as enchanting as their ingredients
are banal: intricate, nuanced and wonderfully strange,
filled with mysterious textures and details.
In past exhibitions, Caesar has tended to
emphasise the objects themselves, presenting them
with an air of refinement: sheets, cubes, cylinders and
blocks of this newly fabricated, fossil-like substance
installed in such a way as to invite associations with
minimalist sculpture and abstract expressionist
painting. In this, his second solo show with Susanne
Vielmetter, he draws attention instead to the process.
About half of the 13 pieces in the show have the
clean, finished quality of the earlier work: a pair of low
greenish freestanding cylinders and several gridded
or stacked arrangements of square, wall-mounted
tiles – one asphalt-black, one flecked with vivid
fragments of colour, one predominantly white. The
remaining works chart the various stages of these
objects’ development. One is little more than a 1.5
x 2.5-metre pallet piled with stuff. Another, raised
on a table, is similar but for a two-inch pool of resin
cementing the bottom layer. Two freestanding cubes,
each resembling a shoddy cardboard box filled with
Jedediah Caesar Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
melting ice cream, are presumably moulds seen prior Holding Station 11 April – 23 May
to slicing, and a pair of door-size planks the walls of
moulds already disassembled.
The effect is less didactic than investigative, reflecting a fascination with form, matter, volume
and space, and with the role of the artist in manipulating these things. For last year’s California
Biennial, Caesar packed a collection of similar debris into the cavities of his own pickup truck, as
if simply curious about how it would fit (meanwhile rendering the vehicle itself undrivable). It is a
highly formal enterprise, but one laced with philosophical implications. The world is filled with stuff,
he seems to be pointing out, but what is that stuff really? What else can it do? How else can it look?
Are there other dimensions we may be overlooking? In the resin objects, he found one exceedingly
poetic mode of reinvention; the expanded scope of this show, while transitional in feel, suggests that
he is on his way to finding others. Holly Myers

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Europe
Markus Popp Adamski Gallery for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Ovalprocess 3 April – 16 May

When art is in need of direction, it often turns to interdisciplinary or cross-media projects. Lately, marriages between art and
music have become increasingly popular, and this is without including the high number of art school dropouts (or graduates)
turned rock stars, or all the artists (and critics) working as DJs or starting bands. Conceptually, the fusion between music
and art becomes most interesting when its proponents don’t fit into either category and when their ‘works’ function in both
performance and exhibition contexts; when those working in music raise and answer questions that then come to haunt
the visual art. One such example is Markus Popp and his ‘music boxes’, visual and acoustic manifestations of his project
Ovalprocess. Oval is an electronic music band that, since 1995, has consisted of Popp alone. Oval was instrumental in
promoting the so-called glitch genre, music which derives its sounds from computer crashes, digital malfunction or damaged
audio files. In such a conception, music is a digital product made out of existing sounds accidentally created by computers,
and then further developed and processed with the help of computers. The role of the conventional composer or musician is
abandoned in favour of that of a mediator between technology and the audience.
In 2000 Popp developed Ovalprocess, a software, CD and interactive installation consisting of three boxes that store
and render music and sounds. At the heart of Public Beta (2000), Version 3 and Desk (both 2001) is a computer-based
archive of the sound samples collected by Oval, as well as a software that allows for the elements of this archive to be
accessed, reassembled and remixed. A highly visual and self-explanatory surface operated by a trackball is the interface
between the machine and its users. In a way, Popp has replaced himself with this machine, handing over his sound inventory
to the public: with these interfaces, anyone can generate the kind of music Oval is famous for. But the cubes are also aesthetic
objects in their own right. They were conceived and assembled by design team skotoparc. With their sheets of Perspex that
imitate the structures of circuit boards and
computer chips, their soft illumination and
discreet humming when in a state of idleness,
they recall the intelligent computers of past
sci-fi movies.
With this project, and in particular
this software, Popp has radically renounced
the traditional notion of the author, and has
not only replaced it by a collective approach,
but literally handed over authority to anyone
who manages to put his hands on one of the
interfaces. It is also a project that the artworld
can greatly benefit from on a conceptual and
intellectual level. At the same time, however,
the introduction of Ovalprocess into the
distribution channels of a gallery might in fact
limit its public range – as these machines that
think about and provide alternative models
for the production, distribution and reception
of music are most effective when available to
many. Astrid Mania

Ovalprocess, 2009 (installation view).


Photo: Simon Vogel, Cologne.
Courtesy Adamski Gallery
for Contemporary Art, Berlin

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reviews: europe

The speakers of the 11 monitors blare into the gallery space, resulting in a cacophony of
soundtracks individually discernable as protest, celebration, drunken melee and battle cry only
when compared to the different moving images on each of the screens. For Democracies, Artur
Zmijewski has filmed 11 short documentaries about public demonstrations of political opinion.
They are played concurrently and in continuous loops; in front of each of the monitors stands a
wooden folding chair and headphones, so that a visitor has the opportunity to concentrate on
each of the films in isolation.
Their subjects range from protests against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and a
blockade of ‘the Apartheid Road’ in Israel to reenactments of the Warsaw Uprising, a celebration
of the trade union Solidarność and an official feast of the Polish Army, a Loyalist parade in Belfast,
the funeral of Jörg Haider in Klagenfurt, a Labour Day riot in Berlin and the public celebrations
of the semifinal between Germany and Turkey in last year’s European championships. Through
such direct comparison, many rather unexpected connections appear among the seemingly
unrelated events. Zmijewski’s films weave an intriguing narrative about political activity and
freedom of expression, about crowd psychology, representation and acting.
When does a football match and its public screenings throughout the city – where the
drunken fans shout nationalist slogans – become political? Where lies the distinction between
supporting a national football team and nationalist propaganda? Do the racial slurs against the
Polish artist filming the Loyalist parade discredit the whole event? Is there a connection between
the ritual riot on every Labour Day in Berlin and the reenactment of the Warsaw Uprising? Are
slushy songs about the glorious Polish Army comparable to the sentimental representations of a
dubious right-wing politician in Austria? Is the Palestinian women’s protest in Jerusalem equally
orchestrated?
Democracy in action is, of course, far from its romantic notion as a form of governance
that takes every single person into account and does justice to all their opinions. It is a system
of mass mobilisation and conviction, of shaping the public experience of community, and of
creating powerful images. The various parties within or outside the democratic system have to
constantly reestablish themselves as valid communities, and these acts are revealingly portrayed
in Zmijewski’s films.
Much of Zmijewski’s earlier work was about reenactment, for example the restaging of Democracies (Ramallah), 2009
Philip Zimbardo’s classic 1971 Stanford prison experiment as his contribution to the 2005 Venice (video still). © the artist.
Courtesy the artist & Berliner
Biennale. In Democracies he is, of course, far less active in manipulating the situations depicted Künstlerprogramm / DAAD, Berlin
onscreen. Instead he observes what is already
there, during travels in different parts of Europe
over the period of about a year. Bringing these Artur Zmijewski: daadgalerie, Berlin
films together, and contrasting them with each Democracies 28 March – 9 May
other in the gallery, Zmijewski sets up an engaging
experiment in which all viewers have to position
themselves in relation to the various actions
portrayed and their inevitably propagandistic
points of view. But then again, it is the fact such
a difference can exist between these subjects that
makes such (political) polarities bearable.
Axel Lapp

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Alles wird wieder gut, 2005,


digital video, 19 min 56 sec,
16/9 anamorph, German with
English subtitles. Courtesy
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris

Frédéric Moser, Philippe Schwinger Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris


KOW Issue 2 18 March – 23 May

What happens to ‘radical’ political values when poached by art? Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger’s installation raises
the question through a curious collage of disenfranchised elements. Gallery visitors are invited to sit on hay bales and watch
Alles wird wieder gut (Everything Is Going to Be Alright, 2005), a 20-minute video in which dispirited teenagers in an East
German town gather to discuss ways of escaping the plight of their parents - unemployed workers still manning a picket line
at the town’s factory, even though it closed its doors with the fall of the Berlin Wall 15 years before. In Donnerstag (Thursday,
2006), a young woman silently performs a double shift of drudgery at a mechanised dairy farm. On the floor between the
two projection screens sits a stack of 5,000 coloured posters (Farewell Letter to Swiss Workers, 2006/2009). The image on
the poster is reproduced on a gallery wall, surrounded by white plasticised discs of varying circumference.
Unpacking these disparate bits requires a sixth element: KOW Issue 2, a 16-page pamphlet through whose French,
English or German texts we learn how to read what we see and hear. The 20-minute video, for example, riffs on Jean-Luc
Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Maoist-period film Tout va bien (Everything Is Alright, 1972), in which the tribulations of
two ‘radicalised’ movie stars are contrasted to those of France four years after May 1968. The graphic image on the poster
represents prices on the Zurich Stock Exchange in January 2005, reconfigured to look like a mosaic by the Postwar Zurich
School of Concrete Art. The poster’s title is borrowed from a letter Lenin wrote upon his departure from Zurich, just prior to
Russia’s 1917 October Revolution - and ‘farewell letter’ can also be read ironically, as in letter of dismissal.
Further tuition comes from a gallery worker: the silent woman in Donnerstag is not a milkmaid but a well-rehearsed
actress (the documentary-style images resemble those in Tout va bien of the character played by Jane Fonda assembling
sausages in a factory); the white discs on the walls are meant to suggest defaced and devalued coins; and the words that the
young boy haltingly delivers at the end of Alles wird wieder gut are the closing lines of Lenin’s letter.
Restorative détournement of diminished political content? Or mere recuperation? The stated objective of KOW is to
‘link methodological questions of visual arts with societal topics’ and ‘ask for practical and intellectual consequences of artistic
policies’. The idea, then, to paraphrase Godard, is not to make political art, but to make art politically. Determining whether
Moser and Schwinger achieve or even address these aims will require more pamphleteering. Best known for video-centred
works in which events like the Monica Lewinsky scandal or the My Lai Massacre are refracted through Brechtian prisms of
theatrical representation, the Swiss artists here have found ways to distance their audience even further. Barely descriptive,
and certainly not prescriptive, KOW Issue 2 does not détourne the worker movement’s present-day dystopia so much as
neutralise it, short-circuiting our political and aesthetic expectations and demobilising our response. All is alienated, and
alienating. Christopher Mooney

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Picture Opened to Prism,


2009, gelatin sheets,
paper pellets, frame,
80 x 112 x 12 cm.
Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel
Perrotin, Paris

Lionel Esteve Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris


How to Lie 14 March – 16 May

The title of French artist Lionel Estève’s show at Emmanuel Perrotin can be interpreted in many ways. The first that comes
to mind is how Perrotin’s recent recruit, successfully introduced into the art market at Art Basel in 2005, could actually ‘lie’
within current thinking in contemporary art, considering that his craft – certainly delicate and sensitive – strikes first and last as
absolutely decorative and light. Paradoxically, this is as much his failure as it is his strength. The fact that Estève’s works don’t
seem to bother carrying on any specific reflection or direction for interpretation is what makes them very refreshing to look
at, for they completely slip away from the urge too many artists have to hide behind rhetoric, behind sometimes stifling, not
to say fake, discourses. For this show, Estève suggested the idea of a collective exhibition made of one artist’s work, because
he considers his projects as “disconnected entities, unlinked to a continuous discourse… Theoretically, they have nothing in
common – they weren’t conceived this way”, he says. In this respect, his pieces stand for nothing but themselves, with neither
pretension nor obligation to current or past artistic thinking, nor even obligation to the global body of art to which they might
belong. And as much as they fail to inspire any reflection, they succeed in evoking a sense of beauty while their meticulous
and handmade craft arouses curiosity. In a critical attempt to make some sense in the jungle that is the show, How to Lie could
be understood as how materials can be tricked into delightful artifices.
For example, the ten grey stones of The River at Night (all works 2009), which cluster on a long low pedestal, are
each tied up with a glistening purple thread that transforms them into glossy artefacts and nevertheless manages to evoke
the nocturnal shimmering of a riverbank in the light of the white cube. The steel sculptures Lotus (which describe the lines
of the flower) and The Last One (a constellation of polyfoam balls joined together by thin steel threads) seem so stunningly
delicate and fragile that they might be blown away by a draught at any moment. This draught could come from two steel
mobiles which are suspended next to them: Bubble, a flexible hoop that bounces in the air and moans with each distortion,
and Luminous Yellow Liquid, another animated hula-hoop that quickly and relentlessly turns in an elliptic movement. A Van
de Graaff generator arrayed with long and fluffy pink feathers is turned into a carnivorous plant (Carnivorous Feathers) which
groans each time a viewer approaches (a movement detector automatically turns it on). Finally – and this could go on forever,
since each piece on display shows off a new craft – Picture Opened to Day and Picture Opened to Night set out the palette of
day and night with colourful pellets glued on shredded paper and gelatin sheets. So much to enjoy, so little to say.
Violaine Boutet de Monvel

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Josephine Meckseper Migros Museum, Zurich


21 February – 3 May

Josephine Meckseper’s installations are slick like an oil slick. At Migros Museum, the entire exhibition’s aesthetic space is
heavily macho. Visitors are greeted by a large grey bunker and large replica black and red oil derricks, and the walls are
covered in black-and-white stars and stripes of the American flag. Meckseper’s signature black glossy modular displays
present objects of broken capitalist desire. In Ten High (2008), headless silver mannequins appear, almost obscenely bare,
wearing just a T-shirt or ‘sale’ sign to cover their modesty, surrounded by a collapsible walking aid, a pile of vomit on a mirror,
a bottle of whisky, a Bible and cigarette ends in an ashtray. Everything is lame and broken down, a veteran after the fight.
It’s perhaps worth considering whether Meckseper’s installations have become a little too slick, however. When one of
these installations was placed at the entrance to an art fair in November 2008, the ‘Going out business – Sale’ sign draped
around the mannequin’s neck attracted all the wry smiles and camera-phone snaps that it was supposed to. For ‘going out of
business’, or not, was indeed the theme of the hour. The changes that have taken place even in one year, or even since that
fair, in the world in which Meckseper’s work is produced and received, however, radically affect its meaning. The signposts of
redundancy, the ‘liquidation’ signs which might have looked incongruously ‘artlike’ in the windows of a sleekly modern gallery,
now look like something of a realistic proposition. It’s difficult to decide whether this gives the work more relevance or just
creakingly overbearing timeliness.
The heaviest, most brutal work is 0% Down (2008), a film collage of American advertisements for MPVs and
4x4s, unified in greyscale and accompanied by a repetitive industrial soundtrack: Total War (2003), by Boyd Rice. The car
companies advertise their products like war machines
in a bleak battlefield of an American landscape,
in which protagonists fight for oil and suck it up
simultaneously. Gas-guzzling vehicles the easiest of
easy targets, however. On a critical level, you might
argue that this is on a par with telling us that plastic
bags are bad. We get it, but that doesn’t really fix the
state we’re in. What is, however, fascinating about
these commercials is the world they create. Powerful,
glamorous, alien, full of threat – the imagery and the
influence of this aesthetics extends far beyond an
economy’s reliance on cars.
Nothing else in this exhibition can compete
with this imagery, and this is partly the point. In another
two-channel film installation, footage from Army
recruitment fairs in shopping centres is juxtaposed with
footage of antiwar protesters. Both streams of images
keep on coming in headache-inducing streams, but
the aesthetics of protest, of going out of business, of
support for veterans, cannot compete with the noise
of fighting, power, war, cars: “Do you want total war?”
It’s difficult to forget, while I am watching this, that
the G-20 summit is taking place in London, and that
it is this racket that protesters will be trying to shout
above. Laura McLean-Ferris

Josephine Meckseper,
2008 (installation view,
Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Photo: Jason Schmidt.
Courtesy the artist and
Elizabeth Dee, New York

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It’s ten years since Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) opened


in Dundee’s West End, one of a fleet of arts dreadnoughts built
and launched with National Lottery booty and kept afloat with
little more than the steam of enthusiasm for all industries cultural.
DCA’s tale is, in microcosm, the shanty of the visual arts in the
UK under New Labour kunstwrights. By incorporating the old
Seagate Gallery, Dundee Printmakers’ Workshop and the research
activities of the neighbouring art school, DCA has become a
mainstay, the city’s ‘cultural hub’. It’s a controversial approach to
arts management that’s been resisted particularly vociferously
in Scotland. DCA, however, came along in the right place at the
right time. Tayside art has witnessed a steady renascence since the
late 1990s. Since Generator Projects opened up its hatch, groups
like Ganghut and zines such as Yuck ’n Yum have blossomed. An
asset to its community, DCA has proved to be very popular with
Dundonians. It is always far busier than other Scottish arts centres,
its bustling bar as much a draw as its programme, the DCA Print
Studio or its Visual Research Centre archives, such as REWIND.
Seventeen artists who have trained at Duncan of
Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) are the focus on
this exhibition. These artists are internationally renowned; in what
sense has Dundee contributed to this? There’s certainly something
of DJCAD’s mix of twee archaisms and nosebleed high-tech.
DJCAD has long been an international centre for electronic
imaging and new media. The associates who make the most use of
audiovisual technology – Stephen Sutcliffe, Andy Wake and Katy
Dove – opt for relatively lo-fi approaches that have the directness
and clarity of the pop promo about them. Sutcliffe’s two short films
stand out particularly in their candour and satirical prowess. The
archaisms of DJCAD are borne out far more frequently in works
that are overtly academic or laboured in their technique – in the
use of trompe l’oeil (Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael), decorative
effects (McKenzie, Scott Myles, the Lonely Piper) or the overtly
figurative (Duncan Marquiss and Clare Stephenson). While lo-fi is
hard to avoid, especially in Scotland, it’s the craftsy aspects to the
work on display that are notable and distinctive, and which give the
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland work of these DJCAD grads its peculiar tone.
The Associates 20 March – 21 June The Associates screams out its subcultural credentials –
something that many of the participants attribute to the détourning
influence of their tutor Alan Woods. The underground 1960s
are a recurring reference point for Luke Fowler and Myles, but it’s the more flamboyant spectre of the 1980s that
haunts the majority of these associates: Graham Little’s Facts Are Stupid Things (Fruit vs Fashion), Mockintosh chairs
and the musical Chess (Ellen Munro), the Berlin Wall (Steven Cairns), retrofuturist Top of the Pops sets (Robert
Orchardson), The Face’s typographic totalitarianism (Myles) and profligate femme-romos (Stephenson). The more
contemporary pop references have a conspicuously Dundonian lilt – a quasi-mystical transcendentalism shared by
locals such as the Beta Band and Andy Wake’s the Phantom Band. This neomedieval vernacular is most evident in
the work of Marquiss, in Dove’s Flash-animated lysergic biomorphs and in the Lonely Piper’s spidery folklore.
This constitutes a folk taxonomy, and predilections that have surfaced in other shows curated at DCA by
Graham Domke, so it’s testimony to his skill that they should emerge so strongly, and openly, in what could easily
have become a grown-ups degree show. Equally, the title of the exhibition relates to the idea of ‘the group’, to
strong social bonds and loose federations between friends and acquaintances. McKenzie and Orchardson’s works,
in providing tableaux for other artists to bounce off, work best in this sense. Beyond this, the camaraderie is largely
symbolic. Certainly many of the artists have shown together and shared studios, but there’s less of a sense that they
jointly constitute anything bigger than their alma mater or their shared experience of the silvery Tay. This much was
typical of artists working in the last decade, an increasingly postcollaborative era which saw a larger number of art
grads emerge into the much more comfortable, linear and professionalised infrastructure that DCA heralded. The
Scott Myles, Modern Ornament,
2008, aluminium and paint,
desire to stick around in Dundee and set up anomalous things is dissipating; the path of least resistance beckons
120 x 120 x 51 cm. DJCAD’s current incumbents. The Associates is a much-welcome counter to the apathy that always threatens to
Courtesy Modern Institute/
Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow make Scotland just that little bit less interesting. Neil Mulholland

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Sherman Sam Rubicon Gallery, Dublin


Let’s Stay Together 4 April – 2 May

Even if ‘retro’ as an idea, rather than a word, is not the dirty item it once was, no longer entirely suffused with
unprogressive notions and the sense of depletion, there is still a discomfort to be faced in front of the work
of Sherman Sam. Clever modernist recuperations may power the work of artists as diverse as Liam Gillick or
Isabel Nolan, but Sam’s work is about disorientingly agile détournements, or postproducing, as much as it is
about continuing a conversation that was, apparently, broken off prematurely half a century ago.
Sam is avowedly in the thrall of mid-twentieth-century American painting, but of the time before the
macho posturing of Cold War, CIA-sponsored abstraction, before it was “shanghaied” (in Sam’s words) by
Pollock and others, a wound from which it is still recovering. Then along comes Sam with an aim to get “in
dialogue with viewers rather than corporations”, and a worldview in which size really matters.
True to this article of faith, the works are on an
impeccably modest scale. The show consists of an
array of 15 of them, all compact, some in oil on panel,
some even smaller pencil works on paper, deployed
in a sweep that runs the length of one gallery wall.
The oils and the graphite works have in common
a number of devices. These piles and cascades of
stretched, cellular objects seem to exhibit flocking
behaviour, ripples moving through them as something
imperceptible signals a change in pitch and yaw.
The key image for all of this is It Goes Like This
(2008; snatches of song lyrics turn up in the titles,
debris of Leonard Cohen and Brian Ferry), in which
an intense drawing and redrawing, the bleeding of
graphic boundaries, is under way. While the cell is one
apparent model for many of the devices, here there is
also the suggestion of something crystalline built up
through a succession of angular yellow forays.
Sam’s erratic plaids tend to build up a mood
of perspective, not so much into the picture space,
but somehow down below it, into an infinite recess
of architectural collapse. In the painted works this
comes into focus as a temporal movement, with the
gauzier layers being levered forever deeper into the
painting’s past by the layers of more intense colour
that continue to arrive. In that sense, at least, this is
history painting, since Sam’s graphic strata never
approach erasing what has been painted before, and
instead are formed, segmented and given meaning
by what lies beneath. Luke Clancy

More Than This, 2008, oil on panel,


32 x 32 cm. Courtesy the
artist and Rubicon Gallery, Dublin

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reviews: europe

Six vertical ‘solid light’ film installations by Anthony


McCall – known for his Fire Cycles and influence
on the early 1970s London avant-garde film scene
– make up the New York-based artist’s exhibition at
Hangar Bicocca. The show consists of work exploring
height and verticality that McCall has completed in
the past six years, along with one work, Meeting You
Halfway (2009), made specifically for the show.
Walking among these six works is something
akin to wandering in a dark and misty forest, where
sunlight filters through the dense foliage, creating
intense streams of light-and-shadow patterns on
the ground below. Yet McCall’s three-dimensional
enclosures aren’t based on observed natural forms
as such, but reflect studied mathematical formulae
and geometric forms like ellipses and waves. The
viewer moving about in the space may note how the
waves create the illusion of ephemeral architectural
structures that have the look of soft black velvet, an
effect created by the light beam from the projector
coming into contact with mist generated by a haze
machine. The works, however, are by no means
coldly mathematical, as they also explore the idea of
breathing, or as McCall states, ‘the expansion and
contraction of volume’.
The first ‘solid light’ film, the seminal Line
Describing a Cone (1973), afforded the artist the
possibility of reflecting on the three-dimensional
aspects of a light beam before it comes into contact
with the two-dimensional screen. He has called some
of his work from the 1970s ‘straightforward’, and his
Anthony McCall Hangar Bicocca, Milan titles ‘simple and descriptive’, while mentioning that
Breath (The Vertical Works) 20 March – 21 June the newer work is concerned more with the body
and mortality. Where Line Describing a Cone gives a
clearly structured account of a circle being depicted
by a line, a newer work, such as Coupling (2009), presents the viewer with a more
abstract, even ambiguous narrative. Here one watches the floor and the movement
of two separate ellipses, one inside the other, that expand over a 16-minute time
frame until the smaller form suddenly becomes the larger form – an ‘ending’ that is as
captivating as it is easy to miss, as the changing of position happens rapidly.
A strong feeling thus arises that watching the whole process a second or
third time is required in order to decipher the relationship of the two ovals. In fact,
the sensation of memory failure as to which shape replaced the other becomes a
legitimate concern, also because the ‘sculptural’ element might ‘distract’ one from
seeing where the other shape went. So as the viewer engages with the cinematic
element on the floor, it’s easy to be equally engaged with the sculptural, three-
Breath (The Vertical Works), dimensional aspects of the installation that surrounds one’s body. Finally, McCall’s
interest and aim in investigating and convoluting the space-in-between sculpture and
2009 (installation view).
Photo: Giulio Buono, Studio
Blu Torino. © the artist.
Courtesy Martine Aboucaya
cinema would seem to indicate that rich dialogue between bodies materialises in the
Galerie, Paris, Sean Kelly interstices of fleeting moments; both in the artist’s work and in the haphazard nature
Gallery, New York & Thomas
Zander Gallery, Cologne of daily life. Andrew Smaldone

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David Goldblatt Galeria Elba Benítez, Madrid


In the Time of AIDS 1 April – 30 May

A thousand people die every day of AIDS-related


causes in South Africa. The disease is the nation’s
scourge, inextricably linked to other horrors: rape,
child abuse, drug addiction, abject communal
poverty – as well as to irresponsible, verging on
the criminal, governmental policies that have
withheld retroviral drugs capable of reducing
transmission from mothers to newborns, that have
blocked condom distribution and that have failed
to provide education – especially education – that
might have encouraged the empowerment of
women with regard not only to their own bodies
and their own sexuality, but to their own lives.
And the famous red AIDS ribbon? What is
Are You Master at  its place in the face of such massive suffering, such escalating despair, such institutional impotence? Perhaps in
Kilometer 4 on the R74
Between Harrismith and the 1990s, when actors safety-pinned red ribbons to their lapels at the Oscar Award ceremonies, the fashion-
Bergville, Free State,
in the Time of AIDS. accessory-cum-political-statement possessed some genuine function as a consciousness-raising device
25 August 2005, 2005.
Courtesy the artist,
among uninfected audiences. But now? And among audiences all-too-conscious of the indiscriminate ravages
Galeria Elba Benítez, of the disease?
Yet the red ribbon is still there, even in an AIDS-battered land like South Africa, and its ongoing
Madrid, and Michael
Stevenson, Cape Town
presence supplies the simple visual conceit that structures David Goldblatt’s photographic series In the Time of
AIDS. Somewhere in each photograph the red ribbon can be found, displayed in situ, painted on walls or rocks
or storefront windows; but in each photograph the red ribbon, while literally a sign of the times, has receded
into banality, has become little more than another element of all such signage – civic, religious, monumental,
commercial, vernacular – that in everyday life is soon as blanched of meaning as the dry South African sky is
blanched of blue.
In keeping with their subject matter, the photographs are visually muted and aesthetically modest, yet
formal concerns are not entirely absent. For example, in the photo entitled Fuck, at Kevin Kwanele’s Takwaito
Barber Shop on Landsdowne Road, Khayelitisha, Cape Town, in the Time of Aids. 16 May 2007 (2007), the pose of
the child idly stretching up to touch the street sign echoes the ribbon crudely painted onto that same sign. And
in Are You Master at Kilometer 4 on the R74 Between Harrismith and Bergville, Free State, in the Time of AIDS. 25
August 2005 (2005), the lines of the landscape – the bending rows of dry grass, the big-sky horizon, the sheer-
rising hills, even the straight track of asphalt – converge into a stunning image of the veld.
But in In the Time of AIDS, as in all Goldblatt’s photography, formal values are far from foremost. So
what is foremost? Protest, perhaps, and – again characteristic of Goldblatt’s photography qua photography –
protest devoid of propaganda: there are no AIDS hospices or graveyards in these photographs, no emaciated
bedridden figures, no malformed, crying children. But at the same time, and even more palpable than protest,
these photographs come together into an act of portraiture; for in following the trail of the once-pretty, now-
tattered red ribbon, what emerges – what cannot not emerge – is a portrait of a land, of a society, of an age: the
haunted age of AIDS. George Stolz

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Jochen Lempert Culturgest, Lisbon


Field Work 7 February – 10 May

Perhaps the intimacy of Jochen Lempert’s work is to blame for his relative obscurity. As if that intimacy
somehow bewitched one into jealously guarding the secret of the stark and whispering beauty of his work
intact. Because how an artist this good at this stage in his career (born 1958) is not more well known, nay
celebrated, is an anomaly of criminal proportions.
German, Hamburg-based Lempert takes pictures. His choice of subject matter – primarily animal life
and natural phenomena, often in conjunction with urban environments or humankind – is informed by a degree
in biology. Lempert does not discriminate between levels of animal life, evincing an interest in everything from
luminescent plankton to stuffed donkeys, and no animal is too ignoble (pigeons) for his lens. Anachronistically
working with a 35mm camera, he shoots in black-and-white and develops his silver gelatin prints himself,
generally on a baritate paper, which, due to his wilful neglect (not flattening the paper), becomes slightly
buckled and bent. This raw and seemingly unkempt quality, combined with the fact that his photographs are
exhibited without frames, endow the works with a textured, object-like sensuousness. This partially accounts
for both their extraordinary intimacy and their understated reluctance to be straight photos, allowing them to
create and occupy a space between photography, drawing, abstraction and object (most of which is absolutely
lost in reproduction).
In Field Work, Lempert’s first institutional
survey outside of Germany, the artist presents a
modest selection of work largely from the last six years.
Were it not for the contemporary architecture that
occasionally crops up here, this collection of photos
could be the production of some eccentric 1930s
zoologist with an eye for patterns, seriality, unusual
correspondences and the work of, say, Karl Blossfeldt.
But in addition to a pseudo-research-oriented mode,
one thing that forestalls any charges of nostalgia is
the indexical nature of this work and its proclivity to
fuse form with content. For example, in the six photos
of the series Flock (2005), a thin, black line of birds
against a white sky ambiguously doubles as a graphite
flourish, as if Lempert were literally drawing in the
sky with his camera. Other works, such as a triptych
of white birds taken from bird’s-eye view scattered
over a black expanse of water, become all-over
abstractions. Gridded profiles of birds speak to the
modernist grid and Postwar American seriality, but
with an unorthodox heterogeneity, while groupings
assembled from the artist’s personal archive, like a
triptych from the series Symmetry and Architecture of
the Body (1997–2005) of a woman’s foot, a coquettishly
kneeling goat and the rear view of a pensive goose
address a different kind of motif-based seriality (the
elegance of joints!). Marked by a droll humour, this
work likewise possesses an odd pathos, as touching
as it is hard to account for. Maybe it has something
to do with the candidness and harrowing simplicity of
Lempert’s vision of the world, and the generosity with
which he shares it. Chris Sharp

Untitled (Fly), 2008. Courtesy the artist


and Culturgest, Lisbon

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reviews:

Asia

Bringing British artists to Beijing, and playing with the demarcation


of who might qualify as a ‘British’ or ‘Chinese’ artist, Chinese
contemporary art specialist and curator Katie Hill’s English Lounge
offers a ‘discursive and aesthetic space of words and journeys’, with
works that explore the vicissitudes of globalisation, transnationalism,
immigration, assimilation and appropriation.
White texts on a black background swirl in the projection
space. Obama and the Russians, the financial crisis, unemployment,
the Iraq War, chat-room political discourse – all form real-time
cyclone-shaped whirlwinds, jostling for position and changing
course as new Internet texts join the silent verbal cacophony of
contemporary cyber-discourse. Corby & Baily’s trenchant digital
media work Cyclone (2006) uses weather-pattern software
reconfigured to mimic the volatile and mutually interactive global
circulation of political discourse.
The homogenisation of internationalism is a preoccupation
here: Langlands & Bell’s The Language of Places (2009), overlaid
lettering on a wall, superimposes the three-letter codes for
international airports (JFK, PEK, etc) mingled with the codes for
Chinese regional airports, visually instantiating the interpenetration
of global and local. Likewise, Thomson & Craighead’s Flat Earth
(2007) uses Google Earth to take us on a seven-minute, locally Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing
narrated trip around the globe.
In their performance installation Tomato Lorry (2009), Mad
English Lounge 16 March – 26 April
for Real (UK-transplant Chinese émigré artists Cai Yuan and JJ
Xi) revisit the 2000 tragedy of the 57 Fujianese stowaways who
suffocated in the tomato lorry smuggling them to ‘freedom’ in the West. A video shows the artists locked in the
back of a lorry, juicing tomatoes and costumed as the Monkey King from the Chinese classic Journey to the West
(c. 1590). In the gallery, they juice and offer visitors this ‘sacrament’ to remember those would-be immigrants,
before enacting a frenzied, ritualised ablution that left the wall splattered crimson.
Appropriation ties together works by Little Artists (Cake & Neave), such as their Lego remakes of famous
pieces (Damien Hirst’s shark) and Mad for Real’s Jumping on Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999) at the Tate. But works
by Martin Creed — a yellow neon Don’t Worry (2009) — and Adam Chodzko’s eerie Pyramid (2008) seemed
thematically disconnected.
In Battle of Britain (2007), red flags dot Anthony Key’s map of Britain — a replica of Winston Churchill’s
Second World War map. Inscribed on the flags are the names of all the Chinese restaurants in Great Britain. Stacks
of flags tower in metropolitan areas, but where ethnic homogeneity has scarcely been challenged by this culinary
colonisation, flags stand out in isolation. The work’s brilliance is the subtlety with which Key engages cultural
identity and the understated suggestion that assimilation goes both ways; not only can the subaltern speak, they
can cook as well. And the topographical representation of cross-cultural diffusion, such as those experienced by
immigrants like Key himself, captures the ethos of the exhibition as a whole.
With the metaphor of a lounge — a public space where people mix and mingle, or relax between destinations,
such as an airport lounge — Hill offers visitors a place to sit back and consider our transnational times and the flows Corby & Baily, Cyclone,
of people, culture and capital that are transforming nations like Britain and China – a process in which art is both 2006. © the artists.
Courtesy Tang Contemporary,
participant and observer. Maya Kóvskaya Beijing

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Mori Arts Center, Tokyo


The Kaleidoscopic Eye 4 April – 5 July

Cocurated by Daniela Zyman of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection (T-BA21) and Araki Natsumi of
the Mori Arts Center, The Kaleidoscopic Eye uses the unique space of the Mori Arts Center – situated on the 52nd floor of
one of Tokyo’s iconic skyscrapers, with panoramic views of the city – to frame approximately 45 of 450 works of art amassed
and commissioned by T-BA21 since its founding in 2002.
Included are pieces that present fractured images, sensory experiences and fragmented realities through lenses that
are not only visual but also conceptual and political. In line with the exhibition title, a number of the pieces focus on vision
and optics, utilising light, mirror, glass and the like. In this vein, Carsten Höller’s Y (2003), a series of intersecting light tunnels
through which visitors are invited to walk, create a funhouse effect; and Olafur Eliasson’s Your Welcome Reflected (2003),
a group of suspended coloured discs, throw glowing light onto the gallery walls and into adjacent spaces. Likewise, Jeppe
Hein’s mirrored-globe Reflecting Object (2006), seen here rolling on a Jim Lambie striped floor, and the hanging reflective
spheres of John M. Armleder’s Global Domes XII (2000) create so-called kaleidoscopic experiences. Some works, including
Sarah Morris’s painting Wolf (Origami) (2007), Haris Epaminonda’s black-and-white collages and Los Carpinteros’s Frio
Estudio del Desastre (2005), convey the exhibition’s theme either formally or conceptually through disjointed forms, patterns
and networks.
Still others are less literally optical or physically splintered, focusing more broadly on shifting perspectives, nonlinear
narratives and the multiplicity of interpretation that typifies contemporary life. It is in these pieces that the exhibition opens
up to the ways information and meaning are fragmented and often diffused. Janet Cardiff’s To Touch (1994), the first piece
acquired by T-BA21, as well as her Newspaper Poem (2002), overlay multiple soundtracks and collage otherwise disparate
printed words, respectively. Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999), comprising found film footage, and Matthew Ritchie’s
multifaceted installation The Family Farm (2001), in which visual and conceptual information explodes on the gallery walls and
floor, each feature disjunctive narrative strands.
Perhaps Cerith Wyn Evans’s Murano glass chandelier, ‘Astrophotography – Stages of Photographic Development’ by
Siegfried Marx (1987) (2007), flashing a text in Morse code to the world beyond the gallery best expresses the shifting vantage
points one needs to adopt to interpret works of art, let alone decipher the world at large. From inside the Mori, his stunning
object, installed in a floor-to-ceiling-windowed gallery, blinks seemingly random light patterns, while from outside the tower,
someone somewhere receives the otherwise encrypted text.
Taken together, the works in the exhibition compose an analogy for reordering the endless streams of overlapping
– and often competing – information we continually receive in all forms. It serves to remind us that altering one’s perspective
will allow and encourage the world to come into and out of focus before our eyes. Rochelle Steiner
Cerith Wyn Evans,
Untitled, 2008–9, multiple
fluorescent tubes, wood,
402 x 50 cm. Photo:
Watanabe Osamu. Courtesy
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

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Matrix (5ch version), 2009.


Photo: Ryuichi Maruo.
© 2009 the artist

Ryoji Ikeda Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo


+/- (The Infinite Between 0 and 1) 2 April – 21 June

Two rooms on two floors house the first major retrospective of the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda. On the first floor, hundreds
of square metres of space are plunged into darkness, in stark contrast to the bright whiteness of the subterranean lower
room. In this terrifically effective binary scenario, all the mathematical refinement of Ikeda’s oeuvre is condensed. As a sort
of introduction, each of the two first floors open with a square metal plate engraved with microscopic digital numerals.
Monumentalised by the cuboid plinths on which they are mounted, these two plates should be identical, yet presented in the
two opposed lighting environments, they appear quite different.
Upon encountering the first in subdued lighting, visitors quickly find themselves immersed in a dark room in which
are installed ten simultaneous computer projections. Sound underscores these visual animations: what is calculated by these
constantly changing numbers? Knowing what all this data signifies is ultimately not important; better just to experience its
evolving permutations; everything happens with a magnified coldness, full of intriguing diagrams and an aesthetic of mystery.
White and black dominate. The screens are of identical size, and the visitor discovers them as a group before moving on to
confront another wall projection, this time on an enormous scale. From floor to ceiling, zeros and ones scroll down in columns,
their speed related to different accompanying rhythmic beats, before a horizontal line of unchanging numbers is suddenly
formed across the screen.
One cannot fail to be enthralled with the quality of the projection, a perfect embodiment of Ikeda’s severe and moving
universe, which expresses the vast space–time of possibility that could be thought to exist between 0 and 1. Because what if
things and events were not merely due to chance, but could be calculated, could be entirely formulated? Out of his dialogue
with the American mathematician Benedict Gross, Ikeda’s work defines the sublime as the immateriality of the infinite. Such
an encounter therefore explores the possibility of an aesthetic language common to both art and science, born from a sense
of exacting precision.
If sound occupies a significant place in the blackness of the first floor, it becomes the supreme entity in the white
brightness of the basement. This time, walking barefoot on the white carpet, the visitor wanders among massive speakers
which each produce a different, high-pitched tone, the tone changing in response to the visitor’s own movement and position;
one feels the sound physically in space – it is almost a sculptural experience of sound.
Out of the experience of these two floors, out of the black and white, out of video and sound, emerges a profound
equilibrium that is testimony to the visual and sonic intelligence of an artist known as much for his concerts as for his installations.
Here, sound and image cannot be dissociated, but rather feed each other in Ikeda’s severe and measured orchestration.
The effect that emerges from this purified musical and graphical world is truly monumental. Karine Tissot

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REVIEWS:

Books

in the 1970s I went to Kingsdale Comprehensive School, built by Kingsley Martin for the
London County Council; a great glass shoebox with a quadrangle and concrete stairwells in
the Le Corbusier style. In his sterling case for Modernism, Owen Hatherley looks back at a
childhood in Postwar-built Southampton, with its walkways, Cunard-liner modelled Wyndham
Court (by Lyons Israel Ellis) and a glass and concrete secondary school: ‘I can recall looking at its
mainly 1960s skyline from the walkway of a bricky pomo Asda, thinking how excitingly modern it
all seemed… a shabby version of the glittering towers of science fiction.’ It was. We were growing
up on the sets for A Clockwork Orange (1971), Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Tarkovsky’s
Solaris (1972), and the inhuman glamour was almost unbearable.
Hatherley blogs on architecture and modernism at The Measures Taken as well as writing
for New Statesman and other radical outlets. He loves writing, and it shows. Militant Modernism
is a panegyric – and a paroxysm. It is about architecture, in passing, and about sex and culture
and alienation, too. But it is really about Modernism, about the time when the future arrived in
the present, and all our output was bent to making tomorrow today.
Early on, Hatherley crashes through one pain barrier that we must overcome if we are to
see Modernism clearly. He takes us, with Wyndham Lewis in the company of Edward Wadsworth,
to a hill above Halifax, to look down on the factories (sweets, textiles and Gannex macs,
I remember). Lewis says of Wadsworth, ‘I could see he was proud of it. “It’s like Hell, isn’t it?” he
said enthusiastically.’ To love the modern, you have to let go of a lot of aesthetic ideas about
beauty, ideas that turn out to be nothing but class animosity stirred up by the proximity of

Militant Modernism By Owen Hatherley


Zero Books, £9.99 / $19.95 (paperback)

working people. A lover of the New Brutalism of the Thamesmead and Robin Hood Gardens
estates, Hatherley makes us see the poetry of concrete slabs. He finds the promise of the future
in unlikely places, from Yugoslav sex films to early Russian planning.
At times Hatherley’s wilful naughtiness seems a bit camp, as if he is going out of his way
to say something shocking. Would you really take sex advice from the terrorist Andreas Baader?
Wasn’t Lewis a Hitler supporter? Hatherley knows that there is a problem with ‘nostalgia for
the future, a longing for the fragments of the half-hearted post war attempts at building a new
society’. ‘These remnants of social democracy’, he writes, ‘can at best have the effect of critiquing
the paucity of ambition and grotesque inequalities of the present’. Modernism stands here for
the future blocked off, the socialist New Jerusalem that ran into the ground.
It really was not all that good, though. English socialism was a tawdry totalitarianism,
policed not by Stormtroopers but Boy Scouts. London County Council’s Modernism was
cheapskate, and poverty is not glamorous. Hatherley lauds the Soviet Proletcult movement, but
forgets Trotsky’s criticism that a working-class art could only mirror the degraded state of an
exploited class. The municipal authorities, the welfare system and the nationalised industries
that underpinned the social democracy of Postwar Modernism were the enemies of promise,
not its champions. The left were too tied up in all that, so it was Margaret Thatcher who got all
the glory from kicking it over. Sometimes Militant Modernism reads as if, from the Olympian
heights of Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government, Hatherley is rubbishing today’s working
class, who have strayed from the socialist faith, flocking instead to the Mammon of out-of-town
shopping centres, like Bluewater in Essex, abandoning their modernist ‘workers’ flats’ for Barratt-
built mock-Georgian suburbs. James Heartfield

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aptly for a self-described ‘renegade christian’, Paul Thek has died and been reborn more
than once. His first exit came in 1967, when he exhibited his best-known work, The Tomb (also
known as Death of a Hippie, a title the American artist resented): a wax effigy of an expired,
black-tongued Thek inside a ziggurat-cum-miniature-skyscraper, and a symbolic sayonara to a
Manhattan artworld he saw as irredeemably corrupt. Two years later, Fishman (1969) – a sculpted
figure encrusted with model fish, shown repeatedly in altered versions – served to introduce
Thek Mk. II, who would spend the next half-decade pioneering a collaborative, process-based,
market-defying, institution-critiquing, perpetually unfinished aesthetic that alienated him still
further from the artworld. Later still, he would concentrate on naïf newsprint drawings of animals
and landscape; retreat to a monastery; and like some artistic version of Dostoevsky’s Prince
Myshkin, characterise himself as a ‘pied piper’ and work often with children (‘the only people he
could bear by the end’, writes Harald Falckenberg) before dying in actuality, of AIDS-related
illness, in 1988.
Now Thek is back once more. The 650-page hardback Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist contains
newly commissioned and sometimes grindingly academic essays (complete with old-school
titles like ‘Art (re)forms and (re)forms of life’), appreciations and poems by demimonde habitués
like Kim Gordon and Mike Kelley, Thek’s beautifully thin-skinned letters to Susan Sontag and
Peter Hujar, his teaching notes, vintage interviews and articles, and a 170-page, image-based
chronological flythrough of his 30-year career, from liquefied black abstractions to pulsating Big
Bang Paintings. ‘So much recent art looks like Paul Thek’s… Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, Charles
Ray, Cady Noland, John Miller…’, Kelley wrote in 1992. Noland aside, that’s mostly just dealing
with Thek’s proto-abject period in the mid-1960s: the wax body parts he inserted into transparent
geometric structures and Brillo boxes by way of noting the lack of visceral reality in minimalism
and Pop. Since the early 1990s, meanwhile, those who knew Thek installations like his Tower of
Babel (1977–80, whose architecture built of sand was received as a slight by the Venice Biennale
when it was exhibited there) or Visual Therapy (1986), a playground he created for children,
might have spotted his influence on recent art that privileges environment and refuses closure,
or seeks to have direct effects in the social sphere. That most of this work no longer exists hasn’t,
of course, helped the long-term project of putting Thek into history books (nor has the fact that,
due to insurance issues, The Tomb probably ended up in a landfill).

Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist Edited by Harald Falckenberg, Peter Weibel


MIT Press , £32.95 / $54.95 (hardcover)

This book is timed to coincide with another attempt at habilitating Thek: a big
retrospective (following one in the mid-1990s that didn’t satisfactorily inflate his reputation), this
time coordinated by the Whitney Museum and LACMA and set for late 2010. The volume,
meanwhile, offers pretty much all the Thek material one could desire, as well as being a model
for ethical practice and a guide to career suicide. And there, of course, is the presiding irony.
The artist, infused with Catholic mysticism (and struggling to ‘serve two masters’, as he puts it),
spends his days despising the industry around him, doing himself out of a job there. The industry
could care less, but when it realises, via artists’ practices, how prescient he was (and despite
Thek’s modestly claiming, in an effusive 1973 interview with Harald Szeemann, that art comes
from the spirit), it wants to credit him and trade on his credibility. The artist, through his career,
steps increasingly lightly, making work that is evanescent and ecological (eg, reusing newspaper)
and tenderhearted. The combined industries of academia and the market reward him, finally,
with Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist – an ostentatious tombstone intended to ensure resurrection.
Martin Herbert

ArtReview

June Books.indd 151 7/5/09 15:21:08


reviews: books

nicolas bourriaud’s almost embarrassingly overcited book Relational Aesthetics (1998)


defined a generation of innovative artistic practice that emerged in the 1990s, becoming an
artworld bestseller in the process. It’s a testament to the nomadic French curator-critic’s
uncommon talent for fusing a keen attention to emergent trends in art with a freewheeling taste
for grand theoretical speculation, for unlike celebrity philosophers or theory-spouting curator-
clones, Bourriaud is a genuine mediator of big ideas and has the temerity to come up with a few
of his own, all the time keeping these plausibly close to the prevailing artistic and cultural winds.
With The Radicant, published simultaneously with his latest curatorial outing – Tate
Britain’s Altermodern Triennial – Bourriaud attempts to rethink what is supposed to happen after
postmodernism. After all, the pomo ‘end of grand narratives’ doesn’t mean that events have
stopped happening, yet any nostalgic returns to the linear certainties of modernist progress, or to
the dodgy universalism of Western-centric accounts of history and society, still hold the negative
connotations of a generation of postcolonialist theorising. So how does Bourriaud get through
the problem of how to be post-postmodern without resorting to a simplistic ‘neo’ or ‘retro’?
Bourriaud’s answer is the ‘altermodern’ – an other modernity. To get to this, however,
he targets and isolates one of postmodernism’s more repressive theoretical shortcomings:
multiculturalism. The best part of The Radicant is a lively critique of the conservative consequences
of postmodern multiculturalism: ‘In their most dogmatic form’, he writes, ‘these theories go so far
as to obliterate any possibility of dialogue among individuals who do not share the same history
or cultural identity.’ Rejecting the ‘politics of recognition’ of theorists such as Charles Taylor,
Bourriaud challenges that we ‘must move beyond the peaceful and sterile coexistence of reified
cultures (multiculturalism) to a state of cooperation among cultures that are equally critical of
their own identity’.
Bourriaud’s bête noire is not cultural diversity itself but rather the sterile, managed
cultural difference that turns out to be the flipside of globalisation’s imposition of cultural
homogenisation. Dialogue, translation and encounter between equals, artistic or otherwise, are
the utopian horizons of Bourriaud’s altermodernity, in opposition to the veiled condescension of
a ‘respect for the other’.
Nevertheless, while Bourriaud does a good job of surveying the exemplary practitioners
of his anti homogenising, ‘creolised’ global artistic practice – the homo viators, artists as travellers
or ‘semionauts’ navigating and recoding the territories of contemporary cultural signification

The Radicant By Nicolas Bourriaud


Lukas & Sternberg, €15 / $19.95 (paperback)

– there still remains the thorny problem of History and Progress. In this, Bourriaud is more of the
good postmodernist than he would like to admit; at every turn, The Radicant attempts to forestall
the spectre of meaningful historical progress; a radicant, following vegetal terminology, is a plant
that puts down roots as it propagates and relocates, rather than the radical, which remains rooted
in one linear trajectory of growth, and in which Bourriaud sees nothing but Modernism’s obsession
with essentialist origins. ‘To believe that things were better before is fundamentally no different
from the illusion that they will inevitably be better tomorrow’, whereas we should distinguish ‘our
modernity from preceding ones, against futurist prescriptions, teleological notions of all sorts,
and the radicality that accompanies them’.
Bourriaud’s aversion to cultural universalism and grand historical narratives is, however,
conditional, and in fact what The Radicant struggles with is how to consider historical change and
cultural identity as conditions to be negotiated. Though he hesitates to spell it out, Bourriaud is
attempting to articulate culture and history not as lifeless prescriptions (progress as history ‘on
automatic’, cultural identity as given and inert) but as potentials to be actively produced by new
self-determining communities of equals. Bourriaud has to turn rhetorical somersaults to avoid this
conclusion, but in an unguarded aside to Marx (‘because history is a movement of interaction and
growing interdependence among the individuals and groups that constitute humanity, its logical
destiny is to be universal’), the contradiction is evident. Bourriaud’s altermodern, therefore, is
more of a protomodern – a ‘pre’ not a ‘post’ of a history and a culture yet to be made. If only we
had the courage to give them one more push, the wheels of our history might start turning again.
J.J. Charlesworth

152 ArtReview

June Books.indd 152 7/5/09 15:22:10


for robert ryman, in his own words, ‘there is never a question of what to paint, only how to
paint’. And just how does Ryman paint? Suzanne Hudson’s answer: pragmatically. In her new
monograph, Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Hudson gets quickly to the point about how she intends
to ‘frame’ Ryman anew: ‘Against antiaesthetic historicism and anticonceptual hedonism, this
book asserts Ryman’s pragmatism’, which is to say, painting as a true ‘practice’.
Every artist today is engaged in some sort of ‘practice’, but Hudson asks us to consider
exactly what this means within the scope of pragmatism as it was developed by the likes of C.S.
Peirce, William James and John Dewey. For these turn-of-the-twentieth-century American
thinkers, pragmatism offered a means of navigating between the Scylla of empiricism and the
Charybdis of idealism; it entailed considering the potential effects of one or another solution to
otherwise irresoluble metaphysical problems, and then going with whatever worked best. Hudson
explains how ‘[Ryman’s practice] is marked by a careful working over of painting’s conventions in
their most radically reduced (to white paint and a support structure) and paradoxically inverted
and expanded possibilities’; and staying with the pragmatist vein, Hudson compares this method
to a kind of ‘laboratory-derived problem solving’, through which the results of each painting
or series of paintings are taken into account, mulled over and ultimately mined for new and
promising directions.

Robert Ryman: Used Paint Edited by Suzanne P. Hudson


MIT Press, £25.95 / $39.95 (hardcover)

For anyone familiar with the art of the 1960s and 70s in New York, the period when Ryman’s
work first came to public attention, the gunshots of process art and postminimalism can be heard
just down the street. But what Hudson shows us – and this is perhaps her study’s one genuine
contribution to the field – is that Ryman’s pragmatism was formed in the crucible of the Museum
of Modern Art, where he had been employed as a guard beginning in 1953. As Hudson states
quite plainly: ‘Ryman’s acquisition of the skills of looking and painting were made possible by the
museum. As a pragmatist institution during the period under consideration, MoMA nudged its
installations and related programs, publications, and courses toward such educational purposes
under the aegis of Victor D’Amico [director of the museum’s education department and head
of the early People’s Art Center] and Alfred Barr [the museum’s influential founding director]’,
both of whom were pragmatism devotees. In this narrative, postminimalism is simply a passing
storm that picked up Ryman for its own purposes and then left him behind when new and more
interesting alternatives outside the galleries beckoned.
Ryman never strayed, of course. And throughout Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Hudson
invokes the pragmatist framework again and again to make sense of how Ryman worked.
For example, ‘Ryman’s pragmatism comes dramatically to the fore in that his painting, while
based on “painting”, offers no guarantees for future success any more than it argues against
such potentiality.’ And ‘Ryman opens the material and conventional dimensions of painting to a
different kind of medium-specificity that involves a narrow-band infinitude of provisional answers
to questions of what makes a painting, how it is made, with which materials, and why.’
But, one seems compelled to ask, so what? Is this really a newly won understanding of
Ryman? Yes, all of this adds up to what Hudson calls Ryman’s ‘arhetorical’ painting, a practice
which eludes, even shuns, discourse in the face of doing. But why not call this ‘narrow-band
infinitude’ a ‘productive solipsism’, the constant traversal of an admittedly complex state space
with few degrees of freedom (which as Hudson’s chapter titles reveal, reduce to ‘primer’, ‘paint’,
‘edge’, ‘support’ and ‘wall’)?
Without any kind of theoretical or historical expansion, Robert Ryman: Used Paint reads
like an academic essay that has been stretched to fill a book-length study, its salient points easily
condensed into a single chapter within a larger and more ambitious account, say, of pragmatism’s
resurgence in the US since the 1970s. And what of Ryman’s ‘realism’ (the artist’s own retrospective
understanding of his work), which Hudson never argues much beyond a pragmatic belief in the
‘literalism’ that has set in place painting’s conceptual trajectory since the 1960s? To my mind,
‘realism’ is the concept in greatest need of reassessment today. Just how Ryman and others of his
generation came to understand their work as such is the question that still needs answering.
Jonathan T.D. Neil

ArtReview

June Books.indd 153 6/5/09 11:54:03


the strip: by Gosha Ostretsov

The state and women


archaeologists say that
ancient society was most
likely ruled by women.
The oldest Stone Age
figurines they have found,
loosely called Venuses,
represent Mother Earth,
who gives life and feeds.
But modern politics,
although based on
democratic principles,
still entertain New Age
illusions.
A revolution is a rebellion
against fathers, and so
should be led by women.
A relevant example is
Liberty Leading the
People (1830), by Eugene
Delacroix, with naked
boobs as the symbol of
human liberation.
The work I am presenting
in this magazine should
draw the reader’s
attention to the problem
of freedom in modern
society as ‘a naked
freedom’, and of state
machinery as a many-
headed monster hiding
behind the masks of
officials, against
which this revolution
is directed.
Power, freedom and
revolution are the
three female elements
that spill blood.

154 ArtReview

Strip June.indd 154 6/5/09 09:38:39


Strip June.indd 155 6/5/09 09:39:29
on the town:

2 April
Whitechapel Gallery reopening, London

18 April
Martin Kersels at Renwick Gallery, New York

photography Marcus Dawes and Tyler Coburn

C 5

00 ArtReview

Party June.indd 156 5/5/09 14:00:34


Whitechapel Gallery Martin Kersels

1 Illustrator Daisy de Villeneuve A Sam Orlofsky, Harris Lieberman’s Michael Lieberman,


2 Claire Neate James and Blur’s Alex James artists Joel Mesler and Lucas Ajemian, and Harris
3 Tate’s Sir Nicholas Serota Lieberman’s Jessie Washburne-Harris
4 Fashion designer Henry Holland b  Renwick Gallery’s Christine Messineo and Joel Mesler
5 Burlesque performer Immodesty Blaise C Francesca Padilla and Tanya Bonakdar’s James Lavender
6 Whitechapel’s Iwona Blazwick and artist D Artist Wayne Gonzales and gallerist Lauren Wittels
Michael Craig-Martin E MoMA’s Eva Respini and artist Jacob Dyrenforth
7 Jewellery designer Lara Bohinc F Eric Diefenbach and Jill Kraus
8 DJ Dan Lywood G Model Lana Ogilvie, Grant Hailey and Christine Messineo
9 BBC’s Alan Yentob H Artist Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen
10 Model Astrid Muñoz I Scott Calhoun and gallerist Lisa Cooley
11 Designer Ron Arad J Artists Martin Kersels and Jason Kraus
12 Artists Anders Clausen and Wolfgang Tillmans

10

11

12

ArtReview 00

Party June.indd 157 5/5/09 14:01:39


Friday, April 24, 2009 08:09

Subject: How to make it in the artworld


Date: Friday, April 24, 2009 08:08
From: givemeabreak@artreview.com
To: <office@artreview.com>
Conversation: How to make it in the artworld

For a few years now I’ve managed to persuade people that I’m an art consultant. Basically
this means setting up your own website, going to private views and getting promisingly
frisky with suited-and-booted fellas from the city before offering to help ‘guide’ their
collection. This, obviously, has come to an end. Gone are the days of striding through the
aisles at art fairs, barking into a BlackBerry with a sheepish hedge-fund manager in tow
before hissing at pathetic dealers. It was a mug’s game. You advise some poor munchkin to
buy something, they say yes over dinner, they pay for dinner, you let them grope your
breasts, you make an offer to the dealer and then you demand the discount that acts as your
cut. You buy anything. Anything you can in order to get the cut. Occasionally I used to lead
‘collector groups’ around fairs and galleries – basically the City munchkin and a few gay
friends of mine there to make up numbers. The homos talk up an artist, the City munchkin
nods in astounded wonder, I move in, I make my money, me and the gays drink champagne.
But as I said, these days are now over. Still, no point crying – the whole thing was fun, but
you know, these days I want to do something less shallow.
So for a while I toyed with the idea of being a freelance curator. Reassuringly, like
being an art consultant, this is essentially a made-up job that doesn’t exist in the lexicon
of career advisors. This is a good thing, given that I scraped out of the University of
Leicester with a 2.2 in cultural studies. The line I use to my coterie of collectors is just a
hop, skip and a jump from the reality of my undergraduate achievements: “Well, a middling
upper second in art history from the Light Blues.” But let’s face it, there’s even less money
in freelance curating right now than there is in art consulting. So readers, I have taken a
momentous decision. Right now, in the midst of the storm, in the eye of the needle, in the
hump of the camel, I am going to open a gallery. Well, sort of. I’m becoming the associate
director of a space that one of my benighted collectors from the past is going to open.
For him it’s a vanity project, born of years of dealers fawning over his limited intelligence
and suggesting that he is the true heir to J.P. Morgan’s collecting impulse. The fact that J.P.
Morgan was collecting Italian masters bought from Lord Duveen and that my new boss has
been collecting graduates with no discernible talent from galleries near Brick Lane does not
seem to have crossed the numpty’s mind. Still, what might be a vanity project for him
means one thing for me: a job. And the great thing is that he’s a tormented homo, so I don’t
even have to hand-shandy the loser.
And given the number of galleries in freefall, this is news that has high PR value.
You know the crap that PRs come up with: ‘A sign of recovery in the darkness!’ blazes
some art website. Better that than the more accurate story: ‘A random business idea by
maniac whose predilection for poppers and North African taxi drivers has finally run its
course.’ We’ve found a spot in Noho, we’ve got a celeb-studded mailing list and we’ve got
the brother of the star of Monkeyslap, a low-budget Brit flick which did surprisingly well
last year, to unveil the terrible doodlings he has produced during his coke-fuelled years at
the University of the Arts as our first show. His subject matter is ‘the underside of
celebrity’. When I first heard this, I thought he might simply mean Peaches Geldof with no
underwear, and to be fair, this would have been a top show. And that said, some of his
doodlings might well be Peaches Geldof with no underwear. I have no idea. I tell people
they’re very Elizabeth Peyton.
Anyhow, I’m fairly sure we’ve got the London freebie newspapers coming to the
opening to snap our in-crowd, and if they don’t turn up, the low-rent photographer
who does the grainy photos at the back of this rag might get a look in – although the
repro quality is admittedly dogshit – and if that doesn’t work, there’s always the gutter:
Artforum’s ‘Scene and Herd’. I don’t care. I just want publicity. And a paycheque.

GMAB

Page 1 of 1

158 ArtReview

GALLERY GIRL_June.indd 158 6/5/09 09:42:56


LISTINGS: MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES

UNITED STATES, NEW YORK GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY TATE MODERN ISENDYOUTHIS.COM


OF LONDON Bankside, London SE1 Lamper Head, Conworthy, Totnes
EDWARD TYLER Ben Pimlott Building T +44 (0)20 7887 8888 T +44 (0)1364 653 208
NAHEM FINE ART St James, New Cross Open Sun–Thurs 10–6, Art Slide Show, Artist Portfolio
37 West 57th Street London SE14 Fri–Sat 10–10 Gallery Guide , Exhibition Guide
New York, NY 10019 T +44 (0)20 7919 7671 tate.org.uk/modern & Artist Directory
T +1 212 517 2453 goldsmiths.ac.uk/art Per Kirkeby 17 Jun–6 Sep
etnahem.com Open daily 10–5, Sun 12–4 Futurism 12 Jun–20 Sept NEWCASTLE GATESHEAD
Goldsmiths Department of Art ART FAIR
PACEWILDENSTEIN Undergraduate Shows 2009 UNITED KINGDOM Gateshead Quays
545 West 22nd Street 18–22 Jun Tyne and Wear
New York, NY 10011 Private view on 18 Jun 6–9 pm AXIS Newcastle
T +1 212 989 4258 Round Foundry Media Centre T +44 (0) 19102 414 523
pacewildenstein.com HALCYON GALLERY Foundry Street ngartfair.com
24 Bruton Street Leeds Art galleries are taking part in a
UNITED KINGDOM, London W1 T +44 (0)8453 628 230 series of talks on buying art and
LONDON T +44 (0)20 7659 7640 axisweb.org building a collection and of course
halcyongallery.com The online resource for an extensive range of unique art
ARTANGEL Simon Gudgeon: ISIS contemporary art. works – paintings, photographs,
31 Eyre St Hill 11 Jun–29 Jul sculpture, ceramics and glass – will
London EC1 BALTIC CENTRE FOR be on show and available to buy
T +44 (0)20 7713 1400 IAP FINE ART CONTEMPORARY ART with price tags ranging from under
artangel.org.uk 65 Roman Rd South Shore Road £100. 1–4 Oct
Mens Suits by Charles LeDray London E2 Gateshead
28 May–28 Jun T +44 (0)844 561 1833 T +44 (0)1914 781 810 NORTHERN GALLERY FOR
Alan Kane: Life Class: Today’s Nude Open Fri 12:30–6:30, Sat 12–4 balticmill.com CONTEMPORARY ART
Channel 4 Broadcast 6–10 July or by appointment A Duck For Mr. Darwin Fawcett Street
Live life drawing Classes 22–26 iapfineart.com to 20 Sept Sunderland
Jun & 29 Jun–3 July Chris Gollon to 28 Jun David Blandy to 19 July T +44 (0)1915 141 235
Tobias Putrih & Mos to 31 Aug ngca.co.uk
BLACK RAT PRESS LA GALERIE Sarah Sze: Tilting Planet Rank: Picturing The Social Order
Thru Cargo Garden, Arch 461 5 Blenheim Crescent to 31 Aug 1516–2009 to 11 July
83 Rivington Street London W11
London EC2 T + 44 (0)20 7352 1278 CERI HAND GALLERY BELGIUM
T +44 (0)20 7613 7200 lagalerielondon.co.uk 12 Cotton Street, Liverpool
blackratpress.co.uk Open Wed–Fri 10–6, T +44 (0)1512 070 899 ZENO X GALLERY
Nick Walker to 19 Jun Sat–Sun 10–5 cerihand.co.uk Leopold De Waelplaats 16
Nancy Barwell 3–8 Jun Henny Acloque: A Dressing B-2000 Antwerp
CYNTHIA CORBETT 3 July–8 Aug T +32 32 161 626
GALLERY MATTS GALLERY zeno-x.com
An-offsite exhibition at 42-44 Copperfield Road HATTON GALLERY Johannes Khars to 6 Jun
Gallery 27 London E3 Newcastle University
27 Cork Street T +44 (0)20 8983 1771 Newcastle upon Tyne NETHERLANDS
London W1 mattsgallery.org T +44 (0)191 222 6047
T +44 (0)20 8947 6782 Richard Grayson to 28 Jun Open Mon–Sat 10–5 VAN ABBE MUSEUM
thecynthiacorbettgallery.com fineartforum.ncl.ac.uk/index.html Bilderdijklaan 10 , Eindhoven
Andrew Burgess: Pop Geometry SARTORIAL Newcastle University Fine Art T +31 (0)40 238 1000
28 Jun–11 July 26 Argyle Square Degree Show 2009 vanabbemuseum.nl
London WC1 29 May–13 Jun Deimantas Narkevicius to 1 Jun
SELMA FERIANI GALLERY T +44 (0)20 7278 0866 Jo Baer, Lynda Benglis & Jutta
23 Maddox Street sartorialart.com HINTERLAND Koether 20 Jun–4 Oct
London W1 Rowdy–Crocodile 4–27 Jun 1 Thoresby Street
T +44 (0)20 7493 6090 The Russell Herron Collection: Nottingham GERMANY
selmaferiani.com This Was Now. Curated by Harry annexinema.org
Raja Aissa: Click Pye 8–30 July hinterlandprojects.com ARNDT & PARTNER
to 30 Jun Hinterland Launch Event (starts at Zimmerstrasse 90–91
TATE BRITAIN dusk) Annexinema will present an 10117 Berlin
ALEXIA GOETHE GALLERY Millbank outdoor cycle-cinema powered by T +49 (0)30 280 8123
7 Dover Street London SW1 bikes in a secret location. Tours and arndt-partner.com
London W1 T +44 (0)20 7887 8888 walks of the River Trent will lead Gilbert & George 13 Jun–4 Jul
T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 Open daily 10-5:50 visitors to a late summer evening
alexiagoethegallery.com tate.org.uk/britain of artist’s films, performance and BEREZNITSKY GALLERY
Aditya Pande Richard Long 3 Jun–6 Sep projections by the riverside. 21 Aug Heidestraße 73
29 May–24 Aug 10557 Berlin
T +49 (0)307 008 1256
bereznitsky-gallery.com

„ OQBSFBT
CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS ITALY, MILAN GALERIE ALMINE RECH CHINA
GALERIE 15, rue de Saintonge
Am Kupfergraben 10 GALLERIA RICCARDO CRESPI 75003 Paris AYE GALLERY
10117 Berlin Mitte via Mellerio n° 1 T +33 (0)145 837 190 Rm 601, Yonghe Garden, Yard 3
T +49 (0)30 288 7870 20123 Milan galeriealminerech.com Dongbinhe Road
cfa-berlin.com T +39 (0)289 072 491 L’Iran Sans Frontières 17 Jun–25 Jul Beijing 100013
Daniel Richter 20 Jun–1 Aug riccardocrespi.com T +86 (0) 10 8422 1726
Lisi Raskin 28 May–25 Jul GALERIE THADDAEUS ayegallery.com
DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM ROPAC
Unter den Linden 13/15 GALLERIA EMI FONTANA 7, rue Debelleyme HONG KONG
10117 Berlin Viale Bligny, 42 75003 Paris
T +49 (0)30 20 2093 20136 Milan T +33 (0)142 729 900 SCHOENI ART GALLERY
deutsche-guggenheim.de T +39 (0)258 322 237 ropac.net 21-31 Old Bailey Street, Central H
galleriaemifontana.com Gilbert & George 20 June–25 Jul T+ 852 2869 8802
LUMAS BERLIN Liliana Moro to 31 July schoeni.com.hk
Hackesche Höfe SPAIN Satellite Project, Adapta presents
Rosenthaler Straße 40/41 MAST Adam Neate 19 Jun–18 July
10178 Berlin Via Cola Montano, 8 GALERIA ELBA BENITEZ
T +49 (0)30 2804 0373 20159 Milano San Lorenzo 11 KOREA
lumas.com T +39 (0)26 071 623 28004 Madrid
amaze.it T +34 91 308 0468 KIAF
AUSTRIA elbabenitez.com O-won bldg. 901, 198–36
GALLERIA PACK Vik Muniz 3Jun–31 Jul Kwanhun-dong, Jongro-gu
ESSL MUSEUM Foro Bonaparte, 60 Seoul 110-300
An der Donau-Au 1 20121 Milan CAC MALAGA T +82 (2) 766 3702
3400 Klosterneuburg T +39 (0)286 996 395 c/ Alemania, s/n kiaf.org
T +43 (0)2243 3705 0150 galleriapack.com 29001 Málaga Guest Country: India Venue:
sammlung-essl.at T +34 95 212 0055 COEX, Seoul 18–22 Sep
Alechinsky Appel Jorn to 16 Aug PROMETEOGALLERY cacmalaga.org
Via Giovanni Ventura 3 Susy Gomez to 28 Jun TAIWAN
GALERIE THADDAEUS 20134 Milan
ROPAC T+ 39 02 2692 4450 GALERIA HELGA DE ALVEAR ART TAIPEI 2009
Mirabellplatz 2 prometeogallery.com c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 1, Bade Rd., Taipei
5020 Salzburg Santiago Sierra to 20 Jun 28012 Madrid T +886 2 2321 4808
T +43 662 881 393 Regina José Galindo July T +34 914 680 506 art-taipei.com
ropac.net helgadealvear.com 28 Aug–1 Sep
ITALY, VENICE Angela Bulloch / Jorque Queiroz
GALERIE HUBERT WINTER to 20 Jun ESLITE GALLERY
Breite Grasse 17 PEGGY GUGGENHEIM 5F, No. 11, Songgao Rd.
A-1070 Wien COLLECTION POLAND Taipei 11073
T +43 (0)1524 09 76 Dorsoduro 701 T +886 2 8789 3388
galeriewinter.at I-30123 Venezia GALLERY F.A.I.T. Open Tue-Sun 11-7
Marcia Hafif 18 Jun-5 Sept T +39 041 2405411 ul. Karmelicka 28 eslitegallery.com
guggenheim-venice.it 31-128 Kraków Tzu Chi Yeh: Landscape to 7 Jun
SWITZERLAND Robert Rauschenberg to 20 Sept T +48 123 575 781 Concept Art Exhibition 4 Jul–2 Aug
fait.pl
GALERIE GUY BARTSCHI FONDAZIONE PRADA SINGAPORE
3a, rue du Vieux Billard San Giorgio Maggiore Island RUSSIA
CH-1205 Genève Venice EAGLE’S EYE ART GALLERY
T +41 22 310 0013 T +39 02 535709200 XL GALLERY 9 Stamford Road
bartschi.ch fondazioneprada.org 105120 Moscow, 4 Stamford House #01-01, 178885
Recent Works to 5 Sept John Wesley Jun–Oct Siromiatnichesky per 1 T + 65 63 39 8 297
Winzavod elitepainter.com
GALERIE BERTAND & THE FEAR SOCIETY T +7 495 7758 373 History of Humanity: 911 America
GRUNER CURATED BY JOTA CASTRO xlgallery.ru Under Attack
16, rue du Simplon Pabellón de la Urgencia, Murcia.
1207 Geneva 53rd Biennale Venezia JAPAN INDIA
T +41 227 005 151
bertrand-gruner.com FRANCE GALLERIA GRAFICA TOKIO ARUSHI ARTS
Ginza S2 Bldg., 6-13-4 Ginza C-36, Okhla Industrial Area
GALERIE URS MEILE GALERIE EMMANUEL Chou-Ku Phase-1
Beijing-Lucerne PERROTIN Tokyo 104-0061 New Delhi 110020
Rosenberghoehe 4 76, rue de Turenne T +03 55 50 1335 T +91 1141 435 490
6004 Lucerne 75003 Paris galleriagrafica.com Open Mon–Sat 11-6
T +41 414 203 318 T +33 (0)142 167 979 eindiaart.com
galerieursmeile.com galerieperrotin.com Harvest in Stainless Gallery, New
Duane Hanson to 7 Jul Delhi 1 Aug–1 Sept
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Ashley Bickerton White Cube Hoxton Square, London
Recent Wurg 3 April – 9 May

Yes, ‘recent wurg’. What? I don’t know, maybe he has a speech impediment. Yes, I’m googling it
now. OK, ‘Camp Wurg’ is one of the homes of the Dustbelcher ogres in World of Warcraft.
On the face of it, that doesn’t seem very helpful, but I dare to think that Bickerton might
like that. The Warcraft reference, not the unhelpfulness (although who knows?). Because there’s
certainly something more than a little ogre-like about the inhabitants of the works on show here.
Particularly the sculpture Flower Pot (all works 2009), in which four Shrek-heads are partially
submerged in a pot of resin ‘water’, a variety of brightly coloured flowering plants sprouting
Medusa-like from their heads and modern rubbish (food wrappers, plastic bottles, etc) floating
around them in the tank. The funny thing about it is that, while the work on show here tackles the
themes of money (coins decorate the frames of many of Bickerton’s paintings), sex, power, nature
and nurture, and their good and bad sides, Bickerton doesn’t appear preachy; there’s a degree of
ambivalence in his work that makes you think he’s having too much fun to be truly sermonising.
To use an analogy from the kind of popular culture into which Bickerton’s work so seamlessly fits,
while there may be a side of him that’s a bit Lisa Simpson campaigning to save the planet, there’s
another that’s tyrant industrialist Mr Burns arguing that a three-eyed fish produced as a result
of the effluent leached from a nuclear power station is ‘evolution’. Perhaps this is best summed
up in a pair of paintings: The Alley, which depicts some form of sordid boys’ night out (ahhh…
‘wurg’ – perhaps he was drunk?), and Bed, a bunch of dreamy naked females beatifically asleep
on a bed littered with money. Although Kid, an asexual tropical Marilyn Manson rendered in a
vaguely Gaugin-esque manner, might make the point just as well.
Talking of pot and plants, as I was earlier, there’s no denying that the work on show here
is reminiscent of the kind of ‘surf culture’ you expect to find gracing the walls of an Amsterdam
coffee shop, next to a series of plastic bongs and Bob Marley posters. But – amazingly – that
doesn’t really matter. With carved Indonesian-style frames (which have the look of some sort
of postindustrial handicraft driftwood) surrounding almost frighteningly colourful oil-painted
digital prints that seem to articulate some kind of strange future island vernacular (Bickerton lives
in Bali) that sci-fi comic 2000 AD’s green-skinned editor Tharg the Mighty might be familiar with
from holidays back home on Quaxxann. And even if Tharg means nothing to you, it’s important
to note that there’s a study of both the alien and of alienation going on here, presented across
the paintings, via the ‘adventures’ of a blue man clad in a Picasso-style striped shirt, as some sort
of Hogarthian narrative. Albeit not necessarily a moral one.
I’m too young to remember Bickerton’s first coming, as part of the Neo-Geo movement
during the mid-1980s, but I hope he’s in line for a second. The enduring thought on leaving this
show was ‘Why don’t more people make crazy stuff like this?’ Back in the 1970s music reviewers
could get away with writing album reviews that consisted of phrases like “Fuck me” and very
little else, collect their paycheques and buy more drugs. There’s something about Bickerton’s
work that makes me wish that contemporary art reviewers could take the same approach (of
course minus the drugs, OF COURSE), because in this instance, seeing a weird blue man in Red
Scooter puttering along a beachfront in a scooter-cum-palanquin with his multicoloured family,
bongos and a few coconuts strapped on board, “fuck me” might say it best. Mark Rappolt

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REVIEWS: UK

Andrei Molodkin Orel Art UK, London


Liquid Modernity 23 April – 12 June

This may be Andrei Molodkin’s first solo show in London, but he comes here with a reputation. Looking like a member of
Bauhaus (the band, not the school) who’s wandered into a time machine and found himself 20 years in the future, the Russian
artist arrives surrounded by suitably Gothic tales of his plans to render bodies for their oil and to buy blood ‘on the black
market’ (according to the Evening Standard’s shocktastic trailer for this show) to mix with the oil that will fill his version of the
Winged Victory of Samothrace (c. 220–190 BC ) at the Russian Pavilion in this summer’s Venice Biennale. So when you enter
this exhibition and find a slew of explanatory wall text explaining how he’s going to fuck with ‘the system’, and spelling out
(very precisely) the resonance his work has with Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), you can start to think that it might not be
just Molodkin’s trademark material – oil (used to fill various clear acrylic structures) – that’s a bit crude.
The centrepiece of this show, Untitled (all works 2009), consists of two cagelike cubes, one light (electric, Dan Flavin-
esque) and one dark (with oil drooled into a plastic grid from a number of barrels), and a hissing soundtrack of the compressors
and pumps that keep the flow flowing. There it all is, two cages of capitalist exchange, the transformation of darkness into
light, an aesthetic celebration of their oppositional qualities and a questioning of modernist visions of progress, advancement,
purity and utopia. Like Molodkin’s work as a whole, it seems to be both celebrating and critiquing the lifeblood-like power of
oil. Not least because the ‘refinement’ of crude, messy oil into controlled, valuable art, puts art’s transformative properties in
much the same bracket as the energy system and commodities market.
Around the corner is Das Kapital, the title of Marx’s famous book, spelled out (three times) in acrylic and half-filled with
oil. Off you trot to muse over empty words, oil as capital, oil as the only thing that gives the insubstantial words any substance,
etc, etc. But the feeling you’re left with is the fact that recent events such as, say, the Iraq War or Russia and Ukraine’s ongoing
gas disputes are more powerful and more shocking demonstrations of the point Molodkin’s trying to make. That he’s tackling
something so real, so blatant and so obvious that it needs no metaphorical description to bring it’s unniceties to our attention.
Mark Rappolt

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The early conceptual art of the late


1960s and the 70s was anything but
a homogeneous phenomenon. Flat
Time House in Southeast London,
home of the late John Latham, is
now dedicated to contextualising the
too-often marginalised oeuvre of this
maverick philosopher-artist. Inside
Flat Time House, London
Out Show, subtitled Some performed
sculpture made in London 1968–74, Inside Outside Show 16 April – 10 May
revisits a ‘conceptual’ art that sought
to rethink the terms of the art object
beyond the narrow precepts of a then-still-dominant modernist formalism, and assembles work by Latham with that of a
younger group of artists who emerged in the early 1970s – work by Bruce McLean, Barry Flanagan and Liliane Lijn, along
with a film about the groundbreaking A Course, which ran at St Martins School of Art between 1969 and 1973, where Latham
had previously taught.
Most striking is Latham’s Sculpture of the First Second of the Year 1973 (1973), a corridor divided by successive white
curtains; on either side, in the spaces between the curtains, are opposing, identical text-cards. The lefthand card asks, ‘So
what can you say to be going on?’, while the righthand one responds, ‘So what can you say to have gone on?’ This repeats as
one advances through the curtains, and through the unchanging repetition you begin to notice how the experience of static
physical space is modulated not only by our movement in time, but by our perception of time as a changing event; nothing
much is ‘going on’ except our reading of the repeating questions of what is going on; the piece brilliantly materialises Latham’s
lifelong metaphysical investigation of reality as ‘event’ rather than object matter.
Latham’s theoretical preoccupations presaged the development of other text and event-based approaches to
artmaking, and the other works operate in this space: Bruce McLean’s comic photo-sequence Pose Work for Plinths (1970)
has the artist ludicrously propping himself up or draping himself on three white plinths. As with Barry Flanagan’s photo
series Grass (1967–8), which purports to document patches of Hampstead Heath where couples have been cavorting, it is
the nature of what counts as ‘sculpture’ which is here thrown into question, using performance and time-based strategies to
dissolve the narrow terms of attention prescribed in modernist sculpture.
The two videos, meanwhile, turn on the encounter between text and society: Lijn’s The Power Game (1974) records
the performance of an invented card game in which words are played against each other based on how ‘powerful’ they seem.
Performed during a festival in support of Chilean democracy, The Power Game satirises the anything-but-neutral function of
language as a tool of ideology and propaganda. And the remarkable The Locked Room (1972) documents the students of the
A Course as they are let into the studio, to be confronted with strict instructions on how to proceed: no speaking, no drawing,
no leaving the studio space except to fetch tools to work on the block of polystyrene each is given to work with. It’s queasily
sadistic and, now, geekishly retro – like watching Big Brother crossed with an Open University broadcast. But the course was
in fact much loved by its students, the arbitrary and explicit rules helping to reveal the covert ideology behind the ‘common
sense’ of the traditional artschool system. Today, with conceptual art providing the easy license of so much contemporary
work, it’s important to be reminded of a moment when that breadth still had to be fought for. J.J. Charlesworth

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Merlin Carpenter Simon Lee Gallery, London


The Opening 1 – 25 April

Merlin Carpenter’s wheeze of arriving at his own private view, mingling with the guests, then pulling out a thick brush and a
pot of black paint and dashing off mardy text paintings on a series of installed blank canvases has been repeated too many
times to be considered laudably seat-of-the-pants. Instead, with every incarnation, The Opening seems to be sucked further
into its hollow core. This is a performance based on well-rehearsed clichés and truisms – about artworld duplicity, the fact that
every big shot is really only a catamite to the Man. You go to one of Carpenter’s Opening shows expecting bad language,
and he doesn’t disappoint, the word ‘cunts’ scrawled provocatively on the canvas nearest the gallery window. Next up is the
obligatory dig at whichever dealer he happens to be showing with – in this instance ‘Simon Lee utter swine’ (which seems
rather less barbed than ‘Relax, it’s only a crap Reena Spaulings show’, produced for his New York gallery in 2007). Finally,
there’s bound to be some badinage about the worlds of art and high finance, served here by the teenager-level political
insight ‘Banks are bad’.
Of course what Carpenter’s canvases, like every other painting in every other gallery, are really saying is ‘Please buy
me’, and he highlights the issue by subtitling these works Intrinsic Value. His joke about bad banks, even in these straitened
times, gains traction from the fact that antagonism is as much a come-on in the artworld as sycophancy – in fact the two
are often hard to tell apart. This is a show, then, that grimaces at the whole sordid, hypocritical business of producing, selling
and collecting art, the stereotype of the artist-genius and – since Carpenter seems forever branded an ex-assistant of
Martin Kippenberger – the terrible burden of influence. And if you think such a position lets the viewer off the hook, just try
pondering how these works fit into a painterly tradition, or the economy of Carpenter’s brushwork, or that these are really
rather nice stretchers covered with excellent linen. It’s a blisteringly quick ride to pseud’s corner.
What soon irks is the lack of panache, mischief or fun in evidence. That Carpenter feels ensnared by the system is
one thing; that he is unable to find much of a direction for his bad-boy routine smacks of imaginative paucity on his part and
increasing indulgence on that of his dealers. How safe it all seems, and condescending. Scrawled on the last painting you
come to is the phrase ‘Stop art’. Carpenter dropped his brush before finishing the final ‘t’, but of course that’s all part of the
pose. Carpenter can’t go on, he’ll go on. Like the good boy he really is. Martin Coomer
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John Strutton’s charged offerings can make the most strident political poster appear a bit thin on commitment. He employs
modes of protest – the badge, campaign handout, placard and stage – to give form to a sputtering, hybridised stream
of sketchbook doodles and zine-style commentary on topics as diverse as Specials lyrics and corn-dolly mythology.
Autobiographical details, the nutter’s rant and Wiki whispers all appear to play a part in this characteristically dense display
of harsh, funny and oddly desirable art objects and artefacts at Domo Baal. It’s a ludicrously inconclusive, fortuitously topical
spectacle – bristling with pre-demo energy around the time of the G-20 summit in London this spring – which, over and
above the inferences to class struggles and failed ideologies, most powerfully describes the tortuous process of mobilising
heart and mind to express belief.
‘Offerings’ might sound a bit vague, but is an entirely suitable word to describe what Strutton makes, customises,
writes and sings about, for there is a totemic quality to his perhaps defensively peekaboo arrangement of this stuff as art: a
clusterfuck assembly of ideas punctuated by acts of homage and irreverence to the great, the evil and the overlooked. This
particular outing of Strutton’s developing collection of paintings, customised guitars and Dad’s Army jumble comes with a
day-of-reckoning-type theme. The exhibition’s title, Donderslag, translates from the Dutch as ‘thunderclap’ and refers to a
1654 gunpowder explosion that destroyed most of Delft – at the time home to many of the Golden Age painters. The notion
of a cull of cultural clutter might sit oddly with this one-man museum, but the sentiment of reception to change bleeds into
the surrounding urban landscape like alcopops over a dry student
population.
John Strutton Domo Baal, London Watercolours on stilts, propped in groups against the walls,
dominate the main gallery – not unified but inextricably linked by
Donderslag 27 March – 9 May
the same graphic, painterly hand. It is often easier to recognise
particular Strutton stylistics (Cold War typography, Blake album-
cover figuration) than place the motley crew of real and fictional
characters they describe: from Colonel Sanders to ‘Cobby Bobbler
the Potato Bomber’. Painted drumskins cover an entire wall like
giant badges pledging allegiance to God knows what. It might be
bat dentists, for all the urgent symbology suggests, but the group
feels rather real and relevant. The wooden objects in the fireplace
underneath are actually hat lasts nicked from the Kangol factory
that unceremoniously dispensed with Strutton’s father’s services
after 40 years’ hard graft.
I wonder how the space next door will appear without
the drum kit and instruments left over from the private-view
performance of Strutton’s band Arthur Brick – a bit like the token
museological room always slotted into the posthumous artist-
survey, perhaps. The success, however, of his infectious, decidedly
masculine iconography lies in the palpable devotion to the magpie
randomness of web browsing and channel hopping, or to the
associative malady of a day’s events. One is left with a strong sense
of symptom over message – despite the shouty schoolboy laments
and cheeky customisation of history’s menu – as a result of not always
being able to tune in to the vast array of channels on Strutton’s pop-
cultural dial. Rebecca Geldard

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Modern Art Oxford


Transmission Interrupted 18 April – 21 June

Political art so often shouts too loudly. Like most political poems, it knows where it’s going long
before it gets there, so there is no element of real surprise or genuine imaginative engagement.
This choice new group show at Modern Art Oxford, which exhibits works by 14 young artists from
around the world, is quiet and nuanced by comparison. This is political art as it should be made,
wheedlingly purposeful, skilful, quietly memorable.
Take Timeline: Romanian Culture from 500BC Until Today (1997–) by Lia Perjovschi, for
example. This piece runs riot around the walls of one of the first-floor galleries, a kind of crazy,
seething mass of scribbled notations on 40 sheets of paper, randomly placed photographs and
incomprehensible crowdings-in of information. It makes you laugh out loud to see it, because it
mocks the kinds of absurdities that historians and cultural commentators indulge in all the time,
the rapid, pat analysis of the complexities of national history. Another equally engaging piece is an
assemblage by Michael Rakowitz of objects displayed on a long, curving table called The Invisible
Enemy Should Not Exist (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series) (2007). Rakowitz has remade a selection
from the thousands of objects that went missing – and remain missing – from the National Museum
of Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Except that he has made them out of trash – Middle Eastern product
packaging, sheets of newspapers, glue. They are all solemnly displayed chronologically, as they
might be in the British Museum. They are a powerful reminder of absent, priceless things, remade
out of rubbish.
We impose meanings from outside when we deal with cultures other than our own. What
do we make of Mircea Cantor’s Monument for the End of the World (2006)? Once again, this piece
works its way with us through humour. A tabletop display shows us what resembles a scale model of
something that looks somewhat akin to Machu Picchu. Wooden blocks stand in for built structures
– yes, it is a kind of scale model. Tiers of steps ascend to nothing more meaningful than a wind
chime gently stirring in the breeze, and suspended in the air by the arm of a crane. It has all the
trappings, and all the strange atmosphere, of a sequestered place of hidden ritual, but its meaning is
completely opaque to us, if not absurd. Once again, we are forced to stand on the outside and look
in, abandoning our clever games of cultural appropriation even before we begin.
Downstairs, one entire gallery
is occupied by the giant hulk of a
blackened, burnt-out car – except that
it has been made in terracotta by Adel
Abdessemed. This object, which out in
the street would create a frisson of fear,
has been tamed into a monumental
piece for a museum of modern art.
Some trace of a street war has been
pleasingly aestheticised. No one need
worry any more. Michael Glover

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REVIEWS:

USA
New Museum, New York
The Generational: Younger Than Jesus 4 April – 5 July

If the New Museum’s The Generational: Younger Than Jesus were to have a theme song, it would have to be
borrowed from the Monkees. No one familiar with those mock-ominous opening bars and accompanying
lyrics could fail to hum “Here we come…” when confronted by an exhibition dedicated to nothing more than the
presentation of an international array of artists who had to meet only one selection criterion: knowing how to
operate an iPod (that is, being thirty-three years old or younger). The purpose, as the show’s title announces, is
to frame a ‘generation’, and in particular, the one that takes the suffix ‘Y’. As the curators argue, up till now these
kids have been regarded by savvy marketers (often Generation Y members themselves) as nothing more than
a prized consumer demographic. Now, The Generational states, it’s time to see what the kids can do.
Too often such generational thinking involves drawing lines in the sand that divide ‘them’ (warmongers)
from ‘us’ (innocents) – remember the 1960s mantra: ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’. Thankfully, then, what one
does not see in The Generational are explicit images of war and strife, even though most of the 50 included
artists only began making art in earnest during the past decade, which, we barely need reminding, has been
marred by terrible acts of war and violence. Some works hint at this violence, of course, but only obliquely.
Stephen G. Rhodes’s sculptural installation Interregnum Repetition Restoration (Upholstered) (2008) subjects
the trappings of the office of the US presidency to a type of emasculating deflation (note the flaccid flagpoles).
Stanca (2006), a 17-second video by Ciprian Muresan (one of the more promising artists in the exhibition)
shows nothing more than a young boy pulling his index finger across his throat. Is the gesture meant for us? Or
does he mean it for another, as if ordering a hit? It is impossible to know.
One could argue that the lack of overt political or activist statements should be credited to the curators,
who likely pruned such adolescent sproutings from their selections. But Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory,
the listing of 500 artists (compiled by a network of 150 curators, critics and educators) from which the 50
elect were ultimately chosen, reveals that this generation really is interested only in matters mostly local to its
own ethno- and techno-cultural concerns. Between the exhibition and the directory, I’m certain the latter will
prove to be the more enduring public offering, not only because it will become the young artist’s credential,
but also because it distils the larger cross-section of contemporary artists consumed by their own unremitting
contemporaneity.
How then to approach the many artists who forge so many returns – some self-consciously, some not – to
the strategies of previous generations? Tauba Auerbach is certainly one of the better artists working today, but
in the context of The Generational, I feel forced to ask whether her easy melding of Lawrence Weiner, Bridget
Riley and ‘the Pictures Generation’ is taking their lessons in a new direction or simply one more example of the
mashup – currently accepted without reflection as our time’s self-justifying aesthetic ‘move’. The same second-
guessing goes for LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of herself and her family, which, though strong, perhaps
do nothing more than recast Nan Goldin through the lens of race and class. Many others artists, such as Kitty
Kraus (minimalist lightboxes), Adriana Lara (discarded banana peel as critical intervention) and Elad Lassry
(Richard Prince-style photographic appropriations) simply confuse quotation and technique for imagination.
Other artists do move in new directions, and here I have to mention Marc Essen, at the age of twenty-
three one of the youngest artists in the show, and likely the most technically astute: Essen’s contribution to
Younger Than Jesus is a simple videogame, Flywrench (2007), which recalls early favourites such as Asteroids
(1979) and Battlezone (1980). It’s hard to explain the feeling of playing a videogame in a museum, though it’s
much less of an affront than one might suspect. I’m tempted to see it as equivalent to that moment when
Warhol picked up a Super 8 camera and began shooting film, an act which both set Warhol apart from his
contemporaries and opened up new horizons for those who would come later. It’s a simple gesture, but one
with serious repercussions, and so, like Warhol, Essen may belong to generations yet to come.
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Those who miss the Studio Museum’s survey of Kalup Linzy’s work over the past
seven years could do worse than browse his videos on YouTube. They’ll miss the
comprehensiveness of If It Don’t Fit, the first museum show devoted to the thirty-
one-year-old African-American video artist and performer, but they’ll catch
instalments of one of his largest endeavours, Da Churen (2003–5), a spoof of
a black family melodrama. They’ll also see various parts of his pop video series,
SweetBerry Sonnet (2008), including Asshole, which is performed by one of his
drag personas, Taiwan, who fouls the vanilla sentiment of chart soul with her coarse
black street slang (“Asshole! Asshole! Whhhyyy did you do this to meeeeee!”);
and Chewing Gum, in which Linzy animates a multitude of personae, and which,
like a lot of his efforts in the music video line, maybe isn’t as parodic as it first seems.
Glancing over all this, they’ll notice that, having already scored appearances at the
Kitchen and MoMA in New York, and with a documentary forthcoming from the
Art Production Fund, Linzy is making headway.
It’ll feel about right catching up on Linzy on YouTube, since a lot of his work is
reminiscent of that web-genre of the lip-synced cover-song video. As a boy, Linzy
passed through church choirs in Florida, soon growing his talent into party shtick
for family and friends; the next thing was inevitably some species of performance,
but what? It would be interesting to know if he contemplated the cabaret drag
scene, as the route he took, carrying his performing through art college and into
the galleries, seems like a journey through hostile territory. Film and video may
have broadened the feel of what is deemed valid in a gallery, yet still, those works
which do find their way inside conform to a type: they contribute to the amorphous,
quasi-academic chatter that lends art its status, and/or they encourage certain
forms of attention. The show’s curator, Thomas J. Lax, supplies a good essay in the
catalogue, yet one isn’t convinced that Linzy can carry (or that he even wants to) all
the theoretical baggage Lax ascribes to
him. And one tends to drink in Linzy’s
spoofs with distracted pleasure, not Kalup Linzy Studio Museum in Harlem, New York
sharpened concentration. Often Linzy
simply comes over as a performer with
If It Don’t Fit 2 April – 28 June
a performer’s failings – a dogged belief
that he can play any role whatsoever,
and some weak jokes (eg, his retooling
of Otis Reddings (Sittin’ on) The Dock
of the Bay, 1968, to create Edge of My
Couch, 2008). Just as often, however,
he balances his performances so finely
between parody and sincerity; and
the unruly sexuality of his personae
so overpowers the cardboard roles he
finds for them; and indeed the presence
of soaps and pop videos feels so fresh
in the galleries… that Linzy looks – as
he might put it himself – like one red
hot mama. Morgan Falconer

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Tacita Dean Marian Goodman Gallery, New York


2–29 April

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Tacita Dean has always dealt with imponderables that resist translation into word and image, like faith, memory and longing.
Here she turns to an arc of associative Romanticism running through German culture, from Goethe to Joseph Beuys and
W.G. Sebald.
Goethe is evoked in Fernweh (2008) – the title references Goethe’s concept of longing for the distant and exotic
– an enormous photogravure depicting a fantastic landscape of karsts and sand dunes based, in part, on rock formations
described in his Italian Journey (1816–7). Beuys’s spirit appears in the film Darmstädter Werkblock (2007), which examines the
tattered burlap and stained carpet, now slated for replacement, in the seven galleries that house and give their name to his
magnum opus in the Hessisches Landesmuseum. (For copyright reasons, Dean was forbidden to film the installation itself.)
Sebald lurks behind Michael Hamburger (2007), a film about a poet and apple farmer who appears in his book The Rings of
Saturn (1998).
An intricate web of allusions connects these works. Where wall and floor stand in for Beuys’s sculpture and, in their
shabbiness, for the passage of time, Hamburger’s loving descriptions of the skins and flavours of the heirloom fruit he raises in
his Suffolk garden become a meditation on history – including his own as a refugee from Nazi Germany – nature, continuity
and innovation. Fernweh is scrawled with the names of rock clusters like the Devil’s Toes and God’s Fingers, suggesting the
mythic power landscape exercises on the imagination, a mystique perverted in more recent German history.
Dean’s method of spinning the observation of small details into complex associations resembles Sebald’s, much as her
finding mystery in the ordinary reflects Beuys’s aesthetic. The dates 1787 and 2008, also written onto Fernweh, refer to the
years Goethe wrote, and Dean read, his text. Such parallels suggest that these pieces are, for Dean, both considerations of
her art and homages to her masters. But the autobiographical cuts deeper: Fernweh also bears a dedication to her son, and it
is difficult not to think of the natural formations she highlights in terms of the rheumatoid arthritis she suffers, especially as she
has drawn hands and feet in the past. Her exploration of time and decay, and her keen attention to details like Hamburger’s
wrinkled skin and the faded burlap in Darmstadt seem, then, to bespeak a sensitivity derived from deeply private and complex
experience.
Dean’s allusions can be obtuse, and several pieces in the show – three large, overpainted photographs of dolmen
– have a compositional stolidness to match. A series of nineteenth-century photographs of gnarled trees – also overpainted –
betray a deadening preciosity. In contrast, her films are so visually rich and their composition so perfect that they pull meaning
from the ordinary and transform the deeply personal into the universal as only the greatest poetry can. Joshua Mack

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Nathaniel Mellors Lombard-Freid Projects, New York


Giantbum 17 April – 16 May

The mainstream British press could hardly have dreamed up a better emblem of its problems with the Tate Triennial than
Nathaniel Mellors’s animatronic heads, a bug-eyed, bloodless trio prone to chanting and singing of liberty and escape: all
language games and mock-seriousness, hiding much and (supposedly) signifying nothing. Yet given that Mellors’s practice
considers no less volatile an art than rhetoric, and that his heads share the visage of the born-again, fear-mongering Father
from his multimedia installation Giantbum, one could also take the conservative response as a sobering justification for his
preoccupations. This irony has surely not, at the very least, been lost upon the wry Mr Mellors.
The British artist has pared down Giantbum for his first US solo exhibition, at Lombard-Freid. Gone is the triennial’s
carpeted, coiled structure that eased viewers from one stage to the next, like bits of digested refuse through an intestinal tract.
In its place is a sparse main-gallery installation – of two projected performances and the chorus of the heads – that seems
more budgetarily than conceptually derived but does effectively shift greater focus to the scatologies and word trickeries of
Mellors’s script. In a rehearsal video, shot in an East London school, Steadicam operators share screen time with a cast of
trained actors who perform the hardships of a 100-plus group of explorers who accidentally wandered into the mouth of a
giant in 1213 AD. In a climate of dipping morale and growing hunger, the Father returns from a solo expedition to its bowels,
professing to have encountered the ‘contraceptive’ gatekeepers of the poop-chute of the beast (aka God) and extolling the
merits of coprophagia, a progressive form of cannibalism entailing consumption of one’s own shit to self-regenerative effect.
Dissent from the leader of the group, a blonde gamine known as Sir Boss, sets in play a familiar allegorical battle between
reason and theology, with susceptible underling Truthcurator flipping parties with each argumentative lunge and parry. As
the father boils over in a sermon-like speech, the group quickly follows suit, and by the time Sir Boss and the Truthcurator
decide to debunk him, via name-calling and ‘narrative fragmentation’, he and his followers have already departed, seeking
purification in God’s upper stomach.
The accompanying projection finds the three main characters costumed and alone in a Victorian music hall, a historical
venue for popular entertainment that solidifies the bridge between the script and many of the contemporary cultural and
political archetypes Mellors targets, from the right-wing rhetorician who here takes absurdist form as the ‘biopolitico-
theologician’ Father, stuffed to the hilt with tautologies, to the contemporary appropriation artist, an uroboros of ideological
nostalgia who, like the shit-eating self-regenerators, departs further from reality with each circuit. Even the logician gets
her comeuppance, as Sir Boss grows increasingly agitated in observing that, despite her mastery of analytical reasoning,
she is unable to account for her party’s intractable situation. Mellors has previously discussed the importance of building a
‘contemporary vernacular’, and while Giantbum at times risks being overwhelmed by its many fictive and parodic conventions,
an unwavering playfulness and suspicion of most things – himself not excluded – gives rise to an artwork far greater than the
sum of its parts. Tyler Coburn

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Kerry Tribe is known for curiously probing the hazy


limits of human perception, existence, memory
and their phenomenological intersections. In past
film and video projects, she has asked hired actors
to recount the memories of her family, meditated
on the life narratives of the elderly, staged a talk
show featuring UFO witnesses and recreated
multiple versions of her own experience of a near
car accident. Each of these undertakings has
resulted in artwork (be it time-based, text-based
or photographic) that hovers between fact and
fiction, leaving it to the viewer to draw parameters
around the two. In a sophisticated and confident
move, Tribe applies this logic to the objectivity of
science in her recent exhibition and film installation,
both titled H.M.
H.M. is arguably the most straightforward
of Tribe’s investigations into memory, perhaps
Kerry Tribe 1301PE, Los Angeles
because it is rooted in an important and well- H.M. 14 March – 25 April
documented scientific case. The two-channel,
quasi-documentary film presents the story of
Patient H.M., a man whose experimental brain surgery in 1953 left him without the ability to process
and store long-term memories. The severity of his amnesia — only a 20-second recall — made H.M.
an ideal subject for ongoing neuropsychological study at MIT, where many of these film’s scenes
take place. Equally heartwarming and heartbreaking, H.M.’s story unfolds through the intimate
narration of one of the patient’s closest doctors, fragments of interviews, historical photographs,
‘on-location’ footage, stock footage, animation, flashes of text and a recurring soundtrack. This
single film is run through two side-by-side film projectors, and there is a carefully choreographed
20-second delay between the two channels of projection that subtly mimics H.M.’s cognitive lapses
while weaving in the formal dynamics of repeating images and overlapping sound. Throughout
the gallery, related photographs depict a portrait of the patient and certain bits of memory-testing
equipment as they appear in the film (in addition to some striking drawings and letterpress prints
that recall associated instruments and activities). But at the end of the film, the viewer learns that
H.M. was never photographed or filmed, and that Tribe’s work is in fact a kind of dramatisation.
It is this weighty plot-twist that ties H.M. to Tribe’s ongoing project of using film to
simultaneously reveal and fill in the gaps created by reality, or more specifically, linear time. But
unlike Tribe’s previous work, H.M. seems freed of hoary philosophical pretensions — the kind that
encumber her 2002 video Here and Elsewhere, in which film critic Peter Wollen asks his ten-year-old
daughter to describe, among other things, her existence in terms of space and time — and is allowed
to exist as a theoretical text through simpler formal terms. The film is almost clinical in its approach
towards such abstract ideas as anonymity, identity, amnesia, recollection and history. And when the
existential puzzle that is the human condition becomes a fixed and quantifiable thing, we can carry
on with ignorant (or amnesiac) bliss. Catherine Taft

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“ It’s the end, the end of the 70s/It’s the


end, the end of the century”, cried the
Ramones in 1980. And as Tom Lawson
spoke at the Glasgow International in
2006, ‘So I was looking at painting as a
strategy, and I thought of each painting
as analogous to a very fast song by the
Ramones…’

End-of–the-1970s and end-of-the-


century angst are realised by a cool critic
in Thomas Lawson’s current exhibition
of paintings, his first commercial solo
in many years. This reckoning for a
painter better known for his essays than
his art might be a way for the gallery
to familiarise their client base with a
new artist than an actual corrective
for the history books, but it serves the
same purpose. These paintings cover
the same time that Lawson’s seminal Thomas Lawson David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
essay ‘Last Exit: Painting’ was written 1977–1987 28 March – 2 May
(theoretically while listening to the
Ramones in 1981), the same time that
the painting wars of the late 1970s and
80s were being waged, with Douglas Crimp’s Pictures artists duelling each other as well as neoexpressionist
apologists like Rene Ricard and his gang of painters. Lawson weighed in with something nuanced, a defence
that fell into neither category, though went more towards Crimp. His examples haven’t fared historically as well
as Crimp’s or Ricard’s gangs, but history has a way of rewriting itself. And is probably in the act of doing so right
now with the Metropolitan Museum’s survey The Pictures Generation, in which Lawson is included.
This reassessment of Lawson is a specifically necessary one for Los Angeles, where Lawson has lived
and, since the early 1990s, served as the Dean of School of Art at CalArts. The show offers the kind of
alternative that ‘Last Exit: Painting’ did between the Pictures artists, with their concentration on photography,
and the neoexpressionist obsession with painting. Hardheaded and thoughtful, yet still done with a punk rock
and painterly awareness, Thomas Lawson: 1977–1987 is the successful synthesis of an either/or debate capturing
the spirit of the age in utero, of a generation of artists who were shaking a minimalist hangover and returning
to the politics of representation. Rather than just re-presenting Pop, those artists, as Richard Prince has said,
‘turned the lie back on itself’.
Lawson’s exhibition pulls together images from pop culture, with grim titles relating to their origins (like
Teen Star Has Cancer, 1981, and Shot for a Bike, 1981), as well as a smattering of studies taken from advertisements
and a series of altered postcards. Painting is still not intellectually fashionable, and appropriation was (and still
is, in some ways) a hotly contested issue, but Lawson, with one part Pop enjoyment and paint, and another the ELQCLO>FHB—‡†—
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Maureen Gallace Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles


New Paintings 21 March – 23 May

Maureen Gallace lives out repetition and monastic habits in her work. For more than 15 years she has painted
a limited set of themes – the windowless sheds or houses, seascapes, winter bridges and lakefronts of New
England. The paintings are pared down to a series of brushstrokes, border on the abstract, and have almost no
human presence. Her devotion to a firm set of conditions has drawn comparisons to figures like Agnes Martin
or Donald Judd, artists who searched for poetry among the limited.
Gallace skirts sentimentality so dangerously in her work that the typical critical dance has been to
separate her paintings from those found in tourist shops or Sunday studios. Writers focus on how Gallace’s
work distances itself from easy pleasures and postcard landscapes, how her houses avoid sappy ideas of home
and how ultimately her work dwells in repeated anonymous forms found in minimalism or in the documentary
photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Some even suspect that Gallace is critiquing the very work her work
recalls, bridging, as Roberta Smith said, the ‘unlikely overlap between Fairfield Porter (or early Edward Hopper)
and Allan McCollum’.
Gallace, however, is too deft in her pursuits to find much value in these claims. For instance in Marfa,
TX, June (all works 2008), Gallace acknowledges and also toys with her comparison to minimalism. In the
work, the viewer finds her anonymous house, set back in a landscape, but Gallace has abandoned her snowy,
creamy whites, greys and greens for Southwestern dirt and O’Keeffe pinks. On one hand Gallace pursues an
association with Judd by painting a work in Marfa, yet she momentarily breaks her rigorous relationship with
winter moods and New England, the stalwart commitment to a set of forms that drew the comparison to Judd
in the first place.
Gallace’s career is an accumulation of such small moves and minute variations. For instance, another
work, September Sunset, if viewed in isolation, might seem derivative, easily confused for a small version of an
Impressionist seascape. Viewed in relation to the entirety of her work, however, this simple scene takes on the
anonymity of her houses, and the sunset becomes just another form of poetic repetition. How strange it is
that Gallace can paint a sunset, the most metaphoric of subjects, and render it mute, neither transcendent nor
romantic, a subject, simply put, and straightforward.
It seems almost perverse to like painting of such simple resonance and colloquial impulse, and perhaps
what Gallace does best is ask the viewer to consider the conditions by which they value a work of art. The
paintings are seductive and tender, yet call out for a considered, deeper reading that includes these quiet
landscapes among the last 50 years of
art history. That tiny landscapes can
force such a critical look, that it seems
like a necessity to critically manoeuvre
Gallace among Martin and Judd, is
in a way a testament to their value, a
certification that they are more than
they seem. Ed Schad

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The fundamentally alchemical nature of artmaking is


crudely explicit in the work of Jedediah Caesar. His
process, in most cases, appears to go something like
this: find a bunch of stuff (fence posts, pipes, bits of
metal, plastic jugs, rolls of carpet, chunks of foam,
fabrics, crates, pegboard, cardboard, tree branches,
pine cones, seed pods and so on), dump it in a box,
fill the box with resin and cut the resulting block into
cross sections — a little like using gelatin or aspic to
transform a fruit salad into a sliced terrine. With the
stroke of an industrial band saw, however, something
magical happens: the act of trash collection yields a
crop of objects distinguished by a sort of geological
elegance, objects as enchanting as their ingredients
are banal: intricate, nuanced and wonderfully strange,
filled with mysterious textures and details.
In past exhibitions, Caesar has tended to
emphasise the objects themselves, presenting them
with an air of refinement: sheets, cubes, cylinders and
blocks of this newly fabricated, fossil-like substance
installed in such a way as to invite associations with
minimalist sculpture and abstract expressionist
painting. In this, his second solo show with Susanne
Vielmetter, he draws attention instead to the process.
About half of the 13 pieces in the show have the
clean, finished quality of the earlier work: a pair of low
greenish freestanding cylinders and several gridded
or stacked arrangements of square, wall-mounted
tiles – one asphalt-black, one flecked with vivid
fragments of colour, one predominantly white. The
remaining works chart the various stages of these
objects’ development. One is little more than a 1.5
x 2.5-metre pallet piled with stuff. Another, raised
on a table, is similar but for a two-inch pool of resin
cementing the bottom layer. Two freestanding cubes,
each resembling a shoddy cardboard box filled with
Jedediah Caesar Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
melting ice cream, are presumably moulds seen prior Holding Station 11 April – 23 May
to slicing, and a pair of door-size planks the walls of
moulds already disassembled.
The effect is less didactic than investigative, reflecting a fascination with form, matter, volume
and space, and with the role of the artist in manipulating these things. For last year’s California
Biennial, Caesar packed a collection of similar debris into the cavities of his own pickup truck, as
if simply curious about how it would fit (meanwhile rendering the vehicle itself undrivable). It is a
highly formal enterprise, but one laced with philosophical implications. The world is filled with stuff,
he seems to be pointing out, but what is that stuff really? What else can it do? How else can it look?
Are there other dimensions we may be overlooking? In the resin objects, he found one exceedingly
poetic mode of reinvention; the expanded scope of this show, while transitional in feel, suggests that
he is on his way to finding others. Holly Myers

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Europe
Markus Popp Adamski Gallery for Contemporary Art, Berlin
Ovalprocess 3 April – 16 May

When art is in need of direction, it often turns to interdisciplinary or cross-media projects. Lately, marriages between art and
music have become increasingly popular, and this is without including the high number of art school dropouts (or graduates)
turned rock stars, or all the artists (and critics) working as DJs or starting bands. Conceptually, the fusion between music
and art becomes most interesting when its proponents don’t fit into either category and when their ‘works’ function in both
performance and exhibition contexts; when those working in music raise and answer questions that then come to haunt
the visual art. One such example is Markus Popp and his ‘music boxes’, visual and acoustic manifestations of his project
Ovalprocess. Oval is an electronic music band that, since 1995, has consisted of Popp alone. Oval was instrumental in
promoting the so-called glitch genre, music which derives its sounds from computer crashes, digital malfunction or damaged
audio files. In such a conception, music is a digital product made out of existing sounds accidentally created by computers,
and then further developed and processed with the help of computers. The role of the conventional composer or musician is
abandoned in favour of that of a mediator between technology and the audience.
In 2000 Popp developed Ovalprocess, a software, CD and interactive installation consisting of three boxes that store
and render music and sounds. At the heart of Public Beta (2000), Version 3 and Desk (both 2001) is a computer-based
archive of the sound samples collected by Oval, as well as a software that allows for the elements of this archive to be
accessed, reassembled and remixed. A highly visual and self-explanatory surface operated by a trackball is the interface
between the machine and its users. In a way, Popp has replaced himself with this machine, handing over his sound inventory
to the public: with these interfaces, anyone can generate the kind of music Oval is famous for. But the cubes are also aesthetic
objects in their own right. They were conceived and assembled by design team skotoparc. With their sheets of Perspex that
imitate the structures of circuit boards and
computer chips, their soft illumination and
discreet humming when in a state of idleness,
they recall the intelligent computers of past
sci-fi movies.
With this project, and in particular
this software, Popp has radically renounced
the traditional notion of the author, and has
not only replaced it by a collective approach,
but literally handed over authority to anyone
who manages to put his hands on one of the
interfaces. It is also a project that the artworld
can greatly benefit from on a conceptual and
intellectual level. At the same time, however,
the introduction of Ovalprocess into the
distribution channels of a gallery might in fact
limit its public range – as these machines that
think about and provide alternative models
for the production, distribution and reception
of music are most effective when available to
many. Astrid Mania

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The speakers of the 11 monitors blare into the gallery space, resulting in a cacophony of
soundtracks individually discernable as protest, celebration, drunken melee and battle cry only
when compared to the different moving images on each of the screens. For Democracies, Artur
Zmijewski has filmed 11 short documentaries about public demonstrations of political opinion.
They are played concurrently and in continuous loops; in front of each of the monitors stands a
wooden folding chair and headphones, so that a visitor has the opportunity to concentrate on
each of the films in isolation.
Their subjects range from protests against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and a
blockade of ‘the Apartheid Road’ in Israel to reenactments of the Warsaw Uprising, a celebration
of the trade union Solidarność and an official feast of the Polish Army, a Loyalist parade in Belfast,
the funeral of Jörg Haider in Klagenfurt, a Labour Day riot in Berlin and the public celebrations
of the semifinal between Germany and Turkey in last year’s European championships. Through
such direct comparison, many rather unexpected connections appear among the seemingly
unrelated events. Zmijewski’s films weave an intriguing narrative about political activity and
freedom of expression, about crowd psychology, representation and acting.
When does a football match and its public screenings throughout the city – where the
drunken fans shout nationalist slogans – become political? Where lies the distinction between
supporting a national football team and nationalist propaganda? Do the racial slurs against the
Polish artist filming the Loyalist parade discredit the whole event? Is there a connection between
the ritual riot on every Labour Day in Berlin and the reenactment of the Warsaw Uprising? Are
slushy songs about the glorious Polish Army comparable to the sentimental representations of a
dubious right-wing politician in Austria? Is the Palestinian women’s protest in Jerusalem equally
orchestrated?
Democracy in action is, of course, far from its romantic notion as a form of governance
that takes every single person into account and does justice to all their opinions. It is a system
of mass mobilisation and conviction, of shaping the public experience of community, and of
creating powerful images. The various parties within or outside the democratic system have to
constantly reestablish themselves as valid communities, and these acts are revealingly portrayed
in Zmijewski’s films.
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onscreen. Instead he observes what is already
there, during travels in different parts of Europe
over the period of about a year. Bringing these Artur Zmijewski: daadgalerie, Berlin
films together, and contrasting them with each Democracies 28 March – 9 May
other in the gallery, Zmijewski sets up an engaging
experiment in which all viewers have to position
themselves in relation to the various actions
portrayed and their inevitably propagandistic
points of view. But then again, it is the fact such
a difference can exist between these subjects that
makes such (political) polarities bearable.
Axel Lapp

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Frédéric Moser, Philippe Schwinger Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris


KOW Issue 2 18 March – 23 May

What happens to ‘radical’ political values when poached by art? Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger’s installation raises
the question through a curious collage of disenfranchised elements. Gallery visitors are invited to sit on hay bales and watch
Alles wird wieder gut (Everything Is Going to Be Alright, 2005), a 20-minute video in which dispirited teenagers in an East
German town gather to discuss ways of escaping the plight of their parents - unemployed workers still manning a picket line
at the town’s factory, even though it closed its doors with the fall of the Berlin Wall 15 years before. In Donnerstag (Thursday,
2006), a young woman silently performs a double shift of drudgery at a mechanised dairy farm. On the floor between the
two projection screens sits a stack of 5,000 coloured posters (Farewell Letter to Swiss Workers, 2006/2009). The image on
the poster is reproduced on a gallery wall, surrounded by white plasticised discs of varying circumference.
Unpacking these disparate bits requires a sixth element: KOW Issue 2, a 16-page pamphlet through whose French,
English or German texts we learn how to read what we see and hear. The 20-minute video, for example, riffs on Jean-Luc
Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Maoist-period film Tout va bien (Everything Is Alright, 1972), in which the tribulations of
two ‘radicalised’ movie stars are contrasted to those of France four years after May 1968. The graphic image on the poster
represents prices on the Zurich Stock Exchange in January 2005, reconfigured to look like a mosaic by the Postwar Zurich
School of Concrete Art. The poster’s title is borrowed from a letter Lenin wrote upon his departure from Zurich, just prior to
Russia’s 1917 October Revolution - and ‘farewell letter’ can also be read ironically, as in letter of dismissal.
Further tuition comes from a gallery worker: the silent woman in Donnerstag is not a milkmaid but a well-rehearsed
actress (the documentary-style images resemble those in Tout va bien of the character played by Jane Fonda assembling
sausages in a factory); the white discs on the walls are meant to suggest defaced and devalued coins; and the words that the
young boy haltingly delivers at the end of Alles wird wieder gut are the closing lines of Lenin’s letter.
Restorative détournement of diminished political content? Or mere recuperation? The stated objective of KOW is to
‘link methodological questions of visual arts with societal topics’ and ‘ask for practical and intellectual consequences of artistic
policies’. The idea, then, to paraphrase Godard, is not to make political art, but to make art politically. Determining whether
Moser and Schwinger achieve or even address these aims will require more pamphleteering. Best known for video-centred
works in which events like the Monica Lewinsky scandal or the My Lai Massacre are refracted through Brechtian prisms of
theatrical representation, the Swiss artists here have found ways to distance their audience even further. Barely descriptive,
and certainly not prescriptive, KOW Issue 2 does not détourne the worker movement’s present-day dystopia so much as
neutralise it, short-circuiting our political and aesthetic expectations and demobilising our response. All is alienated, and
alienating. Christopher Mooney

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Lionel Esteve Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris


How to Lie 14 March – 16 May

The title of French artist Lionel Estève’s show at Emmanuel Perrotin can be interpreted in many ways. The first that comes
to mind is how Perrotin’s recent recruit, successfully introduced into the art market at Art Basel in 2005, could actually ‘lie’
within current thinking in contemporary art, considering that his craft – certainly delicate and sensitive – strikes first and last as
absolutely decorative and light. Paradoxically, this is as much his failure as it is his strength. The fact that Estève’s works don’t
seem to bother carrying on any specific reflection or direction for interpretation is what makes them very refreshing to look
at, for they completely slip away from the urge too many artists have to hide behind rhetoric, behind sometimes stifling, not
to say fake, discourses. For this show, Estève suggested the idea of a collective exhibition made of one artist’s work, because
he considers his projects as “disconnected entities, unlinked to a continuous discourse… Theoretically, they have nothing in
common – they weren’t conceived this way”, he says. In this respect, his pieces stand for nothing but themselves, with neither
pretension nor obligation to current or past artistic thinking, nor even obligation to the global body of art to which they might
belong. And as much as they fail to inspire any reflection, they succeed in evoking a sense of beauty while their meticulous
and handmade craft arouses curiosity. In a critical attempt to make some sense in the jungle that is the show, How to Lie could
be understood as how materials can be tricked into delightful artifices.
For example, the ten grey stones of The River at Night (all works 2009), which cluster on a long low pedestal, are
each tied up with a glistening purple thread that transforms them into glossy artefacts and nevertheless manages to evoke
the nocturnal shimmering of a riverbank in the light of the white cube. The steel sculptures Lotus (which describe the lines
of the flower) and The Last One (a constellation of polyfoam balls joined together by thin steel threads) seem so stunningly
delicate and fragile that they might be blown away by a draught at any moment. This draught could come from two steel
mobiles which are suspended next to them: Bubble, a flexible hoop that bounces in the air and moans with each distortion,
and Luminous Yellow Liquid, another animated hula-hoop that quickly and relentlessly turns in an elliptic movement. A Van
de Graaff generator arrayed with long and fluffy pink feathers is turned into a carnivorous plant (Carnivorous Feathers) which
groans each time a viewer approaches (a movement detector automatically turns it on). Finally – and this could go on forever,
since each piece on display shows off a new craft – Picture Opened to Day and Picture Opened to Night set out the palette of
day and night with colourful pellets glued on shredded paper and gelatin sheets. So much to enjoy, so little to say.
Violaine Boutet de Monvel

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Josephine Meckseper Migros Museum, Zurich


21 February – 3 May

Josephine Meckseper’s installations are slick like an oil slick. At Migros Museum, the entire exhibition’s aesthetic space is
heavily macho. Visitors are greeted by a large grey bunker and large replica black and red oil derricks, and the walls are
covered in black-and-white stars and stripes of the American flag. Meckseper’s signature black glossy modular displays
present objects of broken capitalist desire. In Ten High (2008), headless silver mannequins appear, almost obscenely bare,
wearing just a T-shirt or ‘sale’ sign to cover their modesty, surrounded by a collapsible walking aid, a pile of vomit on a mirror,
a bottle of whisky, a Bible and cigarette ends in an ashtray. Everything is lame and broken down, a veteran after the fight.
It’s perhaps worth considering whether Meckseper’s installations have become a little too slick, however. When one of
these installations was placed at the entrance to an art fair in November 2008, the ‘Going out business – Sale’ sign draped
around the mannequin’s neck attracted all the wry smiles and camera-phone snaps that it was supposed to. For ‘going out of
business’, or not, was indeed the theme of the hour. The changes that have taken place even in one year, or even since that
fair, in the world in which Meckseper’s work is produced and received, however, radically affect its meaning. The signposts of
redundancy, the ‘liquidation’ signs which might have looked incongruously ‘artlike’ in the windows of a sleekly modern gallery,
now look like something of a realistic proposition. It’s difficult to decide whether this gives the work more relevance or just
creakingly overbearing timeliness.
The heaviest, most brutal work is 0% Down (2008), a film collage of American advertisements for MPVs and
4x4s, unified in greyscale and accompanied by a repetitive industrial soundtrack: Total War (2003), by Boyd Rice. The car
companies advertise their products like war machines
in a bleak battlefield of an American landscape,
in which protagonists fight for oil and suck it up
simultaneously. Gas-guzzling vehicles the easiest of
easy targets, however. On a critical level, you might
argue that this is on a par with telling us that plastic
bags are bad. We get it, but that doesn’t really fix the
state we’re in. What is, however, fascinating about
these commercials is the world they create. Powerful,
glamorous, alien, full of threat – the imagery and the
influence of this aesthetics extends far beyond an
economy’s reliance on cars.
Nothing else in this exhibition can compete
with this imagery, and this is partly the point. In another
two-channel film installation, footage from Army
recruitment fairs in shopping centres is juxtaposed with
footage of antiwar protesters. Both streams of images
keep on coming in headache-inducing streams, but
the aesthetics of protest, of going out of business, of
support for veterans, cannot compete with the noise
of fighting, power, war, cars: “Do you want total war?”
It’s difficult to forget, while I am watching this, that
the G-20 summit is taking place in London, and that
it is this racket that protesters will be trying to shout
above. Laura McLean-Ferris


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It’s ten years since Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) opened


in Dundee’s West End, one of a fleet of arts dreadnoughts built
and launched with National Lottery booty and kept afloat with
little more than the steam of enthusiasm for all industries cultural.
DCA’s tale is, in microcosm, the shanty of the visual arts in the
UK under New Labour kunstwrights. By incorporating the old
Seagate Gallery, Dundee Printmakers’ Workshop and the research
activities of the neighbouring art school, DCA has become a
mainstay, the city’s ‘cultural hub’. It’s a controversial approach to
arts management that’s been resisted particularly vociferously
in Scotland. DCA, however, came along in the right place at the
right time. Tayside art has witnessed a steady renascence since the
late 1990s. Since Generator Projects opened up its hatch, groups
like Ganghut and zines such as Yuck ’n Yum have blossomed. An
asset to its community, DCA has proved to be very popular with
Dundonians. It is always far busier than other Scottish arts centres,
its bustling bar as much a draw as its programme, the DCA Print
Studio or its Visual Research Centre archives, such as REWIND.
Seventeen artists who have trained at Duncan of
Jordanstone College of Art & Design (DJCAD) are the focus on
this exhibition. These artists are internationally renowned; in what
sense has Dundee contributed to this? There’s certainly something
of DJCAD’s mix of twee archaisms and nosebleed high-tech.
DJCAD has long been an international centre for electronic
imaging and new media. The associates who make the most use of
audiovisual technology – Stephen Sutcliffe, Andy Wake and Katy
Dove – opt for relatively lo-fi approaches that have the directness
and clarity of the pop promo about them. Sutcliffe’s two short films
stand out particularly in their candour and satirical prowess. The
archaisms of DJCAD are borne out far more frequently in works
that are overtly academic or laboured in their technique – in the
use of trompe l’oeil (Lucy McKenzie and Alan Michael), decorative
effects (McKenzie, Scott Myles, the Lonely Piper) or the overtly
figurative (Duncan Marquiss and Clare Stephenson). While lo-fi is
hard to avoid, especially in Scotland, it’s the craftsy aspects to the
work on display that are notable and distinctive, and which give the
Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland work of these DJCAD grads its peculiar tone.
The Associates 20 March – 21 June The Associates screams out its subcultural credentials –
something that many of the participants attribute to the détourning
influence of their tutor Alan Woods. The underground 1960s
are a recurring reference point for Luke Fowler and Myles, but it’s the more flamboyant spectre of the 1980s that
haunts the majority of these associates: Graham Little’s Facts Are Stupid Things (Fruit vs Fashion), Mockintosh chairs
and the musical Chess (Ellen Munro), the Berlin Wall (Steven Cairns), retrofuturist Top of the Pops sets (Robert
Orchardson), The Face’s typographic totalitarianism (Myles) and profligate femme-romos (Stephenson). The more
contemporary pop references have a conspicuously Dundonian lilt – a quasi-mystical transcendentalism shared by
locals such as the Beta Band and Andy Wake’s the Phantom Band. This neomedieval vernacular is most evident in
the work of Marquiss, in Dove’s Flash-animated lysergic biomorphs and in the Lonely Piper’s spidery folklore.
This constitutes a folk taxonomy, and predilections that have surfaced in other shows curated at DCA by
Graham Domke, so it’s testimony to his skill that they should emerge so strongly, and openly, in what could easily
have become a grown-ups degree show. Equally, the title of the exhibition relates to the idea of ‘the group’, to
strong social bonds and loose federations between friends and acquaintances. McKenzie and Orchardson’s works,
in providing tableaux for other artists to bounce off, work best in this sense. Beyond this, the camaraderie is largely
symbolic. Certainly many of the artists have shown together and shared studios, but there’s less of a sense that they
jointly constitute anything bigger than their alma mater or their shared experience of the silvery Tay. This much was
typical of artists working in the last decade, an increasingly postcollaborative era which saw a larger number of art
grads emerge into the much more comfortable, linear and professionalised infrastructure that DCA heralded. The
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€ˆU€ˆUƒ@J’ DJCAD’s current incumbents. The Associates is a much-welcome counter to the apathy that always threatens to
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Sherman Sam Rubicon Gallery, Dublin


Let’s Stay Together 4 April – 2 May

Even if ‘retro’ as an idea, rather than a word, is not the dirty item it once was, no longer entirely suffused with
unprogressive notions and the sense of depletion, there is still a discomfort to be faced in front of the work
of Sherman Sam. Clever modernist recuperations may power the work of artists as diverse as Liam Gillick or
Isabel Nolan, but Sam’s work is about disorientingly agile détournements, or postproducing, as much as it is
about continuing a conversation that was, apparently, broken off prematurely half a century ago.
Sam is avowedly in the thrall of mid-twentieth-century American painting, but of the time before the
macho posturing of Cold War, CIA-sponsored abstraction, before it was “shanghaied” (in Sam’s words) by
Pollock and others, a wound from which it is still recovering. Then along comes Sam with an aim to get “in
dialogue with viewers rather than corporations”, and a worldview in which size really matters.
True to this article of faith, the works are on an
impeccably modest scale. The show consists of an
array of 15 of them, all compact, some in oil on panel,
some even smaller pencil works on paper, deployed
in a sweep that runs the length of one gallery wall.
The oils and the graphite works have in common
a number of devices. These piles and cascades of
stretched, cellular objects seem to exhibit flocking
behaviour, ripples moving through them as something
imperceptible signals a change in pitch and yaw.
The key image for all of this is It Goes Like This
(2008; snatches of song lyrics turn up in the titles,
debris of Leonard Cohen and Brian Ferry), in which
an intense drawing and redrawing, the bleeding of
graphic boundaries, is under way. While the cell is one
apparent model for many of the devices, here there is
also the suggestion of something crystalline built up
through a succession of angular yellow forays.
Sam’s erratic plaids tend to build up a mood
of perspective, not so much into the picture space,
but somehow down below it, into an infinite recess
of architectural collapse. In the painted works this
comes into focus as a temporal movement, with the
gauzier layers being levered forever deeper into the
painting’s past by the layers of more intense colour
that continue to arrive. In that sense, at least, this is
history painting, since Sam’s graphic strata never
approach erasing what has been painted before, and
instead are formed, segmented and given meaning
by what lies beneath. Luke Clancy

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Six vertical ‘solid light’ film installations by Anthony


McCall – known for his Fire Cycles and influence
on the early 1970s London avant-garde film scene
– make up the New York-based artist’s exhibition at
Hangar Bicocca. The show consists of work exploring
height and verticality that McCall has completed in
the past six years, along with one work, Meeting You
Halfway (2009), made specifically for the show.
Walking among these six works is something
akin to wandering in a dark and misty forest, where
sunlight filters through the dense foliage, creating
intense streams of light-and-shadow patterns on
the ground below. Yet McCall’s three-dimensional
enclosures aren’t based on observed natural forms
as such, but reflect studied mathematical formulae
and geometric forms like ellipses and waves. The
viewer moving about in the space may note how the
waves create the illusion of ephemeral architectural
structures that have the look of soft black velvet, an
effect created by the light beam from the projector
coming into contact with mist generated by a haze
machine. The works, however, are by no means
coldly mathematical, as they also explore the idea of
breathing, or as McCall states, ‘the expansion and
contraction of volume’.
The first ‘solid light’ film, the seminal Line
Describing a Cone (1973), afforded the artist the
possibility of reflecting on the three-dimensional
aspects of a light beam before it comes into contact
with the two-dimensional screen. He has called some
of his work from the 1970s ‘straightforward’, and his
Anthony McCall Hangar Bicocca, Milan titles ‘simple and descriptive’, while mentioning that
Breath (The Vertical Works) 20 March – 21 June the newer work is concerned more with the body
and mortality. Where Line Describing a Cone gives a
clearly structured account of a circle being depicted
by a line, a newer work, such as Coupling (2009), presents the viewer with a more
abstract, even ambiguous narrative. Here one watches the floor and the movement
of two separate ellipses, one inside the other, that expand over a 16-minute time
frame until the smaller form suddenly becomes the larger form – an ‘ending’ that is as
captivating as it is easy to miss, as the changing of position happens rapidly.
A strong feeling thus arises that watching the whole process a second or
third time is required in order to decipher the relationship of the two ovals. In fact,
the sensation of memory failure as to which shape replaced the other becomes a
legitimate concern, also because the ‘sculptural’ element might ‘distract’ one from
seeing where the other shape went. So as the viewer engages with the cinematic
element on the floor, it’s easy to be equally engaged with the sculptural, three-
OB>QEªEBBOQF@>ILOHP«— dimensional aspects of the installation that surrounds one’s body. Finally, McCall’s
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David Goldblatt Galeria Elba Benítez, Madrid


In the Time of AIDS 1 April – 30 May

A thousand people die every day of AIDS-related


causes in South Africa. The disease is the nation’s
scourge, inextricably linked to other horrors: rape,
child abuse, drug addiction, abject communal
poverty – as well as to irresponsible, verging on
the criminal, governmental policies that have
withheld retroviral drugs capable of reducing
transmission from mothers to newborns, that have
blocked condom distribution and that have failed
to provide education – especially education – that
might have encouraged the empowerment of
women with regard not only to their own bodies
and their own sexuality, but to their own lives.
And the famous red AIDS ribbon? What is
OBLR >PQBO>Q its place in the face of such massive suffering, such escalating despair, such institutional impotence? Perhaps in
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presence supplies the simple visual conceit that structures David Goldblatt’s photographic series In the Time of
AIDS. Somewhere in each photograph the red ribbon can be found, displayed in situ, painted on walls or rocks
or storefront windows; but in each photograph the red ribbon, while literally a sign of the times, has receded
into banality, has become little more than another element of all such signage – civic, religious, monumental,
commercial, vernacular – that in everyday life is soon as blanched of meaning as the dry South African sky is
blanched of blue.
In keeping with their subject matter, the photographs are visually muted and aesthetically modest, yet
formal concerns are not entirely absent. For example, in the photo entitled Fuck, at Kevin Kwanele’s Takwaito
Barber Shop on Landsdowne Road, Khayelitisha, Cape Town, in the Time of Aids. 16 May 2007 (2007), the pose of
the child idly stretching up to touch the street sign echoes the ribbon crudely painted onto that same sign. And
in Are You Master at Kilometer 4 on the R74 Between Harrismith and Bergville, Free State, in the Time of AIDS. 25
August 2005 (2005), the lines of the landscape – the bending rows of dry grass, the big-sky horizon, the sheer-
rising hills, even the straight track of asphalt – converge into a stunning image of the veld.
But in In the Time of AIDS, as in all Goldblatt’s photography, formal values are far from foremost. So
what is foremost? Protest, perhaps, and – again characteristic of Goldblatt’s photography qua photography –
protest devoid of propaganda: there are no AIDS hospices or graveyards in these photographs, no emaciated
bedridden figures, no malformed, crying children. But at the same time, and even more palpable than protest,
these photographs come together into an act of portraiture; for in following the trail of the once-pretty, now-
tattered red ribbon, what emerges – what cannot not emerge – is a portrait of a land, of a society, of an age: the
haunted age of AIDS. George Stolz

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Jochen Lempert Culturgest, Lisbon


Field Work 7 February – 10 May

Perhaps the intimacy of Jochen Lempert’s work is to blame for his relative obscurity. As if that intimacy
somehow bewitched one into jealously guarding the secret of the stark and whispering beauty of his work
intact. Because how an artist this good at this stage in his career (born 1958) is not more well known, nay
celebrated, is an anomaly of criminal proportions.
German, Hamburg-based Lempert takes pictures. His choice of subject matter – primarily animal life
and natural phenomena, often in conjunction with urban environments or humankind – is informed by a degree
in biology. Lempert does not discriminate between levels of animal life, evincing an interest in everything from
luminescent plankton to stuffed donkeys, and no animal is too ignoble (pigeons) for his lens. Anachronistically
working with a 35mm camera, he shoots in black-and-white and develops his silver gelatin prints himself,
generally on a baritate paper, which, due to his wilful neglect (not flattening the paper), becomes slightly
buckled and bent. This raw and seemingly unkempt quality, combined with the fact that his photographs are
exhibited without frames, endow the works with a textured, object-like sensuousness. This partially accounts
for both their extraordinary intimacy and their understated reluctance to be straight photos, allowing them to
create and occupy a space between photography, drawing, abstraction and object (most of which is absolutely
lost in reproduction).
In Field Work, Lempert’s first institutional
survey outside of Germany, the artist presents a
modest selection of work largely from the last six years.
Were it not for the contemporary architecture that
occasionally crops up here, this collection of photos
could be the production of some eccentric 1930s
zoologist with an eye for patterns, seriality, unusual
correspondences and the work of, say, Karl Blossfeldt.
But in addition to a pseudo-research-oriented mode,
one thing that forestalls any charges of nostalgia is
the indexical nature of this work and its proclivity to
fuse form with content. For example, in the six photos
of the series Flock (2005), a thin, black line of birds
against a white sky ambiguously doubles as a graphite
flourish, as if Lempert were literally drawing in the
sky with his camera. Other works, such as a triptych
of white birds taken from bird’s-eye view scattered
over a black expanse of water, become all-over
abstractions. Gridded profiles of birds speak to the
modernist grid and Postwar American seriality, but
with an unorthodox heterogeneity, while groupings
assembled from the artist’s personal archive, like a
triptych from the series Symmetry and Architecture of
the Body (1997–2005) of a woman’s foot, a coquettishly
kneeling goat and the rear view of a pensive goose
address a different kind of motif-based seriality (the
elegance of joints!). Marked by a droll humour, this
work likewise possesses an odd pathos, as touching
as it is hard to account for. Maybe it has something
to do with the candidness and harrowing simplicity of
Lempert’s vision of the world, and the generosity with
which he shares it. Chris Sharp

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Asia

Bringing British artists to Beijing, and playing with the demarcation


of who might qualify as a ‘British’ or ‘Chinese’ artist, Chinese
contemporary art specialist and curator Katie Hill’s English Lounge
offers a ‘discursive and aesthetic space of words and journeys’, with
works that explore the vicissitudes of globalisation, transnationalism,
immigration, assimilation and appropriation.
White texts on a black background swirl in the projection
space. Obama and the Russians, the financial crisis, unemployment,
the Iraq War, chat-room political discourse – all form real-time
cyclone-shaped whirlwinds, jostling for position and changing
course as new Internet texts join the silent verbal cacophony of
contemporary cyber-discourse. Corby & Baily’s trenchant digital
media work Cyclone (2006) uses weather-pattern software
reconfigured to mimic the volatile and mutually interactive global
circulation of political discourse.
The homogenisation of internationalism is a preoccupation
here: Langlands & Bell’s The Language of Places (2009), overlaid
lettering on a wall, superimposes the three-letter codes for
international airports (JFK, PEK, etc) mingled with the codes for
Chinese regional airports, visually instantiating the interpenetration
of global and local. Likewise, Thomson & Craighead’s Flat Earth
(2007) uses Google Earth to take us on a seven-minute, locally Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing
narrated trip around the globe.
In their performance installation Tomato Lorry (2009), Mad
English Lounge 16 March – 26 April
for Real (UK-transplant Chinese émigré artists Cai Yuan and JJ
Xi) revisit the 2000 tragedy of the 57 Fujianese stowaways who
suffocated in the tomato lorry smuggling them to ‘freedom’ in the West. A video shows the artists locked in the
back of a lorry, juicing tomatoes and costumed as the Monkey King from the Chinese classic Journey to the West
(c. 1590). In the gallery, they juice and offer visitors this ‘sacrament’ to remember those would-be immigrants,
before enacting a frenzied, ritualised ablution that left the wall splattered crimson.
Appropriation ties together works by Little Artists (Cake & Neave), such as their Lego remakes of famous
pieces (Damien Hirst’s shark) and Mad for Real’s Jumping on Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999) at the Tate. But works
by Martin Creed — a yellow neon Don’t Worry (2009) — and Adam Chodzko’s eerie Pyramid (2008) seemed
thematically disconnected.
In Battle of Britain (2007), red flags dot Anthony Key’s map of Britain — a replica of Winston Churchill’s
Second World War map. Inscribed on the flags are the names of all the Chinese restaurants in Great Britain. Stacks
of flags tower in metropolitan areas, but where ethnic homogeneity has scarcely been challenged by this culinary
colonisation, flags stand out in isolation. The work’s brilliance is the subtlety with which Key engages cultural
identity and the understated suggestion that assimilation goes both ways; not only can the subaltern speak, they
can cook as well. And the topographical representation of cross-cultural diffusion, such as those experienced by
immigrants like Key himself, captures the ethos of the exhibition as a whole.
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Mori Arts Center, Tokyo


The Kaleidoscopic Eye 4 April – 5 July

Cocurated by Daniela Zyman of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection (T-BA21) and Araki Natsumi of
the Mori Arts Center, The Kaleidoscopic Eye uses the unique space of the Mori Arts Center – situated on the 52nd floor of
one of Tokyo’s iconic skyscrapers, with panoramic views of the city – to frame approximately 45 of 450 works of art amassed
and commissioned by T-BA21 since its founding in 2002.
Included are pieces that present fractured images, sensory experiences and fragmented realities through lenses that
are not only visual but also conceptual and political. In line with the exhibition title, a number of the pieces focus on vision
and optics, utilising light, mirror, glass and the like. In this vein, Carsten Höller’s Y (2003), a series of intersecting light tunnels
through which visitors are invited to walk, create a funhouse effect; and Olafur Eliasson’s Your Welcome Reflected (2003),
a group of suspended coloured discs, throw glowing light onto the gallery walls and into adjacent spaces. Likewise, Jeppe
Hein’s mirrored-globe Reflecting Object (2006), seen here rolling on a Jim Lambie striped floor, and the hanging reflective
spheres of John M. Armleder’s Global Domes XII (2000) create so-called kaleidoscopic experiences. Some works, including
Sarah Morris’s painting Wolf (Origami) (2007), Haris Epaminonda’s black-and-white collages and Los Carpinteros’s Frio
Estudio del Desastre (2005), convey the exhibition’s theme either formally or conceptually through disjointed forms, patterns
and networks.
Still others are less literally optical or physically splintered, focusing more broadly on shifting perspectives, nonlinear
narratives and the multiplicity of interpretation that typifies contemporary life. It is in these pieces that the exhibition opens
up to the ways information and meaning are fragmented and often diffused. Janet Cardiff’s To Touch (1994), the first piece
acquired by T-BA21, as well as her Newspaper Poem (2002), overlay multiple soundtracks and collage otherwise disparate
printed words, respectively. Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999), comprising found film footage, and Matthew Ritchie’s
multifaceted installation The Family Farm (2001), in which visual and conceptual information explodes on the gallery walls and
floor, each feature disjunctive narrative strands.
Perhaps Cerith Wyn Evans’s Murano glass chandelier, ‘Astrophotography – Stages of Photographic Development’ by
Siegfried Marx (1987) (2007), flashing a text in Morse code to the world beyond the gallery best expresses the shifting vantage
points one needs to adopt to interpret works of art, let alone decipher the world at large. From inside the Mori, his stunning
object, installed in a floor-to-ceiling-windowed gallery, blinks seemingly random light patterns, while from outside the tower,
someone somewhere receives the otherwise encrypted text.
Taken together, the works in the exhibition compose an analogy for reordering the endless streams of overlapping
– and often competing – information we continually receive in all forms. It serves to remind us that altering one’s perspective
will allow and encourage the world to come into and out of focus before our eyes. Rochelle Steiner
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Ryoji Ikeda Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo


+/- (The Infinite Between 0 and 1) 2 April – 21 June

Two rooms on two floors house the first major retrospective of the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda. On the first floor, hundreds
of square metres of space are plunged into darkness, in stark contrast to the bright whiteness of the subterranean lower
room. In this terrifically effective binary scenario, all the mathematical refinement of Ikeda’s oeuvre is condensed. As a sort
of introduction, each of the two first floors open with a square metal plate engraved with microscopic digital numerals.
Monumentalised by the cuboid plinths on which they are mounted, these two plates should be identical, yet presented in the
two opposed lighting environments, they appear quite different.
Upon encountering the first in subdued lighting, visitors quickly find themselves immersed in a dark room in which
are installed ten simultaneous computer projections. Sound underscores these visual animations: what is calculated by these
constantly changing numbers? Knowing what all this data signifies is ultimately not important; better just to experience its
evolving permutations; everything happens with a magnified coldness, full of intriguing diagrams and an aesthetic of mystery.
White and black dominate. The screens are of identical size, and the visitor discovers them as a group before moving on to
confront another wall projection, this time on an enormous scale. From floor to ceiling, zeros and ones scroll down in columns,
their speed related to different accompanying rhythmic beats, before a horizontal line of unchanging numbers is suddenly
formed across the screen.
One cannot fail to be enthralled with the quality of the projection, a perfect embodiment of Ikeda’s severe and moving
universe, which expresses the vast space–time of possibility that could be thought to exist between 0 and 1. Because what if
things and events were not merely due to chance, but could be calculated, could be entirely formulated? Out of his dialogue
with the American mathematician Benedict Gross, Ikeda’s work defines the sublime as the immateriality of the infinite. Such
an encounter therefore explores the possibility of an aesthetic language common to both art and science, born from a sense
of exacting precision.
If sound occupies a significant place in the blackness of the first floor, it becomes the supreme entity in the white
brightness of the basement. This time, walking barefoot on the white carpet, the visitor wanders among massive speakers
which each produce a different, high-pitched tone, the tone changing in response to the visitor’s own movement and position;
one feels the sound physically in space – it is almost a sculptural experience of sound.
Out of the experience of these two floors, out of the black and white, out of video and sound, emerges a profound
equilibrium that is testimony to the visual and sonic intelligence of an artist known as much for his concerts as for his installations.
Here, sound and image cannot be dissociated, but rather feed each other in Ikeda’s severe and measured orchestration.
The effect that emerges from this purified musical and graphical world is truly monumental. Karine Tissot

OQBSFBT ‚‡
REVIEWS:

Books

IN THE 1970S I went to Kingsdale Comprehensive School, built by Kingsley Martin for the
London County Council; a great glass shoebox with a quadrangle and concrete stairwells in
the Le Corbusier style. In his sterling case for Modernism, Owen Hatherley looks back at a
childhood in Postwar-built Southampton, with its walkways, Cunard-liner modelled Wyndham
Court (by Lyons Israel Ellis) and a glass and concrete secondary school: ‘I can recall looking at its
mainly 1960s skyline from the walkway of a bricky pomo Asda, thinking how excitingly modern it
all seemed… a shabby version of the glittering towers of science fiction.’ It was. We were growing
up on the sets for A Clockwork Orange (1971), Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) and Tarkovsky’s
Solaris (1972), and the inhuman glamour was almost unbearable.
Hatherley blogs on architecture and modernism at The Measures Taken as well as writing
for New Statesman and other radical outlets. He loves writing, and it shows. Militant Modernism
is a panegyric – and a paroxysm. It is about architecture, in passing, and about sex and culture
and alienation, too. But it is really about Modernism, about the time when the future arrived in
the present, and all our output was bent to making tomorrow today.
Early on, Hatherley crashes through one pain barrier that we must overcome if we are to
see Modernism clearly. He takes us, with Wyndham Lewis in the company of Edward Wadsworth,
to a hill above Halifax, to look down on the factories (sweets, textiles and Gannex macs,
I remember). Lewis says of Wadsworth, ‘I could see he was proud of it. “It’s like Hell, isn’t it?” he
said enthusiastically.’ To love the modern, you have to let go of a lot of aesthetic ideas about
beauty, ideas that turn out to be nothing but class animosity stirred up by the proximity of

Militant Modernism By Owen Hatherley


Zero Books, £9.99 / $19.95 (paperback)

working people. A lover of the New Brutalism of the Thamesmead and Robin Hood Gardens
estates, Hatherley makes us see the poetry of concrete slabs. He finds the promise of the future
in unlikely places, from Yugoslav sex films to early Russian planning.
At times Hatherley’s wilful naughtiness seems a bit camp, as if he is going out of his way
to say something shocking. Would you really take sex advice from the terrorist Andreas Baader?
Wasn’t Lewis a Hitler supporter? Hatherley knows that there is a problem with ‘nostalgia for
the future, a longing for the fragments of the half-hearted post war attempts at building a new
society’. ‘These remnants of social democracy’, he writes, ‘can at best have the effect of critiquing
the paucity of ambition and grotesque inequalities of the present’. Modernism stands here for
the future blocked off, the socialist New Jerusalem that ran into the ground.
It really was not all that good, though. English socialism was a tawdry totalitarianism,
policed not by Stormtroopers but Boy Scouts. London County Council’s Modernism was
cheapskate, and poverty is not glamorous. Hatherley lauds the Soviet Proletcult movement, but
forgets Trotsky’s criticism that a working-class art could only mirror the degraded state of an
exploited class. The municipal authorities, the welfare system and the nationalised industries
that underpinned the social democracy of Postwar Modernism were the enemies of promise,
not its champions. The left were too tied up in all that, so it was Margaret Thatcher who got all
the glory from kicking it over. Sometimes Militant Modernism reads as if, from the Olympian
heights of Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government, Hatherley is rubbishing today’s working
class, who have strayed from the socialist faith, flocking instead to the Mammon of out-of-town
shopping centres, like Bluewater in Essex, abandoning their modernist ‘workers’ flats’ for Barratt-
built mock-Georgian suburbs. James Heartfield

ƒˆ OQBSFBT
APTLY FOR A SELF-DESCRIBED ‘RENEGADE CHRISTIAN’, Paul Thek has died and been reborn more
than once. His first exit came in 1967, when he exhibited his best-known work, The Tomb (also
known as Death of a Hippie, a title the American artist resented): a wax effigy of an expired,
black-tongued Thek inside a ziggurat-cum-miniature-skyscraper, and a symbolic sayonara to a
Manhattan artworld he saw as irredeemably corrupt. Two years later, Fishman (1969) – a sculpted
figure encrusted with model fish, shown repeatedly in altered versions – served to introduce
Thek Mk. II, who would spend the next half-decade pioneering a collaborative, process-based,
market-defying, institution-critiquing, perpetually unfinished aesthetic that alienated him still
further from the artworld. Later still, he would concentrate on naïf newsprint drawings of animals
and landscape; retreat to a monastery; and like some artistic version of Dostoevsky’s Prince
Myshkin, characterise himself as a ‘pied piper’ and work often with children (‘the only people he
could bear by the end’, writes Harald Falckenberg) before dying in actuality, of AIDS-related
illness, in 1988.
Now Thek is back once more. The 650-page hardback Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist contains
newly commissioned and sometimes grindingly academic essays (complete with old-school
titles like ‘Art (re)forms and (re)forms of life’), appreciations and poems by demimonde habitués
like Kim Gordon and Mike Kelley, Thek’s beautifully thin-skinned letters to Susan Sontag and
Peter Hujar, his teaching notes, vintage interviews and articles, and a 170-page, image-based
chronological flythrough of his 30-year career, from liquefied black abstractions to pulsating Big
Bang Paintings. ‘So much recent art looks like Paul Thek’s… Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, Charles
Ray, Cady Noland, John Miller…’, Kelley wrote in 1992. Noland aside, that’s mostly just dealing
with Thek’s proto-abject period in the mid-1960s: the wax body parts he inserted into transparent
geometric structures and Brillo boxes by way of noting the lack of visceral reality in minimalism
and Pop. Since the early 1990s, meanwhile, those who knew Thek installations like his Tower of
Babel (1977–80, whose architecture built of sand was received as a slight by the Venice Biennale
when it was exhibited there) or Visual Therapy (1986), a playground he created for children,
might have spotted his influence on recent art that privileges environment and refuses closure,
or seeks to have direct effects in the social sphere. That most of this work no longer exists hasn’t,
of course, helped the long-term project of putting Thek into history books (nor has the fact that,
due to insurance issues, The Tomb probably ended up in a landfill).

Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist Edited by Harald Falckenberg, Peter Weibel


MIT Press , £32.95 / $54.95 (hardcover)

This book is timed to coincide with another attempt at habilitating Thek: a big
retrospective (following one in the mid-1990s that didn’t satisfactorily inflate his reputation), this
time coordinated by the Whitney Museum and LACMA and set for late 2010. The volume,
meanwhile, offers pretty much all the Thek material one could desire, as well as being a model
for ethical practice and a guide to career suicide. And there, of course, is the presiding irony.
The artist, infused with Catholic mysticism (and struggling to ‘serve two masters’, as he puts it),
spends his days despising the industry around him, doing himself out of a job there. The industry
could care less, but when it realises, via artists’ practices, how prescient he was (and despite
Thek’s modestly claiming, in an effusive 1973 interview with Harald Szeemann, that art comes
from the spirit), it wants to credit him and trade on his credibility. The artist, through his career,
steps increasingly lightly, making work that is evanescent and ecological (eg, reusing newspaper)
and tenderhearted. The combined industries of academia and the market reward him, finally,
with Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist – an ostentatious tombstone intended to ensure resurrection.
Martin Herbert

OQBSFBT
REVIEWS: BOOKS

NICOLAS BOURRIAUD’S ALMOST embarrassingly overcited book Relational Aesthetics (1998)


defined a generation of innovative artistic practice that emerged in the 1990s, becoming an
artworld bestseller in the process. It’s a testament to the nomadic French curator-critic’s
uncommon talent for fusing a keen attention to emergent trends in art with a freewheeling taste
for grand theoretical speculation, for unlike celebrity philosophers or theory-spouting curator-
clones, Bourriaud is a genuine mediator of big ideas and has the temerity to come up with a few
of his own, all the time keeping these plausibly close to the prevailing artistic and cultural winds.
With The Radicant, published simultaneously with his latest curatorial outing – Tate
Britain’s Altermodern Triennial – Bourriaud attempts to rethink what is supposed to happen after
postmodernism. After all, the pomo ‘end of grand narratives’ doesn’t mean that events have
stopped happening, yet any nostalgic returns to the linear certainties of modernist progress, or to
the dodgy universalism of Western-centric accounts of history and society, still hold the negative
connotations of a generation of postcolonialist theorising. So how does Bourriaud get through
the problem of how to be post-postmodern without resorting to a simplistic ‘neo’ or ‘retro’?
Bourriaud’s answer is the ‘altermodern’ – an other modernity. To get to this, however,
he targets and isolates one of postmodernism’s more repressive theoretical shortcomings:
multiculturalism. The best part of The Radicant is a lively critique of the conservative consequences
of postmodern multiculturalism: ‘In their most dogmatic form’, he writes, ‘these theories go so far
as to obliterate any possibility of dialogue among individuals who do not share the same history
or cultural identity.’ Rejecting the ‘politics of recognition’ of theorists such as Charles Taylor,
Bourriaud challenges that we ‘must move beyond the peaceful and sterile coexistence of reified
cultures (multiculturalism) to a state of cooperation among cultures that are equally critical of
their own identity’.
Bourriaud’s bête noire is not cultural diversity itself but rather the sterile, managed
cultural difference that turns out to be the flipside of globalisation’s imposition of cultural
homogenisation. Dialogue, translation and encounter between equals, artistic or otherwise, are
the utopian horizons of Bourriaud’s altermodernity, in opposition to the veiled condescension of
a ‘respect for the other’.
Nevertheless, while Bourriaud does a good job of surveying the exemplary practitioners
of his anti homogenising, ‘creolised’ global artistic practice – the homo viators, artists as travellers
or ‘semionauts’ navigating and recoding the territories of contemporary cultural signification

The Radicant By Nicolas Bourriaud


Lukas & Sternberg, €15 / $19.95 (paperback)

– there still remains the thorny problem of History and Progress. In this, Bourriaud is more of the
good postmodernist than he would like to admit; at every turn, The Radicant attempts to forestall
the spectre of meaningful historical progress; a radicant, following vegetal terminology, is a plant
that puts down roots as it propagates and relocates, rather than the radical, which remains rooted
in one linear trajectory of growth, and in which Bourriaud sees nothing but Modernism’s obsession
with essentialist origins. ‘To believe that things were better before is fundamentally no different
from the illusion that they will inevitably be better tomorrow’, whereas we should distinguish ‘our
modernity from preceding ones, against futurist prescriptions, teleological notions of all sorts,
and the radicality that accompanies them’.
Bourriaud’s aversion to cultural universalism and grand historical narratives is, however,
conditional, and in fact what The Radicant struggles with is how to consider historical change and
cultural identity as conditions to be negotiated. Though he hesitates to spell it out, Bourriaud is
attempting to articulate culture and history not as lifeless prescriptions (progress as history ‘on
automatic’, cultural identity as given and inert) but as potentials to be actively produced by new
self-determining communities of equals. Bourriaud has to turn rhetorical somersaults to avoid this
conclusion, but in an unguarded aside to Marx (‘because history is a movement of interaction and
growing interdependence among the individuals and groups that constitute humanity, its logical
destiny is to be universal’), the contradiction is evident. Bourriaud’s altermodern, therefore, is
more of a protomodern – a ‘pre’ not a ‘post’ of a history and a culture yet to be made. If only we
had the courage to give them one more push, the wheels of our history might start turning again.
J.J. Charlesworth

ƒ€ OQBSFBT
FOR ROBERT RYMAN, in his own words, ‘there is never a question of what to paint, only how to
paint’. And just how does Ryman paint? Suzanne Hudson’s answer: pragmatically. In her new
monograph, Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Hudson gets quickly to the point about how she intends
to ‘frame’ Ryman anew: ‘Against antiaesthetic historicism and anticonceptual hedonism, this
book asserts Ryman’s pragmatism’, which is to say, painting as a true ‘practice’.
Every artist today is engaged in some sort of ‘practice’, but Hudson asks us to consider
exactly what this means within the scope of pragmatism as it was developed by the likes of C.S.
Peirce, William James and John Dewey. For these turn-of-the-twentieth-century American
thinkers, pragmatism offered a means of navigating between the Scylla of empiricism and the
Charybdis of idealism; it entailed considering the potential effects of one or another solution to
otherwise irresoluble metaphysical problems, and then going with whatever worked best. Hudson
explains how ‘[Ryman’s practice] is marked by a careful working over of painting’s conventions in
their most radically reduced (to white paint and a support structure) and paradoxically inverted
and expanded possibilities’; and staying with the pragmatist vein, Hudson compares this method
to a kind of ‘laboratory-derived problem solving’, through which the results of each painting
or series of paintings are taken into account, mulled over and ultimately mined for new and
promising directions.

Robert Ryman: Used Paint Edited by Suzanne P. Hudson


MIT Press, £25.95 / $39.95 (hardcover)

For anyone familiar with the art of the 1960s and 70s in New York, the period when Ryman’s
work first came to public attention, the gunshots of process art and postminimalism can be heard
just down the street. But what Hudson shows us – and this is perhaps her study’s one genuine
contribution to the field – is that Ryman’s pragmatism was formed in the crucible of the Museum
of Modern Art, where he had been employed as a guard beginning in 1953. As Hudson states
quite plainly: ‘Ryman’s acquisition of the skills of looking and painting were made possible by the
museum. As a pragmatist institution during the period under consideration, MoMA nudged its
installations and related programs, publications, and courses toward such educational purposes
under the aegis of Victor D’Amico [director of the museum’s education department and head
of the early People’s Art Center] and Alfred Barr [the museum’s influential founding director]’,
both of whom were pragmatism devotees. In this narrative, postminimalism is simply a passing
storm that picked up Ryman for its own purposes and then left him behind when new and more
interesting alternatives outside the galleries beckoned.
Ryman never strayed, of course. And throughout Robert Ryman: Used Paint, Hudson
invokes the pragmatist framework again and again to make sense of how Ryman worked.
For example, ‘Ryman’s pragmatism comes dramatically to the fore in that his painting, while
based on “painting”, offers no guarantees for future success any more than it argues against
such potentiality.’ And ‘Ryman opens the material and conventional dimensions of painting to a
different kind of medium-specificity that involves a narrow-band infinitude of provisional answers
to questions of what makes a painting, how it is made, with which materials, and why.’
But, one seems compelled to ask, so what? Is this really a newly won understanding of
Ryman? Yes, all of this adds up to what Hudson calls Ryman’s ‘arhetorical’ painting, a practice
which eludes, even shuns, discourse in the face of doing. But why not call this ‘narrow-band
infinitude’ a ‘productive solipsism’, the constant traversal of an admittedly complex state space
with few degrees of freedom (which as Hudson’s chapter titles reveal, reduce to ‘primer’, ‘paint’,
‘edge’, ‘support’ and ‘wall’)?
Without any kind of theoretical or historical expansion, Robert Ryman: Used Paint reads
like an academic essay that has been stretched to fill a book-length study, its salient points easily
condensed into a single chapter within a larger and more ambitious account, say, of pragmatism’s
resurgence in the US since the 1970s. And what of Ryman’s ‘realism’ (the artist’s own retrospective
understanding of his work), which Hudson never argues much beyond a pragmatic belief in the
‘literalism’ that has set in place painting’s conceptual trajectory since the 1960s? To my mind,
‘realism’ is the concept in greatest need of reassessment today. Just how Ryman and others of his
generation came to understand their work as such is the question that still needs answering.
Jonathan T.D. Neil

OQBSFBT
THE STRIP: BY GOSHA OSTRETSOV

THE STATE AND WOMEN


ARCHAEOLOGISTS SAY THAT
ANCIENT SOCIETY WAS MOST
LIKELY RULED BY WOMEN.
THE OLDEST STONE AGE
FIGURINES THEY HAVE FOUND,
LOOSELY CALLED VENUSES,
REPRESENT MOTHER EARTH,
WHO GIVES LIFE AND FEEDS.
BUT MODERN POLITICS,
ALTHOUGH BASED ON
DEMOCRATIC PRINCIPLES,
STILL ENTERTAIN NEW AGE
ILLUSIONS.
A REVOLUTION IS A REBELLION
AGAINST FATHERS, AND SO
SHOULD BE LED BY WOMEN.
A RELEVANT EXAMPLE IS
LIBERTY LEADING THE
PEOPLE (1830), BY EUGENE
DELACROIX, WITH NAKED
BOOBS AS THE SYMBOL OF
HUMAN LIBERATION.
THE WORK I AM PRESENTING
IN THIS MAGAZINE SHOULD
DRAW THE READER’S
ATTENTION TO THE PROBLEM
OF FREEDOM IN MODERN
SOCIETY AS ‘A NAKED
FREEDOM’, AND OF STATE
MACHINERY AS A MANY-
HEADED MONSTER HIDING
BEHIND THE MASKS OF
OFFICIALS, AGAINST
WHICH THIS REVOLUTION
IS DIRECTED.
POWER, FREEDOM AND
REVOLUTION ARE THE
THREE FEMALE ELEMENTS
THAT SPILL BLOOD.

ƒ‚ OQBSFBT
ON THE TOWN:

2 April
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ˆˆ OQBSFBT
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OQBSFBT ˆˆ
Friday, April 24, 2009 08:09

Subject: How to make it in the artworld


Date: Friday, April 24, 2009 08:08
From: givemeabreak@artreview.com
To: <office@artreview.com>
Conversation: How to make it in the artworld

For a few years now I’ve managed to persuade people that I’m an art consultant. Basically
this means setting up your own website, going to private views and getting promisingly
frisky with suited-and-booted fellas from the city before offering to help ‘guide’ their
collection. This, obviously, has come to an end. Gone are the days of striding through the
aisles at art fairs, barking into a BlackBerry with a sheepish hedge-fund manager in tow
before hissing at pathetic dealers. It was a mug’s game. You advise some poor munchkin to
buy something, they say yes over dinner, they pay for dinner, you let them grope your
breasts, you make an offer to the dealer and then you demand the discount that acts as your
cut. You buy anything. Anything you can in order to get the cut. Occasionally I used to lead
‘collector groups’ around fairs and galleries – basically the City munchkin and a few gay
friends of mine there to make up numbers. The homos talk up an artist, the City munchkin
nods in astounded wonder, I move in, I make my money, me and the gays drink champagne.
But as I said, these days are now over. Still, no point crying – the whole thing was fun, but
you know, these days I want to do something less shallow.
So for a while I toyed with the idea of being a freelance curator. Reassuringly, like
being an art consultant, this is essentially a made-up job that doesn’t exist in the lexicon
of career advisors. This is a good thing, given that I scraped out of the University of
Leicester with a 2.2 in cultural studies. The line I use to my coterie of collectors is just a
hop, skip and a jump from the reality of my undergraduate achievements: “Well, a middling
upper second in art history from the Light Blues.” But let’s face it, there’s even less money
in freelance curating right now than there is in art consulting. So readers, I have taken a
momentous decision. Right now, in the midst of the storm, in the eye of the needle, in the
hump of the camel, I am going to open a gallery. Well, sort of. I’m becoming the associate
director of a space that one of my benighted collectors from the past is going to open.
For him it’s a vanity project, born of years of dealers fawning over his limited intelligence
and suggesting that he is the true heir to J.P. Morgan’s collecting impulse. The fact that J.P.
Morgan was collecting Italian masters bought from Lord Duveen and that my new boss has
been collecting graduates with no discernible talent from galleries near Brick Lane does not
seem to have crossed the numpty’s mind. Still, what might be a vanity project for him
means one thing for me: a job. And the great thing is that he’s a tormented homo, so I don’t
even have to hand-shandy the loser.
And given the number of galleries in freefall, this is news that has high PR value.
You know the crap that PRs come up with: ‘A sign of recovery in the darkness!’ blazes
some art website. Better that than the more accurate story: ‘A random business idea by
maniac whose predilection for poppers and North African taxi drivers has finally run its
course.’ We’ve found a spot in Noho, we’ve got a celeb-studded mailing list and we’ve got
the brother of the star of Monkeyslap, a low-budget Brit flick which did surprisingly well
last year, to unveil the terrible doodlings he has produced during his coke-fuelled years at
the University of the Arts as our first show. His subject matter is ‘the underside of
celebrity’. When I first heard this, I thought he might simply mean Peaches Geldof with no
underwear, and to be fair, this would have been a top show. And that said, some of his
doodlings might well be Peaches Geldof with no underwear. I have no idea. I tell people
they’re very Elizabeth Peyton.
Anyhow, I’m fairly sure we’ve got the London freebie newspapers coming to the
opening to snap our in-crowd, and if they don’t turn up, the low-rent photographer
who does the grainy photos at the back of this rag might get a look in – although the
repro quality is admittedly dogshit – and if that doesn’t work, there’s always the gutter:
Artforum’s ‘Scene and Herd’. I don’t care. I just want publicity. And a paycheque.

GMAB

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