ArtReview Magazine, October 2010

Citation preview

Issue 44 £5.00 ‘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?

Londonissue

the

New Eternity

A lexander Tovborg 2 SE p T E m bE r - 30 Oc T ObE r 2010

LIZALOU AMERICAN IDOL

1995 – 2010

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Galerie Ron Mandos | Amsterdam www.ronmandos.nl

Hernan Bas The Hallucinations of Poets

Isaac Julien Ten Thousand Waves

Yayoi Kusama outdoor sculptures

Victoria Miro 7 October - 13 November 2010

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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

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David Zink Yi, Neusilber (New Silver), 2010. Photo: Roman März

Johann König Berlin Art Forum Berlin Berlin Exhibition Grounds, hall 20, booth 124 October 7 – October 10, 2010 abc – art berlin contemporary Marshall-Haus, Berlin Exhibition Grounds October 7 – October 10, 2010 Frieze Art Fair Regent‘s Park - London, booth E7 October 14 – October 17, 2010 Fiac Grand Palais - Paris, booth C18 October 21 – October 24, 2010

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marlene dumas, naomi, 1995, private collection © marlene dumas

tronies marlene dumas and the old masters hausderkunst 29/10/10 06/02/11

Contents

on the cover: Doug Fishbone photographed by DAVID HUGHES

october 2010

New on ArtReview.com

DISPATCHES 25 Snapshot: Rinko Kawauchi Now See This: Richard Hawkins, Marcel Broodthaers, The Museum of Everything, Brighton Photo Biennial, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sharon Lockhart, Larry Bell/ Jeppe Hein, Marlene Dumas and the Old Masters, Uri Aran, Ernesto Neto Columns: Paul Gravett decipher’s Adam Dant’s Elizabethan make-believe; Joshua Mack escribe sobre el mundo latinoamericano de Nueva York; Axel Lapp on fair politics; Marie Darrieussecq writes on writing The Free Lance: We get the memorials we deserve, argues Christian Viveros-Fauné London Calling: It’s all too clever by half, J.J. Charlesworth ruminates The Painted Word: Culture: it’s all relative, argues Nigel Cooke The Shape of Things: What’s the use, asks Sam Jacob Hong Kong Diary: The curious incident of the Karl Lagerfeld-designed safe – Mark Rappolt journals the second part of his Eastern adventures Design: Hettie Judah 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 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: Superflex 14 ArtReview

Audio 100 percent Woolley – he’s got a solo show currently open at SPACE in London, but artist Charlie Woolley has found time to deliver another episode of the Charlie Woolley Radio Show. Project Space Berlin-based Polish artist Agnieszka Polska is the latest to contribute to the Project Space, with a meditative scrolling video collage.

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Text Laura McLean-Ferris posts not one, but two postcards from Villa Reykjavik. Channelling the spirit of Alan Lomax, the review includes field recordings from the Icelandic capital’s art scene. David Everitt Howe invokes the Deep South in his review of Supernatural Conductor at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, plus much more.

Contents

october 2010

FEATURES london 88

It’s the time of year when London galleries pull out all the stops. Oliver Basciano, J.J. Charlesworth, Laura McLean-Ferris, Jim Quilty and Mark Rappolt take their pick of the season’s best: Nina Beier, Steven Claydon, Matthew Darbyshire, Ruth Ewan, Doug Fishbone, Pascal Hachem, Christian Marclay, Walid Raad and Rirkrit Tiravanija

Dance 108

Art and dance. Laura McLean-Ferris asks why the disciplines seem so eager to make a move on each other

Art Pilgrimage 120

Christian Viveros-Fauné meets the Chilean movers and shakers in Santiago

REAR VIEW Reviews 139 Fiona Banner, Andrea Zittel, Sergej Jensen, Jess FloodPaddock, Unrealised Potential, Martin Creed, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Charlotte Posenenske, Adam Cvijanovic and David Humphrey, Kori Newkirk, Yvonne Venegas, Rodney Graham, Ebru Ozseçen, Carlos Garaicoa, Thomas Struth, Ettore Spalletti, Portugal Arte 10

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100

BOOKS 158

Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Art of McSweeney’s, Hitch-22: A Memoir

THE STRIP 162

Adam Dant describes the enigmatic library of Doctor London

132 111

158

ON THE TOWN 164

Systematic at 176 project space, London; the Fourth Plinth shortlist unveiling at St Martin-in-the-Fields crypt, London

OFF THE RECORD 166

124

Gallery Girl does her bit for art’s race relations

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164

16 ArtReview

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Editorial

Art

Editor Mark Rappolt Executive Editor David Terrien Associate Editors J.J. Charlesworth Martin Herbert Editors at Large Laura McLean-Ferris Jonathan T.D. Neil Assistant Editor Oliver Basciano [email protected]

Art Director Tom Watt Design Ian Davies [email protected]

Contributors Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, Hettie Judah, Axel Lapp, Joshua Mack, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Laura Allsop, Neal Brown, Barbara Casavecchia, Luke Clancy, James Clegg, Nigel Cooke, Marie Darrieussecq, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Sam Jacob, Quinn Latimer, Sarah LehrerGraiwer, Colin Perry, Jim Quilty, John Quin, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Ed Schad, Andrew Smaldone, Ben Tallis, Murtaza Vali, Christian Viveros-Fauné

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Contributing Artists / Photographers Adam Dant, Issie Gibbons, David Hughes, Rinko Kawauchi, Ian Pierce, Superflex Interns Suzie Martins, Ksenia Landa, Roisin McQueirns

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ArtReview

HA U S E R & W IR T H

LOUISE BOURGEOIS THE FABRIC WORKS CURATED BY GERMANO CELANT THE INAUGURAL EXHIBITION AT HAUSER & WIRTH SAVILE ROW, LONDON, WAS ORIGINATED AT THE FONDAZIONE EMILIO E ANNABIANCA VEDOVA, VENICE, ITALY

15 OCTOBER — 18 DECEMBER 2010 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 summer. Previous projects include the collaborative comic This Way Up and captaining the Irish national Beach Ultimate Frisbee team.

Hettie Judah

Former editor in chief of the leftfield Belgian culture and lifestyle magazine The Word and current associate curator of MoMu, in Antwerp, Hettie Judah has just moved back to London after ten years away and is struggling to remember how to measure things in feet and inches.

David Hughes

A photographer producing portraits, landscape and still life alongside ongoing personal projects, David Hughes seeks to reveal the depth and beauty of even the most decrepit abandoned room. His work has been shown at Flowers in London, and his clients include Nick Cave, Tate, O32c, Dunhill and Sony.

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ArtReview

Christian Viveros-Faune

Always ready to party with a few bottles of warm fizzy wine is Christian ViverosFauné, who lives with his long-suffering wife and son in Brooklyn. He was awarded a 2009/2010 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and named inaugural critic-in-residence at the Bronx Museum for 2010/2011. He presently writes art criticism for The Village Voice and The Paris Review website, and teaches at Yale University, in New Haven. A collection of his criticism is forthcoming in Spanish from Metales Pesados, SA

Murtaza Vali

Dividing his time between Brooklyn and Sharjah, Murtaza Vali is a critic and art historian. He is a contributing editor of ArtAsiaPacific and also writes regularly for Bidoun and Art India. He has recently contributed to catalogues for artists Reena Saini Kallat and Emily Jacir, and is currently coediting Manual for Treason, a multilingual publication commissioned by Sharjah Biennial 10 (2011).

A REAL PHOTOGRAPHER’S CAMERA. BUT DON’T TAKE OUR WORD FOR IT.

When given the Lumix GF1 to test drive, professional photographer David Eustace captured amazing 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.

Photograph taken by David Eustace using the Lumix GF1 for Professional Photographer Magazine. To see more of his work visit davideustace.com

See the full range of lenses, colours and accessories at panasonic.co.uk/gf1 0844 844 3852

mother’s tankstation, Dublin

URI ARAN DOCTOR DOG SANDWICH 15th September - 30th October 2010

41 - 43 Watling Street Usher’s Island Dublin 8 IRELAND +353 1 671 7654 [email protected] www.motherstankstation.com

DISPATCHES october

Snapshot Now See This The Free Lance London Calling The Painted Word The Shape of Things Hong Kong Diary

25 26 32 34 36 38

Design Top 5 A New Concise Reference Dictionary Consumed Digested

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50 60 64

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snapshot

Rinko Kawauchi

‘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.’ Rinko Kawauchi’s work appears in the Brighton Photo Biennial, 2 October – 14 November ArtReview

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now see this words

Martin herbert

Some artists need a midcareer retrospective to elucidate years of perplexing zigzags:

Richard Hawkins (Art Institute of Chicago, 22 October – 16 January, www.artic.edu) is definitely one of them.

books in plaster, founded a fictional museum, posited decor as art, videoed himself interviewing 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 Everywhere What I Have Said) – a poised enigma regarding reiteration that includes texts, a recording of a poem, a stuffed parrot and an image of same – and one of Broodthaers’s very few paintings. Anticipate serious, delirious play.

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 Everything (London, 13 October to Christmas, www.musevery.com) returns, Talking of stuffed animals,

is a story of the eye, of the nuanced pleasures of looking. But also likely to resonate in the American artist’s first survey show – entitled Third Mind, after William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s concept that refuses ‘either/or’ propositions – are rich and strange overtones produced by juxtaposition. The titular concept has been name-checked by enough artists and curators in recent years to assume the status of a meme; given the breadth and frequency of Hawkins’s stylistic gearshifts, though, it should feel particularly apposite here. Hawkins didn’t invent the nonlinear career path; Marcel Duchamp perhaps did, and

Marcel Broodthaers (Michael Werner, New York, to 13 November, www.michaelwerner.com) virtually

perfected it. The Belgian artist began as a poet, made his first sculpture by embedding his poetry

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with Exhibition #3. The unofficial star attraction of last October’s Frieze week, its 10,000-squarefoot London space housed a 500-work show of ‘selftaught, marginal and non-traditional art’ that went on to a successful run in Italy. Now the museum has invited Peter Blake, Pop art capo and collector extraordinaire, to cocurate another epic assembly, this one combining elements from his own collection into the largest installation he has ever created. Also on show: ‘one of the great unknown marvels of Victorian England’ – Mr Potter’s Museum of Curiosities, featuring English taxidermist Walter Potter’s dioramas of children’s fairytales filled with stuffed animals. Among those loaning Potter

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 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

DISPATCHES

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, acquired jointly through the d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund, 2008

Adam Dant

Adam Dant’s real name might seem like an apt pseudonym already, a nod to both the postpunkster from Adam and the Ants, and resurrected adventurer Adam Adamant; but from 1995 until the eve of the millennium, 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, palmsize ‘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 own name and winning the Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2002 with his Anecdotal Plan of Tate Britain, Dant has had his entire Daily Journal run reissued through the Hales Gallery, London, in a boxset edition of ten for £6,000 apiece. His predominantly drawn projects are ludic puzzles layered with apocryphal theories such as ‘underneathism’ and arcane references. Although his shows and subjects whisk him around Britain and abroad, from this summer’s drink-themed exhibit at Walsall’s New Art Gallery to New York’s Adam Baumgold Gallery from the end of October, London’s fecund mulch of history is a mainstay of his output from his studio in a former sweetshop in Shoreditch. Hence this issue’s Strip relates to a make-believe Elizabethan urban magician, Doctor London, whose fantastical library Dant has installed in the top mezzanine floor of Battersea Park’s Pump House Gallery. Inspired by Borges’s bibliomania and Italian ‘biblioteche’ of the Mannerist era, Dant fills shelf after shelf with trompe l’oeil tomes, their spines painted in oils under chicken wire. Their titles play with the transposition of terms in the English language between city and body, such as headspace, evacuation, arteries. Atop each bookcase, a gilded plaque categorises them according to both district of London and their equivalent Latin biological part, according to the doctor’s Tudor map of the capital, overlaid with the outlines of a foetal giant, head in Westminster, long neck along the Strand, streets tinted red as bloodstreams. As the finishing touch, he has fragranced it with Florentine sandalwood potpourri. Hypercomics: The Shapes of Comics to Come, curated by Paul Gravett, is at Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London, through 26 September; Adam Dant’s work is also on view at Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York, in October and November words

paul gravett

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. Star curating is again the order of the day at the

Brighton Photo Biennial (2 October – 14 November, www.bpb.org.uk), where

aficionado-of-the-quotidian Martin Parr takes the reins. On the menu: new conceptual and documentary themes in photography, Queer Brighton and a show in

which Alec Soth, Rinko Kawauchi and Stephen Gill view the city through their subjective, well, lenses. Of equal note and nearby is the simultaneous Artist Rooms show (thank you, Mr d’Offay) of some 60

Robert Mapplethorpe (Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, 25 September – 21 November, www. townereastbourne.org.uk). Go and watch the photographs by

local grannies’ glasses steam up.

New York Miami is often called the northernmost city in Latin America, but anyone from Gotham knows that the distinction rightfully belongs to our own Nueva York. It’s not only that a third of the city’s population is Hispanic but also that its citizens have been engaged with the Spanish-speaking world since before New Amsterdam was founded, in 1624. The first nonnative to live on these shores was Juan Rodriguez, a Dominican sailor who cohabited with a Native American woman; as a coda to these beginnings, Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court Justice, grew up in the Bronx. The centuries in between – times of bilateral cultural, political and commercial engagement marked by mutual fascination, mistrust and revulsion – are the subject of a new exhibition mounted by the New York Historical Society, founded in 1804 and thus the grande dame among our museums, and El Museo del Barrio, established in the 1960s in response to demands from African-American and Latino parents that public school curricula address their history and heritage. El Museo’s tradition of resistance by affirmation of identity and of all citizens’ right to cultural inclusion, and the Historical Society’s increasing function as an archive of popular culture, seem like the perfect match of mission and mindset to overcome the stale clichés of minority and majority, inclusion and exclusion, rich and poor, which flatten and obscure the vibrancy of personal and community exchanges that come with urban living and, given New York’s history of trade and immigration, have enormous resonance here. Better, the project’s lead historian, Mike Wallace, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1998), a 1,400-page magnum opus that considers its subject through the work of the city’s people and the myths of identity that have defined them. The exhibition, focusing on five broad periods from 1620 to 1945, explores themes identified as ‘Revolution in North and South America’, ‘Commercial and Cultural Exchanges’ and ‘20th century Migration’. A film by Ric Burns about the Hispanic 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.

Watching the watchers was the burden of the 1999

Sharon Lockhart (Jan Mot, Brussels, to 23 October, www.janmot.com), a kind of ambient melding film Teatro Amazonas by

of Fitzcarraldo (1982) and The Society of the Spectacle (1967) in which, for an hour, a camera observes a local audience in an Amazon opera house as it listens to a piece of challenging experimental

music. A decade later, in Lunch Break (2009), Lockhart finally hazarded an actual camera movement, but retained her exquisitely glacial pace as she observed the rhythms of action and inaction within a context of labour. Stay with her art and it will give you a full interior reset – and on a sociological level, a properly durational sense of the meaning of work, and of looking. One logical upshot of the art-historical referentiality of much contemporary art is a project

Larry Bell/Jeppe Hein (Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, 16 October – 24 November, www.danieltemplon.com). like

The Danish Hein has long worked with a vocabulary of mirrored, neominimalist forms that introduce

Nueva York, at El Museo del Barrio, New York, runs through 9 January words

JOSHUA MACK

elements of instability and subjectivity into the 40-year-old aesthetic and, in a recent series of neons in which light jumps between interlocking 28

ArtReview

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, mirror folie, 140 x 140 x 2 cm, photo: Michael Lio, courtesy the artist and Johann König, Berlin

DISPATCHES

cubic outlines, spin off from Bell’s reflective 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.

Marlene Dumas, Naomi, 1995, oil on canvas, 150 x 110 cm, private collection. © the artist

Berlin 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, immediately followed by Frieze and FIAC. The Berlin fair is going to be smaller this year – down to 110 galleries from 130 – and the younger ‘Sektor’ galleries, which previously were presented in a separate space, are now interspersed among the more established ones in the two main halls. Concentration and sharpening of profile are the buzzwords here, as apparently there was no decline in the number of applications. Art Forum Berlin is also collaborating with ABC, or Art Berlin Contemporary, which in a power struggle with the fair two years ago was founded by a number of Berlin galleries as their own autumn event, mirroring May’s Gallery Weekend. (ABC’s founding director, Michael Neff, is also the manager of Gallery Weekend.) Last year, when the junior fair featured 64 galleries, the dates already coincided; and this 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 by esteemed curator and video art specialist Marc Glöde and will focus on ‘the complex field of the cinematic, film, film installation and… the related aspect of the performative’. As an exhibition, this could be interesting. In terms of the wider picture of Art Forum Berlin, however, one might still ask: what is it all for? If the aim is to be like Frieze, Art Basel or Art Basel Miami Beach, then the programme needs to be much less localised and more spectacular. At the moment, a full third of participants are from Berlin, including many of those who founded ABC and who run the Gallery Weekend – and who take part in many other fairs around the globe. With relatively few galleries from abroad, will this in future be merely an art fair for the established Berlin galleries, a Gallery Weekend in a centralised space? Conversely, with all the continuing hype around Berlin as a place of creativity, production and internationalism, should this not be reflected in the fair programme? It can’t really go both ways. words

axel lapp

Marlene Dumas and the Old Masters (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 29 October – 6 Feb, www. hausderkunst.de) is unlikely to present the

Amsterdam-based South African artist as a footnote to anything, even when her work is shown in the context of some gilded Dutch Old Masters. The connection here is via a transhistorical approach to psychologically penetrating portraiture: a genre in which Dumas, with her slippery, potently distorted figures drawn from photography, has few rivals among living painters. As such, this show – which features new and/or unseen Dumas works – emphasises the long arc from the virtuosic portraits (or ‘tronies’) of Vermeer and Rembrandt to the mediated, anxious nature of portraiture today. Several leagues away

Uri Aran (Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin, to 30 October, www.motherstankstation.com) has from such concerns,

previously exhibited, for example, a battered black chest of drawers sitting at a wild tilt and containing holes filled with chocolate chip cookies, and a tub of goldfish food sitting in a ring of fire. Given that, and Aran’s desire to make a virtue out of seeming arbitrariness so that the viewer’s questioning and sense of disorientation becomes the

DISPATCHES

Ernesto Neto (Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo, to 2 January, www.afmuseet.no) gets his first

And finally,

retrospective anywhere in design-conscious Scandinavia – which makes sense, given that the legacies of 1960s and 70s futurist design, and of Hélio Oiticica’s art, get reborn in his softened, scented environments. The show contains works from the last decade: if something looked like it came from an alternative past when it was new, can it date?

Paris Writers are just like other artists. They have a medium – language – whose particularity is that it belongs to everyone. They work in this medium and manipulate it, play with it and 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 Vitrysur-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 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, I’ve kept that, it’s always present, always there, superb, along banks that are now bare. The undergrowth has been burnt away. The roads parallel to the Seine are perfect, with three lanes. The foreigners have disappeared. Company headquarters have become palaces… At night one is scared because the streets are deserted.’ What makes this text literary? How come virtually everyone can write, but not everyone can write like this? I see Vitry when I read these words, and yet I wouldn’t if I read the following: ‘Vitry has nothing to do with literature, it’s a shapeless 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. words

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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 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

work’s content, it’s hard to foretell what he’ll 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.

THE FREE LANCE

Memorial ‘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 one group’s symbols. Adams’s bones are doing triple axels. Because the proposed mosque and Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero – acknowledging the origin of the site’s name in the Manhattan Project renders it totally creepy – is being discussed as if it were a memorial, perhaps we should consider other monuments around the world as comparative points of interest. Los Angeles has the Hollywood sign (recently saved by Hugh Hefner), the Iraqi town of Tikrit boasts a metal shoe crowned by a leafy bush (commemorating the sandal hurled at a US president) and Paris has César’s giant bronze thumb (celebrating, one supposes, the historical irony that is the Arche de la Défense). But how many people know that Bologna has a 20-foot sculpture of Tupac Shakur, or that another sculpture of the rapper is due for Belgrade’s roughest neighbourhood? An example of a Serb-led phenomenon called turbosculpture, this cultural mutation has inspired existing and planned public European statues of figures as hallowed as Bruce Lee, Rocky Balboa and Samantha Fox. A recent article penned by VVORK, an artist collective, puts the local Serbian craze for memorialising global kitsch in a nutshell. Speaking to

Islamic centre is not at Ground Zero, but two blocks away – a radius that includes an Off Track Betting parlour, a dozen shops advertising bikini wax and a strip joint called the Pussycat Lounge, as well as an actual mosque (it predates the construction of the World Trade Center). The area most affected by the disaster is not ‘hallowed ground’ but part of a grand scheme for ‘55,000 square feet of retail space’. And Allah, while certainly many things to lots of people, appears as a ‘terrorist monkey God’ exclusively to Tea Party Express kingpin Mark Williams and a handful of hair-pulling bigots. Unfortunately, in an election year, few politicians display sufficient ‘testicular virility’ (in disgraced Illinois ex-governor Rod Blagojevich’s phrasing) to contest Williams or perennial presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich (who compared backers of the mosque to Nazis). New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proves an exception, as does New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, neither Republican up for reelection this cycle. But in an environment that prizes shouting loudest over deep thought, how convincing can they and a few intellectuals be when Fox News is constantly channelling Slobodan Milosevic in English? The Ancient Greeks invented the word ‘demagogue’ to describe a new class of ‘leader’ (agogos) expert at preying on words

a juror commissioning a statue to memorialise the victims of the Balkan wars (no official monument was built for lack of worthy candidates to honour), VVORK reported the following: ‘People realize that many of our soldiers in the wars of the 1990s were criminals who stole, robbed and killed. So people are searching for alternative models and this is a healthy rejection of nationalism… These Hollywood monuments are a subversive response [to the governments of that time]…’ One has to admit, the turboists have a point. Or three. In Lower Manhattan, it is as difficult to know what to commemorate today as it is to wade through the jingoistic bullshit heaped up by the self-appointed defenders of Ground Zero. Their claims are easy enough to refute. The mooted 32

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Christian viveros-faune

the worst instincts of the people (demos). About this figure’s effect on the mob, Aristotle once said: ‘The most dangerous form of democracy is the one in which not the law, but the multitude, have the supreme power’. Americans presently poll 70 percent in opposition to the mosque, while 24 percent fervently believe that Obama is secretly a Muslim. That America deserves a monument, but certainly not the deeply evocative Tribute in Light (2002) devised by artists Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda. Instead they merit a turbosculpture. Make it of Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry as formulated by the sagacity of H.L. Mencken: ‘The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots’. Insha’Allah.

LaVerdiere & Myoda, Towers of Light over the Promenade, 2001, artists’ rendering. © the artists

Amid feaverish debate about the Ground Zero site, maybe we should look to Eastern Europe for inspiration

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smartists Is the new art too clever for its own good?

more in accordance with quieter, financially straitened times’. And Independent culture hack Hannah Duguid, in a startlingly sycophantic survey of the London scene, declares that the new generation of artists comprises a ‘more sophisticated bunch… They are thoughtful, intellectual and well-connected. They went to Oxford rather than Goldsmiths. They are elegant and polite. Their world is closer to F. Scott Fitzgerald than Irvine Welsh.’ In other words, flashy, vulgar, working-class and stupid are out, sophisticated, elegant, upper-class and clever are in. If the Old Stupid generation suited the upbeat, hedonistic, meritocratic mood of the late 1990s and early 00s, oriented towards the here-and-now and to the wider culture, the New Clever generation is by contrast ascetic, specialist, introspective, art-history-oriented and concerned with art’s words

couldn’t seem to cope with all the ‘clever’ art that was then starting to show up in big shows like the Turner Prize or the Altermodern Tate Triennial (see ‘Dumb It Down; Keep It Down’, December 2008). By rights I should be cheerful. Rather than desperately holding on to the easy editorial value of the YBA generation’s shock-populism, the mainstream is starting to accept that a recent generation of artists is interested in something a bit more complicated. So Waldemar Januszczak, reviewing part one of Saatchi’s Newspeak in The Sunday Times, discovers a ‘clash of new and old, scientific and irrational, experiment and belief’. This ‘referencing of other movements, other disciplines, deeper theories, strikes me as an important tendency to have noticed’, he declares, insightfully. For Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times, ‘the contemporary art world, instead of rushing to publicise the flashiest, most theatrical, glitziest talent, is searching out a subtler, more searching aesthetic that feels

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separation from other forms of cultural activity. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; much of this comes as a direct reaction to YBA art’s often degraded accommodation to the mass-media demand for an unthinking art that could be easily circulated and consumed. But the danger of such specialism and exclusivity is to turn ‘thinking’ art into the preserve of a professional network of insider curators, collectors and artists, and to withdraw it from any difficult encounter with the conflicting interests and tensions of its relationship to a broader culture and society. Confusing erudition with a self-indulgent esotericism may express an anxiety among artworld folk over whether art could ever really address a broader culture – as if the earlier experiment with art’s encounter with a broader culture had gone badly wrong, and it should now keep itself to itself, a private language spoken among the initiated. A properly thinking art, however, would be able to think through – and give shape to – who it was for, and why. I think I’ve found a way out of this museum. Time for a Chicken Royale…

The Otolith Group, Otolith III, 2009 (still). © the artists

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 literary device, right? It’s symbolic. And what it symbolises is something to do with my growing worries about what we might call ‘the New Clever’. ‘What’s the New Clever?’ you ask. The New Clever is that type of sophisticated, complex, well-read, historically literate, often esoteric art which, in Britain at least, is starting to take centre stage. And which, what with this month’s concurrent openings of the epic five-year survey British Art Show 7, the Turner Prize’s annual outing and the second part of Saatchi’s rumbling behemoth Newspeak, we’re about to see a shitload of. ‘So what’s your problem with that?’ you exclaim. Those of you with long memories will recall that a couple of years ago I used this column to mock those mainstream art critics who

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the painted word

Time to Go Van Gogh 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. Despite urgings from the stoic American ladies ahead of us that the ‘Von Go’ would be worth the wait, we reluctantly knocked it on the head, never to return. Children find art exhibitions challenging enough without queues. But all’s well that ends well; we got to see Van G after all, after a fashion. In June the BBC resurrected the Dutchman for a showdown with space monsters in a Richard Curtis-scripted episode of their time-travel sci-fi series Doctor Who. Played by actor Tony Curran, this Vincent looked enough like Kirk Douglas to recall the artist as depicted in Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film Lust for Life, and thus takes his place not so much in the history of art as in a pop history of contemporary neuroses. The story of Van Gogh is a short but well-known tragedy, a super-vivid historical set-piece that comes to life very easily, owing to the fame of the paintings. There’s unquestionably a visual magic to watching Doctor Who step into The Bedroom at Arles (1889), for instance. But this is not the first example of

the former’s police telephone box/time machine) after spotting a space critter in the window of one of the latter’s chapel paintings. As we learn the cute fact that only Vincent can actually see the beast, the caper escalates, reaching a bizarre climax in a church when Vincent nails the demon, skewering it on his easel. However, this hilarious moment of mockempowerment is overshadowed by a morbid gloom; the Doctor knows that within a year Vincent will be dead. In a strange fusion of the ridiculous and the melancholic, the familiar Van Gogh guilt settles in. After that, Doctor Who’s visit becomes a sad and secret war against the artist’s impending suicide. Conducting a medicinal extension of the narrative from an omnipotent temporal overview, Doctor Who uses time travel to soothe Vincent’s fevered mind (“You turned out to be the first doctor ever actually to make a difference to my life!”), not his wallet. He executes a therapeutic act that is both an artist’s fantasy and a nightmare, at once sadistic and affectionate. He takes Van Gogh to his own (queue-free) retrospective in Paris, words

Van Gogh and time travel we’ve seen in popular culture. Think of the movie Starry Night (1999; directed by Paul Davids), in which Van Gogh returns, 100 years after his death, to steal and auction his own paintings to make money to help starving artists. It’s a rejoinder to the big Vincent money joke: the one about the ear-chopping nut-job who can’t make money when alive but, idiotically, generates billions when dead. The movie rights a perceived wrong and, through time travel, ‘unbelates’ society’s apology for its negligence. Thankfully stopping short of having Hugh Grant play Vincent, the Richard Curtis ‘Arles’ episode of Doctor Who nevertheless takes this temporal idealism further still. It’s 11 years since Starry Night, and the agenda has shifted accordingly; we visit a Van Gogh concerned less with wealth and fortune than with health, love and wellbeing. The episode finds Doctor Who (Matt Smith) visiting Van Gogh (thanks to

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which is teeming with delighted visitors, right now, in 2010. When the Doctor approaches a Van Gogh scholar (Bill Nighy) with Vincent in tow, the dialogue, backed with rousing music, takes on a powerfully parental character, as Who asks for a verdict on the work. With a now sobbing Vincent in earshot, the voice from the future masterfully nurtures the artist’s selfesteem: “[Van Gogh was] certainly the most popular great painter of all time, the most beloved”. Doctor Who returns without Vincent, expecting to see many more paintings in 2010 as a result of his intervention, but he has failed: he finds out that Vincent went onto kill himself at thirty-seven anyway. But not before the Doctor had managed to deliver the latest incarnation of humanity’s apology for the cruelty and philistinism dealt to Vincent, in the form of a loving paternal embrace. After the programme had ended, I asked the children 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.”

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 collective fantasy that we can right art history’s wrongs

The Shape of Things

Usefulness? 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 chord strikes. But here’s the curious thing: despite its macho presentation, the truck looks like nothing more than a toy. In fact, the whole ad looks as though it’s fulfilling the expectations of a generation of kids brought up on those incessant plugs for remote-controlled trucks that played on Saturday-morning TV. Sure, the kids have grown up and the truck is real, but all its utility has been rendered so expressive, so externalised, that it’s gone beyond doing anything. It articulates an idea (perhaps warped) of usefulness rather than being useful itself. So rather than being a device for transporting heavy stuff off-road, it’s something that looks like an idea of transporting stuff off-road. It’s what a bodybuilder is to a strongman, a semiotic sign rather than a demonstrable fact. Use is a fundamental issue in architecture and design, contested through its theories, practice and polemics. As in the urban myth about Eskimos and snow, architects have a vast lexicon to describe their varied conceptions of the ‘doingness’ of architecture. Trace, for example, Vitruvius’s classical ‘utility’ (where his trinity of firmness, commodity and delight are the attributes of good architecture) through to modernist ‘function’

supposedly doing. But notions of utility, it turns out, have a totally other purpose – as a means of making things feel ‘authentic’. If architecture’s championing of a formally recognisable faithfulness to ‘function’ came about as a way of articulating the changes brought about by an industrial age, then postindustrial culture exploited the notion of ‘honesty’ that this had established, as a means of manifesting and marketing a sense of the genuine in objects and environments that were otherwise almost wholly apparitions of consumerism – like this year’s model of a shiny new truck with zero-percent finance. Today, the marketing of ‘utility’ covers a broad spectrum: not only in the souped-up trucks that come off the Wacom tablets of Detroit, but also in the design traditions of Jasper Morrison’s ‘Super Normal’ or Konstantin Grcic’s ‘Design Real’, where the apparent absence of designerly styling allows the truth of an object’s essence to surface. It’s in high-tech architecture, where the bolts, cables and other means of assembly are explicitly displayed as a record of its construction. It’s in the rhetoric of parametric architecture, whose swoopy, fluid forms claim to harness computing power as a totalising solution. words

(with its house-as-a-machine-for-living-in rhetoric) and then to postmodern ‘programme’ (which – broadly – understands use as event), and you’ll find that each description of architecture’s purpose establishes an ideology of utility that prefigures the way particular kinds of architecture do what they do. Usefulness is an idea before it’s a service. Architecture’s recurring belief is that use is a means of delivering a world of honesty and truth. Given how elusive those concepts are, perhaps it’s no surprise that use outruns any attempts to codify its operation or meaning. Think of all those high-spec SUVs taking the kids to school or baby boomer executives squeezing into their weekend denim or warehouses eviscerated of their original industrial logic and turned into lofts. Utility has been so highly processed by culture that’s it’s been entirely delaminated from what its host object is

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But the best view of a contemporary utility is when it’s separated from the pretence of doing anything at all, when it’s all image and sensation. Where better to examine it than in the parade of ageing action heroes in Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables (2010). The film’s tagline, ‘The toughest crew of the century’, really refers not to its narrative but to its amazing lineup of action-movie stars: Stallone himself, Bruce Willis, Jet Li, ex-heartthrob Mickey Rourke, ex-sub-Schwarzenegger Dolph Lundgren, the real Arnold Schwarzenegger, ex-American footballer Terry Crews and ex-wrestler Steve Austin, among others. This is (at least) three decades of muscle-bound action hero, which in its variations of steroid bulk, surgery-gonewrong and gym-honed physiques reads as a fleshy taxonomy of contemporary notions of utility. 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.

The Expendables, 2010, production still. © and courtesy Lions Gate Entertainment, Santa Monica

These days it’s expendable

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HONG KONG diary

marathon man

“Wake up.” Hans Ulrich Obrist has nodded off again. Having left Antony Gormley with his bacon (see part one of ArtReview’s Hong Kong Diary, published in the September issue), we’re in the back of a Mercedes in the middle of a marathon tour of studio visits. Ahhh, these marathons – HUO has done them to the point of cliché, but he doesn’t seem particularly fit for all this long-distance running. He keeps slipping away, drowning in a soup of jetlag and exhaustion beside me. Although I can’t say that I’m in any better shape. The whole thing is HUO’s idea – his theory being that you can obtain some sort of snapshot of the local art scene by packing as many studio visits as humanly possible into one day. We’re going for 16. It’s ambitious. Crazy. And perhaps slightly

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 – sometimes in tiny apartments, sometimes in industrial spaces past the greasy floor and queasy smells of a pig-roasting plant. Context is everything. Back at the Mandarin Oriental in the Captain’s Bar, where I’m enjoying a few stiff drinks as a reward for my, errr… labours. I flick through the May issue of Hong Kong Tatler. There’s an article about how Hong Kong is on the verge of becoming ‘the world’s unlikeliest arts hub’, whatever that means. Apparently Nick Simunovic, the guy who runs the local outpost of the Gagosian empire, expects that the island will ‘become a mandatory destination for collectors, curators and critics in the global art circuit’. Perhaps this will be the only place where art is mandatory. words

pointless. After all, what can you learn from a series of 20-minute (at most) conversations that isn’t superficial? To say the least, I’m sceptical. “I always do this”, HUO says when I voice my concerns. “I’ve done it for years”. He casts me what I’m imagining is his version of a ‘trust me’ look. Sarah Thornton, who writes a column on the art market for The Economist and some book called Seven Days in the Artworld (2008), and who was HUO’s debating partner from last night, is here as well – they lost the debate, and I think she’s still smarting. She blames Hans Ulrich, perhaps; he looks too tired to blame her. In any case, she’s making notes about us doing the tour, and I’m making notes about them. You’ll never get a better sense of the revolting art bubble than this vicious circle of note-taking. All we’re doing really is taking notes about ourselves. “Who is your hero?” Hans Ulrich keeps barking at artists, who cower before him in a mix of terror, hope and anticipation. That’s what happens when you meet the numberone entry on ArtReview’s power list (as HUO seems to be continually introduced). But part of me hopes he doesn’t ask 42

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The Hong Kong art scene article is sandwiched between an advertisement for a Gigawhite Fresh Double-Action Exfoliating Mask and this: ‘You have it all – the haute couture, the designer watches, the rare jewellery – but that damned ugly safe where you keep them all just doesn’t quite fit with your perfectly attuned sense of style’. The solution? ‘Narcissus’, a $399,000 Karl Lagerfeld-designed safe covered in chromeplated aluminium and disguised as a mirror. And just as I’m ready to hit the sack, I overhear some guy I later recognise as a fellow art-fair visitor sitting behind me at what I imagine must be the Captain’s table saying, “I’m not saying she’s a prostitute, but she is friends with everybody”. Oh, dear. Maybe all that stuff about context is rot. Next month: Stars in my eyes – the celebrity touch

Captain’s Bar, Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong. Courtesy Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong

In part two of three reports from Hong Kong, a whirwind tour of artist studios

issue no.02 vol.xvii

INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN TORINO • 5-7 NOVEMBER 2010 • OVAL lingotto fiere Milano; Rachmaninoff ’s, London; RaebervonStenglin, Zurich; Sabot, Cluj-Napoca; September, Berlin; Seventeen, London; SpazioA, Pistoia; Steinle, Munich; Super Window Project, Kyoto; Supportico Lopez, Berlin; The Third Line, Dubai. 

ADVERTORIAL

artissima is a parasite publication inserted in the advertising sections of international magazines

In this issue: House of Contamination

Poetry in the Shape of a Rose

Picnic for the Mind

Hypnotic Show

Visualising Transformation

Exhibitions in Town

artissima is an art fair, and as such it is a trade event. But also, the short duration of the event, just three days, lends itself to a particularly risky form of cultural experimentation: one that echoes the innovative proposals by participating galleries who represent emerging artists. The cultural element of artissima acts not so much to justify or lend credibility to its commercial side, but, rather, to fully inhabit the ambiguity of the fair and exploit its potential. The aim of artissima’s curatorial programme is to offer a space in which current cross-fertilisation between art forms can be put to the test. It provides a context for playing around with new strategies of production, display and reception, and for the public to consider the success and reliability of these strategies. The programme borrows its title directly from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Poesia in forma di rosa (Poetry in the Shape of a Rose), the book that marked his return to poetry following the success of his early films. In the same publication, Pasolini also experimented with graphic design by using concrete poetry to arrange his verse. Just as the interchange between various disciplines is the theme of the curatorial programme, so the interaction between different periods is explored through the juxtaposition of works from various times. Amid the contributions of emerging artists in the main section and new entries section, a temporal leap will bring forth the works in the back to the future section, which is devoted to art from the 1960s and 70s. Both the trade event and the curatorial programme have as their focus the theme of advanced experimentalism which, by its nature, incorporates the possibility of making mistakes as a condition for inventing new ways of creating meaning.

List updated July 31ST, 2010

Artissima’s new location: oval , Lingotto Fiere. Photo: Max Tomasinelli, 2010

THE GALLERIES The Selection Commitee – Daniele Balice, Balicehertling, Paris; Isabella Bortolozzi, Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Mario Cristiani, Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Le Moulin; Darren Flook, Hotel, London; Franco Noero, Franco Noero, Torino; Gregor Podnar, Gregor Podnar, Berlin, Ljubljana – has chosen 95 galleries for the main section and 29 for the new entries section.

MAIN SECTION

1/9 unosunove, Roma; A Palazzo, Brescia; Air De Paris, Paris; Arena Mexico, Guadalajara; Artericambi, Verona; Alfonso Artiaco, Napoli; Enrico Astuni, Bologna, Pietrasanta; Balicehertling, Paris; Federico Bianchi, Milano; Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva; Bonomo, Bari, Roma; Bortolami, New York; Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Bugada & Cargnel, Paris; Cardi Black Box, Milano; Chert, Berlin; Antonio Colombo, Milano; Connoisseur, Hong Kong; Continua, San Gimignano, Beijing, Le Moulin; Pilar Corrias, London, Raffaella Cortese, Milano; CorviMora, London; Guido Costa, Torino; Riccardo Crespi, Milano; Ellen de Bruijne, Amsterdam; Monica De Cardenas, Milano, Zuoz; Massimo De —Francesco Manacorda Carlo, Milano; Umberto Di Marino, Napoli; Duve Berlin, Berlin; frank elbaz, Paris; Fonti, Napoli; Enrico Fornello, Milano; freymond-guth & co, Zurich; Fruit &

Flower Deli / Andreas Brändström, New York / Stockholm; gb agency, Paris; GDM, Paris; Gentili, Prato; Green Cardamom, London; Grimm, Amsterdam; Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart; Hotel, London; Ghislaine Hussenot, Paris; In Arco, Torino; in situ fabienne leclerc, Paris; Alison Jacques, London; Kalfayan, Athens, Salonica; francesca kaufmann, Milano; Peter Kilchmann, Zurich; Lisson, London; Federico Luger, Milano; Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin; Kate MacGarry, London; Magazzino d’Arte Moderna, Roma; Norma Mangione, Torino; Primo Marella, Milano, Beijing; Kamel Mennour, Paris; Francesca Minini, Milano; Massimo Minini, Brescia; Monitor, Roma; Museum 52, London, New York; Franco Noero, Torino; Noire, Torino; Lorcan O’Neill, Roma; Opdahl, Stavanger; Maureen Paley, London; francescopantaleone, Palermo; Parra & Romero, Madrid; Parrotta, Stuttgart; Alberto Peola, Torino; Peres, Berlin, Los Angeles; Giorgio Persano, Torino; Photo&Contemporary, Torino; Photology, Milano; Pinksummer, Genova; Gregor Podnar, Berlin, Ljubljana; prometeogallery, Milano, Lucca; RAM, Roma; Raucci/Santamaria, Napoli; Lia Rumma, Milano, Napoli; S.A.L.E.S, Roma; Federica Schiavo, Roma; Suzy Shammah, Milano; Franco Soffiantino, Torino; Sprovieri, London; Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerpen; TaiK, Helsinki; The Breeder, Athens;

Caterina Tognon, Venezia; Tucci Russo, Torre Pellice; Jonathan Viner, London; Vistamare, Pescara; Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen; Wilkinson, London; Žak | Branicka, Berlin, Cracow.

NEW ENTRIES Ancient & Modern, London; annex14, Bern; Niklas Belenius, Stockholm; Conduits, Milano; Cortex Athletico, Bordeaux; Tiziana Di Caro, Salerno; Fluxia, Milano; Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin; Gaudel de Stampa, Paris; GMG, Moscow; Gonzalez Y Gonzalez, Santiago; Sonja Junkers, Munich; Karma International, Zurich; Khastoo, Los Angeles; Leto, Warsaw; Limoncello, London; lokal_30, Warsaw; Maskara, Mumbai; Room,

Michel Journiac, hommage to freud, 1972. Courtesy of Patricia Dorfmann, Paris

BACK TO THE FUTURE In the theory of parallel universes, the simultaneity of events far apart in time is possible. Yet, when viewed in linear time the same events are in fact a great distance apart on the space–time continuum. The back to the future section presents a time shift creating a simultaneity of works and practices that are temporally very remote from one another. In this sense, artissima offers to its visitors not only a group of modern art pieces, but also an experiment in which the present-day relevance of these works is defined.

Nanni Balestrini, untitled. Courtesy of Giacomo Guidi & MG, Roma

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artissima n˚17 INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN TORINO • 5-7 NOVEMBER 2010 • OVAL lingotto fiere The appointment of the Selection Committee of contemporary art curators is based on the expertise of its members in recognising the contemporary, even in the past. artissima has entrusted them with selecting works that, even though made in the past, nevertheless, resonate with the interests and obsessions of emerging artists today. To heighten the effect of this shift in time, the exhibitions in the back to the future section will be located in an area of the fair that also includes two bookshops with historical material from the same period, 1960-79. SOLO PRESENTATIONS INCLUDE:

Berlin); Anna Maria Maiolino (Raffaella Cortese, Milano); Antoni Miralda (Senda, Barcelona); Hitoshi Nomura (McCaffrey Fine Arts, New York); Gianni Pettena (Enrico Fornello, Milano); Sylvia Sleigh (I-20, New York); Goran Trbuljak (Gregor Podnar, Berlin, Ljubljana); Gil J.Wolman (Lara Vincy, Paris).

PRESENT FUTURE Somewhere between a group exhibition, a series of unprecedented solo displays and a memorandum, present future 2010 will feature a group of artists from different countries, selected by Mai Abu ElDahab, Richard Birkett, Thomas Boutoux and Luigi Fassi.

Nanni Balestrini (Giacomo Guidi & MG, Roma); Gianfranco Baruchello (Michael Janssen, Berlin); Bill Bollinger (Häusler Contemporary, Zurich); Located at the enVlassis Caniaris (Kalfayan, trance to the art fair, the Athens, Salonica); curatorial project present Dadamaino (Carlina, future will be a composiTorino); Noël Dolla tion of all the works in (Dominique Fiat, Paris); artissima, allowing visitors

large installation, present future is thus designed to accompany the visitor on a visual journey that is unique in its synthesis of freshness and complexity, representing the innovation and research that lie at the heart of artissima’s mission. —Luigi Fassi

HOUSE OF CONTAMINATION Architectural models have, to some extent, been made obsolete by 3D computer-graphic simulations. Furthermore, while a small-scale maquette provides a sense of a project’s spaces and volumes, it still requires viewers to project their presence within the prototype and adapt it mentally to a full-scale version. For the house of contamination, artissima has invited raumlaborberlin to create a life-size prototype of a cultural centre that pro-

Raymond Queneau, cent mille milliards de poèmes, Gallimard, 1961 © Pilar Pinchart - All the Rest is Literature

POETRY IN THE SHAPE OF A ROSE SECTIONS IN THE PROGRAMME INCLUDE:

ALL THE REST IS LITERATURE Curated by Vincenzo Latronico

Strictly speaking, All the Rest is Literature could be a contemporary art museum focused on writing, or a literary salon for artists only. Either, or. If it were a contemporary art museum, it would have a permanent collection: The Malady of Writing, an exhibition presented by Chus Martinez after being shown at MACBA, Barcelona. It would also, naturally, host temporary exhibitions: a survey of artist fiction curated by Maria Fusco and a retrospective on literary experiments from the 1960s, presented by the Definitively Temporary Secretary of Oulipo, Marcel Bénabou, upon the organisation’s 50th anraumlaborberlin, atmospheric sketch for house of contamination, 2010 niversary. But All the Rest is Literature is not, strictly motes cross-fertilisation, or speaking, a contemporary Koji Enokura (McCaffrey to get to grips with their art museum. Fine Arts, New York); shared qualities, as well ‘contamination’, between If it were a literary as their diversity and con- the arts. The purpose of Franco Guerzoni salon it would host: a (Nicoletta Rusconi, trasts. Arrived at through prototypes is to assess the combinatorial reading by Milano); Jan Håfström an intensive process of practicality and reliabilNanni Balestrini; a debate (Fruit & Flower Deli / international research, ity of a project, as well as between artists and critics Andreas Brändström, the artists and galleries in its results, for example present future 2010 conon whether art writing is when the model of a new New York / Stockholm); a literary genre; a lecture Carmen Herrera (Arratia, stitute an uncompromising car is tested on a circuit. up-to-the-minute overview Similarly, the structure by performed by Gernot Beer, Berlin); Paolo of the best of young art Wieland on the therapeuIcaro (Massimo Minini, raumlaborberlin and its production from every Brescia); Michel Journiac associated programme will tic permanence of some continent. The culmination be test run during the fair written words; the first (Patricia Dorfmann, of months of exchange be- to evaluate the hypotheses Italian edition of Daniel Paris); Birgit Jürgenssen tween artists and curators, on which they are both Spoerri’s seminal Topogra(Hubert Winter, Wien); present future includes a phy of Chance; a conversaMaria Lai (Isabella based: of dialogue and number of works created Bortolozzi, Berlin); John shared languages between tion on fiction with Keren Cytter; and a showcase Latham (Lisson, London); especially for the fair, as the arts. for Jonathan Safran Foer’s Bob Law (Thomas Dane, well as projects shown in Europe for the first time. new, subtractive narration. London); Adolf Luther Taking the form of one But All the Rest is Literature (401contemporary, 2

is not, strictly speaking, a literary salon. Either, or, else: All the Rest is Literature gathers art critics whose criticism could be fiction; artists whose books are books even if they aren’t by artists; novels that are novels only because it is a writer who wrote them; hybrids, hybrids. All the rest, it’s literature.

Pickpocket Almanack Curated by Joseph del Pesco and Dominic Willsdon

Five faculties from various localities and cultural fields make a selection from events scheduled to take place, at any venue in their region, during November 2010. Each faculty gives its selection a title and description, and transform it into a course. Thus, each course takes pre-existing events out of context and gives them a new narrative frame. Anyone can enroll for one of the five courses for free, either online or at the fair. The five courses and five faculties, will intersect at keynote sessions, which they will organise for the house of contamination

at artissima. Pickpocket Almanack sits on a spectrum between a list of recommendations on one end (which

is typically a casual and unsystematic offering by a friend or colleague) and a formal school or university on the other (with a community of students, fixed site and apparatus, and defined roles, protocols and measures). Pickpocket Almanack is not a school, not even an experimental one. But it is an attempt to generate something like a curriculum out of everyday cultural life, in specific localities, and to bring strangers together to reflect and act on its content. Pickpocket Almanack originated in San Francisco (as a project of SFMOMA)

Typography by Dexter Sinister dexter sinister will demonstrate their Metathe-difference-betweenthe-two-Font, a typeface derived from MetaFont, the 30-year-old computer typography system originally programmed by Donald Knuth. The font will be primarily applied throughout artissima’s architecture in the form of vinyl wall signage, while its backstory will be exhibited as a 3D caption in a dedicated space within the fair. MetaFont is, at once, a programming language and its own interpreter, a swift trick in which it both provides a vocabulary

Pedro Reyes, Urban Genome Project , 2010

artissima n˚17 INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN TORINO • 5-7 NOVEMBER 2010 • OVAL lingotto fiere and decodes its syntax back to the native binary machine language of 1s and 0s. This yields what is essentially a skeleton of a typeface, ready for manipulation by five base parameters: PEN, WEIGHT, SLANT, SUPERNESS and CURLYNESS. U G U P G P U U P G P N T P G P P G G P U

U P G P P U U G P P G G G P P G P U P G U

G P P G U G U P G P U E P G P U U U P U G

P G P U U P G P P U G N P P U U G U U U P

P P U U G P P G U G P O G U G U P G G U P

G U G U P G P U U P P M U U P G P U P P G

U U P G P P U U G P G E U G P P G G P P U

U G P P G U G U P G P P U P G P P P G U U

U P G P U U P G P P U R G P P G U P P G U

G P P U U G P P G U U O P G U U U G U P G

P G U G U P G P U U R J P U U U G U U P P

P U U P G P P U U G B E U U G U P U G G

U U G P P G U G U P A C G U P G P U P P

Urban Genome Project by Joseph Grima and Pedro Reyes

The Urban Genome Project is a research endeavor initiated by editor and curator Joseph Grima and artist and architect Pedro Reyes. Its intent is to ‘map the code on which cities are written’, thereby assembling an index of tools for improving the urban environment, with a specific focus on political processes. To collect testimonies on this subject, a mobile unit resembling an expandable toolbox – designed by Pedro Reyes – will be the venue for a series of live exchanges of knowledge between strategic agents, citizens, politicians and decision makers. When fully open, the ugp unit becomes a fully-functional open-air TV recording studio in which interviews can be conducted and recorded. This pool of knowledge will then be organised as an index that will constitute the ugp archive. A key component of the ugp archive will be a series of in-depth interviews with current or recent mayors of cities around the world. Hand in hand with the world’s rapid urbanisation goes an equivalent rise in the prominence and influence of the figure of the mayor. The conventional perception of the mayor as mid-level bureaucrat and policy maker is being transformed by a new breed of politician: the supermayor. Another principal element of the archive will be a series of dialogues with policymakers responsible

for innovation in the urban sphere: city planners, administrators, governors, regulators, councillors, members of parliament, congressmen, senators, public officers, etc. A third category is strategic agents: citizens, researchers, artists and architects, activists, critics and writers who are collectively transforming our understanding of urbanism, policy and design practices. As in genetics, the operative strategy of the ugp is organised in two distinct phases: prospecting and sequencing. After artissima, the schematic entries produced during the sequencing phase will form the elementary particles of the ugp’s ’urban toolbox’: a database or catalogue of strategies and processes collected all over the world that can be recombined and tested in unrelated urban contexts. 

The Dancers Curated by Antony Huberman

In recent years, dancers have made frequent and significant appearances in the context of visual art. Not since the legendary Judson Dance Theater in the early 1960s have the lines between art and dance been so blurred, with young contemporary artists and choreographers eager to learn from and collaborate with one another. Exhibitions in major art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, have placed the pioneers of postmodern dance – Trisha Brown, Anna Halprin, Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer – within the established canon of the history of art, and a next generation of choreographers and artists are finding provocative new ways to think about the body moving through space and time. At artissima, The Dancers provides a context in which contemporary art shares the stage with contemporary choreography, allowing each discipline to inform and guide the other. Building on the fair’s concept of ‘contamination’, the contributions that make up The Dancers interrupt and overlap with each other, as elements of each successive

performance accumulate on stage over the duration of the fair. Including well-known experimental choreographers such as Xavier Leroy and emerging visual artists such as Ei Arakawa and Amy Granat, the series wanders through performance, sculpture, film and dance, with each participant adding new layers of meaning and different perspectives from which to appreciate the relationship between dance and art. The Dancers also features the premiere of new works by major artists such as Joachim Koester, whose film Tarantism (2007, inspired by the uncontrollable bodily convulsions caused by a spider bite) has been included in several dance-related museum exhibitions around the world.

Thinking Through Cinema (Deep Red)

source text but perhaps without showing a single frame of the original. The artists’ projects will be presented over the course of the fair as part of a rolling programme of timed events, hosted in a specially constructed space modelled on a cinema auditorium. Thinking Through Cinema (Deep Red) offers an opportunity for artists to completely re-imagine cinema – its history, its limits and its untapped possibilities – from the perspective of both creator and audience. Artists include Juliette Blightman, Torsten Lauschmann and Emily Wardill.

Picnic for the Mind Curated by Gianluigi Ricuperati

Three seminar-lectures will take place during artissima at 1967-1977, a pop-up bookshop curated by Amedeo Martegani Curated by Benjamin Cook and (am bookstore). Here Mike Sperlinger of LUX, London authors, designers, artists and historians will officiate In 1975, film director at a public rite of storytellDario Argento shot his giallo masterpiece Profondo ing and discussions about three magazines published rosso in Turin. Featuring in the 1960s and 70s. The David Hemmings and events will include three with a soundtrack by sessions for the mind prog-rock band Goblin, the film, like all Argento’s or three analysis spaces, attended by undergradubest work, is at once a gripping horror and a slyly ate and graduate students from different faculties self-reflexive meditation and art schools, as well as on the dubious pleasures passersby. Three imporof voyeurism. tant publishing initiatives For Thinking Through

With Andrea Branzi, Andrea Cortellessa, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and others.

Gamper, Minale-Maeda and Mischer’Traxler, as well as environmental installations designed and made especially for the ocHypnotic Show casion by MARC, Nucleo Curated by and UdA. Raimundas Malasauskas; Visualising Transformaconducted by Marcos Lutyens tion explores new discourses around the various Hypnotic Show is an ex- disciplines involved in hibition in the mind of the design, with the aim of audience created by fused imagining the results practices art and hypnosis. of the creative process Curated by Raimundas behind it. These results Malasauskas, conducted by are, indeed, decisive for Marcos Lutyens. asserting one fundamental ‘I feel that the exhibinecessity of the contemtions are a construct that porary: that of ceaseless already exists and I am experimentation. guiding people through artissima design is produced in collaboration something that is already with the Chamber of Commerce of Turin there and perhaps has been there for a long while. I think the division between curator, artist, docent, visitor gets completely blurred CASTELLO DI RIVOLI MUSEO D’ARTE CONTEMPORANEA as the exhibit is projected into a kind of collectively john mccracken: A Retrospective curated by Andrea Bellini experienced place within a subliminal state.’ (Marcos exhibition exhibition Lutyens). curated by Adam Carr

EXHIBITIONS IN TOWN

project room :

ARTISSIMA DESIGN VISUALISING TRANSFORMATION Curated by Barbara Brondi and Marco Rainò

Massimo Grimaldi

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FONDAZIONE MERZ mario merz:

Pageantry of painting Corteo della pittura curated by Rudi Fuchs

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FONDAZIONE SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO

modernikon This year, a new Contemporary Art from Russia thematic section titled curated by Francesco Bonami artissima design is being and Irene Calderoni launched. It will present a special in-depth analysis of GAM / GALLERIA CIVICA D’ARTE MODERNA E CONTEMPORANEA the IN Residence project, osvaldo licini: Masterworks the annual workshop promoting interaction between martha rosler . As If curated by Elena Volpato well-established designers and a selection of students. antonio riello: Be Square! GAM The workshop focuses on PINACOTECA GIOVANNI identifying, analysing and E MARELLA AGNELLI deciphering attitudes, and adopts an experimental china power station approach informed by con- curated by Gunnar B. Kvaran, Hans Ulrich Obrist temporary design thought. and Julia Peyton-Jones Following the first two events in Turin in 2008 VILLA DELLA REGINA and 2009, IN Residence philippe parreno returns encouraged by by Enea Righi Collection in collaboration with kaleidoscope the great success of the workshops and the international recognition it has received in such a short SPONSORED BY time. The only event to take place outside the fair FONDAZIONE TORINO MUSEI Emily Wardill, - Thinking Through Cinema (Deep Red) premises, Visualising Transformation has been devised Regione Piemonte and curated by Barbara of a bygone era, from a Cinema (Deep Red), Provincia di Torino Brondi and Marco Rainò, time when a magazine Argento’s film becomes Città di Torino would be launched when- and includes a workshop, a stand-in for cinema as Camera di commercio ever an idea was born, and a series of debates and a a whole; a starting point di Torino from which to explore the when magazines were seen group exhibition in the Compagnia di San Paolo prestigious halls of Palazzo differences between film by artists as places where Fondazione per other disciplines could be Birago in Turin. (as a physical medium) l’Arte Moderna e The exhibition will and cinema (as the culencountered. Some of the Contemporanea CRT present to the general journals explored in this tural, architectural and social space in which film event were modest but ex- public a set of original Main Partner citing journeys that some- works by some of the has traditionally been UniCredit most highly regarded experienced). times never went beyond Partners Six commissioned artists a single issue, while others figures in the international GREY GOOSE will each present their were more akin to regular arena of design research, illycaffè ‘version’ of Profondo rosso, picnics that outlasted their Tomás Alonso, Beta Tank, Julien Carretero, Martino using Argento’s film as a own transient nature.

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sick serena

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design

Warpaint Comedian Simon Munnery used to have a routine that opened: ‘Men lie. Women wear makeup’. He did not go on to cite the fact that they also wear hair extensions, tummytrimming knickers and strange laminated, chicken fillet-like objects tucked down their bras – these are all deceptions common to the game of seduction, but nothing kicks like the lie of an unbared face. As a site of design, the face is an area of extraordinary potency; there is power in the decision of what to reveal and what to conceal. The makeup artist Inge Grognard operates at an extreme of her craft that is at once ascetic and fantastical. She refuses to do what she calls ‘doll makeup’ – the full-face, totally made-up look common to most fashion shoots – but has repeatedly over the course of her quarter-century career focused on the idea of makeup as an actual mask. A long-term associate of Martin Margiela, Grognard helped to develop the aesthetic of disguise that became a key part of Margiela’s label’s identity. Models walking for the designer’s shows over the years variously had their identities concealed by veils, hairpieces and dark paint. In recent years, Maison Martin Margiela has even released a pair of sunglasses resembling the black graphic strip placed over the eyes of a photographic subject to preserve her anonymity. The mask, in European tradition, suggests an inversion of the natural order of things: monstrousness, transgression, subterfuge and, more recently, sex play. Its association with covert behaviour also extends to the idea of exclusivity – only the initiates know the identity of those behind the masks.

large extent we derive a sense of our own identity from the responses to us that we read in the facial expressions of those around us. A face that gives off signs of sexual excitement (wet, engorged lips, sparkling eyes, heightened cheek colour) creates a reciprocal good feeling. It’s another mask, of course, applied via lipstick, kohl and blusher, and regularly modified by cosmetics manufacturers to create a total look that allows every woman to conform to the ideal standard of the moment. There are other forces out there besides Inge Grognard that are paying considerable attention to facial uniqueness over standard beauty. Biometric technologies that allow computers to recognise human faces have turned out to be much trickier to develop than anticipated, largely because facial recognition is words

These are all associations that have enhanced the reputation of Maison Martin Margiela, not least because the designer, too, kept himself hidden – his identity was the ultimate secret for the highest level in the club of initiates. Grognard, though, explains her interest in masking as more of a straight-up protest, making self-evident the artifice that is her currency as a makeup artist, and rejecting the power given to her to make all subjects conform to a uniform standard of beauty. She likes to design around scars and strangeness; she once created a gothic makeup for the designer Jurgi Persoons that emphasised his infected, weeping, bloodshot eye; nothing, she says, bores her so much as perfection. The language of the face is perhaps the most universally understood of all languages. The face is what we look to for identity – we recognise others by facial features, and to a

Hettie Judah

an incredibly complex skill. Those working in the field estimate that 50 percent of human brain function goes into vision, with the major part of that devoted to facial recognition. One wonders how a facial recognition system would deal with the vast numbers of the young female population currently trying to redesign their faces to look like Cheryl Tweedy’s. Perhaps boring perfection, the doll-like mask of total, fashionable makeup, becomes under such circumstances the most powerful mask of all – its very conformity escaping notice, and leaving its wearer blandly anonymous. Imagine if the popular adoption of fashionable makeup actually masked transgression on a mass scale; in a society increasingly paranoid about surveillance, the phrase ‘women wear makeup’ might even be turned from a sneer into a call to arms. Inge Grognard/Ronald Stoops was published by Ludion in September

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ArtReview

Martin Margiela, Collection AW 96/97, 1996 (March, Paris). Courtesy Maison Martin Margiela, Inge Grognard, Ronald Stoops

Could wearing too much makeup be more empowering than not wearing any?

There’s something about Mary (life size)

Mauro Perucchetti

Opens 8 October 2010

24 Bruton Street London W1J 6QQ +44 (0)20 7659 7640 [email protected] www.halcyongallery.com/mauro

What to see this month by

KAROLA KRAUS

Director, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig (MUMOK), Vienna

1  Beautiful Klosterneuburg: Albert Oehlen Hangs Paintings from Sammlung Essl Essl Museum, Klosterneuburg, near Vienna to 30 January www.essl.museum Albert Oehlen is of course best known as a painter: here, though, he presents his personal choice of works from the Essl Collection – which holds 42 of his works, though none will be on show. Oehlen’s selections, spread across seven rooms, also range across time. Though he has apparently planned to put together the exhibition on the spot after a visit to the storage facility, the artists he’s selected in advance range from unclassifiable Austrian painter and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser to Paul McCarthy to Heimo Zobernig.

2  Christian 4 Abstract Philipp Muller: Expressionist Ach wie gut dass New York niemand weiss Artelier Contemporary, Graz 23 September – 4 December www.galerie-edition-artelier. at Christian Philipp Müller’s art is always alert to its surroundings. Green Border (1993), his photographic project, featured him clandestinely crossing Austria’s rural borders on foot; a recent project in Styria, Burning Love (Lodenfüssler) (2010), found him diversely using loden, the local cloth, to underscore the unfixed relationship between materials and the meaning, making it variously into a massive garment for many people and a sculpture. For this exhibition, he plans a site-specific project using sculptures, films and videos.

3 J eder Kunstler ist ein Mensch! Positionen des Selbstportraits Staatliche Kunsthalle BadenBaden, to 21 November www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de The self-portrait has been an aspect of artistic production since the fifteenth century, but its development in recent decades has not received a great deal of attention. This exhibition, at my former home, aims to consider this area of activity, and the ways in which artists have used photography to conduct a critical examination of the genre, via the work of artists including Bruce Nauman, Martin Kippenberger, Cindy Sherman, Katharina Sieverding and Andrea Fraser.

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Museum of Modern Art, New York 3 October – 25 April www.moma.org New York was the hometown of Abstract Expressionism, and MoMA inevitably has a vast store of works – the best in the world – by the movement’s progenitors. This show, put together by Ann Temkin, draws entirely upon it. It traces Ab Ex’s development from the 1940s to the 60s via some 300 works by 30 artists, from Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning to Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Mark Rothko.

5 Art Forum Berlin Exhibition Grounds Messe Berlin, Palais am Funkturm, Hammarskjöldplatz, BerlinCharlottenburg, 7–10 October Germany’s biggest art fair, now in its 15th year, features galleries from the world’s art centres presenting art from 1960 to the present day. This being a moment when curators, collectors, dealers, artists and museum directors are particularly attracted to the city, it’s also when the city’s galleries and museums pull out the stops - there’s a particularly timely show, The Tourist Syndrome, at the NGBK.

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, 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

top five

Hans Op de Beeck Sea of Tranquillity

A New Concise Reference Dictionary

Bb baboon to bureaucracy

baboon A large monkey with a long face, doglike teeth,

large lip and buttock callosities. Vocally dislikes good contemporary art. bad art The enjoyment of poor quality, bad art is a form of high-locus context exhilaration in the presence of incompetence and failure, in many instances related to liminal schadenfreude performativity. Approving reference to bad art has become a commonplace, and should lead to mimetic crisis – and for over 80 years, it has. See camp. banana Motif used in 1990s contemporary art practice. banishment A locus consequence of transgressive breaches of coded artworld dominance hierarchy systems, in which the banished are denied a) art press attention, b) eye contact at art openings and c) access to cocaine rituals, all thus leading to professional death. baroque The Baroque was a characteristic locus artistic style of the seventeenth century; also a recontextualised ahistorical paradigm summary pejorative that describes ordinate complication made for its own sake. Used in respect of false kinds of high intellectual ecstasy, in which the artist seeks to overwhelm his or her audience with an appeal to knowledge formulas complicated by overt, ornamental rhetoric theologies. (See also hidden key.) For this reason such art is often vilified. However, both the artist-agent antagonists and bellicose-victim-complainant audiences of such art are parties to a mutually pleasurable bargain, in which each is able to claim a high piety status payoff, meaning that both are complicit. Other colluding parties in this triangulating pact situation are the curatorial and arts administration authorities who encourage antagonistvictim strategies so as to further their own piety agendas in respect of audience and funding categories, based on expanded social energy targets. barylalia Indistinct ‘thick’ speech and/or poor articulation. See pub (bar) and drugs. basketry A basket is a woven container made of materials such as wood, reed, cane, rattan or rush, often with a handle or handles. It is usually light in weight. Among the 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

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 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. belief It is claimed in various supposition propositions that all artists have a faith belief of some kind in astrology, humanism or nihilism. See apathy, bewilderment, religion, suicide. benefactor A benefactor is one whose quiet desire is to create joy, purpose and meaning in the world. bestiality A common theme among both male and female video artists, but with a slight bias drift towards the female. bewilderment Many art-critical terms are embarrassment synonyms for bewilderment, which is a term commonly avoided, as it implies a diminished knowledge status. See sublime. biennial (biennale) A replicating number of almost identical art events, so common as needing to be kept geographically and durationally ringfenced. bitch See bastard. body A site of meaning, commencing at the anus and terminating everywhere else. bones Extremely common installation prop and visual motif. See cliché, skull. book Outdated locus terminus term for a text. boredom A common durational strategy in video art. bricolage A locus process by which, in the same way a pig becomes pork when served for dinner, so bric-a-brac becomes bricolage when it has a catalogue essay and footnotes written about it. brushwork The most common art material of all is white paint, of which it is estimated that over 100 million gallons are used annually worldwide to paint gallery walls. No brushstrokes are apparent, as paint is applied using rollers, which confer a mechanically stippled ‘orange peel’ effect. bureaucracy Self-generated bureaucracies created by artists, in which they fetishise unnecessary organising statements and conceptual models. Similar to the process in which, it is said, victims can themselves become abusers. buttocks See anus. words

Neal Brown

Cornerhouse and Abandon Normal Devices festival present:

02 October 2010 – 28 November 2010

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

02 October 2010 – 09 January 2011

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.

70 Oxford St, Manchester M1 5NH www.cornerhouse.org

Walid Raad Sweet Talk: Commissions (Beirut) (detail), 1987-present. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; and Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg and Beirut.

Walid Raad Whitechapel Gallery

Miraculous Beginnings 14 October 2010 – 2 January 2011

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

HULAHOOP

A PROJECT FEATURING A GROUP ExHIBITION, TALKS, PERFORMANCES, SCREENINGS ANd A LIBRARY.

HELENE APPEL, BEATE GüTSCHOW, SARA MACKILLOP, URSULA MAYER, JOST MüNSTER, GILES ROUNd, FRANz ERHARd WALTHER 17 SEPTEMBER - 30 OCTOBER 2010

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

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$12,000 01 FROM

$75 05

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03 FROM

Price 05 on request

£100

01 Robert Moog, who died five years ago age seventyone, is one person who can definitively be labelled a music pioneer. A very early version of the keyboard-led synthesizer that bears his name was demonstrated at a conference in 1964, and the instrument – or tool, as its inventor preferred to think of it – became ubiquitous by the end of that decade. Celebrating its enduring appeal through talks, workshops, screenings and gigs (including Devo, pictured) is Moogfest in the good doctor’s birth town of Asheville, North Carolina.

02 Alex Katz’s exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery (on until 21 September) provides a reminder of how much expression, sense of personality and circumstance the artist is able to convey in his colour-blocked subjects. The lack of detailing is reminiscent of fashion sketches, and indeed the artist gives as much weight to the dress of the sitter as he does to her face. Neptune Fine Art is offering an edition by the New York artist, in which we see Ulla, a lady of seeming icy glamour, striking a pose.

03 In an edition of 60, this framed photographic print by Alexander and Susan Maris takes its title, The Pursuit of Fidelity, from their exhibition at Edinburgh’s Stills (through 24 October), which in turn references the caption from a fifteenthcentury tapestry of a pair of lovers following a stag: ‘we are hunting for fidelity and if we find it we would rather live in no dearer time’. Here, running between symbolic myth and photographic realism, the artists likewise capture a fleeing stag, a sense of fictional reenactment pervading.

www.neptunefineart.com

www.stills.org

www.moogfest.com

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04 The London Design Festival offers up some entertaining highlights: robotic arms, from an Audi car plant, are being installed in Trafalgar Square for public play; an exhibition of graphic artist Barney Bubbles (he of many a Hawkwind LP’s artwork) at Chelsea Space; and Finnish food and design coming together in a temporary restaurant. There’s stuff to buy too – including these rather nice wine decanters appropriately titled Minaret. They form part of an exhibition by design duo Hamilton Turksoy at the Mint boutique. www.londondesignfestival. com

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Price 05 on request

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05 Christie’s has come in on October’s London art-fair game. The Multiplied fair, as the name suggests, will deal exclusively in prints and editions – marking it out from Frieze and its rivals. Given the nature of the product, specialists such as Counter Editions – who are offering John Baldessari’s 2009 edition Brain/Cloud (With Seascape and Palm Tree) (pictured) – mix with blue-chip commercials (White Cube), young upstarts (Bearspace) and nonprofits (the ICA and Dundee Contemporary Arts). A welcome addition to the month’s art carnival.

06 The Whitechapel’s annual art book fair mixes books about art with independents offering books that are art. In the latter camp sit the likes of Böhm Kobayashi – presenting their range of subject-themed fanzines; and the p’s & q’s press, who are selling City Cypher: Berlin, the third instalment of Leonie Lachlan’s ongoing linocut relief guides to major cities. Her previous two assiduously crafted creations, concentrating on Paris and São Paulo (pictured), won the Birgit Skiold award at last year’s fair.

07 Michelle Cotton is coming to the end of her 18month curatorial bursary at Cubitt gallery. This bursary has provided the launch platform for many a talent over the last ten years: Munich Kunstverein’s Bart van der Heide, the British Art Show’s Tom Morton and the Showroom’s Emily Pethick are all alumni. To celebrate its decennial anniversary, these and more have nominated an artist each to create an edition for a new boxed print portfolio. John Stezaker’s contribution, as put forward by Matthew Higgs, is pictured.

08 We all know that the UK doesn’t produce anything anymore: it’s all service industry. Yet artists persist in turning out objects. Not the WITH collective. For a fee, they provide Life Enhancement Solutions: whether it be staying a constant age on your behalf (through a yearly rotating roster of collective members); undergoing sex fantasies for you (a lot less messy with a standin); or, for £100, taking the blame for your misdeeds (invoice pictured). Visit Rokeby for a range of options to suit you.

www.multipliedartfair.com

www.whitechapelgallery.org

www.cubittartists.org.uk

www.rokebygallery.com

ArtReview 61

Lindsay Seers It has to be this way 2

It has to be this way² (Book Cover) © Lindsay Seers and Matt’s Gallery, London, 2010

9 October –11 December 2010 Exhibition preview Friday 8 October, 6.30pm–9pm

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 COMMA26

13 October - 4 december

Adrian paci COMMA28

elina Brotherus COMMA27

Julien Bismuth COMMA29

OpeNiNg HOurs Mon - Sat, 11am - 6pm Sun 19 September & Sun 17 October, 11am - 6pm Thu 4 November till 9pm Free AdMissiON NeArest stAtiONs Moorgate & Liverpool Street

Une Idée, une Forme, un Être – Poésie/ Politique du corporel 25th September – 28th November 2010 Opening: Friday, 24th September 2010, 6pm Ai Weiwei Regina José Galindo Teresa Margolles Gianni Motti Eftihis Patsourakis Pamela Rosenkranz Martin Soto Climent Loredana Sperini Alina Szapocznikow

MM_ArtReview_18.8.indd 1

Displaced Fractions – Über die Bruchlinien in Architekturen und ihren Körpern 11th December 2010 – 20th February 2011 Opening: Friday, 10th December 2010, 6pm

Bloomberg spACe 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD +44 20 7330 7959 [email protected] www.bloombergspace.com

Opening hours Tues / Wed / Fri 12 pm – 6 pm Thurs 12 pm – 8 pm Sat /Sun 11am – 5 pm. Thursdays 5 pm – 8 pm, entrance is free of charge. New address for exhibition visits migros museum für gegenwartskunst / Hubertus Exhibitions Albisriederstrasse 199a, 8047 Zürich The migros museum für gegenwartskunst is an institution of the MigrosKulturprozent. migrosmuseum.ch hubertus-exhibitions.ch migros-kulturprozent.ch

With a.o. : Phyllida Barlow Ulrich Rückriem Oscar Tuazon Klaus Winicher A collaboration project with Siemens Stiftung

12.8.2010 15:33:47 Uhr

dispatches

digested

Other Space Odysseys

It’s what we think you should swallow, or spit out

Faker Drinker Soldier Heiress By Clunie Reid Produced in ultra-high-gloss (a UV finish apparently), this limited-edition artist’s book mimics to the point of ridicule the fetishistic finish of the high-end fashion magazine. Containing no text, just 64 pages of ripped-up, defaced multimedia imagery, it continues Reid’s excavation of the motifs and signifiers of commodity-driven culture. The result is a purposely ugly mess of wriggling bodies, gurning faces and prosaic captioning: a nightmarish vision of the media-fed mind. To reaffirm the point that this is not a commentary on anything other than a real-world state of affairs, the container for these collaged visions, a mirrorlike foil cover, reflects back an image of you, the reader. Oliver Basciano Bookworks, £17.95 (softcover)

Geographical Analogies By Cyprien Gaillard When Cyprien Gaillard, chronicler of ruins ancient and modern, was looking for the best way to photograph typical California trees, he turned his Polaroid camera at a 45-degree angle, taking images that, when developed, should be seen diamond-sideup. Collecting the images in groups of nine, Gaillard placed these too in a diamond formation – three rows of three. Placing the nine images this way guides the eye to read them in a spiral, coming to rest on the central image, but it also creates a strong contrast with Gaillard’s favoured subject matters, which are most often vertical objects on horizontal planes – pillars, columns, condemned high-rise flats, hotels and trees. Geographical Analogies brings together 107 of these collections, which Gaillard has been producing meticulously in a format which is itself a ruin in progress. Although, as Gaillard intends, the Polaroid will fade (and indeed the earliest collections at the front of the book are already bleaching out nicely), this book will keep them alive for a little longer, allowing us to see Gaillard’s elegant corralling of graveyards with golf courses, Glasgow with Angkor and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) with a dinosaur themepark. Though ruins are something of a voguish subject for art writing right now (see this month’s book reviews), Gaillard makes a strong case for being their best chronicler and philosopher, without ever saying a word. Laura McLean-Ferris JRP|Ringier, £48/$90/€60 (hardcover)

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Eds. Giovanna Borasi & Mirko Zardini Riffing on the notion that what humanity discovered when it started exploring space was not the beauty of the stars but the beauty of the earth, this catalogue seeks to suggest that thinking about how we might design structures for a future in outer space can inform the way we design structures for living on earth. Published to coincide with an exhibition at Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture featuring the work of Los Angeles-based architects Greg Lynn and Michael Maltzan, along with Alessandro Poli of the nowdefunct 1970s architecture collective Superstudio, this book is a thoroughly entertaining homage to sci-fi. Of course, architects generally don’t make a habit or, more to the point, a living, out of designing space stations, death stars or offworld terraforming facilities, and consequently, as in the classic Hollywood space drama scenario, there’s not always enough fuel in these astronauts’ thrusters for them to quite make it back to base. Stringing together Lynn’s designs for planets in a Hollywood movie and a virtual world for an exhibition at MoMA, Maltzan’s designs for a new building for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and Poli’s (now) retro-looking collages of 1970s astronautica can make the space conceit wear a bit thin. But that’s easily forgivable, as is Borasi’s incredibly shonky interview technique (to Maltzan: ‘What is your aim with this exhibition that we are doing together?’) – what respectable space odyssey doesn’t contain a bit of schmaltz? Mark Rappolt Canadian Centre for Architecture/ Lars Müller Publishers, £22.99/$35 (softcover)

Three Stories By Kurt Schwitters

The Articulate Surface: Ornament and Technology in Contemporary Architecture By Ben Pell A commonsense view of what architecture should ‘do’ might run along the following lines: keep the roof up, the rain out, the light flooding in and, these days, the utility bills cheap. Anything beyond that is an excess, and modesty is the watchword of our recessionary times. You don’t need buildings to entertain or offer a running commentary on the human condition. That’s what Twitter’s for. This is a collection of 36 recent(ish) architectural projects that argue the opposite. And that the architecturally superficial doesn’t need to be culturally superficial. The book’s essential argument is that surface and ornament are the interfaces through which architecture engages with popular culture, and that digital technologies have enhanced architecture’s ability to control these interfaces as never before. Underlying all that is the notion that architecture has to engage with a mass audience in order to be relevant. And relevance, in this case, means being able to take part in social, political and cultural discourses. The only downside? Given that the bulk of this book follows the all-too-familiar gazette of image + caption that is the default setting for most mainstream architecture publishing, you may well wonder why you need to spend this amount of money on something you ought to be able to get from a Google image search for free. MR Birkhauser, £55.95/$115 (hardcover)

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 microfictions are surreal glimpses into the imagination of the artist, who creates unnerving psychological landscapes in the three narratives, most notably in ‘The Story of the Flat and Round Painter’ (1941), about an artist who is able to paint ‘round’ figures in the air rather than flat ones on canvas. Sadly, however, his figures always inflate and pop, dying like bursting bubbles. To save his painted figures – pretty queens and slender-fingered pageboys – he paints himself, though he too explodes into tiny fragments. It’s a lingering visual image that, once read, seems inextricably related to Schwitters’s collages. Also included in this volume is an article and subsequent set of argumentative letters written by the artist’s friends and family members during the course of 1958, all originally published in a certain Art News and Review (as ArtReview was formerly titled). LMF Tate Publishing, £9.99 (hardcover)

A Hedonist’s Guide to Art Ed. Laura K. Jones This genuinely has to be the most depressing book I’ve ever encountered. Utter, cretinous tedium across 320 pages, in which a zoo of artworld folks – many of whom I would cross the floor at a party to avoid – spin their ultimately dull stories of ‘outrageous’ behaviour (as edited by Laura K. Jones). It’s hard to entertain why anyone would think to publish this, let alone how it could garner any readers. Those contributors you have heard of trot out astonishingly tired copy: Brian Sewell repeats his oft-heard opinion that the critic must maintain no industry friends; Sue Webster tells a story of unremitting, sickening smugness about a weekend of free booze and partying; Fergus Henderson gives some ramble about the good old days of the YBAs. Many others, bar a bit of clueless propaganda from culture minister Ed Vaizey, just seem to be a roundup of Jones’s friends (a quick web search dredges up a litany of party-page pouting between editor and contributors), and they hardly ever offer any incisive commentary. It’s a shame, as it could prove an interesting subject: are artists set apart from the rest of us, not subject to the same economic and social laws, or should they be professionals, paid for providing an intellectual service? Instead we get this: ‘We were dropped off at Damien’s place – a beautiful villa with its own pool…’ (from Paul Fryer); ‘It’s 1.30 am in the exclusive 63rd floor Sky Casino of the Wynn Hotel Las Vegas. I still have a hangover from the evening before…’ (Keith Tyson, who should know better); and (from Danny Chadwick), ‘I am not good at class A drugs but they gave me some in my sleep, and the effect was a strange homosexual episode’ featuring fellatio and a famous artist our lawyer advises against naming. Fact? Fiction? Who cares? OB Filmer, £15/$18 (softcover)

Toby Ziegler

The Alienation of

Zabludowicz Collection 7 October –12 December 2010 Thursday–Sunday, 12– 6pm and by appointment Free Entry 176 Prince of Wales Road London NW5 3PT Tel. +44 (0)20 7428 8940 [email protected]

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

Also showing at Better Bankside, 5 Burrell St, London SE1 0UL 29 September – 10 October 2010 Plus artists’ talks and screenings across London. For more information visit: freetoair.org.uk

A PROJECT BY ERGIN ÇAVU OGLU at peer 99 hoxton street london n1 6ql

Commissioned and presented by Film and Video Umbrella in collaboration with PEER Film and Video Umbrella

on view

calling the shots Are the video artists of the 1990s leading the way in experimental cinema? of features such as McQueen’s Cannes Caméra d’Or-winning Hunger (2008), perhaps the most pivotal recent instance of an artist successfully making a feature film. All this activity raises questions: why is it that artists are taking on the task of producing a feature, and choosing to present their work to a very different audience than the one they are used to? And what does it mean for video art? The traffic hasn’t been entirely one-way: some filmmakers, such as Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, British director Duane Hopkins and French New Wave director Agnès Varda, are showing interest in the gallery platform, but it is the move from gallery to cinema that has been most 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

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 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 Taylor-Wood’s film Nowhere Boy (2009), about the life of the young John Lennon, and Shirin Neshat’s masterful Women Without Men (2009), which was awarded the Silver Lion in Venice in 2009. Turner Prize-winner Gillian Wearing, who has worked for years with the documentary format, is screening a feature film entitled Self Made in Manchester this month for Abandon Normal Devices, a festival of new cinema and digital culture. Fiction and documentary overlap in Wearing’s film, which features a group of people taking part in method-acting workshops who have been given the chance to create, and ultimately become, their own new characters. Much has been made of the shift from gallery to cinema. Before the announcement that it was to be axed as part of governmental austerity measures, the UK Film Council – which supported Wearing’s film – had stated its plans to invest more heavily in artist-made films, particularly following the success

however, are diverse, operating within different genres. Some, such as Nowhere Boy, are conventional linear narratives told over three acts. (Indeed, though the film received warm reviews from the film press, art critics were flummoxed by its lack of artistic flourish). Others, Hunger and Women Without Men among them, retain more of their makers’ signature concerns. Still, they are films rather than pieces of art largely on the basis of intent: their creators set out to make a feature film rather than an extended piece of video art. Women Without Men was fantastical in its subject matter and structure, as well as being decidedly cinematic in its sweep and scale. And while the structure of Hunger was radical (moving from a horror film in the first act, to a staggeringly intense 17-minute single take of a piece of dialogue and finally onto its protagonist’s martyrdom), it too was understandable as a piece of cinema. The films of Julian Schnabel are categorised as film rather than artwork, while some artists whose practices take inspiration from cinema produce their own paeans to the medium’s genres. Cindy Sherman’s riotous 1997 film Office Killer, for instance, was the sort of B movie schlock-fest referenced in some of her best photography. Though heterogeneous, artist-made films, as opposed to art films – Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 (2005) and Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane (2006) come to mind as recent examples of the latter – are perhaps better defined as films through their attitudes towards narrative. What they bring to the medium is a daring approach to structure and photography. Neshat points out that “each artist’s attraction and degree of indulging in the cinematic language is unique. Some remain more artistic, and their films appear more or less

as an extended video installation, where others go directly after making a conventional narrative.” Gillian Wearing echoes this: “I don’t stop being an artist when I make a film. People have done that. You could do things in a very traditional way, but, you know, I think there are so many good filmmakers out there who already do that.” On the judging panel for this month’s Jarman Award, which was inaugurated in the UK only two years ago, celebrating artists working in film and awarding them a prime-time spot on Channel 4 to screen their work, Wearing is keen for the medium to be pushed. “I never really sat down and studied any guidebook about how to make a film”, she says. “Everything I was doing was exploration, and I never really wanted to make something that was generic.” When artists are asked why they choose to make films, the issue of democratic access often surfaces. “I suppose mainly I wanted to see if I could cross boundaries and reach a new audience”, Neshat says. “I feel that there is a democracy in filmmaking. The viewer could see a film by paying for a ticket, but as video installations they become collectable items and not possible to distribute, therefore they remain mainly as commodities. Another interesting factor is that to see a film one does not need an education in film history, whereas I cannot imagine going to a gallery and museum to understand any work of contemporary art without needing some general knowledge and education in art.” Tracey Emin, after making the autobiographical feature film Top Spot in 2004, about a young girl growing up in Margate, told The Guardian at the time: ‘It was just a sweet thing. The idea of an art film going to a mainstream space. words

Laura Allsop

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compared the rise in artist-made films to that of video art in the early 1990s: “When that first started, people thought it would have a very short shelf-life. And it’s great that it’s carried on and that it’s not going to go away.” Crucially, what artists bring to film – a medium primarily concerned with seeing – are fresh ways of viewing the world. “To me, the most important thing in filmmaking is that there is always experimenting going on”, says Wearing. “It happens all the time in art.” Gillian Wearing’s feature film, Self Made, will have its UK premiere on 2 October at this year’s Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester (1–7 October). The winner of the 2010 Jarman Award, selected from a shortlist of Spartacus Chetwynd, Ben Rivers, Zineb Sedira and Emily Wardill, will be announced at a special event on 5 October at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. The gallery will also host a day of screenings on 2 October Self Made, 2010, dir Gillian Wearing

That’s all; I liked the idea of it being on in Liverpool for three nights, or Manchester for three nights; of people going and paying their three quid and not feeling like they’d thrown themselves into the arena of contemporary art.’ Not all film and video artists wish to make the transition, however. Lithuanian artist Deimantas Narkevicius, who contributed a short for the UK’s LUX/Independent Cinema Office Artists Cinema Programme earlier this year and has screened work at the British Film Institute, says: “Of course, the differences are kind of disappearing. Now video artists are introducing successful feature-filmmaking practices into their video practice, and vice versa. There’s not much difference any more between a filmmaker and a video artist. The difference is in scale and about engagement and budget. It’s a bigger challenge and, in a way, a risk.” It is this that leaves him reluctant to abandon video art for feature filmmaking. “I like the autonomy that visual artists have, circulating within galleries and museums. I think this is very important. The film scene is far less experimental. It’s more about a model for success. I know it’s fascinating for artists to make films, but I would prefer that the video art scene maintain its autonomy.” Filmmaking is an expensive venture, and the realms of art and film are very different: it’s surely no accident that they are demarcated respectively as a world and as an industry. Yet even in these financially straitened times, and even with the coming demise of the UK Film Council, artists are willing to take on the risky business of producing feature films. McQueen is currently developing a film about the musician Fela Kuti and Neshat is also reportedly at work on a new feature. Wearing

Beaux Arts

Marilène Oliver www.beauxartslondon.co.uk [email protected]

Carne Vale

22 Cork Street, London W1S 3NA +44 (0)20 7437 5799

October 6 to November 6

On view 25 june 2009. Evening. I’m in London’s Soho having dinner with Slater Bradley. The Brooklynbased artist is in town for the opening of an 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 London, however, we’re simply waiting for burgers. Just before they arrive, Slater’s phone begins to hum – SMS whispers that Michael Jackson has died way back west, in LA. What follows is not a mouthful of beef and relish, but rather a series of feverish attempts to confirm the reports from waiters, fellow diners and various mobile Internet devices. Because celebrity gossip site TMZ, at that point the only outlet carrying the story, was a source neither of us was prepared to designate ‘reliable’. And while I’m not now clear as to why we thought having an anonymous waiter confirm the rumour would have, by some strange alchemy, transformed that rumour into fact, it seemed to make perfect sense at the time. In fact everything did. It had been a long time since I’d thought anything at all about Jackson and his various doings. Indeed I’m not sure that I ever had. But there was a certain thrill in this sudden obsession with him and his life. And it involved feeling that

We care a lot While it may seem that he’s documenting obsessive fan culture and an information-saturated age, Slater Bradley, whose latest videowork premieres at the Whitney this month, actually digs deep into the roots of raw emotion, human relationships and the creation of identity the most basic obstacles to engaging with it. The artist is perhaps best known for his explorations of celebrity adulation as documented in his Doppelganger Trilogy (2001–4), consisting of faked fan-made videos of performances by the suicided singers Ian Curtis (Family Archives, 2001–2) and Kurt Cobain (Phantom Release, 2003, and the then-alive (if not exactly healthy) Michael Jackson (Recorded Yesterday, 2004), all played by Benjamin Brock, an actor selected because of his qualities as Bradley’s own words Mark Rappolt

I cared about something in a way that could be shared with someone else. Unless, of course, I’m mistaken (or just overly optimistic about myself), and the thrill was simply due to the sudden and sensational manner of MJ’s death. I realise that one thing we might conclude from this brief vignette is that, fundamentally, I’m an uncaring person. Or at best, that in general I don’t care enough. I wasn’t bothered when Diana died; I went on holiday to miss all the fuss. If I hadn’t been with Slater, MJ’s death wouldn’t have raised much more than an eyebrow and perhaps a mild “oh”. And in case you’re wondering, the date with which this narrative started wasn’t etched into my memory. I had to look it up. In fact, now that I think back on it, perhaps I had succumbed to some sort of derivative of Stockholm syndrome. But let’s not make this all about me. There’s no doubt that the process of succumbing is simultaneously one of the key subjects of much of Bradley’s work and one of

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lookalike. On the one hand you may think that you were never that interested in Curtis, Cobain or Jackson (you have different tastes) and simply rush on by these works; on the other, Bradley’s trilogy rather elegantly, and concisely, unpacks the lure of celebrity and the mechanics of social identification today: Brock, Bradley, celebrity singers, all blending into one another, passing in and out of each other’s bodies. It’s like watching James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), except that rather than running around some alien planet, the avatars in these works facilitate our roaming around a planet (as recorded in a YouTube library) that looks and feels exactly like our own. As in Avatar, in which humans use avatars in order to get close to and examine an alien race, Bradley’s Doppelganger works examine the ways in which we become close to other people and certain ways in which society’s subcultures cohere. My MJ moment, for example. There’s a distinct hint of the creepy in all this – as in, say, The Silence of the Lambs (1991) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), in which faceless or alienated psychopaths attempt to find a place in society by creating new

Slater Bradley and Ed Lachmans, Shadow, 2009-10 (production still), high-definition video, colour, five-channel surround sound; 13 min 30 sec. Collection of the artists. Courtesy Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid; Max Wigram Gallery, London; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and Team Gallery, New York

On view

Slater Bradley and Ed Lachmans, Shadow, 2009-10 (production still), high-definition video, colour, five-channel surround sound; 13 min 30 sec. Collection of the artists. Courtesy Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid; Max Wigram Gallery, London; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; and Team Gallery, New York

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‘outfits’, literally stepping into their victims’ skins. There’s a certain level of adulation that flays the ‘celebrity’ from the venerated individual through a desire for knowledge of the obscure, mundane or trivial detail of their lives. The term doppelgänger is, in its folklore roots, intrinsically related to deception and evil. And understandably the talk at that Soho dinner table quickly turned to the possibility that one person present possessed a kiss of death. And to be clear, the owner of that potentially lethal smooch wasn’t me. The dead return in Bradley’s latest video, Shadow (2009–10), a collaboration with cinematographer Ed Lachman that references the film Dark Blood, which starred River Phoenix and was unfinished at the time of the actor’s death, in 1993, and has never seen the light of

day. Lachman was Dark Blood’s director of photography (something of a legend in his own right, his recent films include I’m Not There, 2007, and Howl, 2010). Shadow sees Boulevard… (and Brock) transported to Utah. Where in Boulevard… the central character, dressed in urban chic, wanders through crowded streets, in Shadow he’s dressed like a cowboy and wandering through an abandoned desert town. And naturally shades and shadows are what really populate the place. Not simply as a result of Lachman’s lighting but also in the presence of ghost figures, a scene in which Brock flicks through photographs of Phoenix on the set of Dark Blood and in the form of Brock/ Phoenix’s dog, called Shadow, who dies in the only fragment of Dark Blood to be found on YouTube. It’s hard not to think of Lachman as looking for auguries among the eviscerated town’s scattered entrails. The sense of haunting is certainly present when Lachman, speaking at a preview screening of the work, recalls the final scene he shot back in 1993. A version of Lachman’s comments, currently posted on the River Phoenix: Beautiful Angel website, reads thus: ‘We did ten takes of the soliloquy, the last day we shot with him on Dark Blood. It was in the cave… all lit by candles. After the last take, I didn’t turn off the camera. When we saw the dailies, for ten seconds River was in front of the camera, just a silhouette lit by ambient light. It was… eerie. People were crying. We knew it was the last we would see of River.’ This tracing of signs and symbols in footage that perhaps includes none is, I can’t help noticing, rather like the way in which one engages with a work like Shadow. Particularly if one is not equipped with the Dark Blood backstory. In fact, Bradley’s latest work introduces a whole new doppelgänger effect. Back when this magazine reviewed Boulevard of Broken Dreams (issue 34), writer Martin Coomer noted that Bradley’s work seemed to be getting better and better. After seeing Shadow, I can only repeat the same. Slater Bradley and Ed Lachman: Shadow is on show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 29 October – 23 January

$6+$=(52)5$11.,6,12'& DFU\OLFRQERDUG[FP ¿QHDUWFRP

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A powerful exhibition from the graffiti pioneer

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dr. FOurQuet 12, 28012 madrid. tel:(34) 91 468 05 06 FaX:(34) 91 467 51 34 e-mail:[email protected]

www.helgadealvear.com

September 16 – OctOber 30

HELENA ALMEIDA “bañada en lágrimaS”

OctOber 14 – 17

FRIEZE ART FAIR Stand a10

nOvember 11 – January 9

KATHARINA GROSSE

centrO de arteS viSualeS Fundación Helga de alvear

MÁRGENES DE SILENCIO WOrkS FrOm cOlección Helga de alvear 1963 – 2009 June 3, 2010 – January 9, 2011 cácereS, Spain

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Revolutions in Art and Science 1890–1935 bis 23.1.2011 MUMOK

MuseumsQuartier

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Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien www.mumok.at Mo–So 10.00–18.00 Do 10.00–21.00

30.08.2010 10:32:34 Uhr

A quarter-century ago, prior to the writing and recording of the Smiths’ 1986 album The Queen Is Dead, extraterrestrials contacted the band’s singer Morrissey and 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, 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 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 – announcing a royal death, obviously – features Alain Delon; and it was a Frenchman named Alain who announced Diana’s death. As for the extraterrestrials bit, it’s complicated, but involves Morrissey being a vegan, Moby, Moby-Dick (1851), Diana Dors, the 1985 Carl Sagan novel Contact, the 1997 film adaptation… Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana, then, is at once lost in a sea of lunacy and, up to a point, unnervingly plausible. Laumann – himself a certified Smiths fanatic who’d come across the Morrissey–Diana link online, articulated by pale Morrissey obsessives and conspiracy theorists – has said he does and doesn’t believe the theory. “If you follow the David Icke-like rhetoric of the narrator, it’s not surprising that aliens are behind it”, he states in an interview conducted by email. “They’re the only logical creators or innovators.” But this is not

Marginal Mainstream Lars Laumann’s videoworks prove that the edge and the centre are never that far apart the 2008 Berlin Biennial will be familiar, is that of a woman who fell in love with – and, in 1979, married – the Berlin Wall. The 23-minute film, featuring Laumann’s own footage, interviews and stringent objectivity, tells a strange but touching tale: Berliner-Mauer is ‘objectum-sexual’, meaning that she’s sexually attracted to objects and believes them to be alive. As she admits, this is essentially animism, and as in Morrissey, there’s a foreign logic in play: if you believe objects are alive, then you can surely fall in love with one. And if you’re married to the Berlin Wall, you will be devastated – as Berliner-Mauer was – when, in 1989, ‘he’ is attacked with sledgehammers. words

an either/or situation. The video bears the defining stripe of the Oslo-based artist’s work: concerning itself with deeply held but dubious ideas, it aims to reshape one’s presumptions about them. “The idea of these convictions or relationships can seem irrational beforehand”, says Laumann, “but if you still think that after you’ve seen the videos, then I’ve failed. To me, these are universal stories.” If that universality revolves around the human need to form attachments and give meaning to one’s life, then Morrissey… was merely the overture to another, more lengthily gestating project. “I started working on Berlinmuren [completed in 2008] many years earlier”, he says. “I’d made a few pieces [Laumann’s first show, in Reykjavík in 2004, featured his collection of E.T. figures, reflecting his fascination with people who claim to have had sex with aliens], but when I came across Mrs Berliner-Mauer and her approach to objects, it just seemed much more valid and true. At first I didn’t know what medium to use in order to tell her story. When I realised it was going to be video, I made Morrissey… to teach myself how to use it.” The story of Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, with which those who witnessed Laumann’s widely noted appearance in

Martin Herbert

“I wish the fall had never happened”, she says. “It is wrong that Germany is united again.” The Berlin Wall, she says, is “a German being”, deserving of respect. The video ends, implicitly defending her, with a grim meeting of East and West: onstage footage of David Hasselhoff, who performed at the Berlin Wall in 1989. Before this point, though, Berlinmuren has performed a bizarre twist: in it, via the Internet, Berliner-Mauer discovers that she isn’t the only person who’s in love with the Berlin Wall. The two women, at first suspicious of each other, reach a rapprochement upon realising that one loves the Wall as it is, the other as it was. “I have different approaches when building the narratives”, says Laumann, “and for Berlinmuren I was inspired by war dramas like Casablanca and The Search, and aesthetically by online videos made by people with severe Asperger’s syndrome”. But stretching one’s credulity and then stretching it again is a hallmark of Laumann’s films, as here and in the extraterrestrial theorems of Morrissey… And it’s a move performed most convincingly in Laumann’s most unsettling piece to date, Shut Up Child, This Ain’t Bingo (2009). 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

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

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Carlton Turner, a prisoner in Huntsville, Texas, who is on death row for shooting his adoptive parents, and invited him to collaborate on an art project. She eventually produces this, but not before the pair meet (albeit separated by a thick pane of glass in the prison’s visiting room); she, unexpectedly, begins to fall in love with him, and Carlton clearly develops feelings for her (that she’s pretty, smart and effusive doesn’t hurt). Kjersti moves into a trailer nearby, befriends a very religious woman named Eileen and – influenced by her – as the date of Carlton’s execution draws near, turns from a rational, articulate, sparky person into a true believer spouting magical thinking about the resurrection of the dead. Inevitably, what Kjersti hopes for doesn’t come to pass, and at the end of the film (shot six months after Carlton’s death) she has snapped out of her delusion, one that had lasted for several months. Shut Up Child, This Ain’t Bingo makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing: “Kjersti and I never really spoke about it afterwards. It does show her unorthodox side; some viewers may find her unsympathetic. But she told me to tell the story how I had to, and I did”, says Laumann. Yet it’s hard not to be convinced by the sincerity of her feelings; and there is, as repeatedly happens in Laumann’s work, a kind of abstract beauty to the compulsion on show. Still, Shut Up Child… is a moral minefield – almost everyone involved seems at once to be using someone else and doing it with the best of intentions – and one in which the question of ownership is raised. Whose story is this? Laumann himself appears in snapshots of Kjersti and her friends at the end of the film, and he was clearly in Texas. Yet some of the footage seems to have been shot not by him but by a British journalist, James Bluemel, who appears repeatedly in the film. Laumann, you sense, wants to vex the issue of authorship across his body of work. Morrissey… is essentially a multifarious heisting of material published on websites and theories floated in online chatrooms, of film footage and sleeve designs; Berlinmuren is someone else’s story, inspired by BerlinerMauer’s website, reframed and given new emphasis (with permission) by Laumann within the larger structure of his art. 80

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Laumann isn’t interested in pinning his work to a kind of Internet-shaped consciousness (“I don’t want to go on about how the Internet changed everything. It’s old news. We all know it did”). But he agrees that open-source ethics – ‘information wants to be free’, as Stewart Brand said back in 1984 – are germane to his art, which might be considered a responsible approach to appropriation. In the 11-minute Kari & Knut (2010), Laumann takes parts of a 1995 Iranian film adaptation of J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey (1961) and puts his own subtitles on it (ie, they don’t correspond to what’s said). The lead actress, a schoolgirl, talks about Helen Keller’s case of ‘cryptomnesia’, in which her first novel turned out to be an unconscious regurgitation of one she’d already read, so deeply had she internalised it. Scenes of Western books being burned recall Keller’s argument in a later book, written after German universities burned a book she’d written on socialism, that ‘history has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas’. Salinger, in his lifetime, refused to allow Franny and Zooey to be filmed; this Iranian version was itself unauthorised. “My author won’t allow any adaptations of my story”, the main character says at one point, expressing a vitality that won’t be contained by a writer’s wishes. What’s being articulated here, and elsewhere in Laumann’s work, is a productive conflation: of censorship and ownership (“copyright as a way of censoring”, as he says of Kari & Knut), and intolerance. Figuring a world predicated on authoritarian restriction and division, Laumann is arguing ardently for the defence of uncommon loves, obsessions and contextually marginal thinking while performing, via rampant appropriation and tweaking, indifference to agencies of control. So when Donald Rumsfeld and Margaret Thatcher appear in the two-minute Duett (2010), with their “beautiful lies” (as Laumann calls them) fed melodiously and hypnotically through Auto-Tune as they pontificate respectively on ‘unknown knowns’ and the rightness of sinking the General Belgrano, we’re not very far from the subject of those who they – or we – might judge worthy of calumny or exclusion for what they believe, or who (or what) they love. Does Laumann need to spell it out? “All my works are political”, he says. Lars Laumann’s solo exhibition is at the Kunsthalle Winterthur from 10 October to 21 November; Laumann will also exhibit at Maureen Paley, London, from 20 November to 9 January

from left: Kari & Knut, 2010, video for monitor, 11 min; Swedish Book Store, 2007, video for monitor, 2 min, 54 sec (loop). Both courtesy Maureen Paley, London

on view

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

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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 8 September – 24 October 2010 www.royalacademy.org.uk Ian McKeever, Hartgrove Painting No 10,1993-1994. Oil and acrylic on cotton-duck, 250 x 265 cm.

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Enrico Castellani. Superficie Argento, 1973 Acrylic on shaped canvas, 120 x 150 cm

38 Dover Street, London W1S 4NL

T: +44 (0) 207 409 1540 - F: +44 (0) 207 409 1565 [email protected] - www.robilantvoena.com Add silver3.indd 1

‘THE GALLANT APPAREL’ Italian Art and the Modern

27 September - 27 October 2010

Exhibition on view: Mon - Fri, 10am-6pm

23/08/2010 15:28

feature:

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s October – which means ar t lovers ever y where are turning their gaze to

London

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Indeed, the more prosperous among them are even coming here. What has come to be known as Frieze Week involves much more than the Frieze Ar t Fair, of course: increasingly, it’s also the moment for which institutions and galleries have been holding back their biggest and best shows. Here we profile our favourites among the ar tists exhibiting concurrently with that modest event in Regent’s Park – a lineup that is, naturally, as cosmopolitan as the London ar tworld itself. At the same time, ar tist Doug Fishbone profiles Londoners – a lineup that is as cosmopolitan as he can make himself.

por t rai t s : D a v i d H u g h e s C O ST U M E S : L i s s i e G i b b o n s hair / ma k eup : S u z y R y c r o f t

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Doug Fishbone E l m i n a, A r t N o w, Ta t e B r i t a i n

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 (videoCD) 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 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, selfselecting 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

Elmina, 2010, production stills. Photos: Thierry Bal. © and courtesy the artist and Rokeby, London

9 Oc tober – 2 Januar y

from top: Glass House (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010; Mazu, Turning (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010; Yishan Island, Dreaming (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. All © the artist and courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

feature: London

Inspired by the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004 (in which 23 Chinese cockle-pickers, all, it turned out, illegal immigrant labourers, drowned off the coast of Lancashire), and four years in the making, Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010) premiered at the Sydney Biennale earlier this year before being screened in Shanghai to coincide with the Expo. An ambitious nine-screen projection, configured in something approximating a spiral, the work is probably most accurately described as an experience or a piece of architecture. ‘Film’ doesn’t really do it justice (and unlike many works of film or video art, you don’t have the option of simply demanding a viewing copy and watching it on a computer screen). But perhaps the slippery nature of any definition of the work itself is appropriate to the experience it presents. In formal terms the setup allows Julien to present several types of shot – establishing, tracking, closeup – simultaneously and for the visual narrative to be variously atomised, sequenced or united as a whole. For the viewer, the microlabyrinthine structure proposes a multitude of ways in which the work might be experienced: you can’t see all the screens at once, but you get fragments of some as you’re looking at others; to get a true sense of the whole (it’s 49 minutes long), you need to be as much in motion as the images before you. Unusually, for something that is essentially filmic, the viewer is a source of animation, and his journey through the space and time of the installation parallels the narrative journey of the film. Of course, and it may be crass to say it, there is also the sense of being drowned in the work. Beginning with genuinely creepy (and genuinely genuine) recordings of emergency calls at the time of the tragedy as well as radio conversations involving helicopters searching for survivors, the work spans the geography of the Lancashire coast, the Yangtze River and Shanghai (past and present). It also features some of the iconic figures of recent Chinese cultural production: notably actresses Maggie Cheung and Zhao Tao, artist Yang Fudong and calligrapher Gong Fagen. As well as spanning a broad spectrum of arts (the project started when Julien commissioned the poet Wang Ping to write in response to Morecambe), Ten Thousand Waves deploys historic fables from Fujian Province (where most of the cockle pickers originated), ghost stories and a brief history of Shanghai cinema to explore the emergence of contemporary China and its flickering identity – from Maggie Cheung floating about in the guise of the goddess Mazu to police camera images of Morecambe Bay and the complex relationships of culture, power and alternate gazes these encapsulate – in a world being constantly reformed by the ebbs and flows of global communication and migration. And it’s hard not to think that Ten Thousand Waves, and the slow dances of form and content, spectator and spectacle that it sets up, represents something of a great leap forward in terms of what movingimage artworks can achieve. Mark Rappolt

Isaac Julien Te n T hou s a n d Wave s in Move: Choreographing You, Hay ward G aller y 13 Oc tober – 9 Januar y

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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. 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 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 for McCarthy’s communist witch hunts, his career not only destroyed by government interference, but his back catalogue of films and recordings withheld from 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

Ruth Ewan

a t Ro b Tu f n e l l ,

Frame, Frieze Ar t Fair

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Anti-Bell, 2010, event documentation. Commissioned by Radar, Loughborough University. Photos: Julian Hughes. Courtesy Rob Tufnell, London

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Pascal Hachem Bring the Boys Back Home Selma Feriani Galler y

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;  Keep Sharpening Your Knife and It Will Blunt, 2010, steel structure, knives, desert sand, plastic, engines, electrical box

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 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 twoday 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 cornkernel-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 How to Cross a Checkpoint in an Express Way. Here he casually removed a dozen or more layers of clothing before his audience – which, most obviously, replicates the Palestinian checkpoint experience. The work for which he has attained notoriety, though, has been his mechanised art, which at times has the savour of Rebecca Horn. Not all his recent work is mechanical, but it made an appearance in in.nate. ness, his Italian solo debut, at Rome’s Federica Schiavo Gallery over the summer. His Hush Hush (2010), for instance, finds a number of stone cubes, upon which rest pairs of children’s white cotton Y-fronts, backside up. Poised vertically above each stone is a wooden stick, each of which is, in turn, affixed to a mechanism that raises it 80cm into the air before dropping it upon the underwear. Over several hours, the repeated impacts leave stains upon the white cotton. Hachem says in.nate.ness grew organically out of specific aspects of each room in the gallery and also from being resident in Rome, where he spent three months before devising the works. “I tried to tackle… the issue of child abuse”, Hachem says of the exhibition, a theme that came to him, in part, he says, from the show’s proximity to the Vatican. In.nate.ness opened alongside Slow Food (2010), a site-specific installation in the city’s Cestia Pyramid – an Egyptianstyle tomb said to have been erected for the emperor’s banquet chief in the first century BC. The monument’s origin, and the traces left by tomb-robbers, inspired Hachem’s work. Upon a piece of white fabric on the floor he placed a single plate. Around its edge he placed 2,000 forks, tines down, one atop the other so that they radiated from the central circle in an irregular pattern, like a continent. The plate rested atop a pair of thin metal rods connected to electric motors. These shifted the plate ever so slightly, causing the forks to ripple in a manner not unlike reflective dominoes. It will be interesting indeed to see how Hachem’s new work ramifies within the confines of Selma Feriani Gallery, and in the sprawling expanse of London without. Jim Quilty

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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

Time never goes away: it is an omnipotent calculus, mediating every action of our day. In Christian Marclay’s new film The Clock (2010), the American artist, now based in London, has succeeded in manipulating time – flattening it out, speeding it up, extending it – all within the confines of a day. The concept is as simple (though a one-liner this isn’t) as the three-year process of making it was epic: thousands of movie fragments in which time is depicted, visually or vocally, spliced and edited into a 24-hour looped film. So far, so ambitious, but that’s not the half of it. Each movie-time clip references the same real-time minute in which the viewer is watching it. The Clock is a clock. The work tells you a lot about the construction of movies. Film time is a pliable material for the director, offering tension, plotting and circumstance. The characters in a film never experience downtime. They are always, even in the most quietly observed scenes, working their narratives in the service of the viewer. The scenes that take place in the early hours of the morning (White Cube, where the film is premiering, will be open all through the night on Fridays for the exhibition’s duration) are no exception. The movies don’t allow their protagonists to sleep. If you do see them slumbering, it is because action is around the corner, a nighttime disturbance being a plot necessity. Like Marclay’s previous forays into film montage, Video Quartet (2002) or Telephones (1995), for example, the editing is subtle, and despite this being one of the first multimedia works by Marclay not primarily dealing with sound as a subject matter, the artist has tuned his musician’s ear to the vagaries of the soundtracks, turning out something audibly rhythmic. Consequently the viewer’s interest in the inevitable game of spotthe-movie fades, leaving behind a strange nonsensical antinarrative 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

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Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010, single-channel video, 24 hr. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London

15 Oc tober – 13 November

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, 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

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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 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 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 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 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 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 know-it-all (in the sense that Claydon’s work points or winks at more-orless-obscure chunks of knowledge) while sidestepping charges of boastfulness, arrogance or condescension, because the knowledge so various locati 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 – 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

Steve Claydon Trom Bell to Bow Draps, Hotel 4 November Ar t Show 7: f the Comet , ons , Not tingham 9 Januar y

ArtReview 101

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Nina Beier What Follows Will Follow Laura Bar tlet t Galler y

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 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 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

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 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

Until 2 3 Oc tober

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; 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

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 LebaneseUS 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 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 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 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 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 ‘Lebanese’ artist, to be a marketable cultural commodity in the eyes of the ‘global’ artworld. Shrewdly eluding the 14 Oc tober – 2 Januar y official script, Raad keeps things real by acting out the story before it’s been written. J.J. Charlesworth

Walid Raad

Miraculous Beginnings Whitechapel Galler y

Mat thew Darbyshire

14 –17 Oc tober; and in B ritish Ar t Show 7: In the Days of the Comet , 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

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)

Frieze Projects: Ever y thing Ever y where

Lung Neaw 8:19, 2010. Photo: Cristian Manzutt. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery, London

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 oneway 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 hallowed for the free and unmediated airing of political and other polemics, mirrors the ambivalence of the passing pedestrian traffic. In emphasising the everyday, Tiravanija is metaphorically kicking away the very stage he has built for himself with this show, pouring scorn on the idea of the artist as visionary, placing himself instead in the realm of normality’s unique tedium. In this manner Tiravanija’s practice still provides no answers, just meetings. Oliver Basciano

Rirkrit Tiravanija Pilar Corrias 13 Oc tober – 1 December

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© 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 ROYAL

PUMP

ROOMS

L E A M I N G TO N S PA A r t Gal l e r y & Museum

25 years on, a selection of work from this seminal exhibition of landscape photography. 15 October 2010 - 27 March 2011 Free Admisson National Media Museum · Bradford · BD1 1NQ www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/faygodwin Tel: 0844 856 3797 Image - Fay Godwin, Flooded tree, Derwentwater, 1981. © The British Library Board

feature:

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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 curators are most happy inviting into the gallery space, at least in London, are contemporary dancers. Michael Clark’s dance company was in residence at Tate Modern for seven weeks over the summer; meanwhile an invitation has been extended to dance companies to come in and ‘respond’ to Claire Barclay’s sculptural installation Shadow Spans (2010), currently at Whitechapel Gallery. Filmmakers such as Tacita Dean and Wim Wenders have been making films that document the work of choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, as in Dean’s Craneway Event (2010), shown recently at Frith Street, or Pina Bausch, as though they have found the film-subject nonpareil, while many artists of a conceptual bent have begun choreographing dance works – Pablo Bronstein, Martin Creed, Emily Wardill and Keren Cytter among them. So what’s the deal? Why did these collaborations between dancers and artists, so common in the 1960s and 70s, tail off, and what’s making them such an attractive proposition again? Let’s start with the 1960s and Judson Dance Theater – a groundbreaking group of individuals working together in New York, which included dancers Simone Forti, Yvonne Rainer, Lucinda Childs and Trisha Brown, and involved artists such as Robert Morris. A renewed appetite for the postmodern dance of this era is currently discernible in London: Dance Umbrella will put on Merce Cunningham’s final work, Nearly Ninety (2009), this autumn, alongside a Celebrating Trisha Brown season. Yvonne Rainer will have a selected retrospective of films and installations, The Yvonne Rainer Project, at the BFI in November, which features Rainer’s installation After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid (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

the Hayward Gallery, which is hosting the performances of Rainer’s Trio A and is coproducing some key events during the Trisha Brown season, such as Brown’s Floor of the Forest (1970), a work in which dancers manoeuvre their way across a structure that looks like a washing line hung with clothes, slipping in and out of the bright garments. Works such as these, employing objects and structures as manipulative or choreographic elements, are the focus of this exhibition, and most often they choreograph the viewer as dancer. Rosenthal’s curatorial take on the relationship between art and dance in those intervening years identifies not amnesia but a shift in interest to darker, more psychological elements that might be deemed ‘choreography’. “In the 60s and 70s”, she says, “artists used sculptural elements to engage the body of the visitor, and to say: ‘Well, you perceive with and through the body, as well as with your eyes’. Artists and choreographers were interested in creating a form of participant, rather than spectator, activating the body, and that lasts until about the 80s; and then there is a different interest in choreography, which is more about manipulation and degenerated behaviour.” A defining example of this is Mike Kelley’s Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999), an installation that pulls together the behavioural experiments of American psychologist Harry Harlow on monkeys, the choreography of the American dancer Martha Graham and the set design – created for Graham’s performances – of sculptor Isamu Noguchi. Dancers interact with the various ‘stimuli’ or props, choreographed in a dancelike >

Rainer admits that she finds the current interest from art galleries ‘curious’ , given how expensive and complicated dance can be to programme

feature: DANCE

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feature: DANCE

manner, but in a way that recalls the antipsychiatry experiments of R.D. Laing – the dancers alternately punch and kick the props, before hugging them. Our entire upbringing, Kelley seems to imply, is choreography. We develop the personalities and positions that we do because of where we are, our educations and what is around us – a world of props and stage directions to direct us through life. This interest in manipulation is reflected, in the Hayward exhibition, in the works of Dan Graham, whose structures lead you around and about them, and in Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970), which leads you down a blind alley. It’s here that issues of dance, moving bodies and manipulation cross over with architecture, a theme that has been picked up in recent years by Pablo Bronstein, who was previously better known for his classically presented ink drawings that narrate fantasy mashups of the histories of eighteenth-century and postmodern architecture. Bronstein began using dancers, dressed in acid-bright unitards, to describe spaces, or to demonstrate the idea of public and corporate spaces, and has more recently been investigating the concept of sprezzatura, an elegant, demonstrative style of gesture developed in Italian Renaissance courts that was an admired form of complete artifice. In Move, dancers in the gallery space will occasionally react to decorative architectural features with sprezzatura gestures. Bronstein, however, works with the form of postmodern dance in a rather ambivalent way. As Rosenthal puts it, there is a ‘double floor’ in Bronstein’s works, in that it always looks like a 114 ArtReview

representation of something, never like something real. “It’s almost like he’s ‘using’ dance… I’m not sure how dancers would feel about that.” Bronstein seems to concur. “I kind of hated dance”, he says. “I always got really embarrassed at it because it always sort of felt very queer and gushing and something was wrong with it. A bit like I still feel about the theatre, but then dance became a very good tool for exploring architecture and exploring the body’s relation to ornamentation and to architectural ornament.” The dance commissions, however, keep on coming, and so Bronstein has been able to develop a repertoire of ballets. So why are those with the power to commission so keen on dance? Obviously there are many conditions and individuals who have contributed to this situation. However, when I search the past five years for a figure who provides a bridge for dancers who are finding themselves back in galleries and museums, I keep returning to Tino Sehgal. Sehgal’s background in dance and economics makes him the perfect figure to take the artworld from its most hedonistic, commercial, object-centric period and walk it through to a place where a word in the ear, a couple kissing or your own conversation can both subvert and be subsumed by the commercial system. Xavier Le Roy, whom Sehgal has danced with previously, will contribute ‘activators’ to the Hayward exhibition, who are trained to engage visitors in directed conversation, a method close in approach to Sehgal’s. The other element that makes dance from the 1960s onwards appear so appealing, however, is the degree to which it incorporates other art forms. Consider the collaborations between

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Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Cunningham, or Morris, Forti and Rainer, which somehow found their most generous statements in dance. The two contemporary projects that get closest to these kinds of positive breakdown in disciplines are both facilitated by dancers: dancer and choreographer Siobhan Davies’s continued collaboration with artists continues this autumn in ROTOR (2010), a dance which will be interpreted in different media by a selection of artists, including Angela de la Cruz and 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 architectural practice called Postworks and artist Daria Martin, and will be shown with alongside a further collaboration with Bronstein. Martin’s film of Butcher’s dance intends to capture the psychological landscape for the dancer, while the architect’s stage set is based on the dance notation of architect Bernard Tschumi as well as cages and grids somewhat informed by the dance. Bronstein is designing a stage set featuring moving columns for a second dance choreographed by Butcher. So does this signal a return to a more expansive period of cross-disciplinary collaboration for the artworld, one that finds its expression in dance? Rosenthal thinks not: “I think it’s related to generosity – people have to be generous with what they are doing, and I’m not sure where we’re at with that right now. You need to be willing to collaborate at real ground level, and not be worried about whose artwork it is. I don’t think we’re there in visual art right now. I think we would need to be somewhere else in society to experience something like that.” Claire Barclay’s installation Shadow Spans (2010) is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, through 2 May. Dance Umbrella’s Celebrating 116 ArtReview

Trisha Brown season is a multivenue festival in London, 5–30 October. The Yvonne Rainer Project can be seen at BFI Southbank, London, 26 November – 23 January. Move: Choreographing You is at the Hayward Gallery, London, 13 October – 9 January. ROTOR is at Siobhan Davies Studios, London, 3–14 November, then touring to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 28 Jan – 6 Feb; and Rosemary Butcher’s Festival of Miniatures runs through 3 October at Sadler’s Wells, London

works (in order of appearance) Trisha Brown, For MG: The Movie, 1991. Photo: Mark Hanauer William Forsythe, The Fact of Matter, 2009, choreographic object. Photo: Julien Gabriel Richter. © the Forsythe Company, Dresden Trisha Brown, Floor of the Forest, 1970. Photo: Egbert Trogemann Yvonne Rainer, AG Indexical with a Little Help from HM, 2007, filmed by Babette Mangold Mike Kelley, Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (Full Cast), 2001, colour photo, 71 x 124 cm. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy Kelley Studio, Los Angeles Pablo Bronstein, Passeggiata, 2008, video on DVD, 20 min. Courtesy Herald St, London, and Franco Noero, Turin Siobhan Davies Dance, The Score, part of ROTOR, 2010. Photo: Pari Naderi Daria Martin, Lapped Translated Lines (detail), 2010, film, part of Rosemary Butcher, Festival of Miniatures, 2010

Marius Bercea Qui Vivra Verra

September 18 – October 24 2010 François Ghebaly @ FRIEZE FRAME — presenting Neil Beloufa — stand R17

Art Pilgrimage:

A s Chile emerges from decades of repression, conser vatism and all-round dullness, capped by one of the planet ’s fiercest ear thquakes,

Santiago

appears to be in

the throes of a movida. Ar t and a swirling nightlife are lighting up one of the most overlooked South American cities. wo r ds : C h r i s ti a n V i v e ros - fau n e

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

a friend and i walk through a grimy passageway, at the end of which lurks a door lit by a bare bulb. We knock and a voice demands a password. We answer. A bolt slides, locks turn, the door swings open and we walk into El Rincón de los Canallas – Riffraff’s Corner. For newcomers to Santiago’s picaresque underground, Riffraff’s Corner is a baptism by fire. A clandestine bar that saw 67 police raids and an arson attack during Pinochet’s tenure, Riffraff’s is a bona fide survivor of Chile’s dark nights. A dive so lugubrious it recalls London’s Colony Room Club, Riffraff’s compels the eye to dart nervously: from the murky beer glasses to the rough trade on the barstools to the corner shadows where sordid memories lie in wait like bitchy Francisco Bacons. Oh, sister! You wouldn’t think so, but Riffraff’s is the perfect place to kick off a tour of Chile’s newly brightened capital. (On 27 February, one of the most severe earthquakes ever recorded – measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale – struck the country, though Santiago was spared much damage.) After considering its nightmarish political past through the bottom of a glass, darkly, it’s possible to stroll out into the city’s bloom like one exits the local cinema’s matinee showing of Stephen King’s Firestarter (1984). Truth is, it’s Santiago that’s on fire. There are new parks, new shops, new hotels, new restaurants, new bars, new museums, new art galleries – even a brand-new billiondollar transportation system. Didn’t anybody tell these people there’s a recession on? If Riffraff’s is a living monument to Chile’s crotchety bohemian past, then its cenotaph, its contemporary Lourdes, is the recently inaugurated Museo de la Memoria. Conveniently located across from Santiago’s popular Quinta Normal park and kitty-corner from Matucana 100, the city’s premier kunsthalle, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights – to use its full name in English – opened during the waning days of President Michelle Bachelet’s tenure. Controversial among that stubborn 20 percent that JFK once pegged as being ‘against everything all the time’, the Museo de la Memoria is housed in an elegantly designed eco-building and contains a Calvary of eye-moistening displays memorialising the thousands of victims of Pinochet’s abuses. Two artworks complete the commemoratory package: a deft mural by New York-based Chilean artist Jorge Tacla emblazoned with the lyrics of polymath and political activist Victor Jara’s last song, and a claustrophobic, room-size installation by Alfredo Jaar that, excruciatingly, repeats old saws about torture. If you squint, Santiago’s uptown looks just like its cousins in Madrid, Barcelona or London. In fact, the further one ventures into the foothills of the Andes, the more the digs evoke the quilted manses of Hampstead Heath. Weirdly, the city’s posher galleries empty out as one boogies up the class ladder. The spaces resemble movie-set versions of White Cube, complete with realistic-sounding guff from vapid gallerinas. They don’t, it turns out, call Chileans the English of Latin America for nothing. With the exception of Tomas Andreu’s flashy but inconsistent Galería Animal, the great majority of Santiago’s ‘established’ galleries – to put it bluntly – wouldn’t know contemporary art if it arrived wearing an ‘I Bought Andy Warhol’ Tshirt. Accordingly, I stuck loyally by the grittier and more daring enterprises of downtown. With Chilean conceptual artist Patrick Hamilton as my Virgil, I took a snappy ramble round Santiago’s liveliest arts neighbourhood – an area bracketed by San Cristóbal Hill to the north, the Paseo Ahumada to the west, Avenida Alameda to the south and natty Avenida Lastarria to the east. Within these approximately four square >

from left: Ideal Project, 2010 (installation view, Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago); Regina José Galindo, Limpieza Social, 2005, video, 1 min 25 sec; Jota Castro, Low Cost Tour, 2010 (installation view, González y González, Santiago)

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from top: Alfredo Jaar, La Geometría de la Conciencia, 2010 (installation view, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago), courtesy the artist; Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago; 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

124 ArtReview

Art Pilgrimage: santiago

miles are sited the balance of Santiago’s best contemporary arts venues, along with their abundant, brain-addling nightlife. Located at the bottom of the Parque Forestal – a tree-lined oasis set next to the Mapocho River – both the Museo de Bellas Artes and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo share a single, theatrically florid Beaux Arts building. While the former recently organised a travelling exhibition of the work of Gordon Matta-Clark (son of Chilean surrealist Roberto Matta Echaurren), the latter hosted a lively July show of crackerjack Latin Americans, including – among other luminaries – Carlos Garaicoa, Regina José Galindo and our favourite Chilean Dutch uncle, Patrick Hamilton.

A stone’s throw away from both institutions, on Calle Lastarria, one finds MAVI, the Museo de Artes Visuales, a private museum founded by two Chilean collecting families: the Santa Cruzes and the Yaconis. Together, these twin Medicis have put on a historical minicalendar of international exhibitions. Following a show of Gerhard Richter paintings and prints, the exhibition Beuys and Beyond: Teaching As Art (for which this author supplied a catalogue essay) ran into early May, and has since been travelling to Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Lima, Monterrey and Mexico City. Near these vastly improved museums are a pair of excellent commercial spaces and one soon-to-be-opened gallery that has smartly goosed Santiago’s ambitious but still parochial arts scene. Firstly there is Juan Pablo Moro’s Galería Moro, which represents Chilean artists with international careers, such as Juan Céspedes, Arturo Duclos and Mario Navarro. Then there is Galería AFA. Located on a second floor above the Paseo Ahumada’s pedestrian buzz, this outfit represents national and international folks such as Martin Parr, Cristobal Palma and the formidable if severely underrecognised photographer Paz Errázuriz (this despite her work being in collections including those of MoMA New York and the Daros Latinamerica foundation, in Zurich and Rio de Janeiro). And finally, there is González y González, the muchanticipated international gallery founded in January by literary editor Daniela González (Mrs Patrick Hamilton) and Peruvian artist/curator Jota Castro. Featuring an itinerant exhibition strategy and a roster of Pan-American notables such as Tania Bruguera, Fernando Bryce, Santiago Sierra and Darío Escobar, González y González officially was supposed to open its doors in Santiago in April with an exhibition of Jota Castro’s nervetweaking work (subsequently postponed). Around the corner from González y González’s space are several afternoons’ worth of bars and cafés plus two retail palaces that contribute as much as the museums and galleries to the local vibe. The first of these is El Bazar, the knickknack store for Chile’s famously irreverent political and literary magazine The Clinic. Get your framed photos of Chilean songstress Violeta Parra here, or condoms in sizes dubbed ‘friendly’, ‘playful’, ‘proud’ or ‘professional’. Across the street at Metales Pesados – ‘heavy metals’ in English – one finds a dynamic bookstore, a publishing house and an exhibition space, with a special emphasis on art books. Sergio Parra, alias ‘Parrita’, is the firm’s owner and all-round master of ceremonies. An otherwise respectable Latin American intellectual with a ticklish wild streak, it was he who was ultimately responsible for our final fit of Debordian dérangement across the river. One detour to El Toro, a funky boozer in Barrio Bellavista – Santiago’s best-known quarter for nightlife – naturally led to another, after which we found ourselves at a garden party for one Victor Hugo Robles, the Chilean writer, provocateur and social gadfly best known locally by his nom de guerre: ‘El Che Guevara Gay’. Not surprisingly, todo el mundo showed up: hard-driving art theorist Nelly Richard (her 1986 book Margins and Institutions virtually inaugurated critical theory in Chile), Paz Errázuriz, a few politicians who shall remain unnamed and someone introduced by Robles as the president of the Chilean Union of Transvestites. Like Santiago’s downtown arts scene, this rather bizarre union rep wore a suit of lights. It winked on and off like a semaphore in the moonlight. The whole rosy evening – and Santiago’s brilliant, young new cultural scene – winked back with what can only be termed inebriated delight.

In t h e N ovemb er issu e

madrid

. ORGANISED BY

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

Participating Galleries 303 Gallery, New York Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid Helga de Alvear, Madrid Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen Paul Andriesse, Amsterdam The Approach, London BaliceHertling, Paris Laura Bartlett, London Catherine Bastide, Brussels Guido W. Baudach, Berlin Marianne Boesky, New York Tanya Bonakdar, New York Bortolami, New York Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin BQ, Berlin The Breeder, Athens Broadway 1602, New York Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York Daniel Buchholz, Cologne Cabinet, London Gisela Capitain, Cologne Casa Triângulo, Sao Paulo China Art Objects, Los Angeles Sadie Coles HQ, London Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin Pilar Corrias, London Corvi-Mora, London Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow Thomas Dane, London Massimo De Carlo, Milan Elizabeth Dee, New York Eigen + Art, Berlin frank elbaz, Paris Foksal, Warsaw Fortes Vilaça, Sao Paulo Marc Foxx, Los Angeles Carl Freedman, London Stephen Friedman, London Frith Street, London Gagosian, London Annet Gelink, Amsterdam A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro Gladstone, New York Marian Goodman, New York Greene Naftali, New York greengrassi, London Karin Guenther, Hamburg Jack Hanley, New York Hauser & Wirth, London

Media partner

Herald St, London hiromiyoshii, Tokyo Hollybush Gardens, London Hotel, London Andreas Huber, Vienna Xavier Huf kens, Brussels IBID Projects, London Ingleby, Edinburgh Taka Ishii, Tokyo Alison Jacques, London Martin Janda, Vienna Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam Annely Juda Fine Art, London Kamm, Berlin Casey Kaplan, New York Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm Paul Kasmin, New York Kerlin, Dublin Anton Kern, New York Peter Kilchmann, Zurich Johann König, Berlin David Kordansky, Los Angeles Tomio Koyama, Tokyo Andrew Kreps, New York Krinzinger, Vienna Kukje, Seoul kurimanzutto, Mexico City Lehmann Maupin, New York Michael Lett, Auckland Lisson, London Long March Space, Beijing Kate MacGarry, London Mai 36, Zurich Giò Marconi, Milan Matthew Marks, New York Mary Mary, Glasgow Meyer Kainer, Vienna Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe Massimo Minini, Brescia Victoria Miro, London The Modern Institute, Glasgow Neu, Berlin Franco Noero, Turin Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin Lorcan O’Neill, Rome Office Baroque, Antwerp Maureen Paley, London Peres Projects, Berlin Perrotin, Paris Friedrich Petzel, New York Francesca Pia, Zurich Plan B, Cluj

Frame Gregor Podnar, Berlin Eva Presenhuber, Zurich Produzentengalerie, Hamburg Raster, Warsaw Raucci/Santamaria, Naples Almine Rech, Paris Regina, Moscow Anthony Reynolds, London Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Sonia Rosso, Turin Salon 94, New York Aurel Scheibler, Berlin Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich Gabriele Senn, Vienna Sfeir-Semler, Beirut Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London Sies + Höke, Dusseldorf Filomena Soares, Lisbon Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Berlin Standard (Oslo), Oslo Diana Stigter, Amsterdam Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo Sutton Lane, London T293, Naples Timothy Taylor, London Team, New York Richard Telles, Los Angeles The Third Line, Dubai Vermelho, Sao Paulo Vilma Gold, London Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou Waddington Galleries, London Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen Barbara Weiss, Berlin Fons Welters, Amsterdam Michael Werner, New York White Cube, London Max Wigram, London Wilkinson, London Christina Wilson, Copenhagen XL, Moscow Zeno X, Antwerp Zero, Milan David Zwirner, New York

Altman Siegel, San Francisco Shannon Ebner Ancient & Modern, London Des Hughes Chert, Berlin Heike Kabisch Lisa Cooley, New York Frank Haines Experimenter, Kolkata Naeem Mohaiemen Fonti, Naples Lorenzo Scotto di Luzio James Fuentes LLC, New York Jessica Dickinson Gaga, Mexico City Adriana Lara Gentili Apri, Berlin Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas (Aids-3D) François Ghebaly, Los Angeles Neil Beloufa Karma International, Zurich Tobias Madison Andreiana Mihail, Bucharest Ion Grigorescu MOT International, London Laure Prouvost Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo Keiichi Tanaami Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles Erika Vogt Platform China, Beijing Jin Shan Simon Preston, New York Carlos Bevilacqua Renwick, New York Drew Heitzler Rodeo, Istanbul Mark Aerial Waller Federica Schiavo, Rome Salvatore Arancio Micky Schubert, Berlin Manuela Leinhoss Seventeen, London Oliver Laric Sommer & Kohl, Berlin Tony Just Supportico Lopez, Berlin Marius Engh Rob Tufnell, London Ruth Ewan

Main sponsor Deutsche Bank

Patmos and the war at sea ALASTAIR WHITTON PATMOS AND THE WAR AT SEA 29 SEPTEMBER – 6 NOVEMBER 2010

71 LOOP STREET, CAPE TOWN / +27 (0) 21 424 5150 / WWW.IART.CO.ZA

WE ARE NOT WITCHES An exhibition for the ‘witch children’ of Africa Participating artists

BEEzy BAIlEy JONATHAN BAldOCk lISA BRyCE JOHNNIE ClARkE dAN COOmBS kEITH COvENTRy HugO dAlTON lEONARdO dREW NEIl gAll STEvE gOddARd lEAH gORdON HASSAN HAJJAJ TONy HEyWOOd PAul HOuSlEy HENRy kROkATSIS vIvIENNE kOORlANd PENNy lAmB CHE lOvElACE AlISTAIR mACkIE OlIvER mARSdEN JASON mARTIN CATHy dE mONCHAux zAk Ové lIONEl SmIT gAvIN TuRk HIRO yAmAgATA Supported by

An exhibition and silent auction of artworks which has been organised to raise money on behalf of Stepping Stones Nigeria, helping children that are tortured and cast out of their villages, becoming vulnerable to rapists, traffickers and even ritualists, who use their body parts for their supposed supernatural power

7–9 October 2010 Private view 7 October, 6pm

The Saatchi gallery duke of york Square king’s Road london SW3 4SQ For more details please contact Emily dolan at FAS [email protected] 0208 318 1895 www.steppingstonesnigeria.org

Listings Museums and Galleries UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON Alexia Goethe Gallery 7 Dover Street London, W1S 4LD T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 www.alexiagoethegallery.com Alexander de Cadenet: Life-Force 24 Sep –19 Nov ART SENSUS 7 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1BB T +44 (0)20 7630 9585 www.artsensus.com Nick Walker: In Gods We Trust’to 13 Oct – 27 Nov BLOOMBERG SPACE 50 Finsbury Square London, EC2A 1HD [email protected] www.bloombergspace.com Ernest Caramelle 2 Sep – 25 Sep Elina Brotherus 2 Sep – 25 Sept DOMOBAAL 3 St John Street London, WC1N 2ES T +44 (0)20 7242 9604 F +44 (0)20 7831 0122 www.domobaal.com Walter Swennen 25 Sep – 30 Oct FRITH STREET GALLERY 17-18 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JJ T +44 (0)20 7494 1550 www. frithstreetgallery.com [email protected] Fiona Tan: Cloud Island and Other New Works 17 Sep – 29 Oct MAUREEN PALEY 21 Herald Street, London, E2 6JT T +44 (0)20 7729 4112 www.maureenpaley.com MALE: group exhibition selected by Vince Aletti 2 Sep – 3 Oct Dirk Stewan 9 Oct — 14 Nov

MAX WIGRAM GALLERY 99 New Bond Street London, W1S 1SW Edwin Burdis: Back Sack and Crack www.maxwigram.com 9 Sep – 2 Oct PALACE ART FAIR Fulham Palace, London www.palaceartfair.co.uk [email protected] 8 - 10 Oct, 11am - 5pm Stephen Friedman Gallery 5-28 Old Burlington Street London W1S 3AN T +44 (0)20 7494 1434 F +44 (0)20 7494 1431 [email protected] BEATRIZ MILHAZES 11 Oct - 20 Nov ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART Kensington Gore London, SW7 2EU www.rca.ac.uk Shi Shaoping: The Metamorphosis Series 13 – 18 Oct, 11am – 7pm daily VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY 16 Wharf Road London N1 7RW T +44 (0)20 7336 81090 www.victoria-miro.com Herrnan Bas: The Hallucinations of Poets 7 Oct – 13 Nov UNITED KINGDOM CORNERHOUSE 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH. www.cornerhouse.org Normality Status Map: Heath Bunting 29 Sep – 21 Nov Ingleby Gallery 15 Calton Road Edinburgh, Scotland EH8 8DL T +44 (0) 131 556 4441 [email protected] www.inglebygallery.com James Hugonin 1 Oct - 12 Nov

John Hansard Gallery University of Southampton Highfield Southampton SO17 1BJ T +44 (0)23 8059 2158 Caroline Bergvall: Middling English 7 Sep – 23 Oct LEAMINGTON SPA ART GALLERY AND MUSEUM Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Leamington Spa, CV32 4AA. T +44 (0)1926 742700 www.warwickdc.gov.uk/ royalpumprooms Touch: an installation by Lyndall Phelps 18 Sep – 28 Nov NATIONAL MEDIA MUSEUM Bradford, BD1 1NQ www.nationalmediamuseum. org.uk T +44 (0)844 856 3797 Fay Godwin: Land Revisited 15 Oct – 27 Mar The Modern Institute 14—20 Osborne Street, Glasgow, Scotland G1 5QN T +44 (0)141 248 3711 F +44 (0)141 248 3280 Dirk Bell from 28 Nov United States, New York DOOSAN Gallery 533 West 25th Street NewYork, NY 10001 [email protected] Open Tue-Sat 10-6 Kyoung Tack Hong:Pens 14 Oct – 13 Nov THE Pace GALLERY 32 East 57th Street T +1 (212) 421 3292 Tues-Frid 9:30– 6 Sat 10-6 www. thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace: A multi-venue retrospective exhibition exploring Pace’s impact on the art world over the past five decades to 23 Oct

THE PACE GALLERY 534 West 25th Street T+1 (212) 929-7000 Tues – Sat 10 – 6 www.thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace to 23 Oct THE PACE GALLERY 545 West 22nd Street T+1 (212) 989-4258 Tues- Sat 10 – 6 www.thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace to 16 Oct THE PACE GALLERY 510 West 25th Street Tues-Sat 10-6 T +1 (212) 255-4044 [email protected] www.thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace to 23 Oct Thomas Nozkowski 22 Oct – 4 Dec Michael Werner Gallery 4 East 77th Street, New York, NY 10075 T +1 (212) 988-1623 www.michaelwerner.com [email protected] Marcel Broodthaers: Major Works 2 Sep – 13 Nov AUSTRIA Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 www.galeriewinter.at KunsthaLLE WEIN halle 1, halle 2 Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 www.ropac.net Arnulf Frainer & Dieter Roth Oct – Nov

Belgium

czech repulic

Galerie Almine Rech 20 Rue de l’Abbaye B-1050 Brussels T +32 26 485 684 www.alminerech.com

MUZEUM MONTANELLO Nerudova 13, 118 01 Prague CZ www.muzeummontanelli.com T +420257531220 Daniel Pešta: Levitation

Galerie BaronianFrancey 2 rue Isidore Verheyden 1050 Brussels T +32 25 12 9295 www.baronianfrancey.com Wang Du to 30 Oct

DENMARK

Galerie Rodolphe Janssen 35, rue de Livourne 1050 Brussels T +32-2-538 08 18 www.galerierodolphejanssen.com Wim Delvoye to 30 Oct think.21 Rue du Mail 21 Brussels 1050 T +32 2 537 87 03 www.think21gallery.com Tim Van Laere Gallery Verlatstraat 23-25 2000 Antwerp T +32 (0)3 257 14 17 www.timvanlaeregallery.com Tomasz Kowalsk to 16 Oct Xavier Hufkens Rue Saint-Georges 6–8 1050 Brussels T +32 2 6396730 www.xavierhufkens.com Group exhibition to 23 Oct ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 B-2000 Antwerp T +32 32 161 626 www.zeno-x.com Raoul De Keyser to 16 Oct Michael Borremans Oct – Nov

LOUISIANA MUSEUM OF MODERN ART Gl. Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk Sophie Calle 23 Jun – 24 Oct GALLERI NICOLAI WALLNER Ny Carlsberg vej 68 OG 1760 Copenhagen V Alexander Tovborg: New Eternity 2 Sep – 30 Oct FRANCE Chateau de versailles 78000 Versailles T +130 837800 www.galerieperrotin.com Murakami Versailles to 12 Dec Galerie Almine Rech 19, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris Tel +33 1 45 83 71 90 www.galeriealminerech.com Galleria Continua Le Moulin (Paris) 46, rue de la Ferté Gaucher 77169 Boissy-le-Châtel Seine-et-Marne T +33 1 64 20 39 50 www.galleriacontinua.com Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin 76, rue de Turenne & 10 Impasse St Claude , 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 16 79 79 www.galerieperrotin.com FIAC Grand Palais & Louvre, Paris 21 – 24 Oct www.fiac.com Fondation Cartier 261 Boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris T +33 1 42 18 56 50 www.fondation.cartier.com Moebius 12 Oct – 13 Mar

Galerie Laurent Godin 5, rue du Grenier St Lazare 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 71 10 66 www.laurentgodin.com Claude Closky/Laloli to 16 Oct David Kramer 21 Oct – 12 Dec Galerie Lelong Paris 13, rue de Téhéran 75008 Paris T +33 1 45 63 13 19 Open Tues–Fri 10:30 – 6 Sat 2 – 6:30 www.galerie-lelong.com MYRVOLD > MYWORLD PIA MYRVOLD 15 rue Sambre et Meuse 75010 Paris T +33607968552 By appointment. www.pia-myrvold.com Galerie Olivier Houg 45 Quai Rambaud 69002 Lyon T +33 4 78 42 98 50 olivierhoug.com David Hevel to 19 May Galerie ThaddAeus Ropac 7, rue Debelleyme 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 72 99 00 www.ropac.net Richard Deacon/Andy Warhol to 16 Oct Liza Lou 21 Oct – 20 Nov GERMANY 401 CONTEMPORARY BERLIN Brunnenstrasse 5 , 10119 Berlin www.401contemporary.com Nadja Frank: Ravaneti to 13 Nov DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 20 2093 www.deutsche-guggenheim.de Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India to 10 Oct

JOHANN KÖNIG GALLERY Dessauer Straße 6-7, 10963 Berlin www.johannkoenig.de Nathan Hylden to 23 Oct VW (VENEKLASEN/WERNER) Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26, 10969 Berlin T+49 30 81 61 60418 [email protected] www. vwberlin.com Open Mon– Fri 10-6 , Sat 11-6 Continuous Projections: Martin Arnold, Gary Beydler, Phil Solomon and Fred Worden, curated by William E. Jones to 23 Oct Greece Frissiras Museum 3 Monis Asteriou Plaka, Athens T +30 2103 234678 or +30 2103 316027 www.frissirasmuseum.com iceland i8 GALLERY Tryggvagata 16, 101 Reykjavík T +354 551 3666 ireland MOTHER’S TANKSTATION 41-43 Watling Street Usher’s Island, Dublin 8 www.motherstankstation.com T +353 (0)1 6717654 Uri Aran: Doctor, Dog, Sandwich 15 Sep - 30 Oct ITALy Alfonso Artiaco Piazza dei Martiri 58 80121 Naples T+39 0814976072 alfonsoartiaco.com Ann Veronica Janssens ARTISSIMA 17 Turin www.artissima.it 5 – 7 Nov Cardi Black Box Corso di Porta Nuova 38 20124 Milan T+39 0245478189 www.cardiblackbox.com

ITALy (continued) Galleria Continua Via del Castello, 11 53037 San Gimignano T +39 0577 94 31 34 www.galleriacontinua.com Kiki Smith/ Michelangelo Pistoletto/Pascale Marthine Tayou 25 Oct – 22 Jan Galleria dello Scudo Via Scudo di Francia 2 37121 Verona T +39 045 59 01 44 www.galleriadelloscudo.com Galleria Francosoffiantino Artecontemporanea Via Rossini 23, 10124 Turin T +39 011837743 www.francosoffiantino.it Galleria Franco Noero Via Giolitti 52A, 0123 Turin T+39 011 - 88 22 08 www.franconoero.com Galleria Lorcan O’ Neill Via Orti d’Alibert 1e 00165 Rome T +39 06 6889-2980 www.lorcanoneill.com Galleria Massimo Minini Via Apollonio 68 25128 Brescia T +39 030 363034 www.galleriaminini.it Federico Luger Via Domodossola 17, Milan 20145 T +39 02 67391341 www.federicolugergallery.com Collezione Maramotti via fratelli cervi 66 Reggio Emilia T +39 0522 382 484 www.collezionemaramotti.org Jacob Kassay to 3 Oct Galleria Massimo De Carlo via Giovanni Ventura 5 20135 Milan T +39 02 70 00 39 87 www.massimodecarlo.it

MAXXI- Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo Via Guido Reni, 4A 00196 Rome T +39 06 32101829 www.maxxi.beniculturali.it GALLERIA PACK Foro Bonaparte, 60, 20121 Milan T +39 02 86 996 395 www.galleriapack.com Matteo Basilé Sep – Oct Peggy Guggenheim Collection 704 Dorsoduro, 30123 Venice T+39 0412405411 www.guggenheim-venice.it Prometeogallery Via Giovanni Ventura 3, 20134 Milan T +39 02 2692 4450 www.prometeogallery.com Riccardo Crespi via Mellerio n° 1 20123 Milano T +39 02 89072491 www.riccardocrespi.com SPAIN CAC Malaga C/ Alemania, s/n 29001-Málaga T +34 952 12 00 55 www.cacmalaga.org Galeria Elba Benitez San Lorenzo 11 28004 Madrid T +34 91 308 0468 www.elbabenitez.com GALERIA HELGA de ALVEAR c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 28012 Madrid T +34 91 468 0506 www.helgadealvear.com Helena Almeida to 30 Oct

Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial Los Prados, 121 33394 Gijón T +34 985 133 431 Open Wed–Mon 12–8 www.laboralcentrodearte.org MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Castilla y Leon Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 24008 León T +34 987 09 00 00 www.musac.es

GALERIE URS MEILE Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne T +41 (0) 41 420 33 18 F +41 (0) 41 420 21 69 [email protected] www.galerieursmeile.com turkey SAKIP SABANCI MUSEUM 1Sakıp Sabancı Cad. No:42 Emirgan 34467, Istanbul T +90 212 277 22 00 www.muze.sabanciuniv.edu

SWEDEN

BRAZIL

MODERNA MUSEET MALMÖ Gasverksgatan 22, 211 29 Malmö Alice Neel: Painted Truths 9 Oct – 2 Jan Spectacular Times: The 60s – The Moderna Museet Collection to 27 Feb

Galeria Fortes Vilaca Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500 05416-001 São Paulol T +55 11 3032 7066 www.fortesvilaca.com.br

MODERNA MUSEET STOCKHOLM Skeppsholmen The Moderna Exhibition 2010 2 Oct – 9 Jan Mary Kelly: Four Works in Dialogue 1973-2010 16 Oct – 23 Jan SWITZERLAND GALERIE BERTAND & GRUNER 16, rue du Simplon, 1207 Geneva T+41 22 700 51 51 www.bertrand-gruner.com GALERIE EVA PRESENHUBER AG Limmatstr. 270, Postfach 1517, CH-8031, Zürich www.presenhuber.com GALERIE GUY BÄRTSCHI rue du Vieux-Billard 3a, 1205 Geneva T +41 (0)22 3100013 www.bartschi.ch MIGROSMUSEUM FüR GEGENWARTSKUNST für gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 Postfach 1766 CH-8005 Zürich www.migrosmuseum.ch

Galeria Leme Rua Agostinho Cantu, 88 05501.010 São Paulo T +55 11 3814.8184 www.galerialeme.com Galeria Luisa Strina Rua Oscar Freire 502, 01426000 São Paulo/SP T +55 11 3088 2417 www.galerialuisastrina.com.br Galeria Nara Roesler Avenida Europa 655 01449-001 São Paulo T +55 11 3063 2344 www.nararoesler.com.br Galerie Vermelho Rua Minas Gerais, 350 01244-010 São Paulo T +55 11 3257-2033 www.galeriavermelho.com.br Casa Triangulo Rua Paes de Araujo 77 04531-090 São Paulo T +55 11 31675621 www.casatriangulo.com Luciana Brito Galeria Rua Gomes de Carvalho, 842, Vila Olímpia, São Paulo T +55.11.3842.0634 www.lucianabritogaleria.com.br

listings: museums and galleries

China

SOUTH korea

LONG MARCH SPACE 4 Jiuxianqiao Rd (Factory 798), Chaoyang District, Beijing, China 100015 T +86 10 5978 9768 Tue – Sun 11 - 7 [email protected] www.longmarchspace.com 8th Shanghai Biennale: Rehearsal Tour: Act One. Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail 4 Sep – 14 Nov Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Borders: Western Enterprise to 4 Dec

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART San58-4 Makgyedong Gwacheonsi Gyeonggido 427-701 T +81 (0)2 2188 6114 Tue – Fri 10 –5 Sat, Sun 10 – 8 [email protected] www.moca.go.kr

japan 34FINEART Second Floor, The Hills Building, Buchanan Square , 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock [email protected] T +27 21 4611863 www.34fineart.com New: Group Exhibition 17 Aug– 9 Oct Lionel Smit : Submerge 12 Oct – 6 Nov KAIKAI KIKI GALLERY Motoazabu Crest Bldg. B1F, 2-330 Motoazabu, Minato-ku,Tokyo 106-0046 T +81-(0) 3-6823-6039 www.gallery.kaikaikiki.co.jp Twitter.com/G_Kaikaikiki_Jp

TELEVISION12 GALLERY 2F Television12 BLDG. 360-12, Seogyo-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul T +82 (2) 3143.1210 Mon – Sat 12-9, Sun 12 – 8 [email protected] www.television12.co.kr United Arab Emirates ABU DHABI ART Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi, T +971 (0)2 690 8207 [email protected] www.abudhabiartfair.ae 4 – 7 Nov, Open 3-10 Special exhibitions: From the Private Collection of Larry Gagosian 22 Sep – 24 Jan Open 10-8 at Manarat Al Saadiyat, Abu Dhabi, Saadiyat Cultural District Exhibition Open 10am-10pm daily at Emirates Palace, Abu Dhabi

South africa iART GALLERY WEMBLEY 71 Loop Street, Cape Town T +27 (0) 21 424 5150 T +27 (0) 84 645 2580 www.iart.co.za Alastair Whitton: Patmos and the War at Sea 29 Sep - 6 Nov

ArtReview 137

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Rear View October

Reviews Books The Strip On the Town Off the Record

ArtReview 139

REVIEWS:

UK Fiona Banner

Harrier and Jaguar

Tate Britain, London 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 betterknown 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

Harrier and Jaguar (detail), 2010. Photo: Tate. © the artist

140 ArtReview

reviews: UK

Material Manifestation: Single Stand Forward Motion, 2010, fir plywood, cotton yarn, flashe, burlap, urethane, 244 x 122 x 1 cm (unframed) 246 x 125 x 7 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London 

Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West – an ‘institute of investigative living’, set in 25 acres of California desert, where the American artist brainstorms furniture designs, clothing and living structures in pursuit of a sustainable, compact lifestyle – is one of the most quietly ambitious, determinedly ethical art projects of our time. But while the things that the American artist makes there underwrite it, they tend to sit slightly uneasily in galleries. At their least effective they’re like inert exotica, and Zittel evidently knows it: marking two decades of production via 11 new works, Clasp is partly about what one does and partly about how one communicates it. A reminder that their maker works out of a conceptualist tradition, Clasp’s interweaving of knitwear, gouaches, home-decor elements (eg, handmade coat hooks) and video is organised within a scheme of representational degrees. Step inside the gallery and the first thing you’re confronted with is what Zittel calls a ‘native experience’: The Bodily Experience of a Physical Impracticality (all works 2010) – a title Damien Hirst would give to a five-legged stuffed sheep – is a crisscrossing, homespun structure using thin knitted blackand-white-striped scarves that one has to step awkwardly over to tour the gallery. An 11-minute video, Clutch, retreats by one order of representation back in the direction of what Zittel calls the ‘factish’, offering short-focus footage of the artist’s hands diversely touching those of her son, Emmett. Moving back another stage, the satisfyingly sharp, cartoonish, handmade gouaches on raw wood from Zittel’s Ideological Resonator series show hands magically causing ribbons to shape themselves in the air, against backdrops of desert landscape; here one gets a first whiff of Carlos Castaneda (the controversial 1960s Peruvian-born anthropologist and shamanist). In further gouaches downstairs, collectively entitled Native Experience and the Three Dynamic Orders of Its Expression, wherein hands reach outward towards a circle-within-a-triangle structure, the overarching structure is underlined: alongside ‘ideological resonator’ and ‘factish depiction’, those orders include ‘material manifestation’. This last refers here to knitwear designs tightly pinned to sheets of fir plywood, like faux paintings: one features a geometric tree or cactus, another a radiating starburst. Zittel has obviously breathed enough desert air to be unbothered about how close her work veers to New Age philosophy: indeed, part of her project seems to be to isolate the good within its feel-good mush. Either way, and despite this show’s perpetuation of the unifying earth-toned palette that’s become a hallmark of her work, there’s a sense that she’s less and less concerned with making cool-looking objects (whereas a fair amount of her earlier furniture and architecture have had serious design appeal) and digging her heels into something that verges on the mystical and animist. In some ways, and ironically given her evident concern to communicate and analyse the process of communication, the unabashed foreignness of Zittel’s new bulletins is a substantial part of their charm and their boldness. And yet the work that stays with one, because it seems to summarise the whole show’s ethos, is the simplest: that video, Clutch, of Zittel stroking her son’s small hand. Something urgently needs to be passed on through an act of wordless touching, that short film says. She clasps Emmett’s hand, tenderly; he, playing his part perfectly, clasps back. Martin Herbert

Andrea Zittel Clasp

Sadie Coles, London 10 June – 14 August

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 blackand-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. The layout of the show exacerbates these The Last Twenty Minutes of 2001 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 lazyprecision 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

Sergej Jensen

Deutsche Bank, 2010, dyed and sewn moneybags, 270 x 240 cm. Photo: Todd-White Art Photography. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London

142 ArtReview

White Cube, London 16 July – 28 August

reviews: UK

Jess Flood-Paddock Gangsta’s Paradise

Gangsta’s Paradise is an oversize bestiary that features: two giant rabbits, a tanklike lobster and a man-size rendition of athlete Michael Johnson’s self-help book Slaying the Dragon: How to Turn Your Small Steps to Great Feats (1996). Now, I tend to think that gigantism in sculpture is a means of showboating opulence, spectacle or grandiose ambition (think of Jeff Koons’s critters or Christoph Büchel’s megalomaniacal installations); this exhibition, however, plumbs a different line. Here, Jess Flood-Paddock deploys supersize props as a sort of nebulous metaphor for the ethical and cultural complexities of contemporary and historical greed. The centrepiece of the show is Big Lobster Supper (all works 2010), a hulking model of haute cuisine crustacean life, whose armour is made of thin fibreboard decorated with yellow and orange spray paint, its claws bound with a beltlike rubber band and its body curled up beneath it (perhaps due to the pain of being boiled alive). Surrounding this is Truman, a canvas printed with an image of blue sky and white clouds that covers three of the gallery’s walls. In The Truman Show (1998), Jim Carey’s character discovers that his life is nothing more than a monstrous reality TV show, and – following a perilous journey across an artificial sea – he breaks through the limits of the set, an artificial sky. Here the lobster makes a similar bid for freedom: its feelers caress the canvas while its right claw pierces the surface of the sham firmament. 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, there is nothing to do but slay the dragon’. In the same room, Flood-

Hayward Project Space, London 4 August – 19 September Paddock has tacked up Utopia Last Days, a snapshot of a closing-down sale at a shop that failed to live up to its own hopeful moniker. On another wall is A Group of Cannibals, a reproduction of an invitation card to a dinner in honour of the Victorian explorer Alfred Cort Haddon showing a benign-looking (and apparently uncannibalistic) group of native Torres Strait islanders. There’s a wonderful circularity to this image: the natives are labelled as anthropophagi, but it’s the explorers who are the true consumers. Weaving through these disparate cultural references is a series of thoughts about subsistence and greed, eating and being eaten. For example, the bunnies populating the atrium are images of a supersize German breed reportedly sold by a German man to the North Korean government for feeding the starving population; in 2007 the German newspaper Der Spiegel reported that they were, in fact, eaten at a birthday feast in honour of Kim Jong-Il. The suggestion here is that, as consumers, we’re all the cause of someone else’s pain. Indeed this exhibition is named after a hit single by rapper Coolio that simultaneously celebrates and bemoans the ‘gangsta’ logic of kill-or-be-killed. We might dream of utopian equality (if I read his book, I might run as fast as Michael Johnson!), but real inequities are harder to negotiate. Colin Perry

Gangsta’s Paradise, 2010 (installation view, Hayward Project Space, London). Photo: Roger Wooldridge

ArtReview 143

REVIEWS: uk

Len Horsey & Brian Reed, Planta de Anodizado, 2010 (production still). Photo: Daniel Walmsley

Unrealised Potential

Cornerhouse, Manchester 17 July – 12 September

“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 ChavezDawson’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

Down Over Up, 2010 (installation view). Photo: Alan Dimmick. © the artist and the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

Martin Creed Down Over Up

Fruitmarket, Edinburgh 30 July – 31 October

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

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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 byproducts – observations that seem all the more Fruits of One’s Labor 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

Natascha Sadr Haghighian

Fruits of One’s Labor, 2010 (installation view). Courtesy the artist, Ludlow 38, New York, and Johann König Gallery, Berlin

146 ArtReview

Ludlow 38, New York 7 July – 15 August

reviews: USA

South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa first garnered international attention in the late 1990s for his Interiors (1995–2005) series, largeformat colour portraits of migrant workers shot in their modest homes in the many informal settlements that surround South African cities. Inner Views, Mthethwa’s first New York museum solo, draws selectively from this and two other series that specifically picture domestic spaces. Produced in collaboration with the sitters, whose homes serve as ad hoc studios (and to whom Mthethwa dutifully gives a finished print), the The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York Interiors pictures offset the detached objectivity of social documentary with the intimate exchange of Inner Views 15 July – 24 October portraiture. Surrounded by their meagre possessions, the workers take up formal poses, and their cramped, makeshift dwellings, cobbled together from panels of cardboard and corrugated tin, are often a riot of colour and pattern. The paper surplus of global capital – gilded advertisements and packaging for liquor, technicolour inserts filled with supermarket specials, glamorous fashion glossies – is repurposed as wallpaper, jostling against equally busy patterned bedspreads and linoleum floors, all masterfully captured in the vivid colour photographs. However, Mthethwa’s use of colour photography is politically, not aesthetically, motivated. Colour, which demonstrates the sitters’ vitality, resilience and resourcefulness in the face of poverty and oppression, restores, in Mthethwa’s words, their ‘dignity’ as individuals. As such, Mthethwa’s images serve as an antidote to the sensationalist rhetoric associated with black-and-white reportage of township life under and after apartheid. In one image, a jacketed young man leans self-assuredly against a blue kitchen cabinet, at the centre of a space otherwise filled with echoes of red. The latter colour draws and holds our attention, indicating similarly coloured details we may have otherwise missed: a small kitchen cart, a piece of cloth covering a plastic basin, a cloth bag dangling from a hook, an empty Coke bottle perched on a shelf above. Despite the overall formal harmony, Mthethwa manages to succinctly convey the stark reality of township life by including large portions of floor, ceiling and wall, literally boxing his subject in; the image’s low hang in the exhibition – the lower left of a quartet – exaggerates this sense of enclosure. Such sitters are notably absent from the other two series. In Empty Beds (2002), the most private of spaces begins to resemble an altar of sorts, the missing figure hinting at the loneliness and the separation from family and community endured by these workers. In a different vein, Common Ground (2008) links marginalised communities in South Africa and post-Katrina New Orleans through photographs of waterdamaged homes from both sites that carefully avoid all markers of cultural or geographic specificity. A wall made up of differently coloured panels resembles a modernist abstraction in one, while another shows an open medicine cabinet embedded in a grotty, stained bathroom wall. Though they evince Mthethwa’s considerable photographic skills, these series lack the active tension that the portraits maintain between recognisable genres of photography, settling too easily into categories such as fine art or social documentary. Murtaza Vali

Zwelethu Mthethwa

Untitled (Interiors), 2001, 179 x 241 cm, chromogenic colour print, private collection, New York

ArtReview 147

reviews: USA

Charlotte Posenenske

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 twoweek 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 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 vieweractivated 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

Adam Cvijanovic and David Humphrey Defrosted: A Life of Walt Disney

Defrosted: A Life of Walt Disney (detail), 2010

Postmasters, New York 29 June – 6 August

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 imagination – or better yet, vision (one tragic man’s in particular) – rather than simply putting it to use. Jonathan T.D. Neil ArtReview 149

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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. The most pervasive piece is also the easiest 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

Kori Newkirk

Mayday, 2010, cotton, particulate, stainless steel, 411 x 411 x 5 cm

150 ArtReview

Country Club Los Angeles 17 July – 21 August

reviews: USA

Yvonne Venegas

Maria Elvia De Hank Series

Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica 5 June – 28 August

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

In his vertiginous, nearly 40-year career, Rodney Graham has inhabited a motley crew of personae: Romantic poet (Reading Machine for Lenz, 1983–93), unconscious pirate (Vexation Island, 1997), student of modernist painting (Picasso, My Master, 2005) and self-serious, 1960s-era musician/artist (Lobbing Potatoes at a Gong, 1969, 2006), not to mention rock guitarist, pop songwriter and conceptual artist. But the Canadian artist has embodied no character more, perhaps, than the studious slacker – a mirror of what he has called, cheekily, ‘the gifted amateur’, a West Coast autodidact and regular genius-in-residence. That both slacker and bookworm are poses is easily assumed by the viewer; less easy to understand is the bountiful borderland where the two characters meet and blur, and from which Graham’s restive works seem Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel to spring, whole-bodied and inexplicable. This hinterland – where European high culture, Through the Forest 13 June – 26 September irreverent pop lyricism and the majestic natural world and its attendant technology meet – can be beautifully observed in this expansive, 100-work survey. Befitting Graham’s interest in alarming layers of associations, the exhibition’s title could allude to the nighttime Polaroids and installations that Graham has made in the woods outside Vancouver. In fact, it is gleaned from an English translation of Georg Büchner’s Lenz (1835), in which – in the layout of the book Graham picked up – the titular phrase appears twice in the same place at the end of a page. From this typographic peculiarity, Graham created a ‘reading machine’ that looped the said five pages. The resulting work, with its literary foundation, filmic aspect and strange, elliptical charge, acts as a kind of looking glass for the larger show – and Graham’s oeuvre. If the aforementioned work appears at the show’s outset, this seems right: the artist’s sensibility is distinctly literary. Along with Büchner, Antonin Artaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Roussel have long inspired Graham (his debt to the late-nineteenth-century French poets, with their literary games, refrains and inspired layouts, is clear). Idiosyncratically, however, what Graham mines books for is their visual value: design, typography, heft, allusiveness. Simultaneously, he mines visual art for its narrative possibilities or sheer decorousness. Thus, for example, Donald Judd’s austere ‘stacks’ become bookcases to hold Freud’s collected works. Yet such beguiling works are not the show’s focus: films are. See then the first floor’s centrepiece: a small room featuring Graham’s 1996 film of cinnamon sprinkled on a hot stoveburner, the granules flaring in the dark like constellations of stars. Elsewhere, to the clicking of old projectors, a 1930s-era German typewriter is sprinkled with flour, which settles over the keys like snow, muting language’s potentiality; crystal chandeliers rotate eerily against darkness; and Graham throws potatoes portentously at a gong. Nearby, the artist’s colour lightboxes reveal the artist in disparate costume dramas: a Morris Louis wannabe, painting in his silk pyjamas; a fallen nineteenth-century French soldier, relaxing against panelled wood. The final floor features recent paintings: slight modernist simulacra, easily discarded. Not so with the last installation, a multipart work on Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) that conflates Graham’s interest in sound, seriality, Minimalism, Romanticism, typography, decor. For Parsifal (1990/2009), Graham inserted an extraneous musical phrase into the opera; accompanying the music is an elegant poster, which pictures the artist in a sombre, Glenn Gould-like headshot, and the 12 bound volumes of the musical score in a beautiful glass case. Graham has called it a ‘joke of cosmic proportions’. Like his best works, Parsifal both sets the mind running, associatively, and induces a kind of meditative trance. Its effect is at once ridiculous, gorgeous, scandalous and insistently perverse. Quinn Latimer

Rodney Graham

Video still from Rheinmetall/Victoria-8, 2003, 35mm film installation (colour, silent), Cinemeccanica Victoria 8 projector, private collection, Switzerland

152 ArtReview

reviews: europe

Ebru Ozseçen Kismet

TANAS, Berlin 12 June – 7 August

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 lightfitting 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

Serbet, 1999–2010, 16mm film installation, looped Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin. © TANAS, Berlin

ArtReview 153

reviews: europe

Cities broken down into buildings, buildings broken down into blocks, blocks pulverised to make new building materials: the writhing palimpsest of the cosmopolis is the territory squatted by Carlos Garaicoa. Within the constant remaking of the city’s structure, the Cuban-born artist goes in search of visually coded versions of the dominant social and political order. But how the coding is performed is key. Reading the city is never as straightforward as its planners might intend, be they capitalist or communist, authoritarian or utopian, muddlers or visionaries. Monsieur Haussmann, La Perfection n’existe pas (2009), the title of one of the artist’s works, informs the great remaker of Paris. The quantum instability of the city’s in-progress revisions is always refusing final meaning, always offering its own critique of the orders it aims to represent and indeed reinforce. Cities, then, are a nice choice of subject. The artist’s vision of all this often displays fractal activity, though hardly in the style of an LSD rush. Instead, Garaicoa seems to come across cultural self-similarity, urban patterns that reproduce social structures; social structures – and even people – that seem built of prefabricated parts. This is an exploration that Kathy Prendergast’s City Drawings series performed with pencil and paper through the 1990s, but Garaicoa rather prefers to pose construction problems to rival those that city planners face. Like Los Carpinteros alongside him, in his drawn-over architectural photographs, metropolises made from cut cardboard and other sculptural projects, he frequently attempts to rebuild the city – or at least its buildings – on a more manageable scale. The hope evidently is to locate, if not quite surprises (after all, who hasn’t been perturbed at some time by, say, the class-conscious, barricade-resistant boulevards of Haussmann), then at least resonances that humans can feel in their bones. Still, the darkened room which houses his Las Joyas de la Corona / The Crown Jewels (2009), a set of eight tiny silver models of buildings from around the world synonymous with the execution of power of one sort of another, doesn’t lack for unexpected mirroring: how unfortunate that the camp at Guantánamo rather recalls Auschwitz from above. A model of the Stasi HQ recalls a tiny silver hammer; that of the KGB, an occult symbol. And then there’s the descriptively named Pentagon. In terms of its floor plan, could it possibly be more evil in its associations with pentagrams – and yet, with its protective, concentric rings, more cowardly? In some ways, Las Joyas de la Corona represents the successful takedown of an easy target, and when Garaicoa is in less gothic mode, his work is more flexible, and inexhaustible in its interrogations. His interest begins with Havana, where the usual building cycle stalled in fascinating ways; but cities in old Europe also now claim his attention. Paris is besieged with particular force in Monsieur Haussmann… (wherein a stack of books on Haussmann’s Paris have their theoretical purity infected by conjunction with a sketch of the insectlike structure of the Place de l’Etoile) and in La plus belle sculpture, c’est le pavé que l’on jette sur la gueule des flics (2009; the title translates as ‘the most beautiful sculpture is the brick we throw at the face of the cops). Here, a broad French pun (pavé denotes both paving stone and a thick book) is literalised in a wall constructed from copies of a chunky tome on the events of 1968, studded with a paving stone, the weapon of choice for rampaging Sorbonne soixante-huitards. Either, obviously, would serve when it comes to storming once more the Bastille. Luke Clancy

Carlos Garaicoa

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

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Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 10 June – 5 September

reviews: europe

Thomas Struth

Photographs 1978–2010

Kunsthaus Zürich 11 June – 12 September

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

Tokamak Asdex Upgrade Interior 2, Max-Planck IPP, Garching, 2009 c-print, 142 x 176 cm. © the artist

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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

Ettore Spalletti

For I Can See with My Own Eyes How Far Off Is the Land

Galleria Lia Rumma, Milan 15 May – 30 September

Inseparabili, 2002, colour impasto and gold leaf on board, 150 x 300 x 4 cm (diptych). Courtesy Studio la Città, Verona

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reviews: europe

Portugal Arte 10

Various venues, Lisbon, Grândola, Portimão and Vila Real de Santo António 16 July – 15 August

Envisioned as the first in a biennial series, Portugal Arte 10 seems – and I use that word because the one thing this event does not suffer from is clarity of intention – to consist of three distinct strands. There’s a major exhibition of international (albeit with a strong LA bias) contemporary art in the stunning Alvaro Siza-designed Portuguese Pavilion in Lisbon; a series of public art commissions spread through the capital and three other towns; and what is billed as the largest survey of contemporary Cuban art outside the Caribbean (here tacked onto the Pavilion exhibition and popping up again in the municipal auditorium of the town of Grândola). Artistic director Stefan Simchowitz’s guiding concept for the biennial – decentralisation – is a challenging one given that it wilfully eschews the type of coagulant via which biennials tend to allow themselves to be marketed and judged: a catchy slogan. There’s no Making Worlds here. But given that it anticipates a certain amount of falling apart, Simchowitz’s apparently laissez-faire approach might be a strategically clever one. Worrying about what exactly this collection of works by around 170 artists is for or about is – perhaps necessarily – a thankless task; it’s best simply to succumb to the first inducement that the biennial organisers offer potential volunteers on their website: ‘we are a lot of fun and have a lot to offer’. Arguably the most ‘fun’ is to be had in the ‘California Dreaming’ section of the Pavilion (split into a series of microexhibitions, each with its own curator, which, reversing the logic that might underlie such a move, seem to bleed into each other). There, in a blacked-out room, you’ll find a presentation of videoworks – shown, generally, as a series of large-scale projections onto a series of freestanding walls, defying the usual logic that requires the zoning-off of such works in sweaty, stinking, black-curtained rooms. The result is that, far from having the usual feeling of claustrophobia and impending doom as you yank back those curtains, you’re encouraged simply to breeze from one work to another (pleasantly, this biennial is clearly put together with the dilettante in mind). And consequently something like Marco Brambilla’s Civilization (2008), a videowork that appears to invoke some fantastical collaboration between Hieronymus Bosch and David LaChapelle as an animated descent through the various circles of hell, looks less like lobby art (it was originally commissioned for the elevators of the Standard hotel in New York) and more like something worth paying attention to. Carlos Beato, the mayor of Grândola, commanded one of the first tanks to enter Lisbon (on the side of the people) during Portugal’s 1974 revolution: true to type, as he opened the town’s contribution to the show, he was more direct than Simchowitz and his chums could ever be in describing what the biennial was all about – putting his town and region on the (tourist and investment) map. So perhaps it was fitting that the most memorable work in Portugal Arte was (one of many) located in a public space, allowing a collision with the ‘real life’ of Portugal. No one admires ‘street’ art less than I do, but Brooklyn collective Faile’s Temple (2010) was a reason to think I might need to revise that particular stance. A collapsed chapel, executed at a 1:1 scale in stone and steel, and clad in ceramic tiles, it’s an edifice that flickers between a number of identities: part classical ruin, part tiled public convenience, part tabloidesque, comic-book narrative, part archive of past Faile works and all a nonsensical babble of references to Christianity, Buddhism and the vernacular architectures of Brooklyn and Portugal, it features a marble torso sporting a horse’s head and scuba gear as its altarpiece. There could be no better symbol for this cacophonous biennial than that. Mark Rappolt

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

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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

Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination 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

By Marsha Meskimmon Routledge, £19.99 (softcover)

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

A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain 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

By Owen Hatherley Verso, £17.99 (hardcover)

reviews: books

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.

after a dozen years and

Art of McSweeney’s 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-butirrelevant 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

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By the editors of McSweeney’s Tate Publishing, £25 (hardcover)

‘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 AngloAmerican 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-twentyfirst-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.

Hitch-22: A Memoir

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

By Christopher Hitchens Atlantic Books, £20/$26.99 (hardcover)

The strip: adam dant

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on the town:

13 August Systematic studio performance, 176, London

19 August Fourth Plinth shortlist announcement, St Martin-in-the-Fields crypt, London B

photography IAN PIERCE

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Fourth plinth

A Artist Sean Dack B  Artist and 176 gallery assistant David Angus C  Artist Laura Buckley and Jonty Rooke D  Saxophonist Karl D’Silva and artist Richard Sides E  176 exhibitions curator Ellen Mara De Wachter F Artist Paul B. Davis and Chicks on Speed’s Anat Ben-David G Musician Richard Strange H  176 interaction curator Maitreyi Maheshwari and Zabludowicz head of collection Elizabeth Neilson I Artist Benedict Drew J  Artists Tom Richards and Bern Roche Farrelly

1 Time Out’s Ossian Ward 2 Artist Brian Griffiths 3  Artists Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen 4 Artist Mariele Neudecker 5  ICA artistic director Ekow Eshun and members of the press 6  Artist Hew Locke and critic Michele Robecchi 7 Ekow Eshun with Grayson Perry 8 Mayor’s office project director Justine Simons and Arts Council  England’s London executive director Moira Sinclair 9  Artist Katharina Fritsch

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Thursday, September 9, 2010 11:12 Subject: off the record Date: Thursday, September 9, 2010 11:11 From: [email protected] To: Conversation: off the record

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

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