Professional Documents
Culture Documents
LONDON
It’s October, which means art lovers everywhere are turning their gaze to London.
What’s come to be known as Frieze week is increasingly the moment for which
institutions and galleries have been holding back their best shows. We profile our
favourites among the artists exhibiting concurrently with that modest event in
Regent’s Park, including Doug Fishbone by J.J. Charlesworth, Steven Claydon by
Mark Rappolt, Ruth Ewan by Oliver Basciano and Nina Beier by Laura McLean-Ferris
Let’s dance
From Move: Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery to Celebrating Trisha Brown
at venues across London, The Yvonne Rainer Project at BFI Southbank, ROTOR
at Siobhan Davies Studios and Rosemary Butcher’s Festival of Miniatures at Sadler’s
Wells, it looks like London is dancing itself right out of the recession.
By Laura McLean-Ferris
Santiago
As Chile emerges from decades of repression, conservatism and all-round dullness,
capped by one of the planet’s fiercest earthquakes, Santiago appears to be in the throes
of a movida. Art and a swirling nightlife are lighting up one of the most overlooked
South American cities. By Christian Viveros-Fauné
VIDEO Extras
Lars Laumann’s Swedish Book Store, 2007, Alan Licht performing Christian Marclay’s
Wind Up Guitar (1994, filmed 2010), Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966, filmed 1978),
Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forest (1970, filmed 2007), Daria Martin’s Lapped
Translated Lines, part of Rosemary Butcher’s Festival of Miniatures (2010),
and Sly Stallone’s The Expendables (2010).
LONDON
It’s October, which means art lovers everywhere are turning their gaze to London.
What’s come to be known as Frieze week is increasingly the moment for which
institutions and galleries have been holding back their best shows. We profile our
favourites among the artists exhibiting concurrently with that modest event in
Regent’s Park, including Doug Fishbone by J.J. Charlesworth, Steven Claydon by
Mark Rappolt, Ruth Ewan by Oliver Basciano and Nina Beier by Laura McLean-Ferris
Let’s dance
From Move: Choreographing You at the Hayward Gallery to Celebrating Trisha Brown
at venues across London, The Yvonne Rainer Project at BFI Southbank, ROTOR
at Siobhan Davies Studios and Rosemary Butcher’s Festival of Miniatures at Sadler’s
Wells, it looks like London is dancing itself right out of the recession.
By Laura McLean-Ferris
Santiago
As Chile emerges from decades of repression, conservatism and all-round dullness,
capped by one of the planet’s fiercest earthquakes, Santiago appears to be in the throes
of a movida. Art and a swirling nightlife are lighting up one of the most overlooked
South American cities. By Christian Viveros-Fauné
VIDEO Extras
Lars Laumann’s Swedish Book Store, 2007, Alan Licht performing Christian Marclay’s
Wind Up Guitar (1994, filmed 2010), Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A (1966, filmed 1978),
Trisha Brown’s Floor of the Forest (1970, filmed 2007), Daria Martin’s Lapped
Translated Lines, part of Rosemary Butcher’s Festival of Miniatures (2010),
and Sly Stallone’s The Expendables (2010).
‘The piece truly kicks in when audiences accept the absurd premise that I am a local Ghanaian’ – Doug Fishbone
October 2010
Lars Laumann:
Clairvoyant
pop stars,
love affairs
with the
Berlin Wall
and other
marginalia
Santiago:
We go off
in search of
Chile’s art
and meet
‘El Che
Guevara Gay’
Dance, Dance,
Dance:
Why are our
art galleries
showing so
much of it?
Moving into
Movies:
Is it because
artists now
prefer to make
feature films?
the Londonissue
New Eternity
A lexander Tovborg
2 SE p T E m bE r - 30 Oc T ObE r 2010
LIZALOU AMERICAN IDOL
1995 – 2010
OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 2010
BOOK AVAILABLE WITH TEXTS BY
DIEDRICH DIEDERICHSEN AND CHRISTOPH DOSWALD
Isaac Julien
Ten Thousand Waves
Yayoi Kusama
outdoor sculptures
Victoria Miro
7 October - 13 November 2010 www.victoria-miro.com
MALE curated by VINCE ALETTI
September – October 2010
Geoffrey Chadsey
Graham Durward
Peter Hujar
Stephen Irwin
Patrick Lee
Attila Richard Lukacs
Paul P.
Jack Pierson
Gary Schneider
Wolfgang Tillmans
Scott Treleaven
Karlheinz Weinberger
DIRK STEWEN
October — November 2010
MUNTEAN/ROSENBLUM
LARS LAUMANN project
November 2010 – January 2011
maureen paley. 21 Herald Street, London E2 6JT telephone: + 44 (0)20 7729 4112 fax: + 44 (0)20 7729 4113 www.maureenpaley.com
David Zink Yi, Neusilber (New Silver), 2010. Photo: Roman März
TATE BRITAIN
DUVEENS COMMISSION
UNTIL 3 JANUARY 2011
WWW.TATE.ORG.UK
PIMLICO u
fREE ADMISSION
SUPPORTED BY
AARON CURRY MMNKTLPLKT THROUGH 20 OCTOBER
sponsored by
roland berger strategy consultants
kindly supported by
esteé lauder
mondriaan foundation
outset contemporary art fund munich
embassy of the kingdom of the netherlands
october 2010
DISPATCHES 25 New on
Snapshot: Rinko Kawauchi Now ArtReview.com
See This: Richard Hawkins,
Marcel Broodthaers, The Museum Audio
of Everything, Brighton Photo 100 percent Woolley – he’s got
Biennial, Robert Mapplethorpe, a solo show currently open at
Sharon Lockhart, Larry Bell/ SPACE in London, but artist
Jeppe Hein, Marlene Dumas and Charlie Woolley has found time
the Old Masters, Uri Aran, to deliver another episode of
Ernesto Neto Columns: Paul the Charlie Woolley Radio Show.
Gravett decipher’s Adam Dant’s
Elizabethan make-believe; Joshua Project Space
Mack escribe sobre el mundo Berlin-based Polish artist
latinoamericano de Nueva York; Agnieszka Polska is the latest
Axel Lapp on fair politics; 29 to contribute to the Project
Marie Darrieussecq writes on Space, with a meditative
writing The Free Lance: We get scrolling video collage.
the memorials we deserve, argues
Christian Viveros-Fauné London Text
Calling: It’s all too clever by Laura McLean-Ferris posts not
half, J.J. Charlesworth ruminates one, but two postcards from
The Painted Word: Culture: it’s Villa Reykjavik. Channelling the
all relative, argues Nigel Cooke spirit of Alan Lomax, the review
The Shape of Things: What’s the includes field recordings from
use, asks Sam Jacob Hong Kong 46 the Icelandic capital’s art
Diary: The curious incident of scene. David Everitt Howe
the Karl Lagerfeld-designed safe invokes the Deep South in his
– Mark Rappolt journals the review of Supernatural Conductor
second part of his Eastern at the Atlanta Contemporary Art
adventures Design: Hettie Judah Center, plus much more.
gets all made-up Top Five:
The pick of shows to see this
month as selected by Karola
Kraus A New Concise Refererence
Dictionary: Baboon to buttocks,
defined by Neal Brown Consumed:
Alex Katz’s Ulla, North
Carolina’s Moog Fest, Alexander
and Susan Maris’s print,
Hamilton Turksoy’s Minaret,
Christie’s Multiplied,
Whitechapel Gallery’s art book 48
fair, Cubitt’s print box, WITH’s
Life Enhancement Solutions
Digested: Clunie Reid,
Cyprien Gaillard, Other Space
Odysseys, The Articulate
Surface, Kurt Schwitters, A
Hedonist’s Guide to Art On View:
Laura Allsop speaks to Gillian
Wearing on making movies Mark
Rappolt views Slater Bradley’s
new videowork, Germano Celant
talks to ArtReview about the
late Louise Bourgeois and Martin
Herbert entertains the strange
worlds of Lars Laumann Manifesto:
60
Superflex
14 ArtReview
Contents
october 2010
FEATURES
london 88
It’s the time of year when
London galleries pull out all
the stops. Oliver Basciano,
REAR VIEW
Reviews 139
J.J. Charlesworth, Laura
McLean-Ferris, Jim Quilty and
Mark Rappolt take their pick Fiona Banner, Andrea Zittel,
of the season’s best: Nina Sergej Jensen, Jess Flood-
Beier, Steven Claydon, Matthew Paddock, Unrealised Potential,
Darbyshire, Ruth Ewan, Doug
Martin Creed, Natascha Sadr
Fishbone, Pascal Hachem,
Haghighian, Zwelethu Mthethwa,
Christian Marclay, Walid Raad
and Rirkrit Tiravanija Charlotte Posenenske, Adam
Cvijanovic and David Humphrey,
Kori Newkirk, Yvonne Venegas,
Dance 108 Rodney Graham, Ebru Ozseçen,
Carlos Garaicoa, Thomas
139
Art and dance. Laura
McLean-Ferris asks why the Struth, Ettore Spalletti,
disciplines seem so eager to Portugal Arte 10
100
make a move on each other
BOOKS 158
Art Pilgrimage 120 Contemporary Art and the
Christian Viveros-Fauné meets Cosmopolitan Imagination,
the Chilean movers and shakers A Guide to the New Ruins
in Santiago of Great Britain, Art of
McSweeney’s, Hitch-22:
A Memoir
137
164
16 ArtReview
*%
Y E A R S AT
1"$&
0/7*&85)306()0$50#&3
"55)&'0--08*/('063/&8:03,-0$"5*0/4
& 8 8 8
Contributing Artists /
Photographers
Adam Dant, Issie Gibbons,
David Hughes, Rinko Kawauchi,
Ian Pierce, Superflex
Interns
Suzie Martins, Ksenia Landa,
Roisin McQueirns
ArtReview Ltd
London:
1 Sekforde Street, London EC1R 0BE
T: 44 (0)20 7107 2760 F: 44 (0)20 7107 2761
New York:
200 Hudson Street, Suite 300, New York, NY 10013
T: 1 201 688 6589
18 ArtReview
visit
Publishing Gallery corporate / Lifestyle
Publisher Advertising Advertising
Charlotte Robinson
charlotterobinson@artreview. UK / Australia Worldwide
com Jenny Rushton Charlotte Regan
T: 44 (0)20 7107 2765 T: 44 (0)7702 554 767
jennyrushton@artreview.com charlotteregan@artreview.com
Production USA / Canada Advertising Offices
Production Manager Florence Dinar USA / Canada
Allen Fisher T: 1 201 688 6589 Publicitas North America
allenfisher@artreview.com florencedinar@artreview.com Jeffrey Molinaro
T 1 212 330 0736
France / Italy / Spain / jeffrey.molinaro@publicitas.
Marketing Belgium / Latin A merica com
Moky May
Magazine and Exhibitions T: 33 (0)6 25 77 04 75 Germany / Austria
Letizia Resta mokymay@artreview.com Mercury Publicity
letiziaresta@artreview.com Angelika Marx
Germany / Switzerland / a.marx@mercury-publicity.de
artreview.com Austria / Holland / T: 49 6172 966 4012
Petra Polic Russia / Scandinavia
petrapolic@artreview.com Anna Müller Italy
T: 44 (0)20 7107 2764 Charlotte Regan
annamuller@artreview.com T: 44 (0)7702 554 767
Distribution charlotteregan@artreview.com
Asia / Middle East
Worldwide Florence Dinar France / Belgium
Stuart White T: 1 201 688 6589 Infopac SA
stuartwhite@artreview.com florencedinar@artreview.com Jean Charles Abeille
jcabeille@infopac.fr
USA T: 33 (0)1 46 43 00 66
Nicola Crockett
nicolacrockett@artreview.com Switzerland /
Lichtenstein
AdGate
Finance Alessandro Induni
ainduni@adgate.ch
Finance Director T: 41 79 500 21 62
Jonathan Steinberg
Financial Controller
Lyndon Morris
Artreview limited
ArtReview is published
by ArtReview Ltd
Chairman
Dennis Hotz
Group Managing Director
Debbie Shorten
Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers,
ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written
permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or
damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, ISSN 1745-9303, is published 9 times a
year by ArtReview Ltd. USA agent: IMS Clevett Worldwide, 19 Route 10 East, Bldg 2
Unit 24, Succasunna, NJ 07876.
Subscription price is US $89 per annum. Periodicals Postage Paid at Folcroft, PA.
Postmaster: Send address changes to: ArtReview, c/o IMS, 3330 Pacific Avenue, Ste
500, Virginia Beach, VA 23451-2983
20 ArtReview
HA U S E R & W IR T H
LOUISE BOURGEOIS
THE FABRIC WORKS
CURATED BY GERMANO CELANT
23 SAVILE ROW
LONDON W1S 2ET
WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM
UNTITLED (DETAIL), 2007, FABRIC AND FABRIC COLLAGE, 41.5 × 31.7 × 6.3 CM / 16 3/8 × 12 1/2 × 2 1/2 IN, PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER BURKE
ConTRIBUTORS
October 2010
Chris Fite-Wassilak
is a critic and curator
based in London. A regular
contributor to Art Papers,
Flash Art and Frieze, he was
the curator of the Hayward
Touring group show Quiet
Revolution in 2009 and
Oneiriography at the Green
on Red Gallery, Dublin, this
Christian
summer. Previous projects
include the collaborative
comic This Way Up and
captaining the Irish national Viveros-Faune
Beach Ultimate Frisbee team. Always ready to party with
a few bottles of warm fizzy
wine is Christian Viveros-
22 ArtReview
A REAL PHOTOGRAPHER’S CAMERA. When given the Lumix GF1 to test drive, professional
photographer David Eustace captured amazing
BUT DON’T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT. photographs, while the GF1 captured his heart. “It feels
like a working camera, a real photographer’s camera,
and I just loved the lenses on it. It’s way beyond being
a point-and-press camera, but it has the same simple
aesthetics if you want to use it like that.”
Featuring a D-SLR size sensor, a class-leading fast
autofocus system, built-in flash, HD movie mode and
a choice of interchangeable lenses, the GF1 has the
handling and responsiveness of a D-SLR, in a more
compact form.
Creative freedom matters.
EVERYTHING MATTERS.
URI ARAN
DOCTOR DOG SANDWICH
41 - 43 Watling Street Usher’s Island Dublin 8 IRELAND +353 1 671 7654 gallery@motherstankstation.com www.motherstankstation.com
DISPATCHES
october
Snapshot 25 Design 46
Now See This 26 Top 5 48
The Free Lance 32 A New Concise
London Calling 34 Reference Dictionary 50
The Painted Word 36 Consumed 60
The Shape of Things 38 Digested 64
Hong Kong Diary 42
‘I looked out onto the sky; if I hadn’t looked, would the image have been
the same? The fact is that we can only accept things before our eyes.’
ArtReview 25
DISPATCHES
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Marcel Broodthaers Les Portes, 1969, vacuum-formed plastic, hand-painted, 192 x 178 cm, courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York; courtesy the Museum of Everything, London
clockwise from left: Richard Hawkins, Disembodied Zombie Ben Green, 1997, inkjet print, 119 x 91 cm (unframed), 138 x 109 cm (framed), courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, collection of the
a cat (the perpetual response was ‘miaow’) and
generally played merry hell with cultural
categorisations. Major Works includes his 1974
installation Dites Partout Que Je L’Ai Dit (Say
words Martin herbert Everywhere What I Have Said) – a poised enigma
regarding reiteration that includes texts, a
recording of a poem, a stuffed parrot and an image
Some artists need a midcareer retrospective
of same – and one of Broodthaers’s very few
to elucidate years of perplexing zigzags:
paintings. Anticipate serious, delirious play.
Richard Hawkins (Art Institute of
Chicago, 22 October – 16 January,
www.artic.edu) is definitely one of them.
Since the early 1990s, he’s switched between tweaked
photographs of decapitated Goth kids and teen
heartthrobs, paintings encompassing woozy blur and
graphic punch when abstract and focusing on pensive
male nudes when brightly figurative, and collages of
Graeco-Roman statues. What this is, it transpires,
the Museum of
Talking of stuffed animals,
26 ArtReview
Adam Dant
works: one Damien Hirst. Potter apparently once
deflected claims of cruelty by claiming that all
his animals died naturally, adding, straight-faced,
that they were ‘all over one hundred years old’.
He and Hirst might have gotten along.
from top: Suzanne Opton, Soldier: Claxton – 120 Days in Afghanistan, 2004; Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter, 1979, Artist Rooms, Tate and National Galleries of Scotland,
Adam Dant’s real name might seem Star curating is again the order of the day at the
like an apt pseudonym already, a
nod to both the postpunkster from
Brighton Photo Biennial (2 October
Adam and the Ants, and resurrected – 14 November, www.bpb.org.uk), where
adventurer Adam Adamant; but from aficionado-of-the-quotidian Martin Parr takes the
1995 until the eve of the millennium, reins. On the menu: new conceptual and documentary
themes in photography, Queer Brighton and a show in
Dant adopted the nom de plume
Donald Parsnips. Back then, if
you were lucky enough to run into him on London’s streets,
he might well have surprised you by handing you a copy of
Donald Parsnips Daily Journal, his wry eight-page, palm-
size ‘newspaper’. He would write, draw and photocopy these
booklets compulsively every day, no matter what, starting at
6am, and distribute them willy-nilly for free in the manner
of an eighteenth-century pamphleteer. To reach passersby,
Dant also cobbled together his own newsstand, plastered with
deranged headlines like ‘Life of Strangers Could Hold Key to
Future Claim’ and ‘Many Predict End of Speculation’.
Today, having become an acclaimed artist under his
acquired jointly through the d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund, 2008
New York
Watching the watchers was the burden of the 1999
from top: Sharon Lockhart, Double Tide, 2009, 16mm film transferred to HD, courtesy Jan Mot, Brussels; Jeppe Hein, Dimensional Circle Illuminated, 2007, Remix Super Mirror, Plexiglas, steel, LED technique,
Sharon Lockhart
film Teatro Amazonas by
mirror folie, 140 x 140 x 2 cm, photo: Michael Lio, courtesy the artist and Johann König, Berlin
the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of Gotham: A History One logical upshot of the art-historical
of New York City to 1898 (1998), a 1,400-page magnum referentiality of much contemporary art is a project
opus that considers its subject through the work of the city’s
people and the myths of identity that have defined them. The
Larry Bell/Jeppe Hein (Galerie
like
exhibition, focusing on five broad periods from 1620 to 1945, Daniel Templon, Paris, 16 October – 24
explores themes identified as ‘Revolution in North and South
America’, ‘Commercial and Cultural Exchanges’ and ‘20th
November, www.danieltemplon.com).
The Danish Hein has long worked with a vocabulary of
century Migration’. A film by Ric Burns about the Hispanic mirrored, neominimalist forms that introduce
experience in the postwar decades brings us to the time when
Justice Sotomayor (born in 1954) was about ten: that is, into
the ambience and experiences in which the generation now in
power learned its first life lessons. While Anglos and Latinos
may not always have been social equals, the exhibition treats
them as equal players in the dynamics that constitute the
social: a take which might be its most refreshingly innovative
aspect at a time when debates about race are virtually taboo in
the public sphere.
28 ArtReview
cubic outlines, spin off from Bell’s reflective
Berlin
cubes in particular. So how better to effect what
the gallery calls a ‘conversational’ exhibition (no
anxiety of influence here) than to have some of
Bell’s cubes right there? Decide for yourself if
Hein’s art is a furthering or a footnote.
It’s that time of the year again: the art fairs are back. Art Forum
Berlin, in its 15th year, is starting the season on 6 October, Marlene Dumas and the Old
immediately followed by Frieze and FIAC. The Berlin fair is
going to be smaller this year – down to 110 galleries from 130 Masters (Haus der Kunst, Munich,
– and the younger ‘Sektor’ galleries, which previously were 29 October – 6 Feb, www.
presented in a separate space, are now interspersed among the
more established ones in the two main halls. Concentration hausderkunst.de) is unlikely to present the
Amsterdam-based South African artist as a footnote
and sharpening of profile are the buzzwords here, as apparently to anything, even when her work is shown in the
there was no decline in the number of applications. context of some gilded Dutch Old Masters. The
Art Forum Berlin is also collaborating with ABC, or connection here is via a transhistorical approach to
Art Berlin Contemporary, which in a power struggle with psychologically penetrating portraiture: a genre in
which Dumas, with her slippery, potently distorted
the fair two years ago was founded by a number of Berlin
figures drawn from photography, has few rivals among
galleries as their own autumn event, mirroring May’s Gallery living painters. As such, this show – which features
Weekend. (ABC’s founding director, Michael Neff, is also the new and/or unseen Dumas works – emphasises the long
manager of Gallery Weekend.) Last year, when the junior fair arc from the virtuosic portraits (or ‘tronies’) of
featured 64 galleries, the dates already coincided; and this Vermeer and Rembrandt to the mediated, anxious
nature of portraiture today. Several leagues away
time the corporation that owns and organises the art fair, the
Messegesellschaft, has let ABC take over the ostentatious
Marshall-Haus – a modernist glass-fronted building with a
gallery and grand sweeping stairs, designed by Bruno Grimmek
and built for the US contribution to an industrial trade show in
1950 – within the fair grounds.
ABC is themed: accordingly, with Light Camera Action
(sic), the ‘curated’ exhibition reemerges at Art Forum Berlin.
(Until 2008, every year featured a curated show, selected
from the galleries’ offerings). It’s an attempt to bridge the gap
between commerce and content, as of course the contributing
galleries are obliged to pay a fee, and in return see it as an
extended commercial presentation. The works are selected
Marlene Dumas, Naomi, 1995, oil on canvas, 150 x 110 cm, private collection. © the artist
Paris
show in Dublin – but Aran has a feel for materials
and their estranging; when Roberta Smith wrote about
him and referenced Robert Gober and Jasper Johns,
she wasn’t comparing idly.
from top: Uri Aran, Untitled, 2006 (video still), video, 3 min 24 sec, courtesy the artist and Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin; Ernesto Neto, Simple and light as a dream… the gravity
stick their heads and hands into it.
A few months ago I wrote a column in this magazine about
a museum I’m very fond of, the MAC/VAL, in a city called Vitry-
sur-Seine, in the southern suburbs of Paris. While rereading
Marguerite Duras’s novel Summer Rain (1980), I came across a
description of Vitry: ‘Vitry… is the least literary place one could
don’t lie… just loves the time, 2006, polyamide textile, nylon stockings, glass beads, styrofoam, 81 x 335 x 366 cm, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
imagine, the least defined. And so I invented it. But I kept the
names of musicians. I kept them for the streets. And also the
sprawling dimension of this suburban city of several million
inhabitants in its immensity.’ (At the time Duras was writing her
text, the city had a population of 80,000). ‘I forgot: the Seine,
Ernesto Neto (Astrup
And finally,
I’ve kept that, it’s always present, always there, superb, along
banks that are now bare. The undergrowth has been burnt away.
Fearnley Museum, Oslo, to 2 January, The roads parallel to the Seine are perfect, with three lanes.
www.afmuseet.no) gets his first The foreigners have disappeared. Company headquarters have
become palaces… At night one is scared because the streets are
retrospective anywhere in design-conscious
Scandinavia – which makes sense, given that the deserted.’
legacies of 1960s and 70s futurist design, and of What makes this text literary? How come virtually
Hélio Oiticica’s art, get reborn in his softened, everyone can write, but not everyone can write like this? I see
scented environments. The show contains works
from the last decade: if something looked like it
Vitry when I read these words, and yet I wouldn’t if I read the
came from an alternative past when it was new, following: ‘Vitry has nothing to do with literature, it’s a shapeless
can it date? suburb. And so I recomposed it in my imagination, keeping the
streets named after musicians, and the size, gigantic, as if there
were a million inhabitants. The commune is crossed over by the
Seine, superb, whose presence is everywhere. The riverbanks
have been reconstructed and the waste grounds rehabilitated.
The illegal immigrants have been deported. Luxurious business
blocks have been built. At night everything is deserted and
people feel unsafe.’
When sentences don’t have the same shape, they cannot
ever have the same meaning. Writers work with meaning if their
main concern (instinct, drive, movement or desire) is form.
Meaning can gush forth from form, and this has nothing to do
with communicating a message. A writer doesn’t necessarily
tell a story, a writer doesn’t display ideas: like all artists,
he works on a form from a medium that is both concrete and
virtual – words.
30 ArtReview
THE FREE LANCE
Memorial
Amid feaverish debate about the
Ground Zero site, maybe we should look
to Eastern Europe for inspiration
‘Democracy’, intoned a coolly rational John Quincy Adams,
‘has no monuments’. The occasion for this utterance was
Congress’s refusal to fund a statue for George Washington.
Since those early days of the Republic, American democracy
has, quite spectacularly, changed its tune. Not only is there a
monument to the crew of the space shuttle Columbia on the
surface of Mars, but a protracted shitstorm of bogus
controversy around an infamous piece of New York real estate
apparently not capacious enough to accommodate more than Islamic centre is not at Ground Zero, but two blocks away – a
one group’s symbols. Adams’s bones are doing triple axels. radius that includes an Off Track Betting parlour, a dozen shops
Because the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural advertising bikini wax and a strip joint called the Pussycat
centre near Ground Zero – acknowledging the origin of the Lounge, as well as an actual mosque (it predates the
site’s name in the Manhattan Project renders it totally creepy – construction of the World Trade Center). The area most
is being discussed as if it were a memorial, perhaps we should affected by the disaster is not ‘hallowed ground’ but part of a
consider other monuments around the world as comparative grand scheme for ‘55,000 square feet of retail space’. And Allah,
points of interest. while certainly many things to lots of people, appears as a
Los Angeles has the Hollywood sign (recently saved by ‘terrorist monkey God’ exclusively to Tea Party Express kingpin
Hugh Hefner), the Iraqi town of Tikrit boasts a metal shoe Mark Williams and a handful of hair-pulling bigots.
crowned by a leafy bush (commemorating the sandal hurled at Unfortunately, in an election year, few politicians display
LaVerdiere & Myoda, Towers of Light over the Promenade, 2001, artists’ rendering. © the artists
a US president) and Paris has César’s giant bronze thumb sufficient ‘testicular virility’ (in disgraced Illinois ex-governor
(celebrating, one supposes, the historical irony that is the Arche Rod Blagojevich’s phrasing) to contest Williams or perennial
de la Défense). But how many people know that Bologna has a presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich (who compared backers of
20-foot sculpture of Tupac Shakur, or that another sculpture of the mosque to Nazis). New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg
the rapper is due for Belgrade’s roughest neighbourhood? proves an exception, as does New Jersey Governor Chris
An example of a Serb-led phenomenon called turbo- Christie, neither Republican up for reelection this cycle. But in
sculpture, this cultural mutation has inspired existing and an environment that prizes shouting loudest over deep thought,
planned public European statues of figures as hallowed as how convincing can they and a few intellectuals be when Fox
Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa and Samantha Fox. A recent article News is constantly channelling Slobodan Milosevic in English?
penned by VVORK, an artist collective, puts the local Serbian The Ancient Greeks invented the word ‘demagogue’ to
craze for memorialising global kitsch in a nutshell. Speaking to describe a new class of ‘leader’ (agogos) expert at preying on
32 ArtReview
Calder Oc tObEr
Judd NOVEMbEr
ADAA
member
1 0 1 8 M A D I S O N A V E @ 7 8 t h S t N E w Y O r k N Y 10 07 5
212 - 7 4 4 - 1 9 0 0 I N f O @ V D w N Y .c O M w w w.V D w N Y . c O M
London calling
smartists
Is the new art too clever for its
own good?
Recently I’ve been having this recurring nightmare.
I find myself living in a giant, crumbling art museum. It’s the
size of a city, room after room, gallery after gallery, built on a
promontory, overlooking a plain. This museum-city is entirely
populated by artists and curators, who all dress like priests or
wizards or university professors, and who wander the halls and
galleries curating shows and attending openings in different
wings of the vast building. Outside, on the plain stretching to
the horizon, is where the masses reside, inhabiting a world that
consists largely of branches of Burger King, where they buy fast
food to gobble up while watching football all day on giant
outdoor screens. In the dream it’s always sunset.
Okay, I made up the recurring nightmare. It’s more of a more in accordance with quieter, financially straitened times’.
literary device, right? It’s symbolic. And what it symbolises is And Independent culture hack Hannah Duguid, in a startlingly
something to do with my growing worries about what we might sycophantic survey of the London scene, declares that the new
call ‘the New Clever’. ‘What’s the New Clever?’ you ask. The generation of artists comprises a ‘more sophisticated bunch…
New Clever is that type of sophisticated, complex, well-read, They are thoughtful, intellectual and well-connected. They
historically literate, often esoteric art which, in Britain at least, went to Oxford rather than Goldsmiths. They are elegant and
is starting to take centre stage. And which, what with this polite. Their world is closer to F. Scott Fitzgerald than Irvine
month’s concurrent openings of the epic five-year survey Welsh.’ In other words, flashy, vulgar, working-class and stupid
British Art Show 7, the Turner Prize’s annual outing and the are out, sophisticated, elegant, upper-class and clever are in.
second part of Saatchi’s rumbling behemoth Newspeak, we’re If the Old Stupid generation suited the upbeat,
about to see a shitload of. hedonistic, meritocratic mood of the late 1990s and early 00s,
‘So what’s your problem with that?’ you exclaim. Those oriented towards the here-and-now and to the wider culture,
of you with long memories will recall that a couple of years ago the New Clever generation is by contrast ascetic, specialist,
I used this column to mock those mainstream art critics who introspective, art-history-oriented and concerned with art’s
couldn’t seem to cope with all the ‘clever’ art that was then separation from other forms of cultural activity. This isn’t
starting to show up in big shows like the Turner Prize or the necessarily a bad thing; much of this comes as a direct reaction
Altermodern Tate Triennial (see ‘Dumb It Down; Keep It to YBA art’s often degraded accommodation to the mass-media
34 ArtReview
HALLE
STURTEVANT
DILLINGER RUNNING SERIES
OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 2010
Time to Go
Van Gogh
On the collective fantasy that we can
right art history’s wrongs
Last April, feeling like it was time for a bit of ‘culture’,
I decided to take the kids to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the
Royal Academy in London. It was the last day of its run. The
queue for tickets was four hours long; we never saw the show. the former’s police telephone box/time machine) after spotting
Despite urgings from the stoic American ladies ahead of us that a space critter in the window of one of the latter’s chapel
the ‘Von Go’ would be worth the wait, we reluctantly knocked it paintings. As we learn the cute fact that only Vincent can
Matt Smith and Karen Gillan in Doctor Who: ‘Vincent and the Doctor’, 2010. Doctor Who Series 5, Volume 4 is out now on BBC DVD
on the head, never to return. Children find art exhibitions actually see the beast, the caper escalates, reaching a bizarre
challenging enough without queues. climax in a church when Vincent nails the demon, skewering it
But all’s well that ends well; we got to see Van G after all, on his easel. However, this hilarious moment of mock-
after a fashion. In June the BBC resurrected the Dutchman for empowerment is overshadowed by a morbid gloom; the Doctor
a showdown with space monsters in a Richard Curtis-scripted knows that within a year Vincent will be dead. In a strange
episode of their time-travel sci-fi series Doctor Who. Played by fusion of the ridiculous and the melancholic, the familiar Van
actor Tony Curran, this Vincent looked enough like Kirk Gogh guilt settles in. After that, Doctor Who’s visit becomes a
Douglas to recall the artist as depicted in Vincente Minnelli’s sad and secret war against the artist’s impending suicide.
1956 film Lust for Life, and thus takes his place not so much in Conducting a medicinal extension of the narrative from
the history of art as in a pop history of contemporary neuroses. an omnipotent temporal overview, Doctor Who uses time travel
The story of Van Gogh is a short but well-known tragedy, to soothe Vincent’s fevered mind (“You turned out to be the first
a super-vivid historical set-piece that comes to life very easily, doctor ever actually to make a difference to my life!”), not his
owing to the fame of the paintings. There’s unquestionably a wallet. He executes a therapeutic act that is both an artist’s
visual magic to watching Doctor Who step into The Bedroom at fantasy and a nightmare, at once sadistic and affectionate. He
Arles (1889), for instance. But this is not the first example of takes Van Gogh to his own (queue-free) retrospective in Paris,
Van Gogh and time travel we’ve seen in popular culture. Think which is teeming with delighted visitors, right now, in 2010.
of the movie Starry Night (1999; directed by Paul Davids), in When the Doctor approaches a Van Gogh scholar (Bill Nighy)
which Van Gogh returns, 100 years after his death, to steal and with Vincent in tow, the dialogue, backed with rousing music,
auction his own paintings to make money to help starving takes on a powerfully parental character, as Who asks for a
artists. It’s a rejoinder to the big Vincent money joke: the one verdict on the work. With a now sobbing Vincent in earshot, the
about the ear-chopping nut-job who can’t make money when voice from the future masterfully nurtures the artist’s self-
alive but, idiotically, generates billions when dead. The movie esteem: “[Van Gogh was] certainly the most popular great
rights a perceived wrong and, through time travel, ‘unbelates’ painter of all time, the most beloved”. Doctor Who returns
society’s apology for its negligence. without Vincent, expecting to see many more paintings in 2010
Thankfully stopping short of having Hugh Grant play as a result of his intervention, but he has failed: he finds out that
Vincent, the Richard Curtis ‘Arles’ episode of Doctor Who Vincent went onto kill himself at thirty-seven anyway. But not
nevertheless takes this temporal idealism further still. It’s 11 before the Doctor had managed to deliver the latest incarnation
years since Starry Night, and the agenda has shifted of humanity’s apology for the cruelty and philistinism dealt to
accordingly; we visit a Van Gogh concerned less with wealth Vincent, in the form of a loving paternal embrace.
and fortune than with health, love and wellbeing. The episode After the programme had ended, I asked the children
finds Doctor Who (Matt Smith) visiting Van Gogh (thanks to whether they had learned anything new about Van Gogh from
his appearance in Doctor Who. The response?
“I knew he was crazy – but not that he was Scottish.”
36 ArtReview
The Shape of Things
Usefulness?
These days it’s expendable
I’m in an American hotel room, half-watching an
advert for some kind of new truck. Everything about it is big. A
big radiator, big chunky chrome roll bars, a big, big shape. It
jumps over the crest of a dirt hill. Its wheels lift off the ground
and its suspension lurches. Dust clouds, chrome and an evening
sun. Then a deep voice intones something about interest-free
credit. Some huge text flashes up on the screen and the power supposedly doing. But notions of utility, it turns out, have a
chord strikes. totally other purpose – as a means of making things feel
But here’s the curious thing: despite its macho ‘authentic’.
presentation, the truck looks like nothing more than a toy. In If architecture’s championing of a formally recognisable
fact, the whole ad looks as though it’s fulfilling the expectations faithfulness to ‘function’ came about as a way of articulating the
of a generation of kids brought up on those incessant plugs for changes brought about by an industrial age, then postindustrial
remote-controlled trucks that played on Saturday-morning TV. culture exploited the notion of ‘honesty’ that this had
Sure, the kids have grown up and the truck is real, but all its established, as a means of manifesting and marketing a sense of
utility has been rendered so expressive, so externalised, that it’s the genuine in objects and environments that were otherwise
gone beyond doing anything. It articulates an idea (perhaps almost wholly apparitions of consumerism – like this year’s
warped) of usefulness rather than being useful itself. So rather model of a shiny new truck with zero-percent finance.
than being a device for transporting heavy stuff off-road, it’s Today, the marketing of ‘utility’ covers a broad spectrum:
something that looks like an idea of transporting stuff off-road. not only in the souped-up trucks that come off the Wacom
It’s what a bodybuilder is to a strongman, a semiotic sign rather tablets of Detroit, but also in the design traditions of Jasper
than a demonstrable fact. Morrison’s ‘Super Normal’ or Konstantin Grcic’s ‘Design Real’,
Use is a fundamental issue in architecture and design, where the apparent absence of designerly styling allows the
contested through its theories, practice and polemics. As in the truth of an object’s essence to surface. It’s in high-tech
The Expendables, 2010, production still. © and courtesy Lions Gate Entertainment, Santa Monica
urban myth about Eskimos and snow, architects have a vast architecture, where the bolts, cables and other means of
lexicon to describe their varied conceptions of the ‘doingness’ assembly are explicitly displayed as a record of its construction.
of architecture. Trace, for example, Vitruvius’s classical ‘utility’ It’s in the rhetoric of parametric architecture, whose swoopy,
(where his trinity of firmness, commodity and delight are the fluid forms claim to harness computing power as a totalising
attributes of good architecture) through to modernist ‘function’ solution.
(with its house-as-a-machine-for-living-in rhetoric) and then But the best view of a contemporary utility is when it’s
to postmodern ‘programme’ (which – broadly – understands separated from the pretence of doing anything at all, when it’s
use as event), and you’ll find that each description of all image and sensation. Where better to examine it than in the
architecture’s purpose establishes an ideology of utility that parade of ageing action heroes in Sylvester Stallone’s The
prefigures the way particular kinds of architecture do what they Expendables (2010). The film’s tagline, ‘The toughest crew of
do. Usefulness is an idea before it’s a service. the century’, really refers not to its narrative but to its amazing
Architecture’s recurring belief is that use is a means of lineup of action-movie stars: Stallone himself, Bruce Willis, Jet
delivering a world of honesty and truth. Given how elusive Li, ex-heartthrob Mickey Rourke, ex-sub-Schwarzenegger
those concepts are, perhaps it’s no surprise that use outruns any Dolph Lundgren, the real Arnold Schwarzenegger, ex-American
attempts to codify its operation or meaning. Think of all those footballer Terry Crews and ex-wrestler Steve Austin, among
high-spec SUVs taking the kids to school or baby boomer others. This is (at least) three decades of muscle-bound action
executives squeezing into their weekend denim or warehouses hero, which in its variations of steroid bulk, surgery-gone-
eviscerated of their original industrial logic and turned into wrong and gym-honed physiques reads as a fleshy taxonomy of
lofts. Utility has been so highly processed by culture that’s it’s contemporary notions of utility.
been entirely delaminated from what its host object is All of which is just like that truck in the advert: its
aesthetic demonstrates the kind of bigness you would associate
with an ageing wrestler – middle-age spread combined with
steroidy muscle – just made out of metal: big fat chromey
arteries and barrel-chested shiny panels. Sly objectified.
38 ArtReview
THE HOUSE OF THE NOBLE MAN
CURATED BY WOLFE VON LENKIEWICZ AND VICTORIA GOLEMBIOVSKAYA
PAUL CEZANNE
JOSEPH BEUYS
SEAN DACK
LEE HOLDEN
HELEN CHADWICK
TRACEY EMIN
ANDREAS GURSKY
DAMIEN HIRST
MARTIN KIPPENBERGER
GUSTAV METZGER
DARREN NERAD
JONATHAN MEESE
WOLFE VON LENKIEWICZ
SETH PRICE
PABLO PICASSO
ANSELM REYLE
MARK TITCHNER
THOMAS ZIPP
YINKA SHONIBARE
GREGORY CREWDSON
CAI GUO-QIANG
QINGSONG WANG
COLLECTION AND SAATCHI GALLERY AND CHANNEL 4’S NEW SENSATIONS SPONSORED BY CADOGAN TATE.
IN COLLABORATION WITH RAGDAN EL-AKABI AND GUENTER LORENZ. OUR SPECIAL THANKS TO WRITER
ROBERT MAHARAJ FOR HIS INVALUABLE CONTRIBUTION. EXHIBITION SPONSORED BY THE MIRAX GROUP
JASON MARTIN
The Roaring Forties
13 October–4 November 2010
HENRY KROKATSIS
Like a Gang of Virtue
10 November–9 December 2010
MARCUS HARVEY
New work
FAS
148 New Bond Street London W1S 2JT
+44(0)20 7629 5116 +44(0)20 7318 1895
tc@faslondon.com fascontemporary.com
HONG KONG diary
marathon man
In part two of three reports from Hong Kong, a whirwind tour of artist studios
Sarah and me the same question – I can’t help feeling that in
this context, “Me” would be the only honest answer.
So how am I going to cram the tour into the space that
remains? Make a list? Here goes: Silas Fong, a representative of
the deceased street artist known as the King of Kowloon,
Adrian Wong, William Lim, Tsang Kin-Wah, Chow Chun Fai…
bah, that tells you nothing; you’re going to have to see how it
pans out in the magazine over the coming months.
The long and short of it all is that I’m wrong to have
doubts, and HUO is right to champion this kind of studio blitz.
(Although I daresay you could do it at a more leisurely pace.) If
you want an idea of what’s going on in Hong Kong, it’s to be
found on a trip like this rather than at the art fair. Because it’s
the only way to find out where the stuff in the art fair comes
from, what it references and in what context it’s produced –
“Wake up.” Hans Ulrich Obrist has nodded off again. Having sometimes in tiny apartments, sometimes in industrial spaces
left Antony Gormley with his bacon (see part one of ArtReview’s past the greasy floor and queasy smells of a pig-roasting plant.
Hong Kong Diary, published in the September issue), we’re in Context is everything.
the back of a Mercedes in the middle of a marathon tour of Back at the Mandarin Oriental in the Captain’s Bar,
studio visits. Ahhh, these marathons – HUO has done them to where I’m enjoying a few stiff drinks as a reward for my, errr…
the point of cliché, but he doesn’t seem particularly fit for all labours. I flick through the May issue of Hong Kong Tatler.
this long-distance running. He keeps slipping away, drowning in There’s an article about how Hong Kong is on the verge of
a soup of jetlag and exhaustion beside me. Although I can’t say becoming ‘the world’s unlikeliest arts hub’, whatever that
that I’m in any better shape. means. Apparently Nick Simunovic, the guy who runs the local
The whole thing is HUO’s idea – his theory being that outpost of the Gagosian empire, expects that the island will
you can obtain some sort of snapshot of the local art scene by ‘become a mandatory destination for collectors, curators and
packing as many studio visits as humanly possible into one day. critics in the global art circuit’. Perhaps this will be the only
Captain’s Bar, Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong. Courtesy Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong
We’re going for 16. It’s ambitious. Crazy. And perhaps slightly place where art is mandatory.
pointless. After all, what can you learn from a series of The Hong Kong art scene article is sandwiched between
20-minute (at most) conversations that isn’t superficial? To say an advertisement for a Gigawhite Fresh Double-Action
the least, I’m sceptical. “I always do this”, HUO says when I Exfoliating Mask and this: ‘You have it all – the haute couture,
voice my concerns. “I’ve done it for years”. He casts me what the designer watches, the rare jewellery – but that damned ugly
I’m imagining is his version of a ‘trust me’ look. safe where you keep them all just doesn’t quite fit with your
Sarah Thornton, who writes a column on the art market perfectly attuned sense of style’. The solution? ‘Narcissus’, a
for The Economist and some book called Seven Days in the $399,000 Karl Lagerfeld-designed safe covered in chrome-
Artworld (2008), and who was HUO’s debating partner from plated aluminium and disguised as a mirror. And just as I’m
last night, is here as well – they lost the debate, and I think she’s ready to hit the sack, I overhear some guy I later recognise as a
still smarting. She blames Hans Ulrich, perhaps; he looks too fellow art-fair visitor sitting behind me at what I imagine must
tired to blame her. In any case, she’s making notes about us be the Captain’s table saying, “I’m not saying she’s a prostitute,
doing the tour, and I’m making notes about them. You’ll never but she is friends with everybody”. Oh, dear. Maybe all that
get a better sense of the revolting art bubble than this vicious stuff about context is rot.
circle of note-taking. All we’re doing really is taking notes about
ourselves. “Who is your hero?” Hans Ulrich keeps barking at Next month: Stars in my eyes – the celebrity touch
artists, who cower before him in a mix of terror, hope and
anticipation. That’s what happens when you meet the number-
one entry on ArtReview’s power list (as HUO seems to be
continually introduced). But part of me hopes he doesn’t ask
42 ArtReview
INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN TORINO • 5-7 NOVEMBER 2010 • OVAL lingotto fiere
issue no.02 vol.xvii
1
artissima n˚17 INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN TORINO • 5-7 NOVEMBER 2010 • OVAL lingotto fiere
The appointment of the Berlin); Anna Maria large installation, present
Selection Committee of Maiolino (Raffaella future is thus designed
contemporary art curators Cortese, Milano); to accompany the visitor
is based on the expertise Antoni Miralda (Senda, on a visual journey that is
of its members in recog- Barcelona); Hitoshi unique in its synthesis of
nising the contemporary, Nomura (McCaffrey Fine freshness and complexity,
even in the past. artissima Arts, New York); Gianni representing the innova-
has entrusted them with Pettena (Enrico Fornello, tion and research that lie
selecting works that, even Milano); Sylvia Sleigh at the heart of artissima’s
though made in the past, (I-20, New York); Goran mission.
nevertheless, resonate with Trbuljak (Gregor Podnar, —Luigi Fassi
the interests and obses- Berlin, Ljubljana); Gil
sions of emerging artists J.Wolman (Lara Vincy,
today. To heighten the Paris).
effect of this shift in time, HOUSE OF
the exhibitions in the back
to the future section will
be located in an area of
PRESENT FUTURE CONTAMINATION
the fair that also includes Somewhere between a Architectural models
two bookshops with his- group exhibition, a series have, to some extent,
torical material from the of unprecedented solo been made obsolete by
same period, 1960-79. displays and a memo- 3D computer-graphic
SOLO PRESENTATIONS INCLUDE: randum, present future simulations. Further-
Raymond Queneau, cent mille milliards de poèmes, Gallimard, 1961 © Pilar Pinchart - All the Rest is Literature
2010 will feature a group more, while a small-scale
Nanni Balestrini of artists from different maquette provides a sense is not, strictly speaking, a is typically a casual and
(Giacomo Guidi & MG,
Roma); Gianfranco
countries, selected by Mai
Abu ElDahab, Richard
of a project’s spaces and
volumes, it still requires
POETRY IN THE literary salon.
Either, or, else: All the
unsystematic offering by a
friend or colleague) and a
Baruchello (Michael
Janssen, Berlin); Bill
Bollinger (Häusler
Birkett, Thomas Boutoux
and Luigi Fassi.
viewers to project their
presence within the proto- SHAPE OF A ROSE Rest is Literature gathers
art critics whose criticism
formal school or university
on the other (with a com-
type and adapt it mentally could be fiction; artists munity of students, fixed
Contemporary, Zurich); Located at the en- to a full-scale version. For SECTIONS IN THE
Vlassis Caniaris (Kalfayan, trance to the art fair, the PROGRAMME INCLUDE: whose books are books site and apparatus, and
the house of contamina- even if they aren’t by art- defined roles, protocols
Athens, Salonica); curatorial project present tion, artissima has invited
Dadamaino (Carlina, ists; novels that are novels and measures). Pickpocket
Torino); Noël Dolla
future will be a composi- raumlaborberlin to create ALL THE REST only because it is a writer Almanack is not a school,
tion of all the works in a life-size prototype of a
(Dominique Fiat, Paris); artissima, allowing visitors cultural centre that pro- IS LITERATURE who wrote them; hybrids,
hybrids. All the rest, it’s
not even an experimental
one. But it is an attempt to
Curated by Vincenzo Latronico
literature. generate something like a
Strictly speaking, All the curriculum out of everyday
Rest is Literature could be a Pickpocket cultural life, in specific
contemporary art museum Almanack localities, and to bring
strangers together to reflect
focused on writing, or a Curated by Joseph del Pesco
literary salon for artists and Dominic Willsdon
and act on its content.
only. Either, or. Pickpocket Almanack originated in San
If it were a contemporary Five faculties from vari- Francisco (as a project of SFMOMA)
art museum, it would have ous localities and cultural
a permanent collection: fields make a selection Typography
The Malady of Writing, an from events scheduled to by Dexter Sinister
exhibition presented by take place, at any venue
Chus Martinez after being in their region, during dexter sinister will
shown at MACBA, Barce- November 2010. Each demonstrate their Meta-
lona. It would also, natu- faculty gives its selection a the-difference-between-
rally, host temporary exhi- title and description, and the-two-Font, a typeface
bitions: a survey of artist transform it into a course. derived from MetaFont,
fiction curated by Maria Thus, each course takes the 30-year-old com-
Fusco and a retrospective pre-existing events out of puter typography system
on literary experiments context and gives them originally programmed by
from the 1960s, presented a new narrative frame. Donald Knuth. The font
by the Definitively Tempo- Anyone can enroll for one will be primarily applied
rary Secretary of Oulipo, of the five courses for free, throughout artissima’s
Marcel Bénabou, upon either online or at the fair. architecture in the form of
the organisation’s 50th an- The five courses and five vinyl wall signage, while
raumlaborberlin, atmospheric sketch for house of contamination, 2010 niversary. But All the Rest faculties, will intersect at its backstory will be exhib-
is Literature is not, strictly keynote sessions, which ited as a 3D caption in a
Koji Enokura (McCaffrey to get to grips with their motes cross-fertilisation, or speaking, a contemporary they will organise for the dedicated space within the
Fine Arts, New York); shared qualities, as well ‘contamination’, between art museum. house of contamination
fair. MetaFont is, at once,
Franco Guerzoni as their diversity and con- the arts. The purpose of If it were a literary at artissima. a programming language
(Nicoletta Rusconi, trasts. Arrived at through prototypes is to assess the salon it would host: a Pickpocket Almanack sits and its own interpreter, a
Milano); Jan Håfström an intensive process of practicality and reliabil- combinatorial reading by on a spectrum between swift trick in which it both
(Fruit & Flower Deli / international research, ity of a project, as well as Nanni Balestrini; a debate a list of recommenda- provides a vocabulary
Andreas Brändström, the artists and galleries in its results, for example between artists and critics tions on one end (which
New York / Stockholm); present future 2010 con- when the model of a new on whether art writing is
Carmen Herrera (Arratia, stitute an uncompromising car is tested on a circuit. a literary genre; a lecture
Beer, Berlin); Paolo up-to-the-minute overview Similarly, the structure by performed by Gernot
Icaro (Massimo Minini, of the best of young art raumlaborberlin and its Wieland on the therapeu-
Brescia); Michel Journiac production from every associated programme will tic permanence of some
(Patricia Dorfmann, continent. The culmination be test run during the fair written words; the first
Paris); Birgit Jürgenssen of months of exchange be- to evaluate the hypotheses Italian edition of Daniel
(Hubert Winter, Wien); tween artists and curators, on which they are both Spoerri’s seminal Topogra-
Maria Lai (Isabella present future includes a based: of dialogue and phy of Chance; a conversa-
Bortolozzi, Berlin); John number of works created shared languages between tion on fiction with Keren
Latham (Lisson, London); especially for the fair, as the arts. Cytter; and a showcase
Bob Law (Thomas Dane, well as projects shown in for Jonathan Safran Foer’s
London); Adolf Luther Europe for the first time. new, subtractive narration.
(401contemporary, Taking the form of one But All the Rest is Literature Pedro Reyes, Urban Genome Project , 2010
2
artissima n˚17 INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN TORINO • 5-7 NOVEMBER 2010 • OVAL lingotto fiere
and decodes its syntax for innovation in the urban performance accumulate source text but perhaps With Andrea Branzi, Gamper, Minale-Maeda
back to the native binary sphere: city planners, on stage over the dura- without showing a single Andrea Cortellessa, and Mischer’Traxler, as
machine language of 1s administrators, governors, tion of the fair. Including frame of the original. Hans Ulrich Obrist, and well as environmental
and 0s. This yields what regulators, councillors, well-known experimental The artists’ projects will others. installations designed and
is essentially a skeleton of members of parliament, choreographers such as be presented over the made especially for the oc-
a typeface, ready for ma- congressmen, senators, Xavier Leroy and emerg- course of the fair as part Hypnotic Show casion by MARC, Nucleo
nipulation by five base pa- public officers, etc. ing visual artists such as Ei of a rolling programme Curated by and UdA.
rameters: PEN, WEIGHT, A third category is Arakawa and Amy Granat, of timed events, hosted Raimundas Malasauskas; Visualising Transforma-
SLANT, SUPERNESS strategic agents: citizens, the series wanders through in a specially constructed conducted by Marcos Lutyens tion explores new dis-
and CURLYNESS. researchers, artists and performance, sculpture, space modelled on a cin- courses around the various
architects, activists, critics film and dance, with each ema auditorium. Thinking Hypnotic Show is an ex- disciplines involved in
U U G P P G U U U G P P U Through Cinema (Deep
G P P G P U U G P P G U U and writers who are col- participant adding new hibition in the mind of the design, with the aim of
U G P P U G P P G P U U G lectively transforming our layers of meaning and Red) offers an opportunity audience created by fused imagining the results
P P G U U U G P P U G P P
G P U U G P P G U U U G P understanding of urban- different perspectives from for artists to completely practices art and hypnosis. of the creative process
P U G P P G P U U G P P G ism, policy and design which to appreciate the re- re-imagine cinema – its Curated by Raimundas behind it. These results
U U U G P P U G P P G P U
U G P P G U U U G P P U G practices. lationship between dance history, its limits and Malasauskas, conducted by are, indeed, decisive for
P P G P U U G P P G U U U As in genetics, the op- and art. The Dancers also its untapped possibili- Marcos Lutyens. asserting one fundamental
G P P U G P P G P U U G P
P G U G P P G P U U R B A erative strategy of the ugp features the premiere of ties – from the perspec- ‘I feel that the exhibi- necessity of the contem-
N G E N O M E P R O J E C is organised in two distinct new works by major artists tive of both creator and tions are a construct that porary: that of ceaseless
T G P P G U U U G P P U G phases: prospecting and such as Joachim Koester, audience. Artists include already exists and I am
P P G P U U G P P G U U U experimentation.
G P P U G P P G P U U G P sequencing. whose film Tarantism Juliette Blightman, Torsten guiding people through
P G U U U G P P G U U U G After artissima, the (2007, inspired by the un- Lauschmann and Emily something that is already artissima design is produced in collaboration
P P U G P P G P U U G P P with the Chamber of Commerce of Turin
G U U U G U G P P G U U U schematic entries pro- controllable bodily convul- Wardill. there and perhaps has been
G P P U G P P G P U U G P duced during the sequenc- sions caused by a spider there for a long while. I
P G U U U P P U G P P G P
U U G P P G U U U G P ing phase will form the
elementary particles of the
bite) has been included in
several dance-related mu-
think the division between
curator, artist, docent, visi-
EXHIBITIONS IN TOWN
Picnic for the Mind
ugp’s ’urban toolbox’: a seum exhibitions around tor gets completely blurred CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEO
Urban Genome database or catalogue of the world.
Curated by
as the exhibit is projected D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Gianluigi Ricuperati
Project strategies and processes into a kind of collectively john mccracken: A Retrospective
by Joseph Grima collected all over the world experienced place within a curated by Andrea Bellini
and Pedro Reyes that can be recombined Thinking Three seminar-lectures
subliminal state.’ (Marcos
will take place during
Through Cinema
exhibition exhibition
and tested in unrelated artissima at 1967-1977, a
Lutyens). curated by Adam Carr
The Urban Genome urban contexts. (Deep Red) pop-up bookshop curated project room : Massimo Grimaldi
Project is a research en-
deavor initiated by editor
Curated by Benjamin Cook and by Amedeo Martegani •
FONDAZIONE MERZ
and curator Joseph Grima The Dancers Mike Sperlinger of LUX, London (am bookstore). Here
authors, designers, artists ARTISSIMA DESIGN mario merz: Pageantry of painting
and artist and architect Curated by Antony Huberman
In 1975, film director and historians will officiate Corteo della pittura
Pedro Reyes. Its intent is Dario Argento shot his at a public rite of storytell- curated by Rudi Fuchs
to ‘map the code on which
cities are written’, thereby
In recent years, dancers
have made frequent and
giallo masterpiece Profondo ing and discussions about
VISUALISING TRANSFORMATION
Curated by Barbara Brondi •
FONDAZIONE SANDRETTO RE
rosso in Turin. Featuring three magazines published and Marco Rainò REBAUDENGO
assembling an index of significant appearances in David Hemmings and in the 1960s and 70s. The
tools for improving the the context of visual art. with a soundtrack by events will include three This year, a new modernikon
Contemporary Art from Russia
urban environment, with a Not since the legendary prog-rock band Goblin, sessions for the mind thematic section titled curated by Francesco Bonami
specific focus on political Judson Dance Theater the film, like all Argento’s or three analysis spaces, artissima design is being and Irene Calderoni
processes. To collect tes-
timonies on this subject,
in the early 1960s have
the lines between art and
best work, is at once a attended by undergradu- launched. It will present a
special in-depth analysis of GAM / GALLERIA CIVICA D’ARTE
•
gripping horror and a slyly ate and graduate students MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA
a mobile unit resembling dance been so blurred, self-reflexive meditation from different faculties the IN Residence project,
an expandable toolbox – with young contemporary the annual workshop pro- osvaldo licini: Masterworks
on the dubious pleasures and art schools, as well as
designed by Pedro Reyes artists and choreogra- of voyeurism. passersby. Three impor- moting interaction between martha rosler . As If
– will be the venue for a phers eager to learn from For Thinking Through tant publishing initiatives well-established designers curated by Elena Volpato
series of live exchanges and collaborate with one and a selection of students. antonio riello: Be Square! GAM
of knowledge between
strategic agents, citizens,
another. Exhibitions in
major art institutions such
The workshop focuses on
identifying, analysing and PINACOTECA GIOVANNI
•
politicians and decision as the Museum of Modern deciphering attitudes, and E MARELLA AGNELLI
makers. When fully open, Art, New York, the Walker adopts an experimental china power station
the ugp unit becomes a Art Center, Minneapolis, approach informed by con- curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran,
Hans Ulrich Obrist
fully-functional open-air and the Whitney Museum temporary design thought. and Julia Peyton-Jones
TV recording studio in
which interviews can be
of American Art, New
York, have placed the
Following the first two
events in Turin in 2008 VILLA DELLA REGINA
•
conducted and recorded. pioneers of postmodern and 2009, IN Residence philippe parreno
This pool of knowledge dance – Trisha Brown, returns encouraged by by Enea Righi Collection
will then be organised as Anna Halprin, Lucinda the great success of the in collaboration with kaleidoscope
an index that will consti- Childs and Yvonne Rainer workshops and the inter-
tute the ugp archive. – within the established national recognition it has
A key component of the canon of the history of art, received in such a short
ugp archive will be a series and a next generation of time. The only event to SPONSORED BY
of in-depth interviews with choreographers and artists take place outside the fair
FONDAZIONE TORINO MUSEI
current or recent mayors are finding provocative Emily Wardill, - Thinking Through Cinema (Deep Red)
sick serena premises, Visualising Trans-
of cities around the world. new ways to think about formation has been devised Regione Piemonte
Hand in hand with the the body moving through Cinema (Deep Red), of a bygone era, from a and curated by Barbara Provincia di Torino
world’s rapid urbanisation space and time. Argento’s film becomes time when a magazine Brondi and Marco Rainò, Città di Torino
goes an equivalent rise in At artissima, The Danc- a stand-in for cinema as would be launched when- and includes a workshop,
the prominence and influ- ers provides a context in a whole; a starting point ever an idea was born, and a series of debates and a Camera di commercio
ence of the figure of the which contemporary art from which to explore the when magazines were seen group exhibition in the di Torino
mayor. The conventional shares the stage with con- differences between film by artists as places where prestigious halls of Palazzo Compagnia di San Paolo
Fondazione per
perception of the mayor temporary choreography, (as a physical medium) other disciplines could be Birago in Turin.
l’Arte Moderna e
as mid-level bureaucrat allowing each discipline and cinema (as the cul- encountered. Some of the The exhibition will Contemporanea CRT
and policy maker is being to inform and guide the tural, architectural and journals explored in this present to the general
transformed by a new other. Building on the social space in which film event were modest but ex- public a set of original Main Partner
breed of politician: the fair’s concept of ‘contami- has traditionally been citing journeys that some- works by some of the UniCredit
supermayor. nation’, the contributions experienced). times never went beyond most highly regarded
Another principal ele- that make up The Dancers Six commissioned artists a single issue, while others figures in the international Partners
ment of the archive will be interrupt and overlap will each present their were more akin to regular arena of design research, GREY GOOSE
illycaffè
a series of dialogues with with each other, as ele- ‘version’ of Profondo rosso, picnics that outlasted their Tomás Alonso, Beta Tank,
policymakers responsible ments of each successive using Argento’s film as a own transient nature. Julien Carretero, Martino
3
design
Warpaint
Could wearing too much makeup be
more empowering than not wearing any?
Martin Margiela, Collection AW 96/97, 1996 (March, Paris). Courtesy Maison Martin Margiela, Inge Grognard, Ronald Stoops
focused on the idea of makeup as an actual mask. A long-term
associate of Martin Margiela, Grognard helped to develop large extent we derive a sense of our own identity from the
the aesthetic of disguise that became a key part of Margiela’s responses to us that we read in the facial expressions of those
label’s identity. Models walking for the designer’s shows over around us. A face that gives off signs of sexual excitement
the years variously had their identities concealed by veils, (wet, engorged lips, sparkling eyes, heightened cheek colour)
hairpieces and dark paint. In recent years, Maison Martin creates a reciprocal good feeling. It’s another mask, of course,
Margiela has even released a pair of sunglasses resembling applied via lipstick, kohl and blusher, and regularly modified
the black graphic strip placed over the eyes of a photographic by cosmetics manufacturers to create a total look that allows
subject to preserve her anonymity. every woman to conform to the ideal standard of the moment.
The mask, in European tradition, suggests an inversion There are other forces out there besides Inge Grognard
of the natural order of things: monstrousness, transgression, that are paying considerable attention to facial uniqueness over
subterfuge and, more recently, sex play. Its association with standard beauty. Biometric technologies that allow computers
covert behaviour also extends to the idea of exclusivity – only to recognise human faces have turned out to be much trickier to
the initiates know the identity of those behind the masks. develop than anticipated, largely because facial recognition is
46 ArtReview
Mauro Perucchetti
There’s something about Mary (life size)
from left: Christian Ludwig Attersee, Hundebüstenhalter, 1966, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 150 cm, photo: Mischa Nawrata, Vienna, © DACS, London, 2010; Hans Hofmann, Memoria in Aeternum, 1962, oil on canvas,
KAROLA
Philipp Muller: Expressionist
Ach wie gut dass New York
niemand weiss Museum of Modern Art, New York
KRAUS
3 October – 25 April
Artelier Contemporary, Graz www.moma.org
23 September – 4 December
www.galerie-edition-artelier. New York was the hometown of
at Abstract Expressionism, and
MoMA inevitably has a vast
Christian Philipp Müller’s store of works – the best in
Director, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung art is always alert to its the world – by the movement’s
213 x 183 cm, courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the artist, © 2010 Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
surroundings. Green Border progenitors. This show, put
Ludwig (MUMOK), Vienna (1993), his photographic together by Ann Temkin, draws
project, featured him entirely upon it. It traces
clandestinely crossing Ab Ex’s development from the
Austria’s rural borders on 1940s to the 60s via some 300
1 Beautiful Klosterneuburg:
foot; a recent project in works by 30 artists, from
Styria, Burning Love Jackson Pollock, Barnett
48 ArtReview
Hans Op de Beeck
Sea of Tranquillity
A New Concise Reference Dictionary
Bb
one of the oldest of crafts. The gendered apotheosis locus
centrum of the basket is the voidant interior space of the
artist’s handbag.
bastard A stereotypical heterosexual term of sociolegal
excitement often, but not exclusively, applied in respect
of business finance models deemed illegitimate in their
intersection basis with art exchange parameter usages.
One of a number of terms used in respect of noncongruent
intensity situations. See bitch.
beauty Once an approbation term but now made critically
absent through a broad consensus of distaste as to be
almost (and sometimes literally) a locus prohibition.
Occasionally subversively reappearing, with great novelty
baboon to bureaucracy and a reempowered neo-effect value. Paradoxically, without
a viable socialised usage of the term ‘beautiful’, there cannot
be an avant-garde, and certainly not a beautiful one.
bed The most common installation prop. Usually metal, often
shown in low light, without mattress. See cliché.
baboon A large monkey with a long face, doglike teeth, belief It is claimed in various supposition propositions that
large lip and buttock callosities. Vocally dislikes good all artists have a faith belief of some kind in astrology,
contemporary art. humanism or nihilism. See apathy, bewilderment,
bad art The enjoyment of poor quality, bad art is a form of religion, suicide.
high-locus context exhilaration in the presence of benefactor A benefactor is one whose quiet desire is to create
incompetence and failure, in many instances related to joy, purpose and meaning in the world.
liminal schadenfreude performativity. Approving reference bestiality A common theme among both male and female
to bad art has become a commonplace, and should lead to video artists, but with a slight bias drift towards the female.
mimetic crisis – and for over 80 years, it has. See camp. bewilderment Many art-critical terms are embarrassment
banana Motif used in 1990s contemporary art practice. synonyms for bewilderment, which is a term commonly
banishment A locus consequence of transgressive breaches avoided, as it implies a diminished knowledge status. See
of coded artworld dominance hierarchy systems, in which sublime.
the banished are denied a) art press attention, b) eye contact biennial (biennale) A replicating number of almost identical
at art openings and c) access to cocaine rituals, all thus art events, so common as needing to be kept geographically
leading to professional death. and durationally ringfenced.
baroque The Baroque was a characteristic locus artistic bitch See bastard.
style of the seventeenth century; also a recontextualised body A site of meaning, commencing at the anus and
ahistorical paradigm summary pejorative that describes terminating everywhere else.
ordinate complication made for its own sake. Used in respect bones Extremely common installation prop and visual motif.
of false kinds of high intellectual ecstasy, in which the artist See cliché, skull.
seeks to overwhelm his or her audience with an appeal to book Outdated locus terminus term for a text.
knowledge formulas complicated by overt, ornamental boredom A common durational strategy in video art.
rhetoric theologies. (See also hidden key.) For this reason bricolage A locus process by which, in the same way a pig
such art is often vilified. However, both the artist-agent becomes pork when served for dinner, so bric-a-brac
antagonists and bellicose-victim-complainant audiences becomes bricolage when it has a catalogue essay and
of such art are parties to a mutually pleasurable bargain, footnotes written about it.
in which each is able to claim a high piety status payoff, brushwork The most common art material of all is white
meaning that both are complicit. Other colluding parties paint, of which it is estimated that over 100 million gallons
in this triangulating pact situation are the curatorial and are used annually worldwide to paint gallery walls. No
arts administration authorities who encourage antagonist- brushstrokes are apparent, as paint is applied using rollers,
victim strategies so as to further their own piety agendas which confer a mechanically stippled ‘orange peel’ effect.
in respect of audience and funding categories, based on bureaucracy Self-generated bureaucracies created by artists,
expanded social energy targets. in which they fetishise unnecessary organising statements
barylalia Indistinct ‘thick’ speech and/or poor articulation. and conceptual models. Similar to the process in which, it is
See pub (bar) and drugs. said, victims can themselves become abusers.
basketry A basket is a woven container made of materials buttocks See anus.
such as wood, reed, cane, rattan or rush, often with a
handle or handles. It is usually light in weight. Among the words Neal Brown
commonly used basketry techniques are plaiting, twining
and coiling. Parts of a basket include the base, the side walls
and rim. A basket may have a lid and handle. Basketry is
50 ArtReview
Cornerhouse and Abandon Normal Devices festival present:
PHIL COLLINS
This exhibition presents Phil Collins’ ongoing project exploring the relevance
of Marxist ideas in the present day, including the UK premiere of his new
work marxism today (prologue).
In partnership with
UNSPOOLING
Michaël Borremans, Cartune Xprez, David Claerbout, Sally Golding,
Ben Gwilliam & Matt Wand, Roman Kirschner, Kerry Laitala, Wayne Lloyd,
Sheena Macrae, Elizabeth McAlpine, Juhana Moisander, Alex Pearl,
Greg Pope with Benedict Drew, Mario Rossi, Gebhard Sengmüller,
Harald Smykla, Ming Wong and Stefan Zeyen.
Curated by
Andrew Bracey & Dave Griffiths.
Supported by
Austrian Cultural Forum, The Finnish Institute, Finnish Embassy, FRAME, City Inn and Bridge Properties.
Miraculous Beginnings
–
Walid Raad
2 January 2011
14 October 2010
Whitechapel Gallery
whitechapelgallery.org
GARY
SIMMONS
DOUBLE
FEATURE
17.09
06.11
SAKS
Daniel Pešta Levitation
10. September - 22. November 2010
Muzeum Montanelli Nerudova 13 118 00 Prague 1 Czech Republic tel: +420 257 531 220 www.muzeummontanelli.com
BERLIN
NADJA FRANK
RAVANETI
10 SEPTEMBER - 13 NOVEMBER 2010
LONdON
TURIN | ARTISSIMA
ADOLF LUTHER
BACK TO THE FUTURE
5 NOVEMBER - 7 NOVEMBER 2010
WWW.401CONTEMPORARY.COM
dispatches
Consumed
The pick of things you didn’t know you
really needed. Words Oliver Basciano
02
$12,000
01
FROM
$75
05
03 04
FROM
Price
£100
05
on request
01 02 03 04
Robert Moog, who died Alex Katz’s exhibition In an edition of 60, this The London Design Festival
five years ago age seventy- at London’s National framed photographic print offers up some entertaining
one, is one person who can Portrait Gallery (on by Alexander and Susan highlights: robotic arms,
definitively be labelled a until 21 September) Maris takes its title, from an Audi car plant,
music pioneer. A very early provides a reminder of The Pursuit of Fidelity, are being installed in
version of the keyboard-led how much expression, from their exhibition Trafalgar Square for
synthesizer that bears his sense of personality and at Edinburgh’s Stills public play; an exhibition
name was demonstrated at circumstance the artist (through 24 October), which of graphic artist Barney
a conference in 1964, and is able to convey in his in turn references the Bubbles (he of many a
the instrument – or tool, colour-blocked subjects. caption from a fifteenth- Hawkwind LP’s artwork) at
as its inventor preferred The lack of detailing is century tapestry of a pair Chelsea Space; and Finnish
to think of it – became reminiscent of fashion of lovers following a food and design coming
ubiquitous by the end of sketches, and indeed stag: ‘we are hunting for together in a temporary
that decade. Celebrating the artist gives as much fidelity and if we find it restaurant. There’s stuff
its enduring appeal weight to the dress of the we would rather live in no to buy too – including
through talks, workshops, sitter as he does to her dearer time’. Here, running these rather nice wine
screenings and gigs face. Neptune Fine Art is between symbolic myth and decanters appropriately
(including Devo, pictured) offering an edition by photographic realism, the titled Minaret. They form
is Moogfest in the good the New York artist, artists likewise capture part of an exhibition by
doctor’s birth town of in which we see Ulla, a fleeing stag, a sense design duo Hamilton Turksoy
Asheville, North Carolina. a lady of seeming icy of fictional reenactment at the Mint boutique.
glamour, striking a pose. pervading.
www.moogfest.com www.londondesignfestival.
www.neptunefineart.com www.stills.org com
60 ArtReview
07
Price
05
on request
05
£1,100
06
£120
08
£10005
05 06 07 08
Christie’s has come in on The Whitechapel’s annual Michelle Cotton is coming We all know that the UK
October’s London art-fair art book fair mixes books to the end of her 18- doesn’t produce anything
game. The Multiplied fair, about art with independents month curatorial bursary anymore: it’s all service
as the name suggests, will offering books that are at Cubitt gallery. This industry. Yet artists
deal exclusively in prints art. In the latter camp sit bursary has provided the persist in turning out
and editions – marking it the likes of Böhm Kobayashi launch platform for many a objects. Not the WITH
out from Frieze and its – presenting their range of talent over the last ten collective. For a fee,
rivals. Given the nature of subject-themed fanzines; years: Munich Kunstverein’s they provide Life
the product, specialists and the p’s & q’s press, Bart van der Heide, the Enhancement Solutions:
such as Counter Editions who are selling City British Art Show’s Tom whether it be staying a
– who are offering John Cypher: Berlin, the third Morton and the Showroom’s constant age on your behalf
Baldessari’s 2009 edition instalment of Leonie Emily Pethick are all (through a yearly rotating
Brain/Cloud (With Seascape Lachlan’s ongoing linocut alumni. To celebrate its roster of collective
and Palm Tree) (pictured) relief guides to major decennial anniversary, members); undergoing sex
– mix with blue-chip cities. Her previous these and more have fantasies for you (a lot
commercials (White Cube), two assiduously crafted nominated an artist each to less messy with a stand-
young upstarts (Bearspace) creations, concentrating create an edition for a new in); or, for £100, taking
and nonprofits (the ICA and on Paris and São Paulo boxed print portfolio. John the blame for your misdeeds
Dundee Contemporary Arts). (pictured), won the Birgit Stezaker’s contribution, (invoice pictured). Visit
A welcome addition to the Skiold award at last as put forward by Matthew Rokeby for a range of
month’s art carnival. year’s fair. Higgs, is pictured. options to suit you.
ArtReview 61
Lindsay Seers
It has to be this way 2
9 October –11 December 2010
Exhibition preview Friday 8 October, 6.30pm–9pm
It has to be this way² (Book Cover) © Lindsay Seers and Matt’s Gallery, London, 2010
Mead Gallery
Warwick Arts Centre
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
www.warwickartscentre.co.uk
This exhibition has been co-commissioned by the National Gallery of Denmark and Mead Gallery in association with Matt’s Gallery, London.
Lindsay Seers is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.
COMMA
New commissions enabling artists to experiment and expand their practice
2 september - 25 september
ernst Caramelle elina Brotherus
COMMA26 COMMA27
13 October - 4 december
Adrian paci Julien Bismuth
COMMA28 COMMA29
OpeNiNg HOurs
Mon - Sat, 11am - 6pm
Sun 19 September &
Bloomberg spACe
Sun 17 October, 11am - 6pm
50 Finsbury Square
Thu 4 November till 9pm
London EC2A 1HD
Free AdMissiON +44 20 7330 7959
gallery@bloomberg.net
NeArest stAtiONs
Moorgate & Liverpool Street www.bloombergspace.com
– Poésie/ Bruchlinien
New address for
exhibition visits
migros museum für
ihren Körpern
The migros museum für
25th September gegenwartskunst is an institution
– 28th November 2010 of the Migros-
Opening: Friday, 24th 11th December 2010 Kulturprozent.
September 2010, 6pm – 20th February 2011 migrosmuseum.ch
Opening: Friday, 10th hubertus-exhibitions.ch
Ai Weiwei December 2010, 6pm migros-kulturprozent.ch
Regina José Galindo
Teresa Margolles With a.o. :
Gianni Motti Phyllida Barlow
Eftihis Patsourakis Ulrich Rückriem
Pamela Rosenkranz Oscar Tuazon
Martin Soto Climent Klaus Winicher
Loredana Sperini
Alina Szapocznikow A collaboration project with
Siemens Stiftung
digested
It’s what we think you should swallow, or spit out
Other Space Odysseys
Eds. Giovanna Borasi
& Mirko Zardini
Geographical Analogies
is a thoroughly entertaining
homage to sci-fi. Of course,
By Cyprien Gaillard
architects generally don’t make
Faker Drinker Soldier Heiress a habit or, more to the point,
By Clunie Reid a living, out of designing space
stations, death stars or off-
Produced in ultra-high-gloss When Cyprien Gaillard, chronicler of ruins ancient
world terraforming facilities,
(a UV finish apparently), this and modern, was looking for the best way to and consequently, as in the
limited-edition artist’s book photograph typical California trees, he turned his classic Hollywood space drama
mimics to the point of ridicule
Polaroid camera at a 45-degree angle, taking images scenario, there’s not always
the fetishistic finish of the enough fuel in these astronauts’
high-end fashion magazine. that, when developed, should be seen diamond-side-
thrusters for them to quite make
Containing no text, just 64 pages up. Collecting the images in groups of nine, Gaillard it back to base. Stringing
of ripped-up, defaced multimedia placed these too in a diamond formation – three together Lynn’s designs for
imagery, it continues Reid’s rows of three. Placing the nine images this way planets in a Hollywood movie and
excavation of the motifs and
signifiers of commodity-driven guides the eye to read them in a spiral, coming to a virtual world for an exhibition
at MoMA, Maltzan’s designs for
culture. The result is a rest on the central image, but it also creates a strong a new building for the Jet
purposely ugly mess of wriggling contrast with Gaillard’s favoured subject matters, Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena
bodies, gurning faces and which are most often vertical objects on horizontal and Poli’s (now) retro-looking
prosaic captioning: a nightmarish
vision of the media-fed mind. planes – pillars, columns, condemned high-rise collages of 1970s astronautica
can make the space conceit wear
To reaffirm the point that this flats, hotels and trees. Geographical Analogies a bit thin. But that’s easily
is not a commentary on anything brings together 107 of these collections, which forgivable, as is Borasi’s
other than a real-world state of Gaillard has been producing meticulously in a incredibly shonky interview
affairs, the container for these
collaged visions, a mirrorlike
format which is itself a ruin in progress. Although, technique (to Maltzan: ‘What is
your aim with this exhibition
foil cover, reflects back as Gaillard intends, the Polaroid will fade (and that we are doing together?’) –
an image of you, the reader. indeed the earliest collections at the front of the what respectable space odyssey
Oliver Basciano book are already bleaching out nicely), this book doesn’t contain a bit of
64 ArtReview
Three Stories
By Kurt Schwitters
After Kurt Schwitters fled Germany in 1937,
he lived, among other places, on the Isle of Man,
in London and finally in the Lake District.
Partly in commemoration of the artist’s time
in England and the Isle of Man, Tate Publishing
has released a collection of short stories that
Schwitters wrote in those years. These A Hedonist’s Guide to Art
microfictions are surreal glimpses into the Ed. Laura K. Jones
imagination of the artist, who creates unnerving
psychological landscapes in the three narratives, This genuinely has to be the
most depressing book I’ve ever
most notably in ‘The Story of the Flat and Round encountered. Utter, cretinous
Painter’ (1941), about an artist who is able to tedium across 320 pages, in which
paint ‘round’ figures in the air rather than flat a zoo of artworld folks – many of
ones on canvas. Sadly, however, his figures always whom I would cross the floor at
a party to avoid – spin their
inflate and pop, dying like bursting bubbles.
ultimately dull stories of
To save his painted figures – pretty queens and ‘outrageous’ behaviour (as edited
slender-fingered pageboys – he paints himself, by Laura K. Jones). It’s hard to
The Articulate Surface: though he too explodes into tiny fragments. It’s a
lingering visual image that, once read, seems
entertain why anyone would think
to publish this, let alone how it
By Ben Pell by the artist’s friends and family members during oft-heard opinion that the critic
must maintain no industry
the course of 1958, all originally published in a friends; Sue Webster tells a
A commonsense view of what architecture certain Art News and Review (as ArtReview was story of unremitting, sickening
should ‘do’ might run along the following lines: formerly titled). LMF smugness about a weekend of free
booze and partying; Fergus
keep the roof up, the rain out, the light flooding in
Henderson gives some ramble
and, these days, the utility bills cheap. Anything Tate Publishing, £9.99 (hardcover) about the good old days of the
beyond that is an excess, and modesty is the YBAs. Many others, bar a bit of
watchword of our recessionary times. You don’t clueless propaganda from culture
minister Ed Vaizey, just seem to
need buildings to entertain or offer a running
be a roundup of Jones’s friends
commentary on the human condition. That’s (a quick web search dredges up
what Twitter’s for. This is a collection of 36 a litany of party-page pouting
recent(ish) architectural projects that argue the between editor and contributors),
opposite. And that the architecturally superficial and they hardly ever offer any
incisive commentary. It’s a
doesn’t need to be culturally superficial. The shame, as it could prove an
book’s essential argument is that surface and interesting subject: are artists
ornament are the interfaces through which set apart from the rest of us,
architecture engages with popular culture, and not subject to the same economic
and social laws, or should they
that digital technologies have enhanced be professionals, paid for
architecture’s ability to control these interfaces providing an intellectual
as never before. Underlying all that is the notion service? Instead we get this:
that architecture has to engage with a mass ‘We were dropped off at Damien’s
place – a beautiful villa with
audience in order to be relevant. And relevance, its own pool…’ (from Paul Fryer);
in this case, means being able to take part in ‘It’s 1.30 am in the exclusive
social, political and cultural discourses. The only 63rd floor Sky Casino of the Wynn
downside? Given that the bulk of this book Hotel Las Vegas. I still have a
hangover from the evening
follows the all-too-familiar gazette of image + before…’ (Keith Tyson, who should
caption that is the default setting for most know better); and (from Danny
mainstream architecture publishing, you may Chadwick), ‘I am not good at
well wonder why you need to spend this amount class A drugs but they gave me
some in my sleep, and the effect
of money on something you ought to be able to get was a strange homosexual
from a Google image search for free. MR episode’ featuring fellatio and
a famous artist our lawyer
Birkhauser, £55.95/$115 (hardcover) advises against naming. Fact?
Fiction? Who cares? OB
Objects
Toby Ziegler is represented by
Simon Lee Gallery, London &
Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
www.zabludowiczcollection.com
Zabludowicz Art Projects registered UK charity: 1120067
exhibition
16 september – 30 october 2010
A PROJECT BY
ERGIN
ÇAVU OGLU
Also showing at Better Bankside,
5 Burrell St, London SE1 0UL
29 September – 10 October 2010 Commissioned and presented
by Film and Video Umbrella in
Plus artists’ talks and screenings at peer collaboration with PEER
across London. For more information 99 hoxton street Film and Video
visit: freetoair.org.uk london n1 6ql Umbrella
on view
calling
At the last Venice Biennale, people wishing to see
Steve McQueen’s commission for the British Pavilion, Giardini
(2009), had to sign up for screenings, arrive promptly at the
allotted time and find a seat in a hushed auditorium. The move
drew some complaints but also sighs of relief: viewers could
the shots
submit to the film in its entirety rather than endure the sorts of
fractured narratives produced when one stumbles into a piece
of film or video three quarters of the way through.
For decades, artists – from Salvador Dalí to Andy Warhol
and beyond – have been attracted to celluloid. But for an artist’s
film to be screened in such a clearly cinematic setting is
symptomatic: it underlines the ambition and sense of scale
shared by certain artists currently working with the medium. In
the last year alone, cinema audiences have been offered Sam Are the video artists of the 1990s leading
Taylor-Wood’s film Nowhere Boy (2009), about the life of the
young John Lennon, and Shirin Neshat’s masterful Women
the way in experimental cinema?
Without Men (2009), which was awarded the Silver Lion in
Venice in 2009. Turner Prize-winner Gillian Wearing, who has of features such as McQueen’s Cannes Caméra d’Or-winning
worked for years with the documentary format, is screening a Hunger (2008), perhaps the most pivotal recent instance of an
feature film entitled Self Made in Manchester this month for artist successfully making a feature film. All this activity raises
Abandon Normal Devices, a festival of new cinema and digital questions: why is it that artists are taking on the task of
culture. Fiction and documentary overlap in Wearing’s film, producing a feature, and choosing to present their work to a
which features a group of people taking part in method-acting very different audience than the one they are used to? And what
workshops who have been given the chance to create, and does it mean for video art?
ultimately become, their own new characters. The traffic hasn’t been entirely one-way: some
Much has been made of the shift from gallery to cinema. filmmakers, such as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
Before the announcement that it was to be axed as part of British director Duane Hopkins and French New Wave director
governmental austerity measures, the UK Film Council – which Agnès Varda, are showing interest in the gallery platform, but it
supported Wearing’s film – had stated its plans to invest more is the move from gallery to cinema that has been most
heavily in artist-made films, particularly following the success pronounced. The kinds of cinematic films created by artists,
this and facing page: Gillian Wearing on the set of Self Made, 2010, with (facing page)
director of photography Roger Chapman. Photos: Paul Cox
however, are diverse, operating within different genres. Some, as an extended video installation, where others go directly after
such as Nowhere Boy, are conventional linear narratives told making a conventional narrative.”
over three acts. (Indeed, though the film received warm reviews Gillian Wearing echoes this: “I don’t stop being an artist
from the film press, art critics were flummoxed by its lack of when I make a film. People have done that. You could do things
artistic flourish). Others, Hunger and Women Without Men in a very traditional way, but, you know, I think there are so
among them, retain more of their makers’ signature concerns. many good filmmakers out there who already do that.” On the
Still, they are films rather than pieces of art largely on the judging panel for this month’s Jarman Award, which was
basis of intent: their creators set out to make a feature film inaugurated in the UK only two years ago, celebrating artists
rather than an extended piece of video art. Women Without working in film and awarding them a prime-time spot on
Men was fantastical in its subject matter and structure, as well Channel 4 to screen their work, Wearing is keen for the medium
as being decidedly cinematic in its sweep and scale. And while to be pushed. “I never really sat down and studied any
the structure of Hunger was radical (moving from a horror film guidebook about how to make a film”, she says. “Everything I
in the first act, to a staggeringly intense 17-minute single take of was doing was exploration, and I never really wanted to make
a piece of dialogue and finally onto its protagonist’s martyrdom), something that was generic.”
it too was understandable as a piece of cinema. The films of When artists are asked why they choose to make films,
Julian Schnabel are categorised as film rather than artwork, the issue of democratic access often surfaces. “I suppose mainly
while some artists whose practices take inspiration from I wanted to see if I could cross boundaries and reach a new
cinema produce their own paeans to the medium’s genres. audience”, Neshat says. “I feel that there is a democracy in
Cindy Sherman’s riotous 1997 film Office Killer, for instance, filmmaking. The viewer could see a film by paying for a ticket,
was the sort of B movie schlock-fest referenced in some of her but as video installations they become collectable items and not
best photography. possible to distribute, therefore they remain mainly as
Though heterogeneous, artist-made films, as opposed to commodities. Another interesting factor is that to see a film one
art films – Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) and does not need an education in film history, whereas I cannot
Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane (2006) come imagine going to a gallery and museum to understand any work
to mind as recent examples of the latter – are perhaps better of contemporary art without needing some general knowledge
defined as films through their attitudes towards narrative. What and education in art.”
they bring to the medium is a daring approach to structure and Tracey Emin, after making the autobiographical feature
photography. Neshat points out that “each artist’s attraction film Top Spot in 2004, about a young girl growing up in
and degree of indulging in the cinematic language is unique. Margate, told The Guardian at the time: ‘It was just a sweet
Some remain more artistic, and their films appear more or less thing. The idea of an art film going to a mainstream space.
ArtReview 69
on view
That’s all; I liked the idea of it being on in Liverpool for three compared the rise in artist-made films to that of video art in the
nights, or Manchester for three nights; of people going and early 1990s: “When that first started, people thought it would
paying their three quid and not feeling like they’d thrown have a very short shelf-life. And it’s great that it’s carried on and
themselves into the arena of contemporary art.’ that it’s not going to go away.”
Not all film and video artists wish to make the transition, Crucially, what artists bring to film – a medium primarily
however. Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius, who concerned with seeing – are fresh ways of viewing the world.
contributed a short for the UK’s LUX/Independent Cinema “To me, the most important thing in filmmaking is that there is
Office Artists Cinema Programme earlier this year and has always experimenting going on”, says Wearing. “It happens all
screened work at the British Film Institute, says: “Of course, the the time in art.”
differences are kind of disappearing. Now video artists are
introducing successful feature-filmmaking practices into their Gillian Wearing’s feature film, Self Made, will have its UK
video practice, and vice versa. There’s not much difference any premiere on 2 October at this year’s Abandon Normal Devices
more between a filmmaker and a video artist. The difference is festival in Manchester (1–7 October). The winner of the 2010
in scale and about engagement and budget. It’s a bigger Jarman Award, selected from a shortlist of Spartacus Chetwynd,
challenge and, in a way, a risk.” It is this that leaves him Ben Rivers, Zineb Sedira and Emily Wardill, will be announced
reluctant to abandon video art for feature filmmaking. “I like at a special event on 5 October at the Whitechapel Gallery,
the autonomy that visual artists have, circulating within London. The gallery will also host a day of screenings on
galleries and museums. I think this is very important. The film 2 October
scene is far less experimental. It’s more about a model for
Self Made, 2010, dir Gillian Wearing
70 ArtReview
Beaux Arts
www.beauxartslondon.co.uk
Marilène Oliver
info@beauxartslondon.co.uk
Carne Vale
22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NA
+44 (0)20 7437 5799 October 6 to November 6
On view
We care a lot
exhibition at the Max Wigram Gallery centred
around a new videowork titled Boulevard of
Broken Dreams (2009). Like Bradley, a native
San Franciscan, the traditional Sunset has been
relocated east, to the streets of Manhattan,
through which an angst-ridden or perhaps just
mentally disturbed youth wanders, occasionally
muttering lines from further east still – borrowed
from M. Ageyev’s Novel with Cocaine (1934). In While it may seem that he’s documenting
London, however, we’re simply waiting for burgers.
Just before they arrive, Slater’s phone begins to
obsessive fan culture and an information-saturated
hum – SMS whispers that Michael Jackson has age, Slater Bradley, whose latest videowork premieres
died way back west, in LA. What follows is not
a mouthful of beef and relish, but rather a series
at the Whitney this month, actually digs deep into
of feverish attempts to confirm the reports from the roots of raw emotion, human relationships and
waiters, fellow diners and various mobile Internet
devices. Because celebrity gossip site TMZ, at
the creation of identity
that point the only outlet carrying the story, was
a source neither of us was prepared to designate the most basic obstacles to engaging with it. The
‘reliable’. And while I’m not now clear as to why artist is perhaps best known for his explorations
we thought having an anonymous waiter confirm of celebrity adulation as documented in his
the rumour would have, by some strange alchemy, Doppelganger Trilogy (2001–4), consisting of
transformed that rumour into fact, it seemed to faked fan-made videos of performances by the
make perfect sense at the time. In fact everything suicided singers Ian Curtis (Family Archives,
did. It had been a long time since I’d thought 2001–2) and Kurt Cobain (Phantom Release,
anything at all about Jackson and his various 2003, and the then-alive (if not exactly healthy)
doings. Indeed I’m not sure that I ever had. But Michael Jackson (Recorded Yesterday, 2004),
there was a certain thrill in this sudden obsession all played by Benjamin Brock, an actor selected
with him and his life. And it involved feeling that because of his qualities as Bradley’s own
I cared about something in a way that could be lookalike. On the one hand you may think that
shared with someone else. Unless, of course, I’m you were never that interested in Curtis, Cobain
mistaken (or just overly optimistic about myself), or Jackson (you have different tastes) and simply
and the thrill was simply due to the sudden and rush on by these works; on the other, Bradley’s
sensational manner of MJ’s death. trilogy rather elegantly, and concisely, unpacks
I realise that one thing we might conclude the lure of celebrity and the mechanics of social
from this brief vignette is that, fundamentally, I’m identification today: Brock, Bradley, celebrity
an uncaring person. Or at best, that in general I singers, all blending into one another, passing in
don’t care enough. I wasn’t bothered when Diana and out of each other’s bodies. It’s like watching
died; I went on holiday to miss all the fuss. If I James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), except that
hadn’t been with Slater, MJ’s death wouldn’t have rather than running around some alien planet,
raised much more than an eyebrow and perhaps a the avatars in these works facilitate our roaming
mild “oh”. And in case you’re wondering, the date around a planet (as recorded in a YouTube library)
with which this narrative started wasn’t etched that looks and feels exactly like our own.
into my memory. I had to look it up. In fact, now As in Avatar, in which humans use avatars
that I think back on it, perhaps I had succumbed to in order to get close to and examine an alien race,
some sort of derivative of Stockholm syndrome. Bradley’s Doppelganger works examine the ways in
But let’s not make this all about me. which we become close to other people and certain
There’s no doubt that the process of ways in which society’s subcultures cohere. My
succumbing is simultaneously one of the key MJ moment, for example. There’s a distinct hint
Slater Bradley and Ed Lachmans, Shadow,
subjects of much of Bradley’s work and one of of the creepy in all this – as in, say, The Silence of 2009-10 (production still), high-definition
the Lambs (1991) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre video, colour, five-channel surround sound;
13 min 30 sec. Collection of the artists.
(1974), in which faceless or alienated psychopaths Courtesy Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid;
Max Wigram Gallery, London; Blum & Poe,
attempt to find a place in society by creating new Los Angeles; and Team Gallery, New York
72 ArtReview
On view
74 ArtReview
$6+$=(52)5$11.,6,12'&
DFU\OLFRQERDUG[FP
¿QHDUWFRP
1,&.:$/.(5
C,1*2'6:(75867
September 16 – OctOber 30
HELENA ALMEIDA
“bañada en lágrimaS”
OctOber 14 – 17
nOvember 11 – January 9
KATHARINA GROSSE
cácereS, Spain
Marginal
inspired him to covertly predict, in various ways, the death of
Princess Diana. The evidence, in Lars Laumann’s 16-minute
video, Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana (2006) –
voiced calmly over clips from French films and stale English
comedies, and shots of record sleeves – is substantial. A few of
many examples: every song on the record contains soothsaying,
Mainstream
from, ‘Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head’ in ‘I
Know It’s Over’ (Mother Teresa died on the eve of Diana’s
from top: Shut Up Child, This Ain’t Bingo, 2009, video for projection, 58 min; Berlinmuren, 2008, video for projection, 23 min 56 sec. Both courtesy Maureen Paley, London
burial) to ‘There Is a Light That Never Goes Out’, in which a
couple driving through ‘a darkened underpass’ fantasise about
being killed in a crash. In 1997, weeks before Diana would die
when her car crashed into a pillar in Paris’s Alma underpass,
Morrissey released a single entitled ‘Alma Matters’, whose
front sleeve featured him standing by a car, and whose rear
found him sitting by a pillar. The cover of The Queen Is Dead – Lars Laumann’s videoworks prove that the
announcing a royal death, obviously – features Alain Delon; and
it was a Frenchman named Alain who announced Diana’s death.
edge and the centre are never that far apart
As for the extraterrestrials bit, it’s complicated, but involves
Morrissey being a vegan, Moby, Moby-Dick (1851), Diana Dors, the 2008 Berlin Biennial will be familiar, is that of a woman
the 1985 Carl Sagan novel Contact, the 1997 film adaptation… who fell in love with – and, in 1979, married – the Berlin Wall.
Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana, then, is at once The 23-minute film, featuring Laumann’s own footage,
lost in a sea of lunacy and, up to a point, unnervingly plausible. interviews and stringent objectivity, tells a strange but touching
Laumann – himself a certified Smiths fanatic who’d come tale: Berliner-Mauer is ‘objectum-sexual’, meaning that she’s
across the Morrissey–Diana link online, articulated by pale sexually attracted to objects and believes them to be alive. As
Morrissey obsessives and conspiracy theorists – has said he she admits, this is essentially animism, and as in Morrissey,
does and doesn’t believe the theory. “If you follow the David there’s a foreign logic in play: if you believe objects are alive,
Icke-like rhetoric of the narrator, it’s not surprising that aliens then you can surely fall in love with one. And if you’re married
are behind it”, he states in an interview conducted by email. to the Berlin Wall, you will be devastated – as Berliner-Mauer
“They’re the only logical creators or innovators.” But this is not was – when, in 1989, ‘he’ is attacked with sledgehammers.
an either/or situation. The video bears the defining stripe of the “I wish the fall had never happened”, she says. “It is wrong that
Oslo-based artist’s work: concerning itself with deeply held but Germany is united again.” The Berlin Wall, she says, is “a
dubious ideas, it aims to reshape one’s presumptions about German being”, deserving of respect. The video ends, implicitly
them. “The idea of these convictions or relationships can seem defending her, with a grim meeting of East and West: onstage
irrational beforehand”, says Laumann, “but if you still think that footage of David Hasselhoff, who performed at the Berlin Wall
after you’ve seen the videos, then I’ve failed. To me, these are in 1989. Before this point, though, Berlinmuren has performed
universal stories.” a bizarre twist: in it, via the Internet, Berliner-Mauer discovers
If that universality revolves around the human need to that she isn’t the only person who’s in love with the Berlin Wall.
form attachments and give meaning to one’s life, then The two women, at first suspicious of each other, reach a
Morrissey… was merely the overture to another, more lengthily rapprochement upon realising that one loves the Wall as it is,
gestating project. “I started working on Berlinmuren [completed the other as it was.
in 2008] many years earlier”, he says. “I’d made a few pieces “I have different approaches when building the
[Laumann’s first show, in Reykjavík in 2004, featured his narratives”, says Laumann, “and for Berlinmuren I was inspired
collection of E.T. figures, reflecting his fascination with people by war dramas like Casablanca and The Search, and
who claim to have had sex with aliens], but when I came across aesthetically by online videos made by people with severe
Mrs Berliner-Mauer and her approach to objects, it just seemed Asperger’s syndrome”. But stretching one’s credulity and then
much more valid and true. At first I didn’t know what medium stretching it again is a hallmark of Laumann’s films, as here and
to use in order to tell her story. When I realised it was going to in the extraterrestrial theorems of Morrissey… And it’s a move
be video, I made Morrissey… to teach myself how to use it.” performed most convincingly in Laumann’s most unsettling
The story of Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, with which piece to date, Shut Up Child, This Ain’t Bingo (2009).
those who witnessed Laumann’s widely noted appearance in This 58-minute film – Laumann’s productions steadily
increased in duration up to this point, though he’s more recently
become something of a miniaturist – traces another unlikely
love story. Kjersti Andvig, a Norwegian artist, has contacted
ArtReview 79
on view
from left: Kari & Knut, 2010, video for monitor, 11 min; Swedish Book Store, 2007, video for monitor, 2 min, 54 sec (loop).
not before the pair meet (albeit separated by a thick pane of correspond to what’s said). The lead actress, a schoolgirl, talks
glass in the prison’s visiting room); she, unexpectedly, begins to about Helen Keller’s case of ‘cryptomnesia’, in which her first
fall in love with him, and Carlton clearly develops feelings for novel turned out to be an unconscious regurgitation of one
her (that she’s pretty, smart and effusive doesn’t hurt). Kjersti she’d already read, so deeply had she internalised it. Scenes of
moves into a trailer nearby, befriends a very religious woman Western books being burned recall Keller’s argument in a later
named Eileen and – influenced by her – as the date of Carlton’s book, written after German universities burned a book she’d
execution draws near, turns from a rational, articulate, sparky written on socialism, that ‘history has taught you nothing if you
person into a true believer spouting magical thinking about the think you can kill ideas’. Salinger, in his lifetime, refused to
resurrection of the dead. allow Franny and Zooey to be filmed; this Iranian version was
Inevitably, what Kjersti hopes for doesn’t come to pass, itself unauthorised. “My author won’t allow any adaptations of
and at the end of the film (shot six months after Carlton’s my story”, the main character says at one point, expressing a
death) she has snapped out of her delusion, one that had lasted vitality that won’t be contained by a writer’s wishes.
for several months. Shut Up Child, This Ain’t Bingo makes for What’s being articulated here, and elsewhere in
extremely uncomfortable viewing: “Kjersti and I never really Laumann’s work, is a productive conflation: of censorship and
spoke about it afterwards. It does show her unorthodox side; ownership (“copyright as a way of censoring”, as he says of Kari
some viewers may find her unsympathetic. But she told me to & Knut), and intolerance. Figuring a world predicated on
tell the story how I had to, and I did”, says Laumann. Yet it’s authoritarian restriction and division, Laumann is arguing
hard not to be convinced by the sincerity of her feelings; and ardently for the defence of uncommon loves, obsessions and
there is, as repeatedly happens in Laumann’s work, a kind of contextually marginal thinking while performing, via rampant
abstract beauty to the compulsion on show. appropriation and tweaking, indifference to agencies of control.
Still, Shut Up Child… is a moral minefield – almost So when Donald Rumsfeld and Margaret Thatcher appear in
everyone involved seems at once to be using someone else and the two-minute Duett (2010), with their “beautiful lies” (as
doing it with the best of intentions – and one in which the Laumann calls them) fed melodiously and hypnotically through
question of ownership is raised. Whose story is this? Laumann Auto-Tune as they pontificate respectively on ‘unknown
himself appears in snapshots of Kjersti and her friends at the knowns’ and the rightness of sinking the General Belgrano,
Both courtesy Maureen Paley, London
end of the film, and he was clearly in Texas. Yet some of the we’re not very far from the subject of those who they – or we –
footage seems to have been shot not by him but by a British might judge worthy of calumny or exclusion for what they
journalist, James Bluemel, who appears repeatedly in the film. believe, or who (or what) they love. Does Laumann need to
Laumann, you sense, wants to vex the issue of authorship spell it out?
across his body of work. Morrissey… is essentially a multifarious “All my works are political”, he says.
heisting of material published on websites and theories floated
in online chatrooms, of film footage and sleeve designs; Lars Laumann’s solo exhibition is at the Kunsthalle Winterthur
Berlinmuren is someone else’s story, inspired by Berliner- from 10 October to 21 November; Laumann will also exhibit at
Mauer’s website, reframed and given new emphasis (with Maureen Paley, London, from 20 November to 9 January
permission) by Laumann within the larger structure of his art.
80 ArtReview
Manifesto
Contract, by Superflex, is the fifth commission in the series
Offer and Exchange: Sites of Negotiation in Contemporary
Art, cocurated by Daniel McClean and Lisa Rosendahl and
produced by Electra, London
.
Superflex was founded in 1993 by Bjørnstjerne
Christiansen, Jakob Fenger and Rasmus Nielsen.
They work and live in Copenhagen and Brazil.
Its most recent project, Power Toilets, was
realised earlier this year in collaboration
with NEZU AYMO architects at Park van Luna in
Heerhugowaard, the Netherlands. It is an exact
copy of the lavatories in the United Nations
building in New York. If you would like to
know more about Superflex, don’t bother reading
ArtReview for the next 12 months.
Artists’ Laboratory 01
Ian McKeever RA
Hartgrove Paintings and Photographs
88 ArtReview
Doug Fishbone
E l m i n a, A r t N o w, Ta t e B r i t a i n
9 Oc tober – 2 Januar y
With the proliferation of international art fairs comes much talk about how globalised art scenes
have become, and how artists can now achieve fame on a worldwide level. But as contemporary
art circles in India, China, Africa and the Middle East gain prominence, do artists still relate
themselves to the locality of the cultures from which they come, or do they become detached –
entering the transnational orbit of the global art scene? And what happens when an artist looks
beyond the artworld itself, to open up a dialogue with other cultural economies, and not on the
artist’s home turf, but thousands of miles away?
That’s what the New York-born, London-based artist Doug
Fishbone has done with his groundbreaking project Elmina (2010),
premiering at Tate Britain this month. Fishbone is better known for
comedy-driven video monologues that muse on the philosophical
absurdities of life in the West, but with Elmina he has taken his wider
interest in the relativity of human cultures onto entirely new ground.
Working in collaboration with Revele Films, a Ghanaian film and TV
production company, Fishbone here coproduces and takes the lead role in
a feature-length drama, to be released on Ghana’s thriving VCD (video-
CD) market – and simultaneously released as a limited-edition art video in
the ‘Western’ artworld. Remarkably, Elmina sees Fishbone – a white guy
from Queens – taking the role of Ato Blankson, a Ghanaian farmer, among
a cast of Ghana’s leading film and TV stars. Key to the work is that at no
point is the presence of a white actor playing the role of a black Ghanaian
ever commented on or referred to.
Elmina is therefore a surprising, entertaining and disorienting work:
Fishbone has handed over all creative responsibility for the film to Revele’s Emmanuel Apea, the
film’s director, who cowrote the script with his brother, John Apea, a well-known actor who also
plays a leading role in the film. The brothers have come up with a potboiler featuring
globalisation, local corruption and political intrigue, in which Fishbone’s farmer pits himself
against the local chief, who is conniving with Chinese industrialists to convince the local
community to sell its land, so that the Chinese can build a car plant, a cigarette factory and a
distillery. It’s high soap opera mixed with social commentary about economic change and the
mixed blessings of modernisation and prosperity.
So Elmina will spark debate, both for its timely content and for how it short-circuits two
very different cultural situations – Western conceptual art and African popular cinema – while
Elmina, 2010, production stills. Photos: Thierry Bal. © and courtesy the artist and Rokeby, London
raising tricky questions about the politics of art’s audience. Although the artworld likes to
congratulate itself for its cosmopolitanism, its contact with a wider public is usually restricted to
the narrow channels of gallery, biennial and art fair – communicating with a preselected, self-
selecting audience. By drawing on wealthy Western art collectors to bankroll a piece of popular
African cinema, Fishbone opens an unlikely channel between two contexts normally worlds
apart. Art audiences find themselves dealing with the narrative conventions of a non-Western
popular film idiom, while Ghanaian viewers encounter the unlooked-for presence of Western
conceptual art, embodied in the curious shape of Ato, the nonblack Ghanaian farmer.
How that will play with its intended Ghanaian audience, who won’t necessarily have the
backstory to hand, is hard to predict, but Fishbone is hopeful: “We’ve aimed to make a watchable,
thought-provoking film, in which the insertion of the white artist will hopefully be absorbed early
on, thanks to a compelling and properly acted and well-shot story. That’s the point at which the
piece truly kicks in – when audiences accept the absurd premise that I am a local Ghanaian, and
it ceases to matter.” He points to how an actor’s race has become incidental in theatre (as with
the recent all-black production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in New York and London), yet how it
remains more rigidly circumscribed in cinema. “If it can be done in a film”, says Fishbone, “not to
mention a complex one which deals with collision of cultures in many ways, and across race lines,
I think Elmina will have done something interesting.” J.J. Charlesworth
feature: London
13 Oc tober – 9 Januar y
ArtReview 91
feature: London
Ruth Ewan’s research-heavy practice digs up forgotten histories and untold stories – ones not
disseminated through formal documentation but surviving orally and in folk consciousness – and uses
them to heckle mainstream orthodoxy. It is an attempt to wrest control from postcapitalist systems and
hand it to the people. Two exhibitions featuring Ewan’s work – one presented by Rob Tufnell as his
contribution to Frame, the Frieze Art Fair’s platform for younger galleries, and another at Arthur
Boskamp Stiftung in Hohenlockstedt, Germany – are typical, bringing to the fore disparate past
narratives that question the mechanisms of historiography and how memories are privileged.
Both exhibitions see the London-based Scottish artist presenting the results of residencies, and
it is an approach that suits Ewan’s practice well, giving her a locality to invoke as subject matter. At
Frieze, a hulking mass of bronze – a meteorlike object – will test the strength of the fair’s temporary
flooring. With its single material and its enigmatic form, Anti-Bell (2010) effectively hides the research
and coincidences that went into its inception (though a run of artist-made pamphlets – the medium
perhaps a reference to historic grassroots socialist publishing – will delve into these on the viewer’s
behalf). The project was realised during a commission Ewan had with Radar, an organisation based at
England’s Loughborough University that links artists to ongoing academic research. There Ewan met
professor Marek Korczynski, who was investigating the controlling aspects of music in industrial and,
more recently, commercial environments, from working songs on the factory line to the psychology of
supermarket radio. Combining Korczynski’s research with Loughborough’s bell-casting history (the
town has been a centre for bell production since the fourteenth century), Ewan staged an
event at the still-operational John Taylor & Co bellfoundry. Prior to a tour of the premises,
those in attendance looked on as a decommissioned church bell was smashed to pieces by
one of the founders. On emerging, the crowd witnessed the bell’s bronze detritus, now
smelted, poured out onto the ground in abstract form.
Anti-Bell, as an epilogue to this action, acts as a symbolic counteraction to an earlier
work, Squeezebox Jukebox, Ewan’s contribution to the Altermodern Tate Triennial in London
in 2009. There, selections from the artist’s collection of protest songs were played on
accordions, one grandly oversize, demonstrating an act of tuneful social activism. In
Squeezebox Jukebox, music is a radical medium; in Anti-Bell it is autocratic, resonating with
a history of soldiers called to war and subjects to church. The destruction of the bell as
musical instrument clearly indicates where the artist’s sentiments lie. The fact that music
can have such an interchangeable purpose – from protest to control and back again – is a
typical facet of Ewan’s work, in which she plays with the slippage of language and rhetoric.
Anti-Bell, 2010, event documentation. Commissioned by Radar, Loughborough University. Photos: Julian Hughes. Courtesy Rob Tufnell, London
In the 2005–6 installation Psittaciformes Trying to Change the World, staged in Edinburgh and
London, the artist trained an aviary of parrots (surely making reference to a spin-doctored
media) to chant slogans from the recent G8 summit protests in Gleneagles. The parrots became
automatons of political rhetoric, emptying it, but simultaneously preserving and documenting it.
If these works have all been about the act of making noise, and the politically divisive
results that that noisemaking can have, then Damnatio Memoriae, a new work developed during
a recent residency at Cove Park in Scotland, for exhibition at Arthur Boskamp Stiftung, is about
the repression of a loaded cacophony. Paul Robeson was loud. Perhaps best known for his role in
Show Boat (1936), the black American’s singing voice
commanded attention with its assured baritone. He was
Ruth Ewan
also politically vocal on the subject of black rights and
socialism (stoking controversy by accepting the Stalin
Peace Prize in 1952). Robeson soon became a prime target
a t Ro b Tu f n e l l ,
for McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, his career not only
destroyed by government interference, but his back
catalogue of films and recordings withheld from
Frame, Frieze Ar t Fair
distribution. This theme of erasure from memory is played
with in a slideshow narrative that constitutes the bulk of
Ewan’s installation piece (together with a crop of heritage
tomatoes named after Robeson), linking it with the actual 14 –17 Oc tober; and in Damnatio Memoriae ,
witch hunts in early modern European history and the
earlier punishment of damnatio memoriae, in which people
found guilty of treachery against the Roman state were Ar thur B oskamp Stif tung , Hohenlockstedt,
banished and their very existence denied. For Ewan
vocalisation is a political act – one that supports the status
quo or agitates against it, but that can never be neutral. through 24 Oc tober
Her practice meditates on this, loudly. Oliver Basciano
92 ArtReview
Pascal Hachem
14 Oc tober – 27 November
“I have to keep myself running”, muses Lebanese artist Pascal Hachem. “I want to be
flexible. Okay, for the last two exhibitions I’ve worked with mechanised objects, but while I
was working on these pieces, I also sat under a bridge for two hours, holding a tabletop over
my head” (this last for a performance installation called Under the Table Under the Bridge,
staged in 2009 north of Beirut).
This month, London’s Selma Feriani Gallery is hosting Bring the Boys Back Home,
Hachem’s first solo show in the UK. As this article went to press, the artist was keeping
mum about the shape of the show. The only thing he could say for sure was that it would be
new. Place is central to the thirty-one-year-old Beirut artist’s creative process – both to the
from top: I’ll Race You, 2008, installation (steel, wood, engine and mechanised hammers); 4 Metres, 2007 (installation view, Amman, Jordan), public intervention, wood strip, screws, existing old bench structure;
subjects he takes up and the language he uses to express them. Not only is he happiest
making work specific to the space where he’s exhibiting, but he finds it
wrenching to show the same work in two different spaces.
He felt that dislocation with I’ll Race You, which he views as his
strongest Beirut-based work. It was created at the end of 2008 for the two-
day collective exhibition Hopes and Doubts. Inspired by the erasure of
Beirut’s architectural patrimony in reckless postwar development, Hachem’s
work consisted of a row of six hammers. Each was affixed to an electric
motor, which drew the hammers back, one by one, to strike the concrete wall
of the space – the ruins of the pockmarked City Center cinema. This corn-
kernel-shaped shell is a remnant of modernist architecture in reconstructed
downtown Beirut. I’ll Race You was then immediately shipped to an
exhibition at the Fondazione Mario Merz, in Turin. Hachem doesn’t say the
meaning of the piece was lost when it was relocated, but he appears
physically uncomfortable as he describes moving it.
Hachem works across a range of media, including performance. His
contribution to 2007’s Kairo Ramallah Express festival, in Bern, was the eight-minute
Keep Sharpening Your Knife and It Will Blunt, 2010, steel structure, knives, desert sand, plastic, engines, electrical box
Christian Marclay
T h e C l o c k , W h i t e C u b e M a s o n’s Ya rd
15 Oc tober – 13 November
Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010, single-channel video, 24 hr. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London
in which half-remembered faces or fragments of dialogue come
and go, all building towards a never identified, and never
materialising, end. Conversely, while aping the never-ending quality
of real time, The Clock also offers the viewer redemption from it.
Through the historical and international nature of its source
material, The Clock gives the viewer an experience of parallel time
duration, one that’s freed from the rigid consecutiveness of real time – no different, of course, to the nonlinear
time experienced while watching the lifetime of Forrest Gump or the back-and-forth of Marty McFly. The
viewer is watching real time tick by, but he is also taken away from it, into the locality of the drama.
It’s a long way from Michael J. Fox to Henri Bergson, but Marclay invites us to make the jump. The
artist’s construction marks some kind of materialisation of the Bergsonian model of consciousness in that it
invokes a perpetual present. The Clock’s viewer will experience a sense of continual ‘nowness’, reminiscent of
the manner in which linear time, with its notions of past and future, is disregarded by Bergson in favour of a
mechanism of image processing – the stuff of consciousness itself – in the ever-present. From this perspective,
the invention of cinema provided us with an escape route from the prison of linear real-time. With The Clock,
on the other hand, depicting a myriad of characters stuck, Groundhog Day-style, in processing the same actions
at the same time, day in, day out, Marclay has made a work that not only affirms the general formulaic nature
of the movies but also throws us right back, momentarily, behind those bars. Oliver Basciano
94 ArtReview
from top: Atop the Loam (A Forester), 2009, wood, hessian, loden coat, casting foam, glitter, black beans, pigment, plastic, 205 x 65 x 45 cm, courtesy the artist and Hotel, London; Western Plan (Commuted), 2009, hessian, wood, powder-coated steel, lacquered wood, horse hair, concrete, gold-plated resin, piano keys, brass, feature: London
206 x 120 x 120 cm, courtesy the artist and Hotel, London; Swan Song Dithyramb, 2009, black steel, iron nitrate, concrete, marble, onyx, copper, wood, red lentils, oregano, pasta, peanut butter, pebbles, wheels, audio cable, buckram, rubber, found objects, 208 x 103 x 103 cm, courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan
There’s a particular way that most writing about Steven Claydon’s work
seems to go: a lengthy preamble describing a vortex of context (let’s call Steve Claydon
this ‘the lecture’) – references to fictional, science-fictional, philosophical or
historical texts that inform or are referenced by the work; into this swirl are
thrust some sample objects from the show (‘the description’), often an Trom Bell to Bow
accumulation of seemingly ordinary things with no special status
connecting them to the lecture – an image of a bat with a Vodafone logo
for an eye, a bust with a bunch of roses popping out of its skull, geometrical Draps, Hotel
structures housing or supporting some potted cacti or other domestic
plants; and from the collision between the lecture and the description is
drawn some sort of conclusion, normally based on the extent to which the 8 Oc tober – 1 4 November
description complies with (the ordinary made extraordinary) or defies (the
ordinary left ordinary) the context of the lecture. This last (‘the result’) may
range from clichés about a world run on ‘organised chaos’ to suggestions and in B ritish Ar t Show 7:
that we are being exposed to some sort of critique of contemporary
capitalist culture. Part of the attraction of Claydon’s work to people like me
is that it allows one to play up to the old-fashioned image of the critic as In the Days o f the Comet ,
know-it-all (in the sense that Claydon’s work points or winks at more-or-
less-obscure chunks of knowledge) while sidestepping charges of
boastfulness, arrogance or condescension, because the knowledge so various locati ons , Not tingham
assertively displayed is often destabilised or rendered comic by the
ordinariness of the description. This we might call ‘the pleasure’ of the
work, which arguably reached an apotheosis in Strange Events Permit 2 3 Oc tober – 9 Januar y
Themselves the Luxury of Occurring, an exhibition curated by Claydon for
the Camden Arts Centre, London, in 2008.
At the heart of the London-based artist’s output is an exploration of the contingency of truth,
particularly as it relates to the truths we extract from the world around us, and physical objects in
particular. As an example of how this operates, Claydon presents the case of one of his favoured
materials – aluminium. The third most common element in the earth’s crust, it was once, owing to the
difficulty involved in extracting the mineral from its ore, as expensive as silver, so much so that in the
middle of the nineteenth century, Napoleon III ordered a state dinner service made from the stuff as
a demonstration of his prosperity and power; now, thanks to the development of electrolytic
extraction, aluminium is a relatively cheap material, and anyone dining off the stuff might be worrying
about its circumstantial connections to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Similarly, Claydon’s The
Author of Mishap (Them) (2005), which appears to be a bronze bust of a man, executed in the heroic
style, is actually made of resin and copper powder, with a patina supplied by a reaction with urine. (If
the lecture were to be presented here, it would include the additional information that the work
references J.G. Frazer’s scandalous study of magic and religion, The Golden Bough, 1890; and that
rather than being a portrait of ‘a man’, it is in fact an agglutination of three historic figures with
opposing political positions. But let’s face it: unless you’re one of those people who can’t tear
themselves away from their iPhones and a continuous Google
connection, the lecture won’t be available when you go into a show
and look at the work anyhow.) As if to emphasise the distance
between the superficies of look and the reality of substance, the
bust sports a peacock feather.
The experience of viewing a Claydon exhibition has a lot in
common with that of reading Gustav Flaubert’s Bouvard and
Pécuchet (published posthumously in 1881), the celebrated tale of
two retired clerks who set out in search of a knowledge of
everything, largely as it is presented in the key reference books of
the age (Flaubert famously claimed to have read 1,500 books in
preparation for writing this one). But taking what they read in as
literal a way as possible, they find that theory and practice (at least
in their hands) are poles apart. The more they think they ‘know’, the
less they understand and the more mad and eccentric they appear
to the people around them, and to the readers of the book. In
Claydon’s work we get the pleasure of laughing at similar follies,
combined with the worry that in the future someone else will be
laughing at what we suppose we know today. Mark Rappolt
ArtReview 101
feature: london
Nina Beier
Until 2 3 Oc tober
A soft grey pigment is selected. It’s the colour and texture of dust, and it lies around the
gallery, collecting on surfaces. It’s a sculpture of dust, a painting with dust. But then
again, it’s effectively just dust: tiny fragments of grey matter lying about the place. What
happens when the description of a thing is so close to what it represents that the
difference is only in the mind of the beholder? How can you tell the difference between
a description of a story and the story itself? Nina Beier’s exhibition What Follows Will
Follow mines the worlds of complexity and confusion that can be found in such minute
discrepancies.
The Danish artist is perhaps best known in London for her many collaborations
from top: Trauerspiel, 2010, performed by Marisa Rigas, clay, pigment, metal stand, dimensions variable; Permanent Collection (Statens Museum for Kunst), 2009, 127 sheets of framing glass collected by framer
with Marie Lund, works that take the form of subtle interventions into a given exhibition.
The pair’s All the Best (2008), for example, is an instruction to the host gallery to leave
all post delivered to the space to pile up at the front door. You might have found a note
on the wall alerting you to The Witness (2008), which states that one of the gallery staff
Mogens Kristiansen from acquisitions of the Danish National Gallery, metal stand, 130 x 35 x 150 cm; The Extreme and Mean Ratio of (Head of Man), 2009, bronze, marble, 18 x 14 x 14 cm
is letting his hair or beard grow for as long as the exhibition is up. During the past few
years, however, Beier has been concentrating on her solo practice. Which is not to say
she’s stepped any closer to the spotlight. If anything, it appears the artist is slipping
further into the shadows, preferring to employ selected agents to carry out a range of
production processes for her. Because the closer you move to her work, the further
away it seems to get.
Recently Beier created a sculpture, for example, for only one viewer. The
viewer is photographed looking at the work, which is then destroyed, leaving only
the photographic record of the event (Spectacle series, 2009–). Then, for
Trauerspiel (2010), shown in Art Basel’s Art Statements section this year, she had
an actress recreate a sculpture that Beier had made previously and shown to no
one, using only Beier’s verbal descriptions of her motivations and procedures for
the making of the work’s initial version. In the end, the sculpture the actress created
appeared to be a round little lumpy black bird, rather like a quail, straining to sing.
While the opportunity to read the expressions and hand marks as revelatory of the
artist’s intentions or emotions is now denied, the choice of actress rather than
fabricator meant that the maker had the opportunity to act out Beier as a character,
and to pick up on various signals the artist was not aware of. Thus, though seeming
to remove the touch of the artist, Beier left scope within the work for the tiniest
possibility that a ghost of her hand might remain.
In addition to covering the Laura Bartlett Gallery in pigment dust for What
Follows Will Follow, Beier uses the act of framing, a device she employs regularly, to
further explore works that become the thing they are attempting to represent. She has
ordered frames to be made that will frame the clothes that the framer was wearing on
the day that he or she made the frames, so that (are you ready? Deep breath now…) the
frame frames the frame of the framer; and in another series she will frame whole books
and newspapers that hold, unseen, nestled between their closed pages, images of
artworks. It wouldn’t be a surprise if either of these works made it into Beier’s series
Framing the Title of the Work (2009–), photographic framed representations of
installation images of previous works, which are rephotographed and reframed each
time they are shown. The original works begin to disappear, reaching into infinity, each
time they are shown. Like the infinite reflections of a mirror in a mirror, you know that a
fragment of the real exists somewhere. If you could only catch its tail and hold onto it.
Laura McLean-Ferris
102 ArtReview
Media commentators and journalists are fond of telling us that we live in an era
of nonstop reporting, 24-hour news cycles and instant communication granting
us ever more transparent access to the social and political realities of the
moment. So it’s easy to think that what we’re seeing on CNN or BBC News or
Al Jazeerah is a truthful interpretation of reality. But after almost a decade of
total news on the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq and the recurring conflicts
in Lebanon and the wider Middle East, are Western audiences any wiser than
they were before?
Since the early 1990s, and particularly with the internationalisation of
biennials, artists have worked increasingly with the video-documentary mode
to investigate and project alternative views on their social and political
experiences. And while many have stuck closely to the factual ethos of
reportage that the video document tends to promote, others, like Lebanese-
US artist Walid Raad, have drawn the documentary form into ever more
labyrinthine encounters with fictional narrative strategies, questioning and
blurring the supposedly clear line between fact and interpretation.
Raad’s work is treated to its first major UK retrospective at the
from top: Civilizationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves (detail), 1958–9/2003, 24 digital prints, each 25 x 20 cm; Notebook volume 38: Already been in a lake of fire (detail), 1999/2003, 9 digital prints, each 31 x 43 cm;
Whitechapel Gallery this month, allowing viewers to get to grips with the
artist’s elusive, darkly ironic semifictions that reflect on the history of Lebanon,
from the civil war period of 1975 to 1990, to the uneasy peace that has
followed. Since 1989, Raad’s photographic and video works have appeared
under the auspices and authorship of the anonymous-sounding Atlas
Group – supposedly a team of researchers whose aim has been to ‘locate,
preserve, study and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that
shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon’.
The handy corporate anonymity provided by the Atlas Group is
part of Raad’s elegantly oblique production of pseudohistories and
Let’s be honest, the weather helped (detail, plate 011 Egypt), 1998/2006–7, 17 lightjet prints, each 49 x 72 cm. All © the artist and courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London
invented archives, whose power rests in the way the artist blends actual
fragmentary archival sources with invention, always couching the end
product in the dry, empirical language and presentations of the historical
researcher. In Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31) (2001), for
example, we follow the to-camcorder monologue of a certain Souheil
Bachar, about his ten years of hostage captivity, alongside five American
hostages. It’s never quite clear whether Bachar was or is real – though the
American hostages mentioned certainly were. Rather, it allows Raad to
inhabit the space of the hostage subject, to delve into the private fears and anxieties
that are never permitted into the public myth of the heroic, stoic captive; Bachar’s
account dwells on the psychosexual paranoia of men kept together in close proximity,
of the sadomasochistic projection that might operate between captor and hostage.
Raad’s attention to simulating reality and spinning yarns around what appears
to be authentic sources have often worked almost too effectively; playing the Atlas
Group persona poker-faced, Raad has often seen audiences and curators mistake his
works for real documents, so much so that Raad has gradually abandoned the conceit
and reasserted his own authorial identity, a shift that was anyway inevitable as the
artist’s reputation has grown. So where to next? For those artists (and comedians)
whose work relies on forms of ironic deception and
subterfuge, success comes at the cost of no longer being
able to exploit your own obscurity. As if to outflank this
Walid Raad
threat, Raad has turned his attention to fictionalising and
subverting his own status and reputation as an artist, in a
series of works that turn the process of artistic
Miraculous Beginnings
institutionalisation back on itself. As stability and a fragile
prosperity have reasserted themselves in Lebanon in
recent years, and a more confident art market emerges,
Raad’s newer work questions what it means to be a Whitechapel Galler y
‘Lebanese’ artist, to be a marketable cultural commodity in
the eyes of the ‘global’ artworld. Shrewdly eluding the
official script, Raad keeps things real by acting out the 14 Oc tober – 2 Januar y
story before it’s been written. J.J. Charlesworth
Mat thew Darbyshire
from top: Stool Series (Kartell Attila Stool and African Luba Stool), 2010, Kartell Attila stool, African Luba stool, shelf, perspex case, 133 x 55 x 55 cm; ELIS, 2010, digital print on dibond, wood, paint, light fittings, 5,000 x 244 cm; Blades House, 2008 (installation view, Gasworks, London)
various locations , Not tingham, 2 3 Oc tober – 9 Januar y
Earlier this year, bright hoardings in white, lime, blue, pink and yellow were wrapped around a building in London’s East End,
promising a new high-rise – named ELIS – and with it, spelled out in blocky lettering, a host of other intangible qualities:
respect, flexibility, freedom. There would, in the end, be no such high-rise, but with these hoardings advertising a building
(and a future) to come, London-based British artist Matthew Darbyshire’s ELIS (2010) presented the modern urban
regeneration project dragged out to its most frightening logical conclusions: a building that promises a corporately managed
bitesize version of everything, and that delivers nothing. Aspirational dream images, in the form of manipulated photos of
actual buildings by the architects AHMM, were featured on the hoardings – 1980s glass-and-steel structures with
‘lighthearted’ sorbet details and open-plan meeting rooms. Putting the billboard’s buzzwords together produces a kind of
chilling nonsense: what would ‘cutting edge social tranquillity’ or ‘cosmopolitan flagship funtime’ actually be? And why would
anyone want to be a part of it? In several of the accompanying images, black silhouettes – those ubiquitous characters from
the iPod adverts who dance, ears stuffed with white buds – appear to be giving the thumbs-up sign, but to
nothing, or everything.
Darbyshire has made it his business to chronicle the enormous sell-off and conversion of our
cultural public spaces into a corporate culture of sameness. CMYK, sterile surfaces, bright lighting and
well-managed displays of ‘individuality’. His installation Blades House (2008) at London’s Gasworks was a
collecting of this design aesthetic into a kind of ‘ideal home’ for standard-issue urban man, while Funhouse
(2009), at London’s Hayward Project Space, brought together the uniformity of advertising, public
services and ‘interactive’ spaces, in which corporate, consumer and public spaces blend seamlessly.
Obviously, all this is enough to make anyone in the trendier coteries of art or design turn up her
nose at the crass, watered-down versions of modernist design or subculture on display (Jacobsen Egg
chairs in McDonalds! Graffiti-‘inspired’ clothing range at BHS!). This is an interesting site of tension in
Darbyshire’s work, a crevasse to be negotiated. Who are the imagined everyman inhabitants of Blades
House, and all the rest of those consumers too easily sold by friendly-looking colourful imagery? Are they
dumb? Are their consumer choices so bad? As Darbyshire puts it, this is down to the issue of the “formal
versus the social”. “I’m constantly trying to balance my attention between the two so as to avoid slipping
into pointless, whimsy nonsense on the one hand or self-righteous, undue didacticism on the other.”
Darbyshire has designed Everything Everywhere – A Ticketing Experience for Frieze Art Fair (2010),
an imagined sell-off of the ticketing area of the fair to a well-known telecommunications company that
uses magenta prominently in its colour scheme. Interestingly, it’s no trouble at all, in a world of Illy coffee
VIP lounges and Deutsche Bank bars, to imagine this happening; but for Darbyshire this reveals
more than just a reliance of the arts on corporate cash. The project “hopefully asks whether or not
this hypothetical yet perhaps looming surrender of autonomy can ever be good for the arts. The
sterility of its sci-fi curved corners, its wipe-clean surfaces and its game-show lighting also operate
as metaphor for a culture contained, controlled, preserved and unable to grow.”
There’s more than just a sociological or political interest in those “sci-fi curved corners”,
however, as Darbyshire is also something of a formalist, and it’s perhaps possible to see a Haim
Steinbach-like sensibility or a glimmer of Jeff Koons’s 1988 Banality works in his collections of the
most ubiquitous objects, coolly displayed and forced to make their own sense. Following ELIS,
Darbyshire became frustrated that it seemed as though his work could only be read in terms of
the social or political legitimacy of its claims, and so, for the British Art Show, he has
returned to a project in which the aesthetic and formal is foregrounded. Naming this An
Exhibition for Modern Living, after a furniture exhibition in Detroit in 1949 that featured
examples by Eames, Aalto et al., Darbyshire has searched out the equivalent items in
contemporary consumer culture, investigating contemporary taste preferences for,
among other things: oatmeal and tan, steel and glass, sentimental and nationalistic, and
the dubiously ethnic, examining what might be lurking beneath those smooth wipe-clean
surfaces. Laura McLean-Ferris
feature: London
Rirkrit Tiravanija is, it could be said, a founding member of the relational aesthetics club. The Thai-born, New York-based
artist had work in Traffic, the 1996 Nicolas Bourriaud-programmed show at Bordeaux’s CAPC Museum of Contemporary
Art, for which the curator coined his most famous term, and much of Tiravanija’s past practice has been a neat illustration
for Bourriaud’s claim – which has attracted many detractors – that a circumstance had emerged in art that moved away
from the tangible towards the catalysing of nonmaterial, nonhierarchical social networks. There’s been the requisite dinner
as art (a Tiravanija solo exhibition at New York’s 303 Gallery in 1992), Tiravanija’s apartment as art (replicated in 1999 at
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, and for the artist’s 2005 Serpentine Gallery solo show, London), curatorial
immersion as art (Utopia Station, which Tiravanija staged alongside Liam Gillick and Hans Ulrich Obrist at the 2003
Venice Biennale, and filled to bursting with works by 160 artists while still leaving space for a discussion lounge). The
artist, however, has gone on record as saying that he is unnerved by the label, given that, at heart, his work is about the
organics of interaction and social productivity, and thus demonstrates an antipathy to the idea of labelling, or absolutely
defining, a practice. Describing Tiravanija’s work, he seems to be saying, should be a process that’s as slippery as the
chaotic situations he sets up.
Perhaps as a consequence of this unease, Tiravanija’s first exhibition at London’s Pilar Corrias Gallery consists of
two works that move away from the social and democratic as artmaking processes, in which he assumes instead the more
traditional role of the artist privileged by his platform to speak. And rather than trading in the highly charged and
revelatory moment of the ‘art experience’ that has marked Tiravanija’s work previously, the works centre on the
challenging and mundane experience of the everyday. Lung Neaw (both works 2010) is a Warholian video portrait of a
Thai man, Uncle Neaw, going about his business over the course of a working day. Where Warhol asked us to gaze upon
extremes – subjects with an alienating glamour attached to them – Tiravanija shows us an outsider. Uncle Neaw is older,
his clothes worn; and despite his patience and tranquil demeanour, he appears at times to tire – understandably – of his
role: the video lasts eight hours, revealing changes in light and other signs of time passing over the course of a day. (The
display of the video strictly corresponds to this passage of time; it won’t, for example, be played during the evening
private view.) As for the gallery’s staff, a comrade has
joined them for six weeks, a new face to add to the
ones that greet them every day, five days a week, week
in, week out. For them the work invites a familiar bond
with the man, a shared act of endurance. The video is
social in this sense, but crucially departs from the
democratic partaking of relational aesthetics: we are
now viewers, and at a remove. A second new work for
the show, Pilar, 08/10/10, demonstrates a similarly one-
way communication. It documents a performance that
takes place this month, in which Tiravanija’s gallerist,
Pilar Corrias, stands on a soapbox at London’s
Speakers’ Corner and recounts the mundanities of a
day in her life (as scripted by Tiravanija from Corrias’s
diary notes). With a nod to Marcel Broodthaers’s 1972
silent performance at the same venue, the unexceptional,
uncontroversial nature of Corrias’s narrative, delivered at a site
Lung Neaw 8:19, 2010. Photo: Cristian Manzutt. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Pilar Corrias
13 Oc tober – 1 December
ArtReview 105
© Lyndall Phelps. Touch (foil blanket), detail 2010. Photography: Peter Mennim
TOUCH
a site specific installation by Lyndall Phelps
16 September – 28 November 2010
Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum
Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade,
Leamington Spa, CV32 4AA. Tel: 01926 742700
www.warwickdc.gov.uk/royalpumprooms
Admission Free
Image - Fay Godwin, Flooded tree, Derwentwater, 1981. © The British Library Board
feature:
feature:
Let’s dance
Why are galleries dancing away the
recessionar y blues?
-
wo r ds : L au r a Mc L e a n - Fe r r i s
ArtReview 109
feature: DANCE
, it would appear that the ones artists and the Hayward Gallery, which is hosting the performances of
curators are most happy inviting into the gallery space, at least in Rainer’s Trio A and is coproducing some key events during the
London, are contemporary dancers. Michael Clark’s dance Trisha Brown season, such as Brown’s Floor of the Forest (1970), a
company was in residence at Tate Modern for seven weeks over work in which dancers manoeuvre their way across a structure that
the summer; meanwhile an invitation has been extended to dance looks like a washing line hung with clothes, slipping in and out of
companies to come in and ‘respond’ to Claire Barclay’s sculptural the bright garments. Works such as these, employing objects and
installation Shadow Spans (2010), currently at Whitechapel structures as manipulative or choreographic elements, are the
Gallery. Filmmakers such as Tacita Dean and Wim Wenders have focus of this exhibition, and most often they choreograph the
been making films that document the work of choreographers viewer as dancer.
such as Merce Cunningham, as in Dean’s Craneway Event (2010), Rosenthal’s curatorial take on the relationship between art
shown recently at Frith Street, or Pina Bausch, as though they and dance in those intervening years identifies not amnesia but a
have found the film-subject nonpareil, while many artists of a shift in interest to darker, more psychological elements that might
conceptual bent have begun choreographing dance works – be deemed ‘choreography’. “In the 60s and 70s”, she says, “artists
Pablo Bronstein, Martin Creed, Emily Wardill and Keren Cytter used sculptural elements to engage the body of the visitor, and to
among them. So what’s the deal? Why did these collaborations say: ‘Well, you perceive with and through the body, as well as with
between dancers and artists, so common in the 1960s and 70s, tail your eyes’. Artists and choreographers were interested in creating
off, and what’s making them such an attractive proposition again? a form of participant, rather than spectator, activating the body,
Let’s start with the 1960s and Judson Dance Theater – a and that lasts until about the 80s; and then there is a different
groundbreaking group of individuals working together in New interest in choreography, which is more about manipulation and
York, which included dancers Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, degenerated behaviour.”
Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown, and involved artists such as A defining example of this is Mike Kelley’s Test Room
Robert Morris. A renewed appetite for the postmodern dance of Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and
this era is currently discernible in London: Dance Umbrella will put Manipulatory Responses (1999), an installation that pulls together
on Merce Cunningham’s final work, Nearly Ninety (2009), this the behavioural experiments of American psychologist Harry
autumn, alongside a Celebrating Trisha Brown season. Yvonne Harlow on monkeys, the choreography of the American dancer
Rainer will have a selected retrospective of films and installations, Martha Graham and the set design – created for Graham’s
The Yvonne Rainer Project, at the BFI in November, which features performances – of sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Dancers interact with
Rainer’s installation After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid the various ‘stimuli’ or props, choreographed in a dancelike >
(2002); and film projections of some of Rainer’s most recent
choreographic projects, including RoS Indexical (2007). Rainer is a
figure whose relationship to dance and choreography almost
mirrors the relationship that dance, and more broadly
performance, have had to the museum space – she discarded
dance for film during the 1970s, though in the past ten years she
has returned to choreographic work.
The autumn also brings new performances of Rainer’s Trio
A (1966). A dance in which a string of nonrepetitive movements
are performed in a pedestrian style while the performer resists all
eye contact with the audience, Trio A is notable for being one of
the only dances of Rainer’s that she can be seen performing
herself, on a video from 1972. It primarily survives, though, through
the Labanotation system (the equivalent of a kind of a musical
score for dancers that has also been referenced by Angela Bulloch
in her dance-video piece Group of Seven (One Absent Friend),
2005), and also through a number of official ‘transmitters’ of the
dance, who are authorised to oversee new performances; this is
itself an interesting take on how dance and movement can be
disseminated or controlled, bought or sold. For her part, Rainer
admits that she finds the current interest from art galleries
“curious”, particularly given how expensive and complicated dance
can be to programme, and its poorer financial return relative to
exhibitions. “It’s as if a kind of amnesia had pervaded the
intervening years between the 60s and 70s, when US museums
were presenting dance and music events, and the present”, she
remarks. “I don’t know what has generated this renewed interest,
especially during these hard economic times.”
Perhaps for answers we should head to the closest thing
London has to a dance/art survey this autumn, the exhibition
Move: Choreographing You, curated by Stephanie Rosenthal at
110 ArtReview
Rainer admits
that she finds
the current
interest from
art galleries
‘curious’ , given
how expensive
and complicated
dance can be
to programme
feature: DANCE
ArtReview 113
feature: DANCE
manner, but in a way that recalls the antipsychiatry experiments of representation of something, never like something real. “It’s almost
R.D. Laing – the dancers alternately punch and kick the props, like he’s ‘using’ dance… I’m not sure how dancers would feel about
before hugging them. Our entire upbringing, Kelley seems to that.” Bronstein seems to concur. “I kind of hated dance”, he says.
imply, is choreography. We develop the personalities and positions “I always got really embarrassed at it because it always sort of felt
that we do because of where we are, our educations and what is very queer and gushing and something was wrong with it. A bit
around us – a world of props and stage directions to direct us like I still feel about the theatre, but then dance became a very
through life. good tool for exploring architecture and exploring the body’s
This interest in manipulation is reflected, in the Hayward relation to ornamentation and to architectural ornament.” The
exhibition, in the works of Dan Graham, whose structures lead you dance commissions, however, keep on coming, and so Bronstein
around and about them, and in Bruce Nauman’s Green Light has been able to develop a repertoire of ballets.
Corridor (1970), which leads you down a blind alley. It’s here that So why are those with the power to commission so keen on
issues of dance, moving bodies and manipulation cross over with dance? Obviously there are many conditions and individuals who
architecture, a theme that has been picked up in recent years by have contributed to this situation. However, when I search the past
Pablo Bronstein, who was previously better known for his five years for a figure who provides a bridge for dancers who are
classically presented ink drawings that narrate fantasy mashups of finding themselves back in galleries and museums, I keep returning
the histories of eighteenth-century and postmodern architecture. to Tino Sehgal. Sehgal’s background in dance and economics
Bronstein began using dancers, dressed in acid-bright unitards, to makes him the perfect figure to take the artworld from its most
describe spaces, or to demonstrate the idea of public and hedonistic, commercial, object-centric period and walk it through
corporate spaces, and has more recently been investigating the to a place where a word in the ear, a couple kissing or your own
concept of sprezzatura, an elegant, demonstrative style of gesture conversation can both subvert and be subsumed by the
developed in Italian Renaissance courts that was an admired form commercial system. Xavier Le Roy, whom Sehgal has danced with
of complete artifice. In Move, dancers in the gallery space will previously, will contribute ‘activators’ to the Hayward exhibition,
occasionally react to decorative architectural features with who are trained to engage visitors in directed conversation, a
sprezzatura gestures. method close in approach to Sehgal’s.
Bronstein, however, works with the form of postmodern The other element that makes dance from the 1960s
dance in a rather ambivalent way. As Rosenthal puts it, there is a onwards appear so appealing, however, is the degree to which it
‘double floor’ in Bronstein’s works, in that it always looks like a incorporates other art forms. Consider the collaborations between
114 ArtReview
feature: dance
Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Cunningham, or Morris, Trisha Brown season is a multivenue festival in London, 5–30
Forti and Rainer, which somehow found their most generous October. The Yvonne Rainer Project can be seen at BFI Southbank,
statements in dance. The two contemporary projects that get London, 26 November – 23 January. Move: Choreographing You is
closest to these kinds of positive breakdown in disciplines are both at the Hayward Gallery, London, 13 October – 9 January. ROTOR
facilitated by dancers: dancer and choreographer Siobhan Davies’s is at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, 3–14 November, then touring
continued collaboration with artists continues this autumn in to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 28 Jan – 6 Feb; and
ROTOR (2010), a dance which will be interpreted in different Rosemary Butcher’s Festival of Miniatures runs through 3 October
media by a selection of artists, including Angela de la Cruz and at Sadler’s Wells, London
Massimo Bartolini; and choreographer Rosemary Butcher’s
Festival of Miniatures, at Sadler’s Wells. Lapped Translated Lines,
one of the events, is a collaboration between Butcher, an
works
architectural practice called Postworks and artist Daria Martin, and (in order of appearance)
will be shown with alongside a further collaboration with Bronstein.
Trisha Brown, For MG: The Movie, 1991. Photo: Mark Hanauer
Martin’s film of Butcher’s dance intends to capture the
psychological landscape for the dancer, while the architect’s stage William Forsythe, The Fact of Matter, 2009, choreographic object. Photo: Julien Gabriel Richter.
© the Forsythe Company, Dresden
set is based on the dance notation of architect Bernard Tschumi
as well as cages and grids somewhat informed by the dance. Trisha Brown, Floor of the Forest, 1970. Photo: Egbert Trogemann
Bronstein is designing a stage set featuring moving columns for a Yvonne Rainer, AG Indexical with a Little Help from HM, 2007, filmed by Babette Mangold
second dance choreographed by Butcher.
Mike Kelley, Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory
So does this signal a return to a more expansive period of Responses (Full Cast), 2001, colour photo, 71 x 124 cm.
cross-disciplinary collaboration for the artworld, one that finds its Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy Kelley Studio, Los Angeles
expression in dance? Rosenthal thinks not: “I think it’s related to Pablo Bronstein, Passeggiata, 2008, video on DVD, 20 min.
generosity – people have to be generous with what they are Courtesy Herald St, London, and Franco Noero, Turin
doing, and I’m not sure where we’re at with that right now. You Siobhan Davies Dance, The Score, part of ROTOR, 2010. Photo: Pari Naderi
need to be willing to collaborate at real ground level, and not be
Daria Martin, Lapped Translated Lines (detail), 2010, film,
worried about whose artwork it is. I don’t think we’re there in visual part of Rosemary Butcher, Festival of Miniatures, 2010
art right now. I think we would need to be somewhere else in
society to experience something like that.”
116 ArtReview
Marius Bercea
Qui Vivra Verra
September 18 – October 24 2010
120 ArtReview
Jorge Tacla, Al Mismo Tiempo en el Mismo Lugar, 2010 (installation view, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago),
blueprint and blowtorch on metal panels, 300 x 3500 cm. Photo: Pin Canpagna
Art Pilgrimage: santiago
124 ArtReview
Art Pilgrimage: santiago
30 th anniversary
INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR www.arco.ifema.es
EASY RIDERS
closing show at
lokal_30_london
14-31 October 2010
Espacio Minimo
Madrid
Doctor Fourquet 17
28012 Madrid
SPAIN
www.espaciominimo.es
in collaboration
with:
www.lokal30.pl
Regent’s Park, London
14–17 October 2010
www.frieze.com
Tickets available from
+44 (0) 871 230 3452
www.seetickets.com
ALASTAIR WHITTON
PATMOS AND THE WAR AT SEA
29 SEPTEMBER – 6 NOVEMBER 2010
Supported by
Listings Museums and Galleries
UNITED KINGDOM, MAX WIGRAM GALLERY John Hansard Gallery THE PACE GALLERY
LONDON 99 New Bond Street University of Southampton 534 West 25th Street
London, W1S 1SW Highfield T+1 (212) 929-7000
Alexia Goethe Gallery Edwin Burdis: Back Sack and Southampton Tues – Sat 10 – 6
7 Dover Street Crack SO17 1BJ www.thepacegallery.com
London, W1S 4LD www.maxwigram.com T +44 (0)23 8059 2158 50 Years at Pace
T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 9 Sep – 2 Oct Caroline Bergvall: to 23 Oct
www.alexiagoethegallery.com Middling English
Alexander de Cadenet: Life-Force PALACE ART FAIR 7 Sep – 23 Oct THE PACE GALLERY
24 Sep –19 Nov Fulham Palace, 545 West 22nd Street
London LEAMINGTON SPA ART T+1 (212) 989-4258
ART SENSUS www.palaceartfair.co.uk GALLERY AND MUSEUM Tues- Sat 10 – 6
7 Howick Place, info@palaceartfair.co.uk Royal Pump Rooms, www.thepacegallery.com
London, SW1P 1BB 8 - 10 Oct, 11am - 5pm The Parade, 50 Years at Pace
T +44 (0)20 7630 9585 Leamington Spa, to 16 Oct
www.artsensus.com Stephen Friedman CV32 4AA.
Nick Walker: In Gods We Trust’to Gallery T +44 (0)1926 742700 THE PACE GALLERY
13 Oct – 27 Nov 5-28 Old Burlington Street www.warwickdc.gov.uk/ 510 West 25th Street
London W1S 3AN royalpumprooms Tues-Sat 10-6
T +44 (0)20 7494 1434 Touch: an installation by Lyndall T +1 (212) 255-4044
BLOOMBERG SPACE
F +44 (0)20 7494 1431 Phelps info2@thepacegallery.com
50 Finsbury Square
info@stephenfriedman.com 18 Sep – 28 Nov www.thepacegallery.com
London, EC2A 1HD
BEATRIZ MILHAZES 50 Years at Pace
gallery@bloomberg.net
11 Oct - 20 Nov NATIONAL MEDIA MUSEUM to 23 Oct
www.bloombergspace.com
Bradford, BD1 1NQ Thomas Nozkowski
Ernest Caramelle
ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART www.nationalmediamuseum. 22 Oct – 4 Dec
2 Sep – 25 Sep
Kensington Gore org.uk
Elina Brotherus
2 Sep – 25 Sept
London, SW7 2EU T +44 (0)844 856 3797 Michael Werner Gallery
www.rca.ac.uk Fay Godwin: Land Revisited 4 East 77th Street,
Shi Shaoping: The Metamorphosis 15 Oct – 27 Mar New York, NY 10075
DOMOBAAL
Series T +1 (212) 988-1623
3 St John Street
13 – 18 Oct, 11am – 7pm daily The Modern Institute www.michaelwerner.com
London, WC1N 2ES
14—20 Osborne Street, info@michaelwerner.com
T +44 (0)20 7242 9604
VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY Glasgow, Scotland Marcel Broodthaers: Major Works
F +44 (0)20 7831 0122
16 Wharf Road G1 5QN 2 Sep – 13 Nov
www.domobaal.com
London N1 7RW T +44 (0)141 248 3711
Walter Swennen
25 Sep – 30 Oct
T +44 (0)20 7336 81090 F +44 (0)141 248 3280 AUSTRIA
www.victoria-miro.com Dirk Bell
FRITH STREET GALLERY
Herrnan Bas: The Hallucinations from 28 Nov Galerie Hubert Winter
of Poets Breite Gasse 17
17-18 Golden Square,
London, W1F 9JJ
7 Oct – 13 Nov United States, New York A-1070 Wien
T +44 (0)20 7494 1550 T +43 (0)1524 09 76
UNITED KINGDOM DOOSAN Gallery www.galeriewinter.at
www. frithstreetgallery.com
info@frithstreetgallery.com 533 West 25th Street
CORNERHOUSE NewYork, KunsthaLLE WEIN
Fiona Tan: Cloud Island and Other
70 Oxford Street, NY 10001 halle 1, halle 2
New Works
Manchester, M1 5NH. newyork@doosangallery.com Museumsplatz 1
17 Sep – 29 Oct
www.cornerhouse.org Open Tue-Sat 10-6 A-1070 Wien
Normality Status Map: Heath
MAUREEN PALEY Kyoung Tack Hong:Pens
21 Herald Street,
Bunting
14 Oct – 13 Nov MUMOK
29 Sep – 21 Nov Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung
London, E2 6JT
T +44 (0)20 7729 4112 THE Pace GALLERY Ludwig Wien
Ingleby Gallery Museumsplatz 1
www.maureenpaley.com 32 East 57th Street
15 Calton Road A-1070 Wien
MALE: group exhibition selected T +1 (212) 421 3292
Edinburgh, Scotland
by Vince Aletti Tues-Frid 9:30– 6 Sat 10-6
2 Sep – 3 Oct
EH8 8DL Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
T +44 (0) 131 556 4441 www. thepacegallery.com
Dirk Stewan Mirabellplatz 2,
info@inglebygallery.com 50 Years at Pace: A multi-venue
9 Oct — 14 Nov 5020 Salzburg
www.inglebygallery.com retrospective exhibition exploring
T +43 662 881 393
James Hugonin Pace’s impact on the art world over
www.ropac.net
1 Oct - 12 Nov the past five decades
Arnulf Frainer & Dieter Roth
to 23 Oct
Oct – Nov
Belgium czech repulic Galerie Laurent Godin JOHANN KÖNIG GALLERY
5, rue du Grenier St Lazare Dessauer Straße 6-7,
Galerie Almine Rech MUZEUM MONTANELLO 75003 Paris 10963 Berlin
20 Rue de l’Abbaye Nerudova 13, 118 01 Prague CZ T +33 1 42 71 10 66 www.johannkoenig.de
B-1050 Brussels www.muzeummontanelli.com www.laurentgodin.com Nathan Hylden
T +32 26 485 684 T +420257531220 Claude Closky/Laloli to 23 Oct
www.alminerech.com Daniel Pešta: Levitation to 16 Oct
David Kramer VW (VENEKLASEN/WERNER)
Galerie Baronian- DENMARK 21 Oct – 12 Dec Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26,
Francey 10969 Berlin
2 rue Isidore Verheyden LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF Galerie Lelong Paris T+49 30 81 61 60418
1050 Brussels MODERN ART 13, rue de Téhéran info@vwberlin.com
T +32 25 12 9295 Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk 75008 Paris www. vwberlin.com
www.baronianfrancey.com Sophie Calle T +33 1 45 63 13 19 Open Mon– Fri 10-6 , Sat 11-6
Wang Du 23 Jun – 24 Oct Open Tues–Fri 10:30 – 6 Continuous Projections: Martin
to 30 Oct Sat 2 – 6:30 Arnold, Gary Beydler, Phil
GALLERI NICOLAI WALLNER www.galerie-lelong.com Solomon and Fred Worden,
Galerie Rodolphe Ny Carlsberg vej 68 OG curated by William E. Jones
Janssen 1760 Copenhagen V MYRVOLD > MYWORLD to 23 Oct
35, rue de Livourne Alexander Tovborg: New Eternity PIA MYRVOLD
1050 Brussels 2 Sep – 30 Oct 15 rue Sambre et Meuse Greece
T +32-2-538 08 18 75010 Paris
www.galerierodolphejanssen.com FRANCE T +33607968552 Frissiras Museum
Wim Delvoye By appointment. 3 Monis Asteriou
to 30 Oct Chateau de versailles www.pia-myrvold.com Plaka, Athens
78000 Versailles Galerie Olivier Houg T +30 2103 234678 or
think.21 T +130 837800 45 Quai Rambaud +30 2103 316027
Rue du Mail 21 www.galerieperrotin.com 69002 Lyon www.frissirasmuseum.com
Brussels 1050 Murakami Versailles T +33 4 78 42 98 50
T +32 2 537 87 03 to 12 Dec olivierhoug.com iceland
www.think21gallery.com David Hevel
Galerie Almine Rech to 19 May i8 GALLERY
Tim Van Laere Gallery 19, rue de Saintonge Tryggvagata 16, 101 Reykjavík
Verlatstraat 23-25 75003 Paris Galerie ThaddAeus T +354 551 3666
2000 Antwerp Tel +33 1 45 83 71 90 Ropac
T +32 (0)3 257 14 17 www.galeriealminerech.com 7, rue Debelleyme ireland
www.timvanlaeregallery.com 75003 Paris
Tomasz Kowalsk Galleria Continua T +33 1 42 72 99 00 MOTHER’S TANKSTATION
to 16 Oct Le Moulin (Paris) www.ropac.net 41-43 Watling Street
46, rue de la Ferté Gaucher Richard Deacon/Andy Warhol Usher’s Island, Dublin 8
Xavier Hufkens 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel to 16 Oct www.motherstankstation.com
Rue Saint-Georges 6–8 Seine-et-Marne Liza Lou T +353 (0)1 6717654
1050 Brussels T +33 1 64 20 39 50 21 Oct – 20 Nov Uri Aran: Doctor, Dog, Sandwich
T +32 2 6396730 www.galleriacontinua.com 15 Sep - 30 Oct
www.xavierhufkens.com GERMANY
Group exhibition Galerie Emmanuel ITALy
to 23 Oct Perrotin 401 CONTEMPORARY
76, rue de Turenne & 10 Impasse BERLIN Alfonso Artiaco
ZENO X GALLERY St Claude , 75003 Paris Brunnenstrasse 5 , 10119 Berlin Piazza dei Martiri 58
Leopold De Waelplaats 16 T +33 1 42 16 79 79 www.401contemporary.com 80121 Naples
B-2000 Antwerp www.galerieperrotin.com Nadja Frank: Ravaneti T+39 0814976072
T +32 32 161 626 to 13 Nov alfonsoartiaco.com
www.zeno-x.com FIAC Ann Veronica Janssens
Raoul De Keyser Grand Palais & Louvre, Paris DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM
to 16 Oct 21 – 24 Oct Unter den Linden 13/15 ARTISSIMA 17
Michael Borremans www.fiac.com 10117 Berlin Turin
Oct – Nov T +49 (0)30 20 2093 www.artissima.it
Fondation Cartier www.deutsche-guggenheim.de 5 – 7 Nov
261 Boulevard Raspail Being Singular Plural: Moving
75014 Paris Images from India Cardi Black Box
T +33 1 42 18 56 50 to 10 Oct Corso di Porta Nuova 38
www.fondation.cartier.com 20124 Milan
Moebius T+39 0245478189
12 Oct – 13 Mar www.cardiblackbox.com
ITALy (continued) MAXXI- Museo nazionale Laboral Centro de Arte GALERIE URS MEILE
delle arti del XXI secolo y Creacion Industrial Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne
Galleria Continua Via Guido Reni, 4A Los Prados, 121 T +41 (0) 41 420 33 18
Via del Castello, 11 00196 Rome 33394 Gijón F +41 (0) 41 420 21 69
53037 San Gimignano T +39 06 32101829 T +34 985 133 431 galerie@galerieursmeile.com
T +39 0577 94 31 34 www.maxxi.beniculturali.it Open Wed–Mon 12–8 www.galerieursmeile.com
www.galleriacontinua.com www.laboralcentrodearte.org
Kiki Smith/ Michelangelo GALLERIA PACK turkey
Pistoletto/Pascale Marthine Tayou Foro Bonaparte, 60, MUSAC – Museo de
25 Oct – 22 Jan 20121 Milan Arte Contemporaneo SAKIP SABANCI MUSEUM
T +39 02 86 996 395 Castilla y Leon 1Sakıp Sabancı Cad. No:42
Galleria dello Scudo www.galleriapack.com Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 Emirgan 34467,
Via Scudo di Francia 2 Matteo Basilé 24008 León Istanbul
37121 Verona Sep – Oct T +34 987 09 00 00 T +90 212 277 22 00
T +39 045 59 01 44 www.musac.es www.muze.sabanciuniv.edu
www.galleriadelloscudo.com Peggy Guggenheim
Collection SWEDEN BRAZIL
Galleria 704 Dorsoduro, 30123 Venice
Francosoffiantino T+39 0412405411 MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ Galeria Fortes Vilaca
Artecontemporanea www.guggenheim-venice.it Gasverksgatan 22, Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500
Via Rossini 23, 211 29 Malmö 05416-001 São Paulol
10124 Turin Prometeogallery Alice Neel: Painted Truths T +55 11 3032 7066
T +39 011837743 Via Giovanni Ventura 3, 9 Oct – 2 Jan www.fortesvilaca.com.br
www.francosoffiantino.it 20134 Milan Spectacular Times: The 60s – The
T +39 02 2692 4450 Moderna Museet Collection Galeria Leme
Galleria Franco Noero www.prometeogallery.com to 27 Feb Rua Agostinho Cantu, 88
Via Giolitti 52A, 05501.010 São Paulo
0123 Turin Riccardo Crespi MODERNA MUSEET T +55 11 3814.8184
T+39 011 - 88 22 08 via Mellerio n° 1 STOCKHOLM www.galerialeme.com
www.franconoero.com 20123 Milano Skeppsholmen
T +39 02 89072491 The Moderna Exhibition 2010 Galeria Luisa Strina
Galleria Lorcan O’ Neill www.riccardocrespi.com 2 Oct – 9 Jan Rua Oscar Freire 502, 01426-
Via Orti d’Alibert 1e Mary Kelly: Four Works in 000 São Paulo/SP
00165 Rome SPAIN Dialogue 1973-2010 T +55 11 3088 2417
T +39 06 6889-2980 16 Oct – 23 Jan www.galerialuisastrina.com.br
www.lorcanoneill.com CAC Malaga
C/ Alemania, s/n SWITZERLAND Galeria Nara Roesler
Galleria Massimo Minini 29001-Málaga Avenida Europa 655
Via Apollonio 68 T +34 952 12 00 55 GALERIE BERTAND & 01449-001 São Paulo
25128 Brescia www.cacmalaga.org GRUNER T +55 11 3063 2344
T +39 030 363034 16, rue du Simplon, 1207 Geneva www.nararoesler.com.br
www.galleriaminini.it Galeria Elba Benitez T+41 22 700 51 51
San Lorenzo 11 www.bertrand-gruner.com Galerie Vermelho
Federico Luger 28004 Madrid Rua Minas Gerais, 350
Via Domodossola 17, T +34 91 308 0468 GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER 01244-010 São Paulo
Milan 20145 www.elbabenitez.com AG T +55 11 3257-2033
T +39 02 67391341 Limmatstr. 270, Postfach 1517, www.galeriavermelho.com.br
www.federicolugergallery.com GALERIA HELGA de ALVEAR CH-8031, Zürich
c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 www.presenhuber.com Casa Triangulo
Collezione Maramotti 28012 Madrid Rua Paes de Araujo 77
via fratelli cervi 66 T +34 91 468 0506 GALERIE GUY BÄRTSCHI 04531-090 São Paulo
Reggio Emilia www.helgadealvear.com rue du Vieux-Billard 3a, T +55 11 31675621
T +39 0522 382 484 Helena Almeida 1205 Geneva www.casatriangulo.com
www.collezionemaramotti.org to 30 Oct T +41 (0)22 3100013
Jacob Kassay www.bartschi.ch Luciana Brito Galeria
to 3 Oct Rua Gomes de Carvalho,
MIGROSMUSEUM FüR 842, Vila Olímpia,
Galleria Massimo De GEGENWARTSKUNST São Paulo
Carlo für gegenwartskunst T +55.11.3842.0634
via Giovanni Ventura 5 Limmatstrasse 270 www.lucianabritogaleria.com.br
20135 Milan Postfach 1766
T +39 02 70 00 39 87 CH-8005 Zürich
www.massimodecarlo.it www.migrosmuseum.ch
listings: museums and galleries
South africa
ArtReview 137
Subscribe now
Subscription is for nine issues. Prices are discounted from the current published cover price
and save 35%
Never miss an issue:
Profiles, news, reviews, city guides and specially commissioned
artworks by established and emerging artists from around the globe
subscribe at
www.artreview.com/subscribe
UK, Europe, Rest of World +44 (0)1858 438 803 (Quote ref: SB44)
USA, Canada +1 800 428 3003 (Quote ref: ARM44)
Rear View Reviews
October Books
The Strip
On the Town
Off the Record
ArtReview 139
REVIEWS:
UK
Fiona Banner Tate Britain, London
Harrier and Jaguar 28 June – 3 January
The weird thing is, it just fits. Tailfin strung up into the vault of Tate Britain’s neoclassical Duveen Galleries, a Royal Navy
Sea Harrier hangs vertically down, 14.2 metres to its nosecone, the tip wavering less than a metre from the polished floor.
Weirder still, it looks really good in there. Fiona Banner’s Harrier and its companion, an upturned Jaguar fighter jet lying
sprawled in the gallery beyond, are British war machines brought into the sanctum of British art; not so long ago, the same
galleries offered a different sort of sanctuary, to Mark Wallinger’s State Britain (2007), a replica of the protest placards of
antiwar protester Brian Haw, forced from nearby Parliament Square by the newly instituted one-mile protest exclusion
zone. If Wallinger’s foray into the political potential of the readymade used a simple transposition of objects to allow the
continued exhibition of an antiwar message, it did so by reducing the cultural status of the gallery to just another space to
show some stuff in. With Banner’s Harrier and Jaguar (2010), the triumphal classicism of the Duveen Galleries, all Ionic
capitals and cornices, conspires with the warplanes to play out a sort of sacred, altarlike spectacle of ever-extending
allusions and connotations, on the subject of the aesthetics of power, the power of aesthetic over reasoned experience
and the way art abstracts these into its own institutional limits.
Harrier and Jaguar isn’t made up of ‘found objects’ and, given the work that has been done to them, its constituents
might just be seen as sculptures. The Harrier has been stripped of its paintwork and repainted a darkish matt grey. It takes
a moment to notice that its whole surface has been stippled with a pattern of painted dots that, from a distance, describe
a bird’s plumage, most evidently across the jet’s wings. The Jaguar, by contrast, tipped awkwardly on its back and side,
has had its metal polished to a mirror finish, its skin
riddled with myriad paths of rivet-screws, throwing
futuristic reflections at the solemn space around it.
Those small transformations count, along with the
child’s-play reorientation of these massive objects,
turning them into public sculptures that are sanctioned
and licensed by the institutional iconography of the
surrounding architecture.
Banner regularly works across the chasm that
exists between textual and visual experience, her better-
known works consisting of dizzyingly relentless written
descriptions of scenes from war films or pornography, as
wall-size blocks of text. By confronting semiotic artifice
with the authenticity of bodily experience, Banner’s work
has progressively traced one of the key shifts in art since
the early 1990s – from the dominance of semiotic
theories of art as sign, to the resurgence of interest in
aesthetic theories of art as experience. It’s perhaps ironic
that while of the First Gulf War Jean Baudrillard could
argue that it ‘did not take place’ (it was a war played out
as images and signs), in the Second Gulf War, US war
chiefs could declare a policy of ‘shock and awe’ – an
aesthetic war, to hide the lack of real purpose or clear
mission. With Harrier and Jaguar, Banner has managed
to reveal the danger – and triumph – that aesthetic
experience always poses, and which now lies as much in
the representation of reality as it does in art. The danger,
perhaps, of wars fought empty of narrative, but
overflowing with sensation. J.J. Charlesworth
140 ArtReview
reviews: UK
ArtReview 141
REVIEWS: uk
There’s a knot at the heart of Sergej Jensen’s work that is at times difficult to swallow; on the
one hand, there’s a lackadaisical whimsy to the way his cloth paintings seem not so much to be
made but left in stairways, bars and alleyways to accumulate stains, rips and small marks. On
the other, there’s the tight, controlled physical binds of the stitches and frames that hold the
pieces together. The end result is slight, muted surfaces that convey narrative fragments in
faded whispers, with the occasional repressed outburst of outright visual allure.
His latest exhibition at White Cube, The Last Twenty Minutes of 2001, is no exception.
Green Digital Snake (all works 2010) transposes the blocky, pixelated eponymous protagonist
of the 1970s videogame onto faded black and grey cashmere, the old Apple computer’s black
screen here enshrined as a sort of decorative quilt. A white-robed figure in an aged black-
and-white photograph hovers in the corner of Things They Said That I Saw, the figure’s face
covered by a floral-patterned cloth. The visions implied in the title might take place in the
expanse of the murky blue linen surrounding the photo, or likewise, we just might be seeing
the figure’s shrouded view; but in either case they are elusive, like trying to find patterns when
you shut your eyes. Many of the other works in the show remain in the background, like the
constant crackle of a record player, the analogue nostalgia of washed-out dyes and home
sewing repairs helping to reinforce the 1970s-sitting-room atmosphere commonly found in
Jensen’s work. As the title of Postauthentic Times reminds us, this hazy fuzz is deliberately
restaged; The Last Twenty Minutes tones down some of Jensen’s more overt early-digital
quotations from previous work, so his use of
nostalgia here works not so much as a problematic
but, more weakly, as a footnote regarding shifts in
medium and technology.
Sergej Jensen White Cube, London
The layout of the show exacerbates these The Last Twenty Minutes of 2001 16 July – 28 August
issues, the ground floor holding the short video that
gives the show its name and one cloth painting,
both presiding over the 14 works lined up in the
gallery’s basement. Upstairs, the patchy Somatic
Intelligence, presented on its own, seems to
emblematise Jensen’s canvas work as a sort of limp
combine-collage. The video is claimed as a
reexamination of the surreal final scenes of Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but it seems more
like a home movie capturing the final throes of a
flailing New Year’s party, with artist Josef Strau
emerging slowly from a bathtub to skewer a candle
with a knife, or Strau and Jensen searching in the
cracks of wooden floorboards, as if trying to locate
the last little crumbs of hash. Encountering these
works first upsets the balance of Jensen’s lazy-
precision knot, giving it the feeling of being an
overstaged, feigned private moment that eclipses
the evocative interstices of the work, instead making
Jensen’s careful and pointed questions of whether
we can locate past idealisms in the present seem
solipsistic and rhetorical. Chris Fite-Wassilak
142 ArtReview
reviews: UK
Gangsta’s Paradise is an oversize bestiary that features: two giant rabbits, Paddock has tacked up Utopia Last Days, a snapshot of a closing-down
a tanklike lobster and a man-size rendition of athlete Michael Johnson’s sale at a shop that failed to live up to its own hopeful moniker.
self-help book Slaying the Dragon: How to Turn Your Small Steps to Great On another wall is A Group of Cannibals, a reproduction of an invitation
Feats (1996). Now, I tend to think that gigantism in sculpture is a means card to a dinner in honour of the Victorian explorer Alfred Cort Haddon
of showboating opulence, spectacle or grandiose ambition (think of Jeff showing a benign-looking (and apparently uncannibalistic) group of
Koons’s critters or Christoph Büchel’s megalomaniacal installations); this native Torres Strait islanders. There’s a wonderful circularity to this image:
exhibition, however, plumbs a different line. Here, Jess Flood-Paddock the natives are labelled as anthropophagi, but it’s the explorers who are
deploys supersize props as a sort of nebulous metaphor for the ethical the true consumers.
and cultural complexities of contemporary and historical greed. Weaving through these disparate cultural references is a series of
The centrepiece of the show is Big Lobster Supper (all works thoughts about subsistence and greed, eating and being eaten.
2010), a hulking model of haute cuisine crustacean life, whose armour is For example, the bunnies populating the atrium are images of a supersize
made of thin fibreboard decorated with yellow and orange spray paint, German breed reportedly sold by a German man to the North Korean
its claws bound with a beltlike rubber band and its body curled up government for feeding the starving population; in 2007 the German
beneath it (perhaps due to the pain of being boiled alive). Surrounding newspaper Der Spiegel reported that they were, in fact, eaten at
this is Truman, a canvas printed with an image of blue sky and white a birthday feast in honour of Kim Jong-Il. The suggestion here is that,
clouds that covers three of the gallery’s walls. In The Truman Show (1998), as consumers, we’re all the cause of someone else’s pain. Indeed this
Jim Carey’s character discovers that his life is nothing more than a exhibition is named after a hit single by rapper Coolio that simultaneously
monstrous reality TV show, and – following a perilous journey across an celebrates and bemoans the ‘gangsta’ logic of kill-or-be-killed. We might
artificial sea – he breaks through the limits of the set, an artificial sky. Here dream of utopian equality (if I read his book, I might run as fast
the lobster makes a similar bid for freedom: its feelers caress the canvas as Michael Johnson!), but real inequities are harder to negotiate.
while its right claw pierces the surface of the sham firmament. Colin Perry
The second gallery space contains Michael Johnson’s Self Help, a
two-metre-tall edition of the Olympic champion’s autobiography cum
self-help book, whose dust jacket informs us, in the author’s own baffling
words, that ‘after you have stared for long enough into the dragon’s eyes,
Gangsta’s Paradise, 2010 (installation view, Hayward Project Space, London).
there is nothing to do but slay the dragon’. In the same room, Flood- Photo: Roger Wooldridge
ArtReview 143
REVIEWS: uk
“How do I win?” asks a confused would-be contestant in the Cornerhouse, uncertain whether or not to
actively join in with RELAX’s What Is Wealth? (2010), the Zurich-based artists’ contribution to this group
show. Standing amidst what looks like the spoils of the Arcade Fire’s house clearance, it is easy to feel caught
between the wall, the wheel, the chairs and the cage with which RELAX have answered the wealth question.
Thankfully, a ‘guard’ is on hand to reassure potential players, explain the rules and encourage us to spin the
neon wheel of personal fortune.
What Is Wealth? and its attendant interactions introduce Unrealised Potential’s key concerns:
participation, the frameworks within which this can (or can’t) happen and the contradictory impulses in both
creative endeavour and communication, and their intertwinement with pasts and possible futures. RELAX’s
answer to ‘What is wealth?’ is the latest part of Gavin Wade’s ongoing Strategic Questions (2002–), which
reconsiders 40 questions originally posed by architect Buckminster Fuller. In tackling such trivia as ‘What do
we mean by universe?’ and ‘What is truth?’, Fuller sought utopian consensus. Back in the present, with
utopia foreclosed, the guard is symbolically stationed in another cage – a repository for the remnants of
strategic answers that Wade has already received.
Continuing along the route of the hostess-led exhibition tours, which seem central to Mike Chavez-
Dawson’s curation, we’re serenely ushered into a beautifully realised blue and white room where information
abounds: wall texts, a disembodied voice, brightly lit reading tables and – of course – a Mac. This textual
feast supplies the background to Sam Ely and Lynn Harris’s
Unrealised Projects (2003–10), Chavez-Dawson’s Potential Hits
(2003) and their fusion into Unrealised Potential. A proudly
displayed legal contract sets out the terms and conditions of 67
unrealised artist projects. A mere £50 buys the sole right to
complete the work within two years: you too can pay-to-play your
part in resurrecting Robin Nature-Bold’s dream of freeing the
Chapman brothers or Barbara Kruger from their (un)creative
cages; or take the rap for Richard Wilson by rolling burning barrels
of tar into a gallery.
Liam Gillick’s potential (Planta de Anodizado – to display
the products of the Mexican company LGD Luck SA) has already
in fact been realised, as the centrepiece of the exhibition. In
rescuing this project from creative limbo, artists Len Horsey and
Brian Reed have simultaneously closed down its possibility of
becoming something else. The smiles and symmetries of the
gliding hostesses who present Luck SA’s ‘compensator’ and
‘complete drive’ are juxtaposed with supposedly unsettling
statements about the realities of neoliberal capitalism.
Disappointingly, these trite critiques fail to tear the immaculately
imagineered corporate curtain, resulting in a skewed mashup of
Vogue and Adbusters which reproduces what it purports to resist.
This is potential exhausted, rather than unrealised.
Gillick’s brand of relational aesthetics has perhaps become
reified and thus easily co-opted, leaving its resistant potential dull
and void. However Wade and Chavez-Dawson et al. leave open
possibilities – of recovering lost voices, engaging with plural pasts
and decolonising our futures. Unasked questions and unspoken
answers jostle for attention with what is manifest in these works.
And there’s also a refreshing para-relationality in engaging the
guard/guide, leaving us better able to ask, “So, winning is what?”
rather than merely “How do I win?” Benjamin Tallis
144 ArtReview
reviews: Uk
An art critic walks into a coffee shop. (S)he orders a large cappuccino and a small cappuccino, and then goes to sit down.
When they are brought over in their respective cup sizes, (s)he asks, “Which is which?”
An art critic walks into Martin Creed’s Down Over Up. There are sculptures made from small chairs sitting on
slightly larger chairs sitting on slightly larger chairs sitting on slightly larger chairs; or in another sense, large chairs sitting
under slightly smaller chairs, etc (Work No. 925, 2008, and Work No. 998, 2009). There is a sculpture made from Lego
blocks, with the bigger pieces at the bottom and smaller ones near the top (Work No. 745, 2007). There are wooden
panels on the central staircase of the gallery that compress to play an ascending scale when people walk up them and a
descending scale when they walk down them (Work No. 1061, 2010).
Eloquent arguments have been made that it is near impossible to attribute conventional meaning to Creed’s work.
As Germaine Greer put it, ‘He strives for utterances that will not yield an ulterior meaning to even the most dogged (mis)
interpreter’. Rather, this view holds, the work somehow just is. This is why interviews make up a disproportionately large
part of the literature surrounding Creed’s practice.
In these interviews, Creed casually sketches out a world in which his art, whether object-based, video, music or now
dance, is performative in the most elusive sense. It is not a form, but forms part of experience. To cite one of the many
poignant passages from John Dewey’s famous Art As Experience (1934), which stimulated a generation of American and
international artists in the 1960s to try to redefine art as something that just is, ‘Things are experienced but not in such a
way that they are composed into an experience. There is distraction and dispersion; what we observe and what we think,
what we desire and what we get, are at odds with each other.’
In Creed’s statements rhythm emerges as a source of comfort, giving a sense, if not actual, of something repeating
and structured within this fleeting reality. Down Over Up is a particularly rhythmic exhibition, with every work – whether
composed of sequenced chairs, tables, Lego bricks, wooden planks, nails, cacti or painted rectangles – offering an
osculating spectacle for the living viewer, who surveys them, up and down.
An art critic walks around Down Over Up. (S)he recalls Creed talking about his music and noting the difference
between the making of it and the listening to it: “When I’m performing, I’m being looked at like an object”. It’s easy – and
perhaps this has as much to do with contemporary institutional practice as with the artist – to objectify ‘Creed’, to feel at a
distance from the performance, even as you walk up and down Work No. 1061. The making has been more intrinsic to less
object-based exhibitions. An art critic walks into a coffee shop. James Clegg
ArtReview 145
REVIEWS:
USA
Originally conceived for the Frankfurter Kunstverein in 2008 and since exhibited at Johann
König, Berlin, Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s Fruits of One’s Labor continues to provide a deft,
symbolic response to the European economic crisis. For this latest iteration, at Ludlow 38, the
Berlin-based artist has scaled her installation to fit the shopfront’s modest size and unusual
multitiered floor. To one side of the gallery entrance sits a pallet of 400 briquettes, comprising
approximately €90 million taken out of circulation by the European Central Bank (ECB),
shredded and compressed for burning. Providing the next link in this production chain, several
tiers up, is an old German coal oven, retrofitted with an exhaust pipe that makes a few clunky
torques before plummeting clean through a vertical sheet of Plexiglas. From the near side,
visitors can watch a cloud of smoke take shape as an array of plastic apples – the ‘fruits’ of
which we, thanks to the obstructive partition, have been deprived. This transparent screen
does more than simply estrange. A pulsating techno soundtrack and flashing lighting units
give the forbidden fruit a chiaroscuro sway, conjuring a clubland celebration of the headier
days of financial speculation, telecast through the Plexi like a shabby spectacle.
Two events served as companion pieces to the Ludlow 38 exhibition: a tour of the
Museum of American Finance, housed in former bank headquarters on Wall Street; and
discussions of proprietary trading, by academic Robert Wosnitzer, and past New York and
Berlin-based cultural entities, such as Art Club 2000, by Jackie McAllister and Axel John
Wieder. Topicality aside, these events seemed designed to shoehorn Sadr Haghigian’s work
into the frame of the American economic situation, which does some disservice to the
conditions of its inception. By first creating Fruits of One’s Labor for exhibition in the ECB’s
host city, the artist referenced the 2002 introduction of euro coins and notes, a cross-national
standardisation that effected periods of inflation and deflation in constituent economies,
generally lowered interest rates – particularly among debtor countries – and in the case of
Germany resulted in the halving of the nominal value of money relative to the Deutschmark.
In this context, Sadr Haghigian’s fanciful reuse
of waste euros signals the valuative instability of a
once-robust currency, as well as its harmful social Natascha Sadr Haghighian Ludlow 38, New York
byproducts – observations that seem all the more Fruits of One’s Labor 7 July – 15 August
prescient in the two years since the Frankfurt
exhibition, as economic fallout in Greece, Spain and
Portugal has prompted social service-slashing
‘austerity regimes’ and led to vague suggestions,
from nations such as France, that the currency be
abandoned outright. Yet the metaphoric logic
strains upon consideration. The artist exhibits the
transformation of waste currency into an air
pollutant, eliding the desired product of the process
(the heat from the oven) that would conventionally
serve as the fruit of labour. Instead the fruits – plastic
apples manufactured in China, to be precise – stand
in for the pollutant, a gesture that could
acknowledge the local cost of outsourcing but, in
the confusion of symbols and inferences, dampens
Sadr Haghigian’s central points. Tyler Coburn
146 ArtReview
reviews: USA
Untitled (Interiors), 2001, 179 x 241 cm, chromogenic colour print, private collection, New York
ArtReview 147
reviews: USA
The German sculptor Charlotte Posenenske (1930–85) was dogmatic in enunciating the
social and political aims of her work. ‘The objects should have the objective character of
industrial products’, she wrote in a 1968 manifesto, and in pursuit of a proletarian ideal of the
equal value of labour, she designed her sculptures in modular units to be mass-produced and
sold at cost to purchasers she called ‘activists’. These latter were free to arrange the objects at
will, becoming equal partners in the creative process. Thus, while her forms resembling
galvanised steel ductwork and folded plastic document covers reflect her exposure to
Minimalism, they are, more cogently, products of her interest in mass production and her
desire to subvert class-based criteria like authorship and authenticity. Value, for Posenenske,
lay in the process, not the object; her intent was to democratise the aesthetic.
These sociopolitical convictions, and Posenenske’s distrust of the power dynamics
behind traditional art exhibitions – despairing of art’s ability to effect meaningful social
change, she threw it over in 1968 to study assembly-line labour – make it very tricky to present
her work in ways which avoid fetishising its authorship and conceptual thrust. Presentation
becomes even more difficult in a venue like Artists Space, a sleek downtown loft which
channels a high-end design aesthetic based on an industrial past – a kind of visual taste which
might be the unanticipated consequence of work like Posenenske’s. (These difficulties stand
apart from the contradictions inherent to art meant to render itself superfluous, or the
conceptual conundrum posed by the role of individual aesthetic choice in the consumption of
pieces intended to engender equality.)
The venue’s solution was to invite three artists, Ei Arakawa, Rirkrit Tiravanija and a third
billed as TBA, who turned out to be the institution’s staff, to reinstall the exhibition at two-
week intervals. The first two artists work in ways which share, in a superficial manner,
Posenenske’s social and participatory ethos, and choosing them appears obvious for that very
reason. Indeed, the very idea of a ‘curatorial selection’ of ‘artists’ asked to reinstall work
designed to subvert the traditional value relationships implied by those very words seems
insensitive, if not antithetical, to Posenenske’s philosophy.
Tiravanija’s intervention was symptomatic. By installing her units on dollies equipped
with brightly coloured pads, he struck a rather decorative note. And in laying out lines of
bright tape to suggest traffic patterns along which
visitors might push the works – that is, by providing
Charlotte Posenenske Artists Space, New York ‘directions’ for public engagement, ones more
23 June – 15 August aesthetically keyed than industrially determined – he
further compromised Posenenske’s belief in viewer-
activated work.
The staff’s classically spare arrangement,
which highlighted discrete objects, also seemed
driven by aesthetic considerations and so divorced
the work from any hint of its industrial origins,
despite the occasional surface scuff or fingerprint.
Perhaps it’s inevitable that Posenenske’s attempts at
radical engagement have become historic artefacts,
but the transformation seems to bespeak an inability
of those who are touted as innovative thinkers to
actually think radically while engaging with it.
Joshua Mack
Series D Vierkantrohre (Square Tubes), 1967, configured by Stefan Kalmár, 23 June – 5 July
(installation view). Photo: Daniel Pérez
148 ArtReview
reviews: USA
Space Mountain was the first rollercoaster I ever rode. Unfortunately, at the time I was not yet old enough to take delight
in my own terror. I’m sure the ride would seem completely pedestrian today – a kind of pseudo- or starter-coaster, which
is what it’s meant to be – but there was something about the darkness and disorientation which made me desperate to
get back out into the light, preferably into Mickey’s fuzzy embrace (though this thought now fills me with an equivalent
kind of dread).
With Defrosted: A Life of Walt Disney, Adam Cvijanovic and David Humphrey have pulled off a brilliant show, one
that goes a long way towards peeling back that thin scrim that papers over such childhood traumas and goes by the
anodyne name of ‘imagination’. The set pieces of the show – and they are quite literally ‘set pieces’ – are Cvijanovic’s epic
mural paintings, which offer a synoptic view of Disney’s ‘life’: there is ‘Doc’ Sherwood’s house in Marceline, Missouri, which
the not-yet-ten-year-old Walt was ‘commissioned’ to draw, his first commercial outing; there is the polo accident, which
killed an MGM contract actor named Gordon Westcott, with Disneyland under construction nearby; and there is Space
Mountain, out on an expanse of weed-ravaged tarmac, looking like a relic of the 1950s futurism that saw it built.
All of this is revealed for the kind of fabrication that it is. The house is a set layered with scenes of Main Street and
the railroad that so fascinated Disney his entire life. The scene of the polo accident, cartoonishly rendered and set within a
large ink ‘splat’, unfolds in some fanciful forest setting seemingly straight out of Snow White. Humphrey’s paintings add
punctuation by depicting, in wildly divergent styles (sometimes within the same frame), some of the more bizarre scenes
from Disney’s life: here he is riding a pig, there he is, with pants down, waiting for his father to pick the switch that will
deliver his whipping. And in the middle of the room stands a wood lattice that mimics the scaffold of Disneyland’s Magic
Mountain, which is seen under construction in Cvijanovic’s mural. On this the pair have gathered pieces by their friends
and other gallery artists (Leon Benn, Will Cotton, Inka Essenhigh, David Herbert, Arturo Herrera, Greg Hopkins, Adam
Hurwitz, Eva and Franco Mattes AKA 0100101110101101.org, Joyce Pensato, Francesco Simeti, John Wesley and Paula
Wilson) that treat – by turns roughly and parodically – different Disney-esque themes.
One wishes more artists (and curators, especially curators) would follow Cvijanovic and Humphrey’s lead in taking
certain singular ideas – biography, celebrity, entertainment, trauma – and developing them so richly and ambitiously.
Defrosted is generous in this way; it’s refreshingly undidactic, and it doesn’t wallow in its own esoteric knowledge, daring
you to try to make sense of the proceedings and snickering when you inevitably come up short. I also won’t hesitate to say
that Cvijanovic and Humphrey’s show is one of the best demonstrations of the capacity of painting to figure the
Defrosted: A Life of Walt
Disney (detail), 2010 imagination – or better yet, vision (one tragic man’s in particular) – rather than simply putting it to use. Jonathan T.D. Neil
ArtReview 149
REVIEWS: USA
When Kori Newkirk strung pony beads onto strands of artificial hair for his curtain-painting
Modernist House (2005), which depicted a pristine white building of geometric simplicity, it was
enough that the image signified a general sense of prestige, wealth, sterile precision, institutional
monumentality and, ultimately, a fortress of remote whiteness. Yet in retrospect, Modernist House
takes on additional resonance: its exterior view now reads as the initial approach to Newkirk’s
recent inhabitation of another, most exemplary modernist structure and architectural landmark in
Los Angeles: R.M. Schindler’s Buck House (1934).
For Newkirk, long celebrated as a conceptually rigorous and formally elegant ‘post-black’
artist, the exhibition context of the Buck House itself, in which Country Club Los Angeles is
housed, strongly activates his ongoing interrogation of the symbolic polyvalence of whiteness
and blackness. Small black magnets sprouting jagged shards dot the glass surfaces of the house,
from the floor-to-ceiling glass walls to the clerestory windows. Floating against the midday sun,
these dark Sonspots (all works 2010) appear like shadow afterimages or negative antidotes to the
summer’s searing bright light, suggesting (through its homophonic spelling) a kind of optical
allegory for inherited, generational blind spots or holes in childhood memory. Mayday, the largest
work, configures 65 white cotton T-shirts (all dirt-dyed from use as rags and worn by the artist
over five or so years) in concentric, overlapping rings on the main gallery’s black floor. Combining
the morphology of a crash-pad target (as in, “Help! Mayday! Mayday!”) with that of a room-size
iris (rhyming with the pupil-shaped Sonspots nearby), the piece sets up ocular perception as a
volatile site of collision and high-energy impact – a subtext underscored by the two adjacent
stainless steel (eye)balls (think Chinese stress balls or Cylon testes), whose position on the ring
of shirts turns it into the circular course of a particle collider.
Optical agitation and disturbance enters elsewhere with Guest, an enlarged photograph
of an unidentified death-row inmate which punctuates the sitting room’s domestic whiteness. In
the otherwise clear photograph, the African American inmate’s eyes degrade and fragment in
what seem to be strangely localised fields of digital static. The confrontationally oversize image
of the young convict instantly politicises the space,
the architecture and the viewer; it is, as the artist
says, a grossly indiscreet reminder of someone not
there – it is the elephant in the room.
Kori Newkirk Country Club Los Angeles
The most pervasive piece is also the easiest 17 July – 21 August
to miss. In la – la, Newkirk has replaced all the
lightbulbs with UV ‘black lights’ – a simple switch
that ricochets language against vision to transform
the Buck House’s emblematically modernist
whiteness into glowing violet. As night falls, the
gallery transitions into its after-hours nightclub alter
ego, where everything white fluoresces radiantly.
Blackness (both ambient darkness and black light)
recasts the whiteness of formal Modernism in terms
of nocturnal desire and electrified explosions in
optical perception. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
150 ArtReview
reviews: USA
The US/Mexico Border is a supercharged issue at the moment, and Yvonne Venegas’s current photographic series is of
the times: a group of large documentary photos of the life of the ‘upper class’ of Tijuana, Mexico. With access to the
household of former Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rohn, Venegas directs her lens to the familial ordinary, from the planning
of dinners and weddings to the family simply living in its surroundings. ‘How the other half lives’ photography can be
terrible if the ideological hand of the photographer is played too forcefully. Fortunately, Venegas understands that for an
LA viewer who knows the photographs were taken in Tijuana, thoughts of the border and problems of immigration in
Mexico and the US arrive effortlessly and undidactically. Though this effect will probably diminish for audiences
elsewhere, Venegas achieves enough universal human content to maintain one’s interest in her subject.
You’ll find nothing ostentatious or overplayed in Venegas’s photographs, perhaps because the ability of Rohn’s
Tijuana household to achieve the outlandish is somewhat limited. For instance, the sad little swamp, Lago (2007), is far
from a lush garden. Eventually the small pool will be a symbol of wealth and leisure, but at the moment it cannot but be
absorbed by the poor landscape of hardscrabble Tijuana. Other Venegas photographs use a similar tactic – the family
matron working intensely on a rather ridiculous, gaudy candelabra in Velas (2008), or a large party tent being constructed
in the centre of a paltry dirt track in Hipodromo 1 (2006). Such misplaced attentions of wealth at play against bleak
landscapes gives Venegas’s photographs a certain understated power.
Class is offered as a series of markers that separate the rich from the poor, the sophisticated from the gauche, and
they are far from extraordinary. Venegas wants to connect the tiny gesture, the indicative moment, to larger issues such as
wealth disparity, status and injustice. The leisure class is portrayed straight ahead and engaged in their pursuits, not
immersed in any sort of decadent behaviour. Instead, a pair of stilettos on a dusty road, a bored child on a satin couch and
a new fútbol stadium on the near side of a fenced boundary is enough to evoke the larger shadow of poverty hanging
over this world.
The photos are laden with subtlety, restraint and empathy; their subject matter is much closer in sensibility to the
early work of Tina Barney than, say, to Daniela Rossell’s Ricas y Famosas (1994–2001). The Rohn family is presumably
staying put, with no need to emigrate, yet a window into their life quietly points to the vacuum that allows the
disenfranchisement of millions. Often, the working poor employed by the Rohn family are noticeable in the photos, but
their presence is not amplified. They are neither suffering nor happy; they simply exist in a status quo that will continue
into the foreseeable future. Ed Schad
from left: Ana y Amigas, 2008, digital print, 102 x 127 cm; La Guera y Nirvana, 2006, digital print, 102 x 127 cm.
Both courtesy the artist and Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica
ArtReview 151
reviews:
Europe
Video still from Rheinmetall/Victoria-8, 2003, 35mm film installation (colour, silent),
Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 projector, private collection, Switzerland
152 ArtReview
reviews: europe
Given the explosion of talent from Turkey in recent years, it is surprising that until now a reviewer has not sought
to label them predictably as the YTAs (Young Turkish Artists) or the TICs (Trickster Istanbulli Conceptualists),
maybe even the TOGs (Trendy Ottoman Groovers). Ebru Ozseçen might escape such categorising, being
based in Munich, but her ability is undeniable. Here, in the Berlin outpost of contemporary Turkish art, is a
selection of her work over the past 14 years. Writing in The New York Times in 2001, Roberta Smith concluded
that Ozseçen’s work ‘leaves one looking forward to future developments’, and her newer honeyed confections
enchant. There is a paradisiacal air full of Eastern promise that toys with the cloying, rose-tinted, Turkish-delight
clichés of phoney Orientalism.
Sweet Dreams (2010) sets the tone – an exquisite crystal lamp and wire construction that reflects
kaleidoscopic light and recalls the earlier work Sugar Chandelier (1998), or the endless rows of baroque light-
fitting shops in Beyoglu. Serbet (2010) is a 16mm film about said fruit beverage, the celluloid looping on the
floor like a string of liquorice. Rose-coloured serbets made from the syrup of quince, apple, pears, peaches
and apricots are generally served in glass cups (kullehs) on a round tray covered by a piece of embroidered
silk. Ozseçen references this with Presentation (1996), a print of four dark drinks on a silver salver served by
two disembodied arms – an image of proffered hospitality from
a lover or an enemy?
The ghosts of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois stalk the
room via its profusion of sexy tactile curves. There’s a palpable
love for artisanal tradition given the variety of materials among
the conceptual riffing, and Ozseçen plays, too, with the facade
of the masculine – witness her détourned ice-cream advert,
Magnum 4 (2007), where a harem of naked beefcake lounges
around slurping said ithyphallic lollies. Elsewhere, men get kicked
in the knackers. On a rotatable pedestal sits Kismet (2010), an
ebony ball upon a conical torso made of bull-testicle leather.
Some sort of customised dildo, a Turkish steely dan? The work,
apparently, is based on a chance find in an Amsterdam antique
shop of an ivory globe that contained a bag of beans inscribed
with initials: a love toy owned by a French countess who randomly
selected her lover for that evening by drawing a bean from the
bag. Oo-er, missus.
This is easily the most penile-fixated show you’ll see in
some time. The Dish Washing Dreams (1996) has wire twisted into
Freudian phallic forms resting on tiles. As for the videos, Bitter
Chocolate Love (1998) finds a confectioner in slo-mo moulding
balanic globules of chocolate using a silk stocking; in Baby Lakritz
(2008), marrow shapes of yellow-and-black-striped liquorice are
pampered and prepared by gloved hands; and in Jawbreaker
(2008), a woman obsessively fellates a giant gobstopper. If
the erotic link between food and sex is an ancient trope that is
regularly reinvented – recall the Japanese film Tampopo (1985)
– here perhaps is the Turkish sculptural and video art update.
Finally, in The Turn-On (1998), what looks like raspberry juice is
folded through viscous cream. Coming from a society dealing
head-on with proscriptive Islamic fundamentalism, Ozseçen’s
work is challengingly erotic and yummy. Just remember to pack
your insulin. John Quin
ArtReview 153
reviews: europe
No Way Out, 2002 (installation view, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin), wood table, wire, rice paper lamps,
140 x 330 x 330 cm. Photo: Denis Mortell. Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing & Le Moulin
154 ArtReview
reviews: europe
Walk into this exhibition and figures from Thomas Struth’s photograph Audience (2004) loom in your path.
Pictured in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia, most are looking upward for enlightenment, but one man, clad
in a floppy wide-brimmed hat, T-shirt and Bermudas, looks directly out in puzzled bemusement – what took you
so long, he seems to ask. This is the largest and most comprehensive retrospective of Struth’s work yet, and it is
a delight to experience images whose reproductions rarely do them justice. Susan Sontag wrote that memory is
in still, not moving, images; but memory struggles to retain the texture and complexity of Struth’s photographs.
This gathering of approximately 100 large-format images includes works from street and museum, family
portraits and series depicting paradises, as well as new one-offs. The hang is not chronological nor in strict
series, but in loose groupings that draw the viewer ever onward, and culminate in the recent pieces.
All of these works are virtuoso; in the Museo del Prado, Struth packs a thousand dramas into one scene
– countless micro-engagements between audience members, audience and works, and the works surveying
their visitors – revealing the complexity of a reality that transcends the everyday. Keeping the same density, his
tone shifts from one environment to another but still finds aesthetic value in banal scenes. His urban landscapes
take in the back streets of Naples, a malfunctioning metropolis, as well as new inhuman settlements without
metropolitan structures, such as the Samsung Apartments, Seoul (2007); the families portrayed range from his
former teacher Gerhard Richter’s brood to Peruvian workers. These choices are not accidental, but political
– ‘there is practically no apolitical’, Struth is quoted as saying in one catalogue essay – and form a tangential
web of interest. Global architecture reveals societies’ aspirations and in turn moulds societies; tourists troop
around the world through museums bagging views of famous
originals; jungles constitute a paradise that could be the opposite
of the new-build horror, or a fabled prelapsarian state beyond
our reach.
New works depicting dockyards, the Kennedy Space
Centre in Florida and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma
Physics in Bavaria form a hiatus at the end of the exhibition.
Struth has gone to the final frontiers of science, of exploitation
and of our built environment (CERN’s Large Hadron Collider
is surely on his to-do list). Unlike his earlier studies of monolithic
buildings or urban landscapes, these retain a central focus but go
beyond what can be assimilated. A semisubmersible rig moored
off Geoje Island, South Korea, threatens to rip free from chains
that strain from the middle of the foreground. The two figures
in the middle ground seem unconcerned, but the rig is not likely
to be concerned about them either. In the Max Planck Institute,
which researches nuclear fusion, the Wendelstein 7-X reactor is
an incomprehensible and claustrophobic jumble of wires, tubes,
mechanical limbs and zip ties; a solitary glove abandoned to one
side is drowned in the visual noise of its surroundings. In an era
of infinite ambition and limited imagination, Struth seems to be
moving warily from the humanity of his oeuvre to date towards,
if not pessimism, then a dispassion akin to fellow Bernd and Hilla
Becher student Andreas Gursky. If salvation or destruction lies in
these environments, the future looks bleak. Aoife Rosenmeyer
ArtReview 155
reviews: europe
Lia Rumma’s inaugural exhibition at her new gallery in Milan – a structure that boasts four floors, two terraces and, thanks to its large
windows, plenty of natural light – is a particularly harmonious showcase for more than 20 years of Ettore Spalletti’s ‘paintings’. The Italian
artist came of age in the mid-1970s and has continued to develop a practice that focuses on blurring the boundaries between painting and
sculpture, abstraction and external reference. For the occasion, Spalletti has evoked Homer’s Odyssey via the show’s title: it’s a quotation
that lends an air of classicism to works entrenched in a modernist aesthetic.
On the ground floor, one enters a room only to encounter another white room built within it, with a series of monochrome silver-grey
panels inside. Here, a type of rope lighting gives the impression that light emanates evenly from the ceiling, lending an almost chapellike
feel to the space. The artist links the silver-grey of these panels to the sea, while on successive floors the viewer is also confronted with works
containing soft blues and pinks: blue, Spalletti recounts in the press release, is equivalent to atmosphere, while pink signifies flesh. On the
second floor, for example, several large-scale blue panels surround the viewer, creating an atmospheric, enveloping impression of the sky.
One work in particular, Untitled, Tenuous Blue (1989), draws the viewer’s gaze to three edges of the rectangle where there is a shift from
blue pigment to a golden hue, a technique reminiscent of certain early Jules Olitski paintings, in which colour on the edge of the canvas is
meant to emphasise the work’s flatness. Spalletti, however, seems less interested in such matters than in using the framing device as a means
to indicate to the viewer how his painting extends onto the wall. Art thereby merges seamlessly with architecture, creating an environment
where a theme begins to emerge, especially when surrounded by large atmospheric blue panels and plenty of natural light: that the sky is
one of life’s most poetic constants.
On the third floor, three sculptures positioned on the ground are accompanied by a horizontal black panel and two vertical pink
rectangles on the walls that surround them. These sculptures, entitled Lost Columns (2000), appear like isolated column fragments from an
old Greek temple and reiterate the artist’s intrigue with classicism; the pink panels, meanwhile, and despite their abstract, monochromatic
nature, invite one to consider potential figurative narratives due to the suggestions of flesh in their coloured pigments. One comes away
feeling that Lia Rumma’s decision to inaugurate this venue with Spalletti, who is less well known than many of her stable of artists, is a
demonstration of farsighted vision on her part. Evidently, she’s aware that one need not choose an internationally fashionable artist to make
an opening feel grand. Andrew Smaldone
Inseparabili, 2002, colour impasto and gold leaf on board, 150 x 300 x 4 cm (diptych). Courtesy Studio la Città, Verona
156 ArtReview
reviews: europe
Various venues, Lisbon, Grândola, Portimão and Vila Real de Santo António
Portugal Arte 10 16 July – 15 August
Faile, Temple, 2010, ceramic, marble, bronze, cast iron, steel, limestone and mosaic,
500 x 900 x 400 cm, presented by Portugal Arte 10. Courtesy Perry Rubenstein Gallery, New York
ArtReview 157
REVIEWS:
Books
as a plucky young masters student nervously receiving my art history dissertation marks,
one piece of criticism particularly stuck with me: ‘the problem you have, McLean-Ferris, is that
the kind of art you are talking about is quite far ahead of the theoretical writing that you are using
to discuss it’. (OK, so perhaps I wasn’t that plucky.) And a few pages into Marsha Meskimmon’s
strictly academic book, I can’t get this admonishment out of mind. In part that’s because
this is the sort of book I read and admired so much back then (I still admire such books, just
don’t read so many these days). Authors like Meskimmon (who is a professor of art history at
Loughborough University) seem able to breeze through Gayatri Spivak and Luce Irigaray as
they discuss contemporary artworks, all the while remaining fastidious about every single use
of every single term. In one chapter, for example, we have Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation
alongside Jacques Derrida’s and Paul Ricoeur’s conceptions of ‘the gift’, described with an
ongoing mindfulness of Rosalyn Diprose’s work on ‘embodiment, ethics and generosity’. What
I’m getting at is that it takes Meskimmon a long time to say anything, and it’s a little bit tiresome
waiting for it to be said. Much like this review, you might be thinking. You don’t even know what
the book is about yet, and if that’s irritating you, then so will this book.
So I’ll put you out of your misery. The book’s about home. Home not just as a geographical
construct but as a kind of ethics – a base that influences our decisions and shapes our morals.
But what is ‘home’ in a globalised world? Writing from a feminist perspective, Meskimmon
considers how domestic aesthetics have become an important device in contemporary art
that deals with the effects of globalisation and with those for whom home is a life on the move.
Rather than considering those who move around the world as ‘displaced’, Meskimmon considers
the proposition that cosmopolitanism is a home, a basis for making ethical decisions, and uses
artworks as imaginative propositions in which to discuss these ideas. Several of these works are
from China, such as Yin Xiuzhen’s Portable Cities (2002–4), suitcases that, when opened up, reveal
city landscapes made from secondhand fabrics. Portability, then, as an ideal for the artist who
might move easily between cities, and preferable to an existence rooted by heavy possessions.
On the subject of the cosmopolitan artist, travelling city to city, Meskimmon displays a strong
sense of the influence that the market brings to bear on the works of, say, Doris Salcedo, an artist
who is more commonly discussed exclusively in terms of national political issues. However, most
of the artworks chosen are exactly the type that can be slotted happily into academic discussions
in a frictionless fashion – almost every element of the works chosen function in a way that is too
neatly illustrative of a certain national or political issue. There are also some artworks, such as
Christine Borland’s, that seem to be most ‘at home’ in academic writing. This encourages the
frustrating sense that there is a particular kind of artwork that is appealing to philosophical writers,
and which can be easily subsumed or repurposed for the sake of argument.
Meskimmon’s work is generous and optimistic in spirit – she argues for the potential of
art to take part in what she calls ‘affirmative criticality’ to change the world for the better – and is
an elegant marriage of ethical and aesthetic ideas. It’s a little frustrating that most of the artwork
here is around ten years old, but this is, perhaps, just the inevitable time lag that occurs between
contemporary art and its appraisal in academic writing, where every utterance is so impressively
careful. Laura McLean-Ferris
158 ArtReview
in recent years Owen Hatherley has become the go-to guy for a print-media editor in need
of a partisan defence of modernist architecture and the politics surrounding it. Incubated in
his increasingly influential blog, which concerns itself with political aesthetics, this position was
amplified by the publication last year of his slim argumentative volume Militant Modernism. The
latter concentrated on the author’s hometown of Southampton as an example of Modernism’s
socialist triumphs and subsequent ruins by architects, planners and developers. New Ruins… is
essentially an extension of this premise, in which Hatherley tours the UK critiquing a reasonable
but selective roster of towns, from Milton Keynes to Glasgow, via Greenwich, Sheffield and
Manchester.
The reader must agree to a number of terms and conditions set by the author before
proceeding, however: aesthetics are political; New Labour is bad; and for the vast majority of
‘Blairite architecture’, speculative commercialism is the only goal. Once these are accepted
(which is not to say they’re wrong; it’s just that the uncomfortably assured subjectivism of
Hatherley’s leftist rhetoric occasionally requires some negotiation), we can accompany our guide
on his tour as he points out the moments in architectural history that have contributed to the
current state of affairs. The crux of Hatherley’s argument is that the vast majority of building
design after Modernism cannot be categorised as postmodern, but rather as ‘pseudo-modern’
– aping modernist architecture’s idealistic rhetoric of social cohesion without ever making any
real attempts at delivering it. In his introduction, Hatherley persuasively links so-called Googie
architecture – the vernacular of the West Coast American highway, all signpost facades and
convoluted, striking forms for attracting the speeding motorist – with New Labour’s fashion for
‘iconic’ buildings that signpost the regeneration of down-at-heel postindustrial cities without
delivering anything of substance. These are buildings as logos, argues Hatherley, parachuted
in, and almost entirely separated from the surroundings: a far cry from Modernism’s skyline
walkways and attempts at a proudly urban community and identity.
So armed, New Ruins… takes aim at regeneration programmes, glass-and-steel office
blocks (frequently vacant, postcrunch) and ‘glamorous’ housing developments. Hatherley’s
unstinting belief in Modernism and scorn for councils that jump into the ‘public–private
partnerships’ by which so many of these projects are funded is infectious. There can’t, for example,
be many people who would disagree with his take on Urban Splash’s tragic redevelopment of
the stoic, brutalist Park Hill housing estate in Sheffield. Indeed, Hatherley’s point is made for
him when he surveys the great what-could-have-been of London’s North Greenwich. Prior to
the millennium, this southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, comprising acres of cleaned-up former
industrial land, was ripe for development in a city crying out for decent social housing. Instead,
John Major’s government suggested, and New Labour delivered… the Dome. The author drives
home his abhorrence for this wasted opportunity by comparing it to a previous celebratory
building enterprise under another Labour government: where Clement Attlee gave us the Royal
Festival Hall (for 1951’s Festival of Britain), all London got from Tony Blair was the Mind Zone
sponsored by BAE Systems and the Learning Zone sponsored by Tesco.
The flow of the book, with its descriptions of and ruminations on buildings, urban plans and
regeneration ploys, is occasionally broken by a tendency to stray into other subjects and entertain
personal whims – tics, presumably, of a veteran blogger. We get, for example, an unnecessary
diversion in Sheffield, when Hatherley describes a Warp Records showcase he attended, or a
really too-perfunctory description of the utopian aims of last year’s Camp for Climate Action in
Blackheath, London. Such tangents feel clunky and unsettle the otherwise strong focus. So too
the lack of in-depth footnoting: just 65 references for 352 pages of heavily researched text (at one
point, Hatherley drops in, as an aside and without reference, the affirmation that CIA assistance
lay behind the supplanting of Paris by New York as the world art capital – a claim which is, at
best, heavily disputed). In the end, however, this is not a survey but an entertaining grand – yet
informal – tour, with Hatherley as commiserator, celebrant and mentor in the subject of what is
and what could have been. Oliver Basciano
reviews: books
after a dozen years and 30 issues, the timing seems right for a retrospective look at
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern – which is not precisely a quarterly, obviously, though a
more formalised operation than it used to be. Spend time with these 264 faultlessly lavish
pages, featuring detailed oral histories by the American periodical’s editors and contributors,
reproductions of intricate page-spreads from the journal and snippets from spin-off magazines
Wholphin and the consistently excellent nonfiction monthly The Believer, book covers from the
McSweeney’s publishing wing and plenty more, and it’s hard to avoid feeling that the era of the
Quarterly Concern itself as dynamic cultural artefact is effectively over.
McSweeney’s 14, published in 2004, featured on its cover a drawing of a one-legged
George W. Bush as war victim, and the journal – in its energetic pursuit of a grassroots
alternative to the norm, even if that norm was simply publishing, with its narrow ideas about
what is publishable – made a fair bit of sense under Bush II. The problem is that while doing so,
it became an institution of its own, one with a tone as recognisable as The New Yorker’s used to
be and, to the wrong reader, deeply irritating: self-righteously smart and reflexively precious.
McSweeney’s 6 came with a CD ‘soundtrack’ in which (who else?) They Might Be Giants perkily
interpreted the writings therein; this book’s caveat emptor epigraph reads: ‘Impossible, you say?
Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus.’ For the uninitiated, these are clues.
There has, nevertheless, been some very funny and very serious writing in McSweeney’s.
The third issue alone, for example, not only featured some hilarious emails concerning a parody
boy band called Fresh Step – named after ‘a popular brand of kitty litter’ and hawking a song
called ‘You Gotta Be Fresh (To Fresh with the Fresh Step)’ – but also hid a pitch-black, 44-line
David Foster Wallace short story on its spine (reprinted in the commodious present volume, of
course, which was evidently fastidiously produced by McSweeney’s and then handed to Tate
Publishing). Reinventing its design with each issue, McSweeney’s resuscitated the text-in-a-box
format that seemingly died out with B.S. Johnson, produced a showcase of Icelandic writers with
a cover logo copied from Big Country and published fine comic-strip anthologies and, heroically,
William T. Vollmann’s 3,400-page, multivolume history of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down
(2003). They have given a regular home to the stone-cold genius of Lawrence Weschler. To slip
into McSweeney’s mock-archaic locutions for a moment, they have done good things, many
good things.
But a fair amount of the rest doesn’t feel remotely necessary; rather, it feels like someone
started a magazine and there were a lot of sympathetic, educated, frolicsome people around
and, hey, here comes content. McSweeney’s was initiated, as a contributions-soliciting email
here from founding editor Dave Eggers clarifies, to publish what other magazines wouldn’t.
Which is fine, except that its editors turned out to have a guiding taste of their own – for sassy
divertimenti, tightly wound emotional displays, quixotic and frequently nostalgic fixations and
look-at-us laboriousness (to quote Vollmann on his own book: ‘I just worked and worked until it
was done. Then I worked some more’). Personal taste applies, of course: someone who’s nestled
himself into the readymade subculture of McSweeney’s isn’t going to cry ‘too much cute-but-
irrelevant information’ when confronted with a multipage photo spread starring the journal’s
wacky, boiler-suited Icelandic printers, because for that mindset there’s no such thing as too
much cute-but-irrelevant information; it’s mother’s milk. (Whereas for me, that kind of thing
finds Art of McSweeney’s soaring towards my noughties time capsule and landing on some early
Sufjan Stevens albums.) Eggers himself has apparently managed to sidestep this trap, writing
different kinds of books and screenplays. But the magazine seems trapped in its own velvet rut,
while The Believer appears to be the magazine it was born to spawn. And as for McSweeney’s
itself these days, so it is for Art of McSweeney’s: for better or worse, you know what to expect.
Martin Herbert
160 ArtReview
‘bloviation’ is the perfect American noun to describe Christopher Hitchens’s 400-plus pages
of drinking boasts. Defined by gassy US president Warren G. Harding as ‘the art of speaking
for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing’, this favourite term of Fox News hacks
acquires new dimensions of bile, gush, rant and wind inside Hitchens’s life story as an Anglo-
American political commentator, as relayed by some rummy louse he nicknames ‘the Hitch’.
Though it is true that it’s always five o’clock somewhere in the world, few early-twenty-
first-century intellectual types incarnate the worldview of Humphrey Bogart like the Hitch (‘The
whole world’, Bogey once complained, ‘is about three drinks behind’). Hitchens’s booze-fuelled
celebrity – according to the Hitch, daily imbibing includes at least a Scotch-and-Perrier and half
a bottle of red at luncheon, same again at night – casts back not to the discursive pub bitters of
his hero George Orwell, but to the champagne bluster of Old Hem; he who ‘liberated’ the bar
at the Paris Ritz ahead of the US 4th Infantry and lecherously insisted that young women call
him ‘Papa’.
Late Hemingway ghosts the ruminations gathered in Hitch-22 like Falstaff the sobriety of
Henry V – and not just because A Moveable Feast (1964) profoundly resembles the dirigible that is
Hitchens’s self-regard. Hem’s youthful obsession with Scott Fitzgerald’s undersize member finds
echo in the Hitch’s same-sex adventures at boarding school (including liaisons ‘with two young
men’, he writes with fake circumspection, ‘who later became members of Margaret Thatcher’s
government’). Like the bard of Ketchum, Idaho, the Hitch transparently uses his reminiscences
to settle old scores (though he’s conspicuously mum about his first two marriages and betraying
the confidence of his old friend, Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal). But what really recalls sloppy
Hemingway within the richly blurbed covers of Hitch-22 (he includes a flattering line from recent
antagonist Gore Vidal with a red line struck through it, making his objection not exactly credible)
is the pathetic sight of yet another intellectual debasing himself before the predictable carrots of
money, celebrity and power.
A formidable polemicist for publications such as the New Statesman, The Nation
and countless other leftie rags, Hitchens (who at the time of writing is battling cancer of the
oesophagus) was once a radiantly bright young thing with a flair for stiletto rhetoric and shouting
loudest. Compare that sleekly radical figure to the Hitch of this narrative: serial repeater of war
stories and flaccid contributor to Vanity Fair who gins up antagonisms with a revolving door of
cultural non sequiturs – the Almighty, for example, in God Is Not Great (2007). This is not Jake
Barnes from The Sun Also Rises (1926), but instead Hemingway’s punch-drunk crank from ‘The
Battler’ (1925).
No doubt Hitchens is neither the first nor last socialist to turn neoliberal for a promised
glimpse of the Star Chamber (there’s Tony Blair, too). But the political switcheroo recounted by
the Hitch in his memoir proves enduringly grotesque. A career man of the left, Hitchens not only
traded close relations with Susan Sontag and Edward Said for face time with his ‘friend’ David
Frum (he of the ‘axis of evil’ speech) and Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s deputy secretary of defense.
He also got – fanatically, unregenerately and definitively – the most important issue of our time
dead wrong. Toss aside the self-serving remonstrations, justifications and excuses put forward
by Hitchens and his crocked alter ego in Hitch-22 for cheerleading the lie that is the war in Iraq.
With the glasses cleared and the parlour games done, that is the tremendous whopper for which
he deserves to be remembered. Christian Viveros-Fauné
The strip: adam dant
162 ArtReview
ArtReview 163
on the town:
13 August
Systematic studio performance, 176, London
19 August
Fourth Plinth shortlist announcement, St Martin-in-the-Fields
crypt, London
4
A
2
3
C
E
e
D
5
164 ArtReview
176 Fourth plinth
7
H I
7
Thursday, September 9, 2010 11:12
I have noticed that artworld supper conversation has had a tediously consistent tone over the past few
weeks. We womenfolk talk incessantly about the effect of Mad Men on autumn fashion and whether it’s
worth splashing out for Prada’s cosy cable-knit sweater, which can then be cinched with a thin patent
belt for that Betty Draper look. Meanwhile the menfolk drone on about the economic outlook for the
West and whether their donations to our glorious Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition have had
any good lobbying effect. And from what I can overhear, it is indeed over ‘over here’ – end of days for
the Western world we know and love. The red sun rises over the mysterious East.
A man in shades and flowing white robes purchases Premier League football clubs like just
another bauble and stuffs his team full of African defensive midfielders. Europe burns and lazy French
farmers work a 15-hour week before blockading the ports with their huge inefficient trucks once made
by Citroën but now made in Korea. The USA is broke. The very Enlightenment is threatened by our
foreign friends who question rationality and don’t fully understand high modernist paintings.
As the West recedes into the dustbin of history, what will become of the stalwarts of Old Europe’s
artworld calendar – the Venice Biennale, Frieze Art Fair, the theatrics at the Kunsthalle Basel bar? I have
little idea, but dear reader, I can tell you I am positively quaking in my leather separates. This year Frieze
Art Fair is filled with Brazilians – and we’re not talking about the new fad I’ve noticed with male artists’
knackers here (I blame ArtReview’s summer football tournament and the unofficial competition in the
sponsored showers afterwards – you know what I’m talking about, Juergen!) but actual muscled,
sweating, I-know-I-look-like-I-just-got-dressed Brazilians. Woof! This is because, while they are foreign,
they luckily make work that looks like Modernism, which means thankfully we can understand what’s
going on and make statement purchases of the stuff. And also some of them, like Marepe, go by just one
name, like footballers, which is super.
There’s some Chinese and Koreans in the fair as well, but to tell you the truth, I find their names
terribly confusing. Distinguishing a Chen from a Zhang isn’t easy when you’re trying not to snag your
Christopher Kane embroidery and lace-shift dress on a Wang, if you know what I mean. But funnily
enough, the gallery names are splendid – as if the directors looked in an English dictionary and picked
a word at random: Vitamin! Luckily there are no Indians, aside from one gallery in the Frame section
– it would be all too much to bear if our ‘jewel in the crown’ stopped serving me lamb pasanda at the
Jewel in the Crown (just off Ealing Broadway) and started making large sculptures out of their kitchen
implements. Hold on, what do you mean they’ve done so already? Alea iacta est! The West is lost!
But instead of bemoaning this shift in civilisation and, more importantly, good hard cash from
the West to somewhere else, I intend to embrace our new Oriental and Brazilian friends. I’ve found the
nearest thing to an Oriental fashion designer I can wear with pride: Erdem Moralioglu is half-Turkish,
and his two-piece evening ensemble is perfect for October parties. And I’ve armed myself with some
native phrases for the private view, such as “¿Usted quiere un cierto arte británico joven en el
secundario?” Hasta la vista, Western art dealers, I say, I’m running as fast as my Isabel Marant ruby-red
heels will carry me into the arms of the Infidel!
GG
Page 1 of 1
166 ArtReview
Iconic style
It’s the differences that make us unique. Forget the established view,
we’ve forged our own using our innovative style. Our expert team delivers
a world-class range of products and services that includes private banking,
capital markets, investment banking, property investments and
asset management.
Private Banking • Capital Markets • Investment Banking • Property Investments • Asset Management
Australia Botswana Canada Hong Kong Ireland Mauritius Namibia South Africa Switzerland Taiwan United Kingdom & Channel Islands United States
Investec Bank plc (Reg. no. 489604) and Investec Asset Management Limited (Reg. no. 2036094) are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority and are members of the London Stock Exchange. Registered at
2 Gresham Street, London EC2V 7QP.
Sold exclusively in Louis Vuitton stores. louisvuitton.com