ArtReview Magazine, January February 2010

Issue 38 £5.00 ‘Disneyland. A man with pigs. Intoxication. Eye-contact with pig. Mistaken identity. White platform. Celebrities…’ – Pig Island

January & February 2010 Kiki Smith’s domestic politics: ‘ I’m not someone living in serial monogamy’ Maurizio Cattelan: Where Disney meets the Devil Nina Canell: Weird science & mysterious machines Copenhagen: Why the city’s climate for art means you should keep watching long after the Summit

Paul McC arthy

a t w en t y- f i r s t- c en t u ry H o m er Plus: free with this issue, his ver sion of ‘ Th e O d y s s e y ’ , an exclusive 164-page artist p u b lic atio n

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UKRAINE

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Contents

on the cover: paul MCCARTHY photographed by LEIGH LEDARE

January & February 2010

DISPATCHES 23 Snapshot: Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin Now See This: Raul Guerrero; Hernan Bas; Annelies Strba; Utopia Matters; Tabaimo; Karla Black; William Daniels; BAROCK – Art, Faith, Science and Technology in the Contemporary Age; Gillian Ayres; Nick Cave Columns: Paul Gravett discusses the work of Barron Storey; Joshua Mack despairs over US budget allotments for the arts; Aoife Rosenmeyer examines Zurich’s changing landscape; Marie Darrieussecq praises France’s 1% culturel policy The Free Lance: Christian Viveros-Fauné on the hullabaloo surrounding the New Museum’s latest show London Calling: J.J. Charlesworth predicts Richard Wright’s Turner Prize win Top Five: The pick of shows to see in the next two months, as selected by Alex Farquharson Design: Hettie Judah gets to grips with the Serpentine’s latest show Consumed: Fiona Tan limited edition; Bits and Bobs from Established & Sons; Bob and Roberta Smith etching; Bauhaus building blocks; Karin Sander scores; Sarah Lucas wallpaper; T-shirts by Dan Attoe and David Blandy; David Shrigley multiple An Oral History of Western Art: Matthew Collings chillaxes with Courbet On View: Jonathan Romney discusses Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s Silver Lion-winning Women Without Men; Mark Rappolt sizes up the Collezione Maramotti; Christopher Mooney talks to Aaron Young about his penchant for wreaking havoc; Andreas Leventis charts the productive role of laughter in the paintings of Ansel Krut Manifesto: Greg Bogin

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Contents

January & February 2010

FEATURES Paul McCarthy 60

Is the LA enfant terrible and creator of ArtReview’s latest artist publication a Homer for our age? Mark Rappolt

Kiki Smith 68

Vincent Katz meets Kiki Smith as she prepares for a major show at the Brooklyn Museum

Christian Boltanski 76

Charles Darwent talks to the French artist about the bet he has placed on his own life, and why the contents of a Tasmanian cave will be his last work

Nina Canell 79

Chris Sharp enjoys the weird science at work in Nina Canell’s experimental art practice

Maurizio Cattelan 82

As a show of work by the artworld’s clown prince goes up at the Menil Collection in Houston, Brian Dillon delves into the oeuvre of contemporary art’s most entertaining and unsettling practitioner

ART PILGRIMAGE 86

Jennifer Thatcher checks out the art scene in Copenhagen

rear view REVIEWS 99

Bridget Riley; Exhibition #1; Duncan Campbell; Catherine Story; Anne Hardy; David Hockney/Frances Stark; Lyon Biennial; Olaf Breuning; Emily Jacir; Futurist Life Redux; Guido van der Werve; Dianna Molzan; Richard Mosse; Feedforward; Gianfranco Baruchello; Sequences; Deadline; Aaron Curry/Thomas Houseago; Stefano Arienti; Istanbul Biennial

14 ArtReview

108

BOOK reviews 122

Painting Abstraction; Juan Muñoz: Writings/Escritos; The Emancipated Spectator; The Banham Lectures

THE STRIP 126 Barron Storey

ON THE TOWN 128

68 122

Rolex Gala Dinner, London X-Initiative closing party, New York

OFF THE RECORD 130

Gallery Girl gives her six trusty tips for gaining artworld success (or at least entrance into the ArtReview Power 100)

Correction: In the November 2009 issue of ArtReview we mistakenly attributed On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators, 2009, to Hans Ulrich Obrist. Though he was involved in the project, it was as writer of the foreword, whereas the bulk of the effort was made by the book’s author, Carolee Thea.

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ArtReview

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22 JANUARY – 12 MARCH 2010 MONDAY TO FRIDAY 10AM–6PM SATURDAY 11AM–4PM

ConTRIBUTORS

january & february 2010

Leigh ledare

vincent katz

sacha maric

andreas leventis

Sacha Maric’s portrait, fashion and documentary work has appeared in publications including Arena, Dazed & Confused, Kilimanjaro and Missbehave. His photographs have been exhibited in London’s National Portrait Gallery, the Lowry, in Manchester, and Still Light, Barcelona. He shot images of the Copenhagen art scene for this issue’s Art Pilgrimage, and will shortly be contributing a solo exhibition to the Copenhagen Photo Festival.

jennifer thatcher

Jennifer Thatcher is a regular contributor to ArtReview and Art Monthly. She recently moved to Folkestone and now has a cliff at the end of her street, which is handy for putting life’s troubles in perspective. She is about to start a new job as project coordinator of the 2011 Folkestone Triennial, and teaches on the MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s, London. 20

ArtReview

Vincent Katz is a New Yorkbased poet, critic and curator. He writes frequently on contemporary art and has published essays or articles on the work of Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh, Jennifer Bartlett, Francesco Clemente, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Taaffe and Cy Twombly. He has curated an exhibition on Black Mountain College for the Reina Sofía in Madrid. With his wife, Vivien Bittencourt, he directed the documentary film Kiki Smith: Squatting the Palace (2007), and for this issue revisits Smith’s work, interviewing the artist as she prepares for her show at the Brooklyn Museum.

Andreas Leventis, a freelance curator and writer based in London, contributes a profile of painter Ansel Krut to this issue of ArtReview. In recent years he has independently curated exhibitions with artists including Dan Attoe, Tommy Hartung, Paul Housley, Merlin James, Sara Mackillop, Alex Pollard and Neal Tait. He has previously contributed features and reviews to magazines including Modern Painters, Dazed & Confused and Turps Banana.

Conrad Ventur

American artist Conrad Ventur, who photographed the X-Initiative closing party in New York for ArtReview’s On the Town this issue, received his MFA in Art Practice from Goldsmiths in 2008. Recent solo shows of his expanded cinematic installations and photography include the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and Unosunove, Rome. His work can be seen at London’s Rokeby Gallery from 13 January to 19 February.

Vincent Katz photo: Vivien Bittencourt

Leigh Ledare, who photographed Paul McCarthy for this issue’s cover and feature story, works primarily in photography and video, exploring motifs emerging around representation, authorship, desire and valences of exchange. He has participated in shows at the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, the Swiss Institute, New York, the Prague Biennale and Les Rencontres d’Arles. Upcoming shows include Greene Naftali Gallery in New York, Guido Costa Projects in Turin and Pilar Corrias in London. His first book, Pretend You’re Actually Alive, was recently published by PPP Editions, New York.

foto originale

A K D O LV E N A N NA BA R R IBA LL AU G U S T I N A VO N N AG E L B R I G I T T E WA L DAC H DA N I E L R I C H T E R

EL INA MER EN MIES ER I K STEF F E NSE N E RW I N W U R M E VA S C H L E G E L EV E SUSSM A N G E ORG B A S E L I T Z H E L M U T F E DE R L E I VA N A N DE R S E N J A N N I S KOU N E L L I S J O N AT H A N M E E S E M A RC E L VA N E E DE N NA N NA H Ä N N INEN N I N A RO O S PER BA K J E NSE N PER K I R K EBY P OU L G E R N E S SIGM A R P OL K E S T E P H A N B A L K E N HO L

F L Æ S K E TO R V E T 8 5 A D K – 1 7 1 1 KØ B E N H AV N V TEL

4 5 33 93 42 2 1

W W W. B J E R G G A A R D. C O M

CAN YOU AFFORD TO BE TOUCHED?

curated by

Bureau des Visceralists

(a.k.a. Jota castro and christian Viveros-Fauné)

15 January – 27 FeBruary 2010 Jota castro, andres Bedoya, the Bruce High Quality Foundation, Graham Dolphin, rainer Ganahl, Kate Gilmore, Goldiechiari, S. Mark Gubb, patrick Hamilton, ciprian Homorodean, Simona Homorodean, rebecca Lennon, alban Muja, abigail reynolds, Guy richards Smit, Mauro Vignando, charlie Woolley

www.biennial.com Ceri Hand Gallery 12 Cotton Street, Liverpool L3 7DY T: +44 (0)151 207 0899 [email protected] www.cerihand.co.uk Opening hours Wednesday – Saturday 10am – 6pm or by appointment

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Graham Dolphin, 26 MC5 Songs, 2008, ink on record cover, 65 x 33cm, Image courtesy of the artist and SevenTeen

TOUCHED International 10 Exhibition 18 Sept–28 Nov 2010

SpaSticuS artiSticuS

4/12/09 14:59:04

DISPATCHES January/February

Snapshot Now See This The Free Lance / London Calling Top Five Design Consumed An Oral History of Western Art

23 24 26/32 34 36 38 42

adam broomberg & oliver chanarin

snapshot

An ongoing series by artists whose work we are interested in. Untitled, 2008

ArtReview

23

now see this words

Martin herbert

Raul Guerrero (CUE Art Foundation, New York, 21 January – 13 March. www.cueartfoundation.org) is clearly

a California cult artist’s California cult artist: the sixty-something San Diegan’s first New York exhibition since the 1990s is curated by Allen Ruppersberg. If Guerrero is under-known, though, it’s because he has stubbornly and changeably followed his own lights since the 1970s. One might prospectively lasso his mercurial effusions – postminimalist installations involving inverted pyramids; sand-flocked busts of Beethoven; prints and photographs; and more recently, variously obstreperous and dreamy oil paintings that often consider North America’s relation to South America – as exploring art’s ritual and mythic functions, and the spiritual bankruptcies of our era. Even so, his Jung-influenced, heartfelt practice tends to wriggle loose. ‘Guerrero: Beguiling, Baffling’ was the title of a Los Angeles Times article on him two decades ago. It still fits.

purplish hints of nineteenth-century decadence, rises above such abject comparisons via a constantly apparent self-awareness that his tremulous hormonal setups threaten to tip into bathos, and a genuinely screwy eye for composition and surreal detail. An odd consonance exists between Bas’s work and

Annelies Strba (Eigen+Art, Berlin, 21 January – 20 March, www. eigen-art.com), despite the divergence in

that of

medium. The photographer and filmmaker has long used her own daughters (and lately her granddaughters) in her work, and her recent tweaked photographs have found her inserting her girls into

That said, however, hypnagogic figurative painting has swung back into style this past decade, as

Hernan Bas (Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, 9 January – 13 March, www.galerieperrotin.com).

witness the fragrant flights of

The young Floridian’s canvases, typically featuring single figures adrift in dramatic, fulsomely allegorical landscapes/mindscapes, might come off as contemporary art’s equivalent to the Twilight movie saga: amped-up dramatisations of adolescents suspended on the cusp of maturity or selfknowledge. Bas, though, who colours his work with 24

ArtReview

clockwise from left: Raul Guerrero, Religion: After, 1985, oil on canvas, 107 x 89 cm, courtesy Stephen and Gary Phillips; Hernan Bas, The Signalmen, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 244 x 183 cm, courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris; Annelies Strba, Madonna 31, 2009, pigment print on canvas, gold paint, 27 x 20 cm, edition of 6, courtesy Galerie Eigen+Art, Leipzig & Berlin

DISPATCHES

Gerrit Rietveld, Red/Blue Chair (Rood-Blauwe Leunstoel), 1918, beech, plywood, paint, 88 x 60 x 84 cm, donation 1959, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009, courtesy Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Barron Storey Barron Storey’s left hand spans the opening page in both of his major published books, affirming his touch and presence on every hand-drawn, handwritten page that follows. An award-winning American illustrator, notably of iconic covers for Time magazine and the 1980 paperback reissue of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Storey teaches a sequential art class at the California College of the Arts, in San Francisco. He has inspired more than a generation of graphic-novel innovators, such as Bill Sienkiewicz, Kent Williams, David Mack and Dave McKean. Key to Storey’s influence have been the journals he began keeping around 1976. Far from the usual sketchbook exercises or preparations for larger works, these are his work. For him they are a way to “break through habits of thought and perception with practice” and find “a lens to something true”. Never intended for the public gaze, five or six of these journals were remixed in 1993 to form The Marat/Sade Journals, which returned to print, remastered, in 2009 via Graphic Novel Art, in Belgium. Here Storey exposed a private outlet where he could vent his passion and pain while falling madly in and out of love, his autobiographical voice unaffected and raw: “They must be a therapy of some kind, but they cannot replace my missing life – and they cannot restore the joy [the woman I loved] gave me.” His collisions and collusions between fractured, accumulated imagery and woven words result in an intense intimacy of innermost thoughts and feelings. By snatching dialogue from Marat/Sade (Peter Weiss’s 1963 play-within-a-play concerning a theatrical event staged by the Marquis de Sade in the Charenton asylum), and from much-loved movies, he found resonances with his own mental states and “that magic theatre of the self ”. In his journals, Storey’s lover blurs with Marat’s murderer, Charlotte Corday, and by the end he draws himself as the “new inmate at the bars with stained hand”. The stormy end of this affair rumbles through the King Lear-inspired journal no. 45, completed in November 1992 and published in 2007 as Life After Black. He reveals that it was the candour of his journals which first attracted his lover to him, and yet it was his sometimes-explicit nudes of her, from memory and love – what she branded his ‘fuckin’ porno’ – which helped drive her away. No barren story, his heartfelt strip for this issue recalls how he painted a giant rainforest scene for the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. Its theme grew out of a discussion with Dave McKean about Richard Dawkins’s atheist bestseller, The God Delusion (2006): “By that measure, I am deluded... and my trying to testify to my own faith may well be a delusion as well.” The Marat/Sade Journals and Life After Black are published by www.graphicnovelart.com words

Paul Gravett

a soft-focus, entirely feminine, fairytale world of white nightdresses and glowing, pastel-toned forests around their home in Melide, Switzerland. Strba’s photographs formerly resembled snapshots and cross-referenced keen parental memorialising with conceptualist rigour. Now, as she progressively unmoors her imagery, the transfiguring is less sentimental than wishful; something of photography’s cloudy, auratic origins adheres to these works, but one might equally compare Strba’s art to the Intimism of, say, Bonnard. It feels like a fantasy of steady-state rapture delivered in life. The history of comparable earthly urges is covered

Utopia Matters (Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, 22 January – 11 April, www.deutsche-guggenheim.de),

by

which seems like it might aptly, if somewhat indelicately, cap a decade of modernist aspirations reconsidered by young artists. But this ‘international sequence of case studies’ expands

the timeframe: working back to the German Nazarenes of the early 1800s and ending with the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, it promises an alternating current of hope and stymieing – and repeat to fade. As a measure of distance (temporal and cultural): the very contemporary, animation-based

Tabaimo (Yokohama Museum of Art, to 3 March, www.yaf. or.jp). Here Japanese commuters hang themselves

installations of

on tube trains, salarymen slave away inside housewives’ refrigerators (prior to being beheaded) and young girls shit on the Japanese flag. The thirty-five-year-old artist may borrow the classical aesthetics of Ukiyo-e, but the tone is anything but nostalgic. She asks how Japanese identity is sustainable in a transforming world, and forecasts a dystopian, crumbling future; one which, in the wraparound spaces that Tabaimo constructs from multiple projections, it can seem we already inhabit.

New? Not Exactly

Business as usual at the New Museum prods the angry beast

Buried in the middle of Sarah Thornton’s Seven Days in the Art World (2008), that clever ethnography of contemporary art and its joiner-ish subcultures, is a popular distinction cutting enough to rip through the colourful camouflage provided by the customs and rites of our weird little clan. That distinction is, simply, the difference between ‘a good eye’, the mythical tastemaker’s talent for finding impeccable art and artists, and

nostalgic for the edgy legacy of Marcia Tucker, its late founder. Of course, times changed, and bullish expectations vanished with them. Well, most people’s bullish expectations. As the recession took hold and the party at the New Museum swanned on, it didn’t take a genius to realise that something was bound to give. Meanwhile, the New Museum’s stated brief of ‘new art, new ideas’ came up short on both counts, just as it fell prey to its curators’ regurgitations of yesterday’s news. A couple of dozen mediocre shows, a bushel of bad reviews and a conflict-of-interest shitstorm later – concerning the public museum’s planned exhibition of gems from trustee Dakis Joannou’s private Deste Foundation collection – an ugly if expected backlash has kicked in. Rarely, it must be said, has an institution amassed such a fast store of goodwill to squander it just as quickly. Helmed presently by director Lisa Phillips and featuring star curators Richard Flood, Laura Hoptman and Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum is, essentially, stuck in a time warp of its own making. What was yesterday’s popular patience for chicken-hawk surveys (2009’s The Generational: Younger than Jesus) and cliquey shows of artists from the same gallery (Gavin Brown, whose stable has provided the work of artists Elizabeth Peyton, Jeremy Deller, Steven Shearer and Urs Fischer to the museum) is gone, leaving nasty outsider-ish resentment in its place. Like most bile, that anger tends to travel upwards. And up it went, straight into the mouthpiece of record: the front page of The New York Times. The ensuing free-for-all of opinionslinging merits a succinct single-word description: clusterfuck. The fact that this mugging of the New Museum has both its origins and principal arena in the complex, largely egotripping mosh pit that is the blogosphere (which has also turned on yours truly for being an art critic with previously competing briefs) says virtually nothing about the real source of the New Museum’s troubles. Just as American Idol alumnus Adam Lambert’s swishing on the American Music Awards proves that community standards are mutable and vague, so it is that the artworld rarely sees a conflict of interest until someone else raises the alarm – especially if, like the New Museum’s Dakis issue, that purported conflict has been hiding in plain sight. The folks brandishing torches and pitchforks over ‘the Joannou affair’ wrongly believe that the collector will benefit financially from bringing his blue-chip stuff Stateside. He won’t (the New Museum clearly stands to benefit here, not the other way around, as visitor figures to this kind of show are bound to words

‘a good ear’, a skill that may be defined as a savvy for keeping one’s ears pricked and one’s memory sharp – and, eventually, for picking the moment to parrot, courteously and consensually, nothing except received ideas. Thornton’s observation came to mind recently in connection with the current debates surrounding New York’s New Museum. Reopened little more than two years ago to great fanfare, the New Museum arrived at its Bowery Street location (the old digs were more jewel-box premises in SoHo) clad in flattering Sejima+Nishizawa steel and concrete, boasting renewed fealty from fat-pocketed trustees and popular support from an art public drunk on Gatsby-esque bubbles yet still 26

ArtReview

Christian viveros-faune

be high). But seasoned arguments do little to quell a species of outrage that is, at once, less focused and more intractable. The truth is, as good an impression of Marie Antoinette as the New Museum has managed, the principals at that institution are not AIG or Bank of America executives. What they’ve turned into, instead, is something both guilty and naive: artworld players who – like many of their haughty curatorial fellows – have long relied on ‘a good ear’ that has just turned tin. The Imaginary Museum, featuring the Dakis Joannou Collection and curated by Jeff Koons, is on view at the New Museum, New York, 3 March – 6 June

Jeff Koons, Balloon Dog, 1994-2000, high chromium stainless steel (with transparent colour coating), 320 x 378 x 119 cm. Courtesy the Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens

the free lance

FARZAN SADJADI “Between A Rock And A Hard Place” January 18th - February 20th 2010

TOBIAS LEHNER “Pluton” February 22nd - March 23rd 2010

WWW.CARBON12DUBAI.COM

DISPATCHES

President Obama has finally decided to deploy additional troops to Afghanistan, and despite hesitations one might feel about the decision taken, it’s reassuring to see deliberation reenter the process of governing after the disasters visited upon the nation by eight years of George W. Bush’s shoot-from-the-hip style. But Obama’s challenge is less about arms and even less about Afghanistan. What’s failing is not a military intervention, but the entire American model of nation building. Not just abroad, but at home. As our media, our elected representatives and the majority of our people embraced a model of democratic reform by armed imposition, our domestic policies sacrificed, as Obama’s 2010 budget puts it, ‘prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care, and infrastructure… for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected’. Sending in the troops is, like cutting taxes, a soundbite, one-size-fits-all solution, a substitution of form for content, of platitudes for analysis. And despite the terse précis quoted above, Obama’s budget allots $680 billion to the military and only $81.1b to education. The National Endowment for the Arts will receive $161.3 million, less than was spent at the Sotheby’s New York Impressionist & Modern Art evening sale in November. Plus ça change. Given our predilection to read flash as substance, and the outsourcing of culture to the private sector, it’s no surprise, for example, that under Mayor Michael Bloomberg large swathes of New York have been rezoned for high-end residential development, with limited public attention to the long-term consequences for social diversity or the strain on the city’s infrastructure. And while the economic downturn has slowed the pace of building, it has not brought a rethink of the underlying urban policy. Nor has the idea that bigger is better necessarily disappeared from the museum lexicon. The Whitney is going ahead with a space (granted, much needed) in the Meatpacking District; Dia has announced plans to build in Chelsea; and in October the city approved plans for a 1,050foot-tall tower by Jean Nouvel which will allow MoMA to increase its exhibition space by 30 percent. At the same time, the Whitney and MoMA have instituted staff cuts and hiring freezes, suggesting that increasing physical size rather than fostering curatorial innovation – ie, new thinking – remains the standard of institutional management. If these expansions prove the equivalent of jobless recoveries, simply more of what we’ve seen, then our museums, like our army, will be bogged down chasing failed policies. words JOSHUA MACK

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ArtReview

Karla Black (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, to 14 February, www.rbge.org.uk) has turned working in performance,

to sculpture more recently, though in a conditional, quietly polemical fashion. What appears, at first, to be a retread of 1970s antiform aesthetics – suspended sheets of delicately tinted plastic, carefully inchoate piles of plaster powder – belies a larger mission: foregrounding a direct experience of materiality, reflecting a sense that spoken

and written language are blunt instruments and arguing for a form of precise articulacy in which the interplay of forms, textures and colours might speak sharply and poetically for itself. It’s an initially vertiginous but, given time, richly rewarding proposal. Since the mid-2000s,

William Daniels (Luhring Augustine, New York, 9 January – 6 February, www.luhringaugustine.com) has been

exhibiting versions of art-historical classics remade in low materials (carefully torn cardboard or, more recently, crumpled silver foil) and

from top: Karla Black, Left Right Left Right, 2009 (installation view, Inverleith House), dirt, spray paint, plaster powder, powder paint, 20 x 531 x 345 cm, photo: Ruth Clark © Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, 2009, courtesy the artist, Mary Mary, Glasgow, and Gisela Capitain, Cologne; William Daniels, Untitled, 2009, oil on board, 33 x 33 cm, courtesy the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Vilma Gold, London

New York

Bring on the (relative) optimists. Initially

DISPATCHES

Zurich is a left-wing island in a right-wing sea – being, for example, one of the few districts to vote against the recent ban on minarets in Switzerland. It’s an island that is proud to commission major contemporary artworks from foreigners, not to mention architecture by iconic Brits. Though skylines across Europe have been cleared of cranes, the Zurich construction industry seems more, erm, ‘industrious’ than ever. The city’s residents grumble at endless diversions and chewed-up streets, but when the dust clears, the city will possess several noteworthy new contemporary artworks. From 2012, drivers along Hardbrücke, the raised dual carriageway that bypasses the city’s industrial northwest, will see the upper storey of the Thomas Demand work Nagelhaus, a replica of the famous ‘nail house’ that, in 2007, was temporarily left standing amid a construction site in Chongquing, China, and which Demand is building with Caruso St John architects. The work is one consequence of lengthy research by the city of Zurich and the ZHdK art school to formulate a policy for public art; their attention to the subject is praiseworthy at a time when other cities’ urban art still seems commissioned on a whim, even if at a recent conference theorist Bazon Brock obstreperously noted the irony of razing a site to rebuild a protest against development. Further proof of the city’s engagement is Sislej Xhafa’s Ypsilon: a 14-metre-high catapult that will light up when people sit on the bench formed by its sling; it’s one of two projects for Hardaupark, a park alongside residential developments to be completed in 2012. A shortlist of artists with an understanding of the dynamic of Balkan communities abroad were invited to propose projects, and Kosovar Xhafa’s selected work will make the community’s presence felt. Then there’s the temporary Zurich Transit Maritim project from Jan Morgenthaler, Barbara Roth, Martin Senn and Fariba Sepehrnia; since last year, elements of nautical furniture have been appearing alongside a stretch of the shallow Limmat River no container ship could navigate, culminating – if the project receives fresh funding – in a crane stationed quayside for the summer of 2014. Equally centrally, the search for a curator to manage a public art budget of CHF2 million in the Europaallee development is now under way. Meanwhile, it may seem calm at the Kunsthaus Zurich, but they plan to open a 15,000-square-metre David Chipperfield-designed extension by 2015. The Löwenbrauareal, the brick building on Limmatstrasse adorned with works from Jenny Holzer, Julian Opie and Ugo Rondinone, and where commercial galleries cluster, is also to be transformed. De Pury & Luxembourg jumped rather than waiting for the wrecking ball, while the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and the Kunsthalle Zurich are only programming onsite till mid-2010. The drive behind an extension more than a dozen storeys skywards is commercial, and will create uncertainty for galleries that are victims of their own success in revivifying the site. words Aoife Rosenmeyer

30

ArtReview

BAROCK – Art, Faith, Science and Technology in the Contemporary Age (MADRE, The extravagantly entitled

Naples, to 5 April, www.museomadre. it) aims to underscore the parallels: a bounding

scientific culture rewiring our sense of our selves, a backdrop of bloody religious fundamentalism and a sensation-craving artworld. It remains to be seen, though, whether this enticing comparison is more than an excuse to roll out – and attach an Italianate legacy to – work by 28 international artists who are mostly heavy hitters, including Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, Matthew Barney and Maurizio Cattelan.

Gillian Ayres (Alan Cristea Gallery, London, 3 February – 13 March, www. alancristea.com) is about to turn eighty –

this selection of new paintings and works on paper marks her birthday – but her work doesn’t show it.

from top: Giulia Piscitelli, Operaio, 2006, courtesy Galleria Fonti, Naples; Gillian Ayres, High Summer World of Light, 2009, oil on canvas, 199 x 275 cm, courtesy the artist and Alan Cristea Gallery, London

Zurich

painted in meticulous trompe l’oeil. As such, the British painter at once marks his distance from, say, the heights reached by Morandi, Caravaggio or Cézanne while asserting a kind of hushed painterly showmanship that feels a long way from despondency. In Naples an argument is being made that Caravaggio’s time and ours aren’t so different.

Nick Cave, Untitled, 2009, framed inkjet print, 126 x 96 cm. Photo: James Prinz. Courtesy the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles

Rather, 54 years into her exhibiting career, it suggests that mysteriously autonomous and acidbright arrays of circles and totems keep one young. “People can live without any fucking art”, says the potty-mouthed pensioner in a video interview on Alan Cristea’s website, going on to say that she nevertheless paints because “one can’t bloody help it”. Thankfully so, because virtually no living painter balances compositional intricacy, vivid application and unlikely composure like Ayres. If anyone on this page is going to approach Ayres

Nick Cave (Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, 10 January – 30 May, www. for superheated colouration, it’s

fowler.ucla.edu)

whose latterly lionised ‘soundsuits’ are the answer to that familiar question: what work do you make if you have a background in art, textiles and modern dance? Swap ‘textiles’ for ‘economics’ and you have Tino Sehgal. Don’t, and you have the Chicagoan Cave, whose loud (in every sense) and wearable costumes are his effusive leveraging of his faceted CV: frequently rainbow-toned full-body outfits that reference African and Caribbean ceremonial costumes, using materials including twigs, kitsch ornaments, metal, hair – anything, essentially, that’ll make noise and look grininducingly carnivalesque. Is it art? Come, come. What else could it be?

Paris The 1% culturel in France refers to the obligation, since 1951, to set aside 1 percent of public building construction budgets for art commissions, in the service of decoration. This is how my old secondary school came to be embellished with a trio of lifesize handball players in reinforced concrete. The framework of rusted metal appeared in their hands, and the ball looked like a bulbous excrescence, painted in red (the players were in blue and white). Less ‘decorative’ than at my school, nine works punctuating the route of Paris’s T3 tram also participate in the 1% culturel tradition. The line starts at the Pont du Garigliano, with a telephone booth designed by Frank Gehry in the shape of a large flower. The passerby who picks up the ringing phone will hear Sophie Calle, who has agreed to call several times a week. Parisians aren’t that surprised: “The first call I made”, the artist told me, “a woman said, ‘Ah, you’re Sophie Calle, that’s nice, but I have a date, I have to go!’” Proof that art is less in the street than in the gutter? Farther along the line, on the Square Barjac, Peter Kogler thought that since his work was going to be squatted regardless, he might as well make a skate park of it; and it’s amusing to see all the kids à la Gus Van Sant take over the hollow sculpture so naturally. In the mineral landscape of nearby social housing, Bertrand Lavier has created a mirage: palm trees in extremely green resin, which succeed in looking fake without being kitsch. They evoke a nostalgia for trees and warm countries in an area which has nothing to do with oases, and which bears a dismal name translatable as Postern of the Poplars. Christian Boltanski’s work is so discreet that you can’t even see it; but you can hear it, a little. It’s a bench, a good old public park bench, sitting among other city benches beneath the venerable trees of the Parc Montsouris. Boltanski’s bench whispers declarations of love recorded in different languages by students staying at the international centre opposite. People smile sometimes when they’re sitting on the bench, and you think they’re hearing the words in their native tongues, spoken from Ukraine, China, Afghanistan. Many fall asleep, too. The bench is very popular. To finish, I enjoy Claude Lévêque’s meditation on the Vanne Aqueduct, just opposite my place. There’s a lot of water in this neighbourhood, but covered, underground. Lévêque brings it out in the form of a metal wave covering the aqueduct. It reflects, among other things, the passing trams. The work is called Tchaikovsky, but don’t ask me why. words marie darrieussecq

London calling

The secret to working out who’s going to win the next Turner Prize

Okay, so I’m not one to blow my own trumpet, but this must be about the tenth time in a row that I’ve predicted the winner of the Turner Prize. Sure, you’re saying, but a blind chicken pecking at the numbers 1 to 4 has a 25 percent chance of picking the winner; and I’ll admit that once you’ve figured out which two nominees are the close-but-no-cigar contestants, you’re down to picking between two, which is even easier. The tricky bit, however, is working out what goes on inside the heads of the Turner Prize jury. My general rule is that the jury is preoccupied with what it thinks the ‘general public’ might think of the work on show, and looks for a contender who offers

stronger, Wright makes more sense as a winner if you consider how the two artists reflect the mood of the times we’re living in. If one thing links Hiorns and Wright, it’s that each artist’s work presented itself as an aesthetic spectacle. Hiorns’s austere Untitled (2008), the atomised remains of the components of a passenger-jet engine, was a sort of chilly moonscape of dead metal – grey dust, somehow out of scale with the gallery. It wasn’t there to explain itself, or offer complicated conceptual puzzles, or shock and annoy. But nor was Richard Wright’s almost inversely opulent and intoxicating No Title (2009), a wall-size design of exquisite complexity made from applied gold leaf. Wright’s work reached towards an immersive ideal of the sublime, absorbing the spectator, while Hiorns’s dust-scape offered the almost impossible effect of distancing: it lay there at your feet, and yet looked like a desert viewed from space. So what was at stake between Hiorns and Wright was a desire to reinstate the value of aesthetic experience in contemporary art. The then Tate Britain director and jury chairman Stephen Deuchar, speaking on the Guardian’s video blog after the announcement, spelled it out: their choice of Wright was driven by its quality as “a beautiful work of art… rooted in tradition and history”; while fellow jury member and Guardian critic Jonathan Jones, writing on his blog, could make wacky associations between the ‘genius’ of Wright and that of Leonardo da Vinci. In these anxious and pessimistic times, which seem hotwired to catastrophe, you can see why people might be anxious for a return to aesthetic value, and why, after so many years of contemporary art as shock-celebrity-spectacle, institutions like Tate might be keen to big-up conservative notions such as beauty and tradition. By contrast, in their scribbled contributions to the ‘comments wall’ that is always words

something that can be reconciled with what it thinks are the public’s tastes rather than just the narrower, insider interests of the artworld. Last year, for example, Mark Leckey was a strong winner, perhaps because he embodied the figure of the artist caught up in popular culture, while his competitors presented works that operated within various specialist, if current, artworld languages – and the last thing Turner Prize juries want is to be viewed as foisting unintelligible contemporary art on a supposedly sceptical public. But this year’s showdown was different: the favourite, Roger Hiorns, had been hotly tipped from the outset, after his hugely popular Artangel project, Seizure (2008), an abandoned modernist flat in South London encrusted floor to ceiling with blue crystals. But on the night, the prize went to the outsider, Richard Wright. It might seem odd that the bookies (and many pundits) could have got it so wrong, but in a way it had always been a contest between the two. While Hiorns’s work was the 32

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J.J. Charlesworth

installed at the exhibition’s exit, visitors were clearly wowed by both Hiorns and Wright, even to the point of merging the two: ‘Richard Hiorns to win’, declared one card. If the Hiorns/Wright opposition makes sense, it’s because Wright’s work could be seen as a welcome celebration of beauty, seduction and craftsmanship, putting the human spectator at its heart. But Hiorns was the more radical, offering a strange spectacle of a world stripped of human presence: postapocalyptic beauty fit for a culture that is afraid of its own future. And perhaps it was that, in the end, that scared the jury...

Richard Wright, No Title, 2009. Photo: Sam Drake and Gabrielle Johnson, Tate Photography. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Gagosian Gallery, London, the Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, and BQ, Berlin

it’s so Predictable

2010

The Armory Show New Art by Living Artists

The Armory Show–Modern Art of the 20th Century

March 4–7, 2010 Piers 92 and 94

New York City thearmoryshow.com armoryartsweek.com SUSAN COLLIS As good As it gets (detail), 2008, 18-carat white gold (hallmarked), white sapphire, turquoise, onyx. Courtesy of seVeNteeN, London

What to see this month by

Alex Farquharson Director of Nottingham Contemporary

2 Lonely at the Top # 3

4 For the blind man…

MuHKA, Antwerp 22 January – 7 March www.muhka.be

ICA, London until 31 January www.ica.org.uk

The third in a sequence of exhibitions at MuHKA from Viktor Misiano, curator of the Central Asia pavilion at the 2005 Venice Biennale – one of that year’s big surprises, since the ‘stans’ (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, etc) are so under-known, artistically and sociopolitically. One might expect, with work by Rustam Khalfin and Almagul Menlibayeva, a continuation of that show’s layering of histories: of ancient and continuing tradition alongside the aftermath of the USSR’s collapse. MuHKA are buying the whole project – an exhibition in time, worth following. Nationally or regionally defined shows may seem played out, but that can’t be said when the subject is Central Asia.

Curated by Anthony Huberman, this is a group show whose premise is that the knowledge its selections generate is speculative rather than to do with decoding. So it flies in the face of the idea that there is some kind of meaning that we need to unlock; instead it seems to be more about multiplying epistemological uncertainties. One could think of it as reviving a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, or the antiEnlightenment outlook ushered in by a lot of poststructuralists. And ranging from Morandi to Marcel Broodthaers to Fischli/Weiss, it’s a nice intergenerational mix of artists.

3 Tatiana Trouve 1 Repetition: Summer Display 1983 Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven until 28 February www.vanabbemuseum.nl Part of an 18-month series of projects called Play Van Abbe, this is a repeat – down to the audioguide – of an exhibition curated here in 1983 by Rudi Fuchs, shortly after his Documenta 7; it featured some of the same artists he’d shown in Kassel, so the experience obviously affected his programming there as director at the time. Now, artworks are ‘repeated’ every time they’re shown again, and we don’t question that, but what happens when you repeat a whole exhibition in a different epoch? It highlights everything that has changed around it, and the historical specificity and contingency of the original curatorial framework. This seems indicative, too, of a strategy at the Van Abbemuseum: their displays make you think as much about the institutional context and the museum’s history as about the internal relations between objects.

34 ArtReview

Migros Museum, Zurich until 21 February www.migrosmuseum.ch Kunsthaus Graz 6 February – 16 May www.museum-joanneum.at The Zurich exhibition is a major solo show, including a large installation called 350 Points Towards Eternity (2009): what look like 350 floor-to-ceiling plumb lines, all at angles, an impression created, I gather, by magnetic fields. More directly architectural installations include scaled-down doors which are both reflective and transparent. The Graz show will likely continue Trouvé’s investigations into spaces that are actual and physical as well as imagined, felt, remembered, and the unease those create. Her sculptural installations, subtle despite their scale, feel evocative of domestic or institutional environments we’ve experienced - but can’t name.

5 Phil Collins: AUTO-KINO! Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin 5 February – 14 March www.kunsthalle-berlin.com This show - pointedly scheduled during the Berlinale Film Festival – is basically a drive-in cinema, screening mainstream movies as well as art videos while the audience sits in a fleet of second-hand cars parked in the gallery. It’s typical of Collins to have one foot in the artworld, one foot out, highlighting the genre distinctions between art video and other film. This is an expanded cinema, collapsing different forms of film and their social, economic and physical contexts.

from left: Zomeropstelling van de Eigen Collectie (Summer Display of the Museum’s Collection), 1983 (installation view, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), photo: Hans Biezen; Peter Fischli & David Weiss, From Ordung und Reinlichkeit (Order and Cleanliness, detail), 2003–9, set of 15 photocopies, 30 x 42 cm each, courtesy the artists and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

top five

Birgit Jürgenssen, Ich möchte hier raus! / I want out of here!, 1976, b&w photograph © Estate of Birgit Jürgenssen / VBK, Vienna, 2009 / Sammlung Verbund, Vienna

DONNA: Feminist Avant-garde of the 1970s from Sammlung Verbund, Vienna 200 works by 17 artists Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Roma Duration of Exhibition 19 February – 16 May 2010 Curators Gabriele Schor and Angelandreina Rorro

Artists Helena Almeida / Eleanor Antin / Renate Bertlmann / Valie Export / Nan Goldin Birgit Jürgenssen / Ketty La Rocca / Leslie Labowitz / Suzanne Lacy / Suzy Lake Ana Mendieta / Martha Rosler / Cindy Sherman / Annegret Soltau Hannah Wilke / Francesca Woodman / Nil Yalter The exhibition is a collaboration between the art collection Sammlung Verbund, Vienna and the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Rome.

www.sammlung.verbund.at

design

the name game The Serpentine Gallery’s first design show: the exhibits may be anonymous, but the curator certainly isn’t

words

objection rather trite: “You can have the same subject curated by a wide variety of people and it will always look different. Whether you’ve seen the objects before is not so much the point – it’s more to do with the fact that it’s Konstantin and it’s here. It would be entirely different at the Design Museum.” As I travelled across town to catch the new shows at the Design Museum later that day, I realised with regret that I had not asked Obrist or fellow director Julia Peyton-Jones whether their zeal for design had made them regular visitors to the Design Museum. My suspicion was perhaps not. I crossed the museum threshold to the big question: could Design Real have been a Design Museum exhibition? Yes and no. The museum seems to have less space than the Serpentine, but that’s likely an illusion created by Grcic’s uncluttered scenography; it surely lacks the Serpentine’s healthy visitor figures. Grcic’s show had the lean, utilitarian elegance of a wellmade, very expensive thing. But in a rather bitter coincidence, 36

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Hettie Judah

the Design Museum had opened an ergonomics show called Real Design the week before, and it is a compliment to both sides that the most surprising elements in Grcic’s selection would have sat happily within it. Yet the fact that no curator’s name is splashed across the wall beside the title points up the major reason why Design Real couldn’t have occupied the same space as Real Design. Over in design world, curators spend months on end covered in dust and nursing paper cuts: the draw of their shows is the subject or manifesto, not the name attached to it. Design Real really does come with a king – Peyton-Jones and Obrist say they consider Grcic “a great genius” – but although the design world is full of stars and personal brands, I’m not sure it’s quite ready for the cult of the celebrity curator. Design Real is on view at the Serpentine Gallery, London, through 7 February. Ergonomics Real Design is at the Design Museum, London, through 7 March

Babybjörn Baby Carrier Synergy, Babybjörn, designed by Ergonomidesign, © 2009 Babybjörn

Check it out, art kids: sometimes a urinal is just a urinal. Welcome to the world of the industrial design exhibition, where objects lack hidden meaning, and notions of good and bad are linked simply to functional success. Designer Konstantin Grcic last appeared in this column after producing an injectionmoulded chair using a fast-moving new plastic developed by BASF, and Design Real, the exhibition he’s curated at London’s Serpentine Gallery, is about as functional as they come. There are no design/art jokes here: the double takes come instead from a selection of exhibits so militantly quotidian that a good 30 percent could have been sourced from the gallery building itself: a chair from the directors’ office; a water carafe from the front desk; the bin from the shop. There’s an empty bell jar that was intended to hold an artificial heart, which Grcic had selected but could not show. One imagines the heart moving through the light, clear gallery space, beating within the ribs of a visitor: the one that got away. After the formally omnivorous Serpentine’s recent love-in with the world of performance poetry, Design Real is its first public recognition of what many people consider one of the nobler creative arts (and for those of us who think that way: damn it’s hard to resist pimping up the title to the more satisfyingly regal Design Reál). Sure, the gallery has collaborated with architects on annual big-budget commissions, but those pavilions have been original works by starchitects; it takes real guts to exhibit the fruits of true mass-production without even a veneer of conceptual significance. The kind of guts hitherto only attached to more educational institutions, such as MoMA, the V&A and, of course, the Design Museum. Design commentators can – and no doubt will – argue themselves lean over the merits of Grcic’s selection; it’s an intelligent but only very occasionally surprising overview of recent industrial design, destined for a nonspecialist audience. “How could I talk about design in depth and be understood by the public at large?” Grcic said recently. For a specialist audience, the show is a curiosity rather than a revelation – something that for me sat rather awkwardly with the gallery’s reputation for tautly executed exhibitions and rigorous yearly marathons. Serpentine co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist clearly found this

STZ

ArtReview240x310:Prototipo_A4_Saloni 11/12/09 11:10 Pagina 1

The Event is back.

Salone Internazionale del Mobile Eurocucina, International Kitchen Furniture Exhibition International Bathroom Exhibition International Furnishing Accessories Exhibition SaloneSatellite Milan Fairgrounds, Rho, 14/19.04.2010 Cosmit spa Foro Buonaparte 65 20121 Milano, Italy

+39 02725941 +39 0289011563 fax

www.cosmit.it e-mail [email protected]

dispatches

Consumed

03

£175

The pick of this month’s offerings from shops, galleries and museums. Words Laura Allsop, Michelle Medjeral

02

from £10,500

04

$150

01

£1,150 01 Artist Fiona Tan, who represented the Netherlands last year at the Venice Biennale, creates film and photography work that probes the nature of selfrepresentation. In 2000 she made a film entitled Lift that involved the artist being hoisted into the Amsterdam sky by a cluster of red balloons in a dramatic and lyrical instance of exhibitionism. A limited-edition print from the crucial moment of elevation is currently available to purchase from London’s Frith Street Gallery in an edition of 100.

02 To commemorate the website relaunch and new partnership with online retailers YOOX, Established & Sons will be showcasing Bits and Bobs, created by acclaimed design duo Committee. Available only online, this limited edition of 24 comes in solid silver (from £8,400) or solid silver gold plated (from £10,500). Bits and Bobs unites everyday objects whose initial lack of obvious connection becomes a curio with references to ornaments of the past and a narrative on twenty-first-century decoration.

03 British artist Bob and Roberta Smith celebrates the opening of his exhibition Factory Outlet at London’s Beaconsfield by producing his firstever hand-printed etchings. Inspired by the building’s mission statement and architecture, and by the artist’s own tremendous artistic output during his one-year residency, the etching is a tonguein-cheek portrayal of Beaconsfield as an art factory. A limited edition of 100 (£175 now or £250 after the exhibition ends on 21 February), each is signed by the artist.

www.frithstreetgallery.com

www.establishedandsons.com

www.beaconsfield.ltd.uk

04 To coincide with MoMA’s critically acclaimed Bauhaus exhibition, the museum shop is stocking a plethora of Bauhausrelated merchandise. Alongside furniture, a chessboard, prints and a special edition replicating Josef Albers’s exercises in understanding colour, the shop is also stocking a building game originally devised by Alma SiedhoffBuscher in 1924. It’s suitable for children aged six and up, but its elegant wood design and bright colours will make this a must for some adults, too. www.moma.org

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ArtReview

CUrrent exhibitiOnS

> January 30th / March 28th, 2010 Laboratorio 987

Yorgos Sapountzis Pre-Bellevue Showcase Project

Loud FLash British Punk on paper The Mott Collection Activity related to exhibition:

Punk Aesthetics seminar > March 27th, 2010

MUSAC OFF

Augusto Alves da Silva Iberia

Collaboration project between MUSAC and the Serralves Foundation (Porto, Portugal)

Schedule: > Project launch: January 30th > Quarantine: February 8th / March 20th > Opening of the exhibition: April 10th www.primerproforma2010.org

UPCOMing exhibitiOnS > Opening: April 10 , 2010 th

Laboratorio 987 & Museo de León

Showcase Project

Bringing up Knowledge

archive of Creators from Castilla y León Designed by un Mundo Feliz

www.musac.es

Fore more information about our Educational and Culture Programme: publications, seminars, symposiums, lectures, workshops, grants, audiovisuals, visit our site www.musac.es; suscribe to our bimonthly newsletter. Free entrance. Avda Reyes Leoneses, 24. 24008. León, Spain.

Consumed

05

€600 07

£90

08

06

£195

$1,200

05

05 Sound art is an increasingly significant aspect of contemporary art practice, and Berlin’s Temporäre Kunsthalle is currently paying homage to all things audio with a show curated by conceptual artist Karin Sander, who has brought together works by more than 500 Berlinbased artists. Each work was ‘translated’ from physical form into sound, and the result is a medley of sung, recited and instrumental compositions. To coincide with the show, Sander has produced four audio scores in an edition of 50. www.kunsthalle-berlin.com 40

ArtReview

06 In February the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester is mounting a show of artists’ wallpaper, exploring the role it plays in contemporary art, and looking at its historical, decorative and political associations. On view will be designs by the likes of Thomas Demand, Rosemarie Trockel, Martin Boyce and Damien Hirst, some even for purchase in the Whitworth shop. Sarah Lucas’s roll (pictured) is entitled Tits in Space, and features, unsurprisingly, breastshaped objects floating on a dark background. www.whitworth.manchester. ac.uk

07 For a slice of wearable art, look no further than London’s 176 project space, which is currently stocking limited-edition T-shirts designed by artists Dan Attoe and David Blandy for an affordable £90 and £30 respectively. Attoe’s hand screen-printed American Apparel T-shirt (pictured) features various cartoonish beasts, including an outsize eagle and a dinosaur, while Blandy’s silk-screened tee depicts the various circles of hell.

08 Scottish artist David Shrigley has made a career of creating offbeat and witty sculptures, drawings and handwritten texts. Brass Tooth, his current multiple on offer at Philadelphia’s Cereal Art, once again plays with the exaggerated scale of everyday objects, offering a solid polished brass molar sculpture of eccentric proportions. The sculpture is available to purchase in an edition of 80, each sold with a unique hand drawing on the box.

www.projectspace176.com

www.cerealart.com

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

NO 14:

Courbet’s notorious self-designed retrospective, held in 1855 in a specially erected building opposite the annual official Salon exhibition, was the high point of a new movement of Realism in French painting, which directly inspired the art of Manet and the Impressionists, and thus can be seen as one of the founding moments of Modernism. Born in rural France in 1819, Courbet was imprisoned for his part in the destruction of the Vendôme column, in Paris, during the 1871 Commune. He died in exile in Switzerland in 1877. interview by matthew collings

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Gustave Courbet, The Painter’s Studio; a Real Allegory, 1854–5. © RMN (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski, Paris

GUSTAVE COURBET

ArtReview What are you wearing? COURBET Oh, you know, nineteenth-century costume. AR What was it like, discovering modern art? GC Great. I loved it. AR What are you doing now? GC Chillaxin’. AR Seen any shows?

frankness of paint and canvas. I saw this handling in sketchy landscapes by other artists in the Salon, and I expanded it and made it harsher and heavier and kind of more delicious at the same time in my own work. Fat bottoms, lovely evening clouds, hairy animals, shadows and poor people, black stuffy clothes, the chalk cliffs in the bit of France near Switzerland where I come from, where you’ve probably been on holiday yourself, Matthew, or been out making one of your TV programmes, all done with thick white paint put on with a knife, and broad brush marks, and solid drawing, and a sense of a powerful, believable pictorial structure that comes from Rembrandt and Caravaggio, but totally leaving out their handed-down religious narratives.

GC Yes, Glenn Brown, superb. I see the dollar signs – that’s how I tell if something’s good.

AR How did you know where to put people and what gestures they should be doing?

AR Surely you didn’t used to think like that?

GC A little bit from folk art, popular prints, woodcuts of the Wandering Jew or peasants at work. I put that with handling and scale that basically came from the Old Masters but was exaggerated by me. And the mood I got from the zeitgeist, it was the mood of my time.

GC In the 1850s, no, but 2009 is a very different era. AR Tell me about the old days. GC Oh, a lot of things were new then, things that are dead now. Bohemianism, socialism and anarchism, they all arrived at once, and I identified with them all. In fact they were frameworks through which I created an artistic identity. You could say painting itself was another one: the painter, this figure connected to Romanticism. It was a new idea: the outcast or outsider, the free-spirit gypsy – I put a new substantial slant on it. Before that, I’d done self-portraits looking crazy and poetic, and then a few more things where I captured the look of the country worker, not the peasants so much, but the rural petite bourgeoisie, which was my social background. I captured it on an epic scale, which hadn’t been done before, and with no clear guide about how to get what you were looking at morally, which also hadn’t been done. I mean, it’s not Bruegel mocking peasant life for the amusement of the aristocrat who’s commissioned peasant scenes from Bruegel. It’s an expression of a certain kind of life that seems to come truly from within that life, but of course it could not in reality come from there, because to be a painter you have to leave that life behind and become something higher and more socially refined. So compared to Bruegel, I’m my own commissioner, and I’m not mocking. But it’s not all that clear either what it is I am positively doing – commemorating, heroicising? Not really. Solidifying, yes, more like that, solidifying something elusive, not an ideal, but a reality, a reality I have known and which now has a political urgency, even a force, and it is exactly that – urgency and force – that goes into my aesthetic expression of it. AR What kinds of subjects? GC People in the dark round a fire, playing music, in the house; people working; people coming home from work; people at a funeral: very big paintings, a lot of Caravaggio-esque and Rembrandt-esque chiaroscuro, inspiring and exciting, and a new rough handling, rough textures, thick paint, a new

AR And everyone was impressed? GC You wouldn’t believe how fast it all moved. There was the 1848 revolutionary attempt all over Europe, which was suppressed, and after that everyone was scared, and fear led to a big political coup in France in 1851, and then everyone was not scared any more but just totally repressed, and they had to get used to new ways: entertainment, amusement, culture, plenty of art – and an iron-hard control operating beneath the surface, as it were. The administrator of the Salon summons me and says, “Here, Courbet, show your paintings in the annual all-important Salon by all means – it’s the Emperor’s Salon, after all, everything in it makes him look like a good guy. Tone down the peasants-r-us stuff a bit maybe, and the whole political angle, but otherwise show as much as you like.” So I said, “You speak in the name of the government, but it seems to me that I am a kind of government myself.” AR That’s a good line. GC Thank you. And I went off and formed my own art system, if you like, a system made of paintings, and their parliament was a brick building I paid to have erected opposite the palace where the Salon was on show, and I called this building the Pavilion of the Real, and in it I hung a few dozen paintings I’d done over the previous seven years. One was this big burial painting I mentioned, which I’d already shown in the Salon a few years previously, and another was the big studio painting, which the Salon rejected. AR What’s going on in The Studio? GC There was a long title. I can’t remember it all now. ‘Real’ and ‘allegory’ were in it. Maybe I thought reality is always how you perceive it, and this is my perception, my allegory,

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART or I wanted to emphasise robustness but I wanted to contextualise it too, so a tough-seeming surface is both real and a proposal about reality. And then I also wanted the title to suggest how a political or social attitude that is against the powerful, and for bringing down the powerful, can be right there in a painting, even when it’s not actually directly illustrated. I mean, The Studio is not a revolution, or barricades, it’s just a big studio. Myself in the middle, painting a landscape – a nude model looking on, and a little kid looking, too. And the rest of the space filled with people. Poets, thinkers, art collectors and so on: my support group – they’re all on one side. On the other side it’s a group of allegorical figures. One of them’s maybe the Emperor. He’s a poacher. He’s poaching the empire, maybe – at least that’s an interpretation that’s settled in. AR Is it what you meant?

I painted stags and hunting dogs, still lifes: apples, trout, that kind of thing. Waves. And baskets of flowers – all these say ‘Down with the repressive regime’ woman is an allegory of beauty, or a muse, or truth, as well as the woman I lived with. She’s a working mum. In fact, that’s my illegitimate kid in the picture. He’s not working yet, of course.

GC Sure. I don’t know. You put these things together; you have an idea at the time. I wouldn’t say this sort of idea is what lasts, though.

AR You’re rambling.

AR What does last?

AR The landscape you’re painting in The Studio is your own home region, the surroundings of Ornans. It’s the centre of the picture, and the light’s all on that depicted painting, while everyone else is in the shadows. You’re making a statement about art, and how it connects to a personal reality, and you’ve lined up an audience for the statement; they represent conflicting priorities, different understandings of what reality is and how existence should be ordered.

GC I like the great expanse of nothingness above everybody, like in Velázquez’s Las Meninas: it’s a beautiful strong absence that makes everything else work. It used to be a lot of other paintings by me hung high on the wall, but the painting as a whole worked better when I obliterated them. AR You sound very abstract when you talk like that – what about “Down with the repressive regime! Up with freedom!” GC That kind of thing is childish in art. In your age childishness dominates so much; I’m reluctant to encourage it. AR I know what you mean. It’s a relief you think like that. But you did paint some great images of work and workers. GC I did. They were great, yes. But also I did lesbians, kitschy fat nudes, very bad landscapes done very quickly and often by assistants. And I painted magnificent scenes of stags and hunting dogs, and still lifes that are among the greatest things in the genre: apples, trout, that kind of thing. Waves that look as powerfully structured as buildings. And baskets of flowers – all these say “Down with the repressive regime” just as much as paintings of workers. In your time they still say something, they say, “Down with childishness”. The excellence is the revolutionary thing, but it has to come out of a new approach, and that approach allegorises the painter’s revolutionary programme. Thick paint, rough handling, solid powerful formal structure, they all go with a new radical carelessness about important narratives. You make something have real importance in painting by making it have a feeling of constant shifting registers, while at the same time there’s always an overall coherence. The Studio too is an image of workers, actually, but not labourers: cultural workers and maybe allegorical politicians, and the 44 ArtReview

GC Yes, it’s the drink. It killed me.

GC Yes, that’s what something cubist by Braque or Léger is, too: existence, how things are, the real thing, or an allegory by painting methods of the real thing. Roughness and finesse are always misunderstood in painting, but in any case, what I started off was a new culture of painting in which reality and roughness seem very important, and finesse and finish are a matter of how you contextualise roughness or carelessness or spontaneity. Manet, the Impressionists, the Postimpressionists, they’re all inspired by it: this holiday art of the Impressionists, where they make picnics political. In fact, I’m looking forward to when you interview one of them to see how they explain it. At the time I never liked them much. Or Manet. Now I see the importance of the move, where artists give to sheer spontaneity a very elevated place: they monumentalise artistic decisionmaking. They cause the flicker or the glimpse to become something authoritative, as classicism had once been full of authority. Next month: Berthe Morisot raises the chick count of this series

On view

World of women Winner of the Silver Lion at last September’s Venice Film Festival for her film Women Without Men, Shirin Neshat is the latest contemporary artist to move into feature filmmaking without compromising her artistic signature

When gallery artists make the transition to feature film, a lot is at stake. There is the question of whether an artist can adapt to the long form and sustain a coherent visual discourse over 90 minutes or more. There is nearly always the requirement to tell a story – a demand that can be oppressive, even in the relatively liberal environment of arthouse cinema, where narrative is sometimes (but not always) permitted to be stretched beyond mainstream norms. But most challenging of all is the question of how much an artist is able, or willing, to import his or her own signature into film – and indeed, whether that personality might best be downplayed rather than highlighted. In Britain, the question is a somewhat pressing one, given that the UK Film Council has announced its intention to invest in features by gallery artists as a way to invigorate British cinema: 46

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Gillian Wearing and Jake & Dinos Chapman are among the first in line, following in the path of Steve McQueen, whose Hunger (2008) was an exemplary case of how cogently an artist can adapt to narrative cinema. Conversely, the way ahead is probably not indicated by Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy (2009), about the early life of John Lennon. If Nowhere Boy stands to be a modestly healthy commercial success, that is largely because it so wholeheartedly adopts mainstream norms that there is no discernible artistic – or indeed directorial – identity visible in what comes across as, at best, a competent British realist narrative in the Stephen Frears tradition. The dangers in artists bringing too much of themselves to the screen can be seen in projects such as Pipilotti Rist’s Pepperminta (2009), the resounding horror of last September’s Venice Film Festival. A lurid fantasia in which the child-woman heroine skips merrily through a lysergically-hued

landscape, dressing her chums in Sgt Pepper costumes and turning uptight Swiss burghers onto the subversive joys of colour, it may have been 100 percent Rist, but it came across like an episode of The Magic Roundabout guest-directed by Björk. That said, Venice also premiered another artist’s debut feature, this one an object lesson in achieving a fit between signature style and the requirements of art-house cinema. It was Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men (2009), and it deservedly won the Silver Lion for best director. Look at practically any still from the film and you instantly know this is a Neshat piece: you recognise the stark, flattened compositions centred on single figures; the geometric arrangements of male and female groups; the monochrome Islamic imagery. At the same time, Women Without Men sees Neshat expanding the scale of her stylised miniatures,

words Jonathan Romney

above and facing page: Shirin Neshat, Women Without Men, 2009, feature film stills. © the artist. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

among them Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999), into a complex, tantalising narrative form. Adapted by Neshat and Shoja Azari from a novel by Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men is a fascinating hybrid: a realistic historical narrative evoking early 1950s political turmoil in Iran, yet also integrating elements of magical realism and myth that amply mobilise the symbolic aspects of Neshat’s distinctive iconography. The time is 1953, when a British-backed coup d’état brought down the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. The story interweaves the fates of four women: Fakhri (Arita Shahrzad), the middle-aged wife of a general who leaves her husband to rediscover the intellectual bohemia of her youth; Zarin, a tormented and martyr-like young prostitute (played with frightening physical intensity by Hungarian actress Orsolya Tóth); Munis (Shabnam Toloui), a young woman whose political awakening brings her into conflict with her traditionalist brother; and Faezeh (Pegah Ferydoni), whose own position and identity fluctuate in relation to the other three. Neshat boldly tackles the language of modern historical drama, as associated with Bertolucci, say, or Taiwan’s Hou Hsiao-hsien. Shooting in Morocco, she musters vivid medium-scale rather than spectacular evocations of 1950s Tehran, of demonstrations and public unrest, staged in an idiosyncratically stylised manner: scenes in which marching groups collide at crossroads, or a remarkable shot of white-shirted demonstrators rushing diagonally across the screen, with an army in pursuit. At the same time, the film often approaches the more overtly theatrical, Brechtian style of Theo Angelopoulos in his philosophical, highly choreographed reimaginings of modern Greek history (Days of ’36, 1972, The Travelling Players, 1975). But alongside the historical reconstruction, there runs an unapologetic magic-realist thread, suggestive of a dream or folktale. The story begins

with Munis’s suicide, but no sooner is she hastily buried by her distraught brother than she is exhumed and miraculously restored to life, and to political activism. The leitmotif of a wooded garden ostensibly suggests a separate female haven; but while at times the garden seems to occupy the realm of pure symbol, at other moments it appears as an altogether realistic territory subject to invasion by the outside world. It is in the garden that the film is at its most impressionistic: in a quietly breathtaking tour de force at the start, the camera snakes at ground level along a brook, then makes an ‘impossible’ transition through a hole in the wall, to crane up above the trees. The film’s densely evocative tenor owes much to such eerie manipulations of space, and to the faded, nearsepia palette mustered by cameraman Martin Gschlacht. Striking as both a personal and political statement, Women Without Men is a fascinating extension of Neshat’s long-running project as an artist: and it may be that the transition has been so successful because the feature itself evolved out of a series of approaches to the material, a set of standalone installations devoted to the individual women in the story. Neshat’s film is proof that gallery artists can move into cinema without having to entertain the more mundane and mainstream assumptions associated with narrative film. An auteur piece in the true sense. Women Without Men is screening at the Sundance Film Festival, held in Park City, 21-30 January

On view On the face of it, you might not necessarily think of Reggio Emilia, the capital (boasting a little under 200,000 inhabitants) of the EmiliaRomagna region of northern Italy, as a stronghold of contemporary art. In fact, it’s best known for the development of an eponymous, widely adopted preschool educational philosophy. But tucked away in the former factory of the MaxMara fashion house is one of the most rewarding private European collections of postwar art you could visit. Discretion, in fact, seems to be a theme of art interventions in Reggio: the city’s Invito a… programme allows contemporary artists to choose a site for a permanent public artwork within the city, which should ultimately create the most open of contemporary art museums. So far the series has led to works by Robert Morris, Eliseo Mattiacci, Luciano Fabro and Sol LeWitt. Don’t look up in the public reading room of the Panizzi Library and you’ll never notice LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1126 Whirls and Twirls 1 (Reggio Emilia) (2004) on the ceiling. Perhaps that absence of hullabaloo is part of Reggio’s charm. Collezione Maramotti was put together by MaxMara’s founder, Achille Maramotti, and it’s a remarkable fusion of twentieth-century art history and one man’s personal taste. It features postwar art, with a definite focus on painting, ranging through Italian movements such as the Roman School, Arte Povera and Transavanguardia before switching (quite dramatically) to 1980s Neo-Geo from New York and ending with a selection of works from the final years of the last century and the very first years of the current one. Among these are the collection’s one videowork, Bill Viola’s Catherine’s Vow (2002) (although the freestanding LCD flat panel is, to all intents and purposes, a moving painting), and one of its overall standouts, Tom Sachs’s The Choice (Ghetto Sculpture Park) (2001–2). Alongside these are a few works that refuse to fit the pattern (such as it is), like Vito Acconci’s labyrinthine installation Due o tre strutture che s’aggancino a una stanza per sostenere un boomerang politico (1978). The fact that visits to the collection must be booked in advance and that, even then, the institution only admits up to 25 people at any one time allows this to be that rare private collection that can really live up to that definition by being viewed in relative privacy. You’d think that Achille Maramotti’s death, in 2005, would have marked the completion of his collection. But you’d be wrong. Aside from the fact that contemporary works continue to be

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A Cut Above

The discreet charms of MaxMara founder Achille Maramotti’s art collection.

added (albeit not to the display of the permanent collection), MaxMara has also partnered up with the Whitechapel Gallery in London to introduce the biennial MaxMara Art Prize for Women, comprising a residency and funding to realise an art project, which is then acquired by the collection. The first award, for 2005–7, went to Margaret Salmon; Hannah Rickards won the 2007–9 edition. The fact that the Maramotti Collection – like, without going all Jerry Saltz, the artworld in general – is dominated by male artists, and that the award has gone to female artists best known for filmwork, videowork and soundwork, provides an intriguing riposte to the Maramotti art aesthetic. On the other hand, the fact that the MaxMara brand name apparently derives from combining the name of a celebrated local drunk, ‘Count Max’, with a fragment of Achille Maramotti’s surname suggests that the great man had both a sense of humour and a far-from-overwhelming ego. And the fact that the brand is aimed squarely at women suggests that while his collection’s evolution has made a seemingly unlikely jump, the late fashion great might have appreciated it.

above: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, www.collezionemaramotti.org facing page, clockwise from top: Vito Acconci, Due o tre strutture che s’aggancino a una stanza per sostenere un boomerang politico, 1978; Julian Schnabel, Man of Sorrow (The King), 1983; Eric Fischl, Birthday Boy, 1983 (foreground), Alex Katz, Ursula, 1988 (left, background), Malcolm Morley, Farewell to Crete, 1984 (right). All images: © the artists. Courtesy Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia

words mark rappolt

On view

hellraiser

Aaron Young imports his distinctly American brand of hard-living artist enthralled by biker culture, delinquency, violence and sex to the quieter precincts of a Brussels gallery With the help of pit bulls, skateboarders, tattoo artists and helicopter pilots, Aaron Young makes shrewd use of the margins of American pop culture. Whether recreating a colossal Jackson Pollock painting in New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory with motorcycles or kicking a video camera to death across Red Square in Moscow, the thirtyseven-year-old New Yorker by way of San Francisco and the Yale MFA programme is embracing an alternative form of American outsider art, aggressively crafting a macho artist persona that attempts to square up to those of the Abstract Expressionists. ArtReview shared a beer with the artist among the painted tyre tracks, burned-rubber glass paintings and graffiti-covered plinths at the opening of his show Semper Idem, in Almine Rech’s newly renovated gallery space in Brussels. AR This [Untitled (Arm), 2009] doesn’t look like any work of yours we’ve seen before.

AY It’s my most explicit, I guess. We took a cast of my arm and the photographed it, brought it into a 3D program and enlarged it to the exact dimensions of the arm of Michelangelo’s David. I like it because, you know, David was the first underdog. Then there’s its hyperchrome finish, and its positioning, coming through the wall, but at crotch level. So, yes, it’s my arm, but completely flexed and engorged, with all my blood flowing through it. AR Is this an idea you’ve been playing with for a while? Will other pieces follow, or is it a one-off ? AY We’ll see. I haven’t made up my mind. As with a lot of my work, I play with the ideas, box them up and then install them. I’ve never been here before, and I didn’t know this space was so gigantic. So, like, this piece [I’m bound to go to heaven because I have already served my time in hell, 2009] I made after I got here. AR And how long have you been here? 50

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AY Two days. It’s a Hells Angels tattoo and a death’s-head ring. And the quote – ‘I’m bound to go to heaven because I’ve already served my time in hell’ – is from an original Oakland Hells Angel. I just walked into a bookstore and opened up a Hells Angels book and grabbed this stuff. AR But you’re not really part of biker culture, are you? You’ve got the coat, I see, but it’s not really part of your world, is it? AY No, no, no. It’s just something that is so American, something I’m so obsessed with. It doesn’t necessarily have to be biker. It just has to be that same kind of aggression, that same kind of live-by-your-own-terms sensibility. AR Which you’re now exporting to Brussels? AY Why not, right? We’re crossing borders all the time, and exporting, and hypnotising, and propagandising, and what you will. AR Have you always had a fascination with badboy rebellion culture? Is it distanced a bit, or are you right in there living it? AY I think I’ve calmed down, but it’s something that’s kind of bred in you, that you almost have to live up to, you know? There’s a lot of kill-youridols kind of stuff, quotes and text in here, and I think that’s more about living up to something, and conquering it. I mean, you know, my father was crazy and all over the place. So you have this

kind of legend that you don’t emulate but, just like anything in art, try to expand. You try to push it on to a different direction. I guess I’m right in the middle of it right now. We’ll see where it goes. AR Has it got you into trouble? I mean, having to live up to this persona or this creation? AY Ah, now you’re looking for dirt. I’m sure if you know anything about me, you’ve probably heard everything there is to tell. AR OK. Let’s talk about the untitled plinths that are in the show. AY They’re riffs on early minimalism, but they’re also like the zero exit of that kind of purity. It’s like the ‘LSD’ [plinth], which is supposed to take you out, but actually captures you. Or the ‘Go home’ or ‘Kill your idols’, which are just empty shouts [scrawled into the surface of the plinths]. Especially empty with these tyre tracks everywhere. The

Christopher mooney

interview by

Gang Bang, 2009, laminated glass with shredded tyre rubber, vinyl letters and epoxy resin, 213 x 152 cm, edition 10 of 40. Courtesy the artist, Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Galerie Almine Rech, Brussels Untitled, 2009, concrete, spray paint, foam, 114 x 37 x 37 cm. Courtesy the artist, Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Galerie Almine Rech, Brussels Semper Idem, 2009 (installation view, Galerie Almine Rech, Brussels, with Untitled (Arm), 2009, right). Courtesy the artist, Bortolami Gallery, New York, and Galerie Almine Rech, Brussels

spray paint and painted tyre tracks on the floor [of the exhibition space] are a reference to the Cage/ Rauschenberg piece (Automobile Tire Print, 1951), where Cage was driving the car and Rauschenberg was painting the tyre and laying down eight-by-ten pieces of paper under it. It was a nice reference to pull everything together. It’s different than the motorcycle paintings, which have so much depth and weight. They’re about being pushed down into the paint and bringing something up to the surface. The floor painting has an emptiness to it because there’s not that weight. It’s just all surface. It doesn’t pull anything out. Some of the plinths are pedestals that should have something on them. Some are knocked down as well, so they do have an aggression and a rebelliousness to them, and the same kind of bravado that a lot of the action pieces have. They’re very much a reference to early minimalism, but trying to pull it to a point where it’s more orientated for, like… a click [snapping his fingers], you know? Like it’s more this kind of monolithic gathering spot. AR Right, like the city parks we used to hang around in when we were kids. The park plinths never served the function that they were supposed to. They just became these smashed-up things. AY Yes. I don’t like anything to serve its original function.

AR The glass pieces [Gang Bang, 2009] are also bike-related, right? AY Right. I was walking around a motorcycle piece in my studio, giving directions to the person that’s burning out on the bike, and the entire time I’m getting hit with hot rubber from the tyre. So picking up on the detail, we made these rubber pieces. The first one that I made was actually in art school at the San Francisco Art Institute, where I stood against the wall and I had the motorcycle rider just kind of move his tyre back and forth, burning out, and all of this hot rubber is going around my body. We made an outline of my body. So I’ve done one other piece on glass, but I have never done text before. I just thought there was a time to actually say something. Put something down. And I’ve always liked this statement, ‘gang bang’. I mean, it can go from orgy to, you know, kids in LA, two rival gangs. I like the phrase itself because I think that it can kind of just go for anything, and in the end, basically it’s just sex and violence, you know? It’s like the Hells Angels quote. Art is about everything, you know, life and death. I find the quote ties this work together nicely, and I think it is kind of hopeful. AR So you’re heaven bound? AY Well, I don’t know about that.

On view

the comic artist Ansel Krut is fond of spirals, vortices and whirlpools. He paints them fast and loose, using a native restlessness to keep thought from getting in the way of good work. So how does he know he’s on the right track? When the painting makes him laugh.

Rows of small carefully resolved colour drawings line much of the available wall space of Ansel Krut’s Dalston studio, in Hackney, London. Citizen Bottle (2009) began life as a loose sketch before being turned into one of these drawings. In the finished oil painting, a wine-bottle motif is set down upon the corner of a table within an indeterminate field of nicotine-ochre. The vessel’s bulging sides convey a large intake of breath, which immediately lends it a human personality. Stuffed onto the neck of the bottle-body is a half-apple shape, which also resembles a pair of buttocks, at the centre of which is situated a singing mouth, or arsehole. The two raised green wings that grow out and up from the centre of the body rouse his audience, the viewer, to join in a chorus. This bon viveur’s face is furnished with a Dalí-esque waxed moustache, which is repeated and blurred to approximate drunken double vision, and simultaneously suggests a set of eyes. Hovering

above this head is a comical brown ten-gallon hat. Krut demonstrates a Surrealist’s facility for perceiving links between the most disparate commonplace objects and having them perform dual functions. It is by attending to the logic that an initial motif triggers, and allowing a character to reveal itself, that the artist arrives at, or discovers, a painting. He continues this quest for the unexpected and marvellous from one work to the next, but is kept in check by a low boredom threshold that prevents the artist repeating himself. Krut took up painting 30 years ago, when he enrolled in a fine art degree course at University of the Witwatersrand, in his native Johannesburg. Moving to London in 1982, and going on to study at the Royal College of Art, he felt the full impact of currents emanating from the Royal Academy’s seminal 1981 New Spirit in Painting exhibition. Like many of his fellow students, Krut was heavily influenced by Guston, de Kooning and others featured in that show; but earlier European painting, especially the horror and morbidity he witnessed in Goya, soon became as vital to his development. Those early influences have since been synthesised and distilled; and as a tutor at the Royal College for some years now, he, in turn, is leaving his mark on younger painters. It is literature, perhaps, more than anything else that fuels his imagination these days. Rather than providing a subject or narrative, however, it only ever functions as a point of departure for formal experimentation. Krut cites the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his skill for anthropomorphism and breathing life into inanimate objects as being particularly pertinent to his own project. Mythological tales of violence 52

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are another source of inspiration. The instances of transformation described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1 AD) go some way towards explaining Krut’s desire to mutate human beings into fantastical hybrid animals or flowers, and vice versa. In the small painting Giants of Modernism #1 (Vortex Head with Pipe) (2009), the artist has composed a pontificating figure, whom he describes as a ‘chinless wonder’, entirely from vortical forms. The head, eyes, ears and mouth – which holds an exaggerated pipe – ludicrously dwarf the body, arms and legs, all of which are described with graphic black brushstrokes and filled with apparently arbitrary shades of orange, yellow and lilac. Krut, however, counter to the supposed practices of this imaginary procrastinating genius, prefers to execute his paintings rapidly, so as to curtail potentially debilitating decision-making processes and resist overworking an image. The artist has been using the whirlpool words Andreas Leventis

form in his paintings for several years, but of late it has proved a particularly productive device. By limiting himself to this single visual element, its various formal ambiguities become infinitely appealing. The optical effects of the spiral generate a confusion between beginning and end, inside and exterior space, negative and positive space, in many ways encapsulating and symbolising much of what painters have explored and attempted to articulate throughout history. The colour and line of the comics Krut read as a child inform his practice more than ever. He recalled and borrowed the spiral motif from publications in which it often served as shorthand for an elbow or knee. Vortex Man (2009) has an unmistakable superhero dynamism about him. The figure lunges towards us with voluminous tubular limbs from a matt grey-green background that has the look of a worn schoolroom blackboard. The tornado from The Wizard of Oz (1939) provides another plausible source for these writhing appendages, which, when considered in conjunction with the patina of the blackboard ground, evinces a nostalgic impulse. Here the head and face are conjured via a simply stencilled thin white line, bookended with perfect circles. This alien glyph floats free of the body, and provides an unexpected mechanical interlude. Nine years ago Krut abandoned a more illustrative style of figuration, executed in a sombre palette, and began working in the singular manner for which he is known today. With this newfound freedom, the artist’s sense of colour and humour was allowed to surface. Indeed, Krut claims to now know when a painting is headed in the right direction: it makes him laugh. Krut’s paintings

reassert the primacy of the bodily and organic over interpretation and meaning. His amputated and spliced protagonists are often difficult to decipher visually, and the emotions and associations they evoke are correspondingly unsettling. In Mushroom (2009) a number of blind, giant fungus dandies dressed in single trouser legs and clown boots stride confidently into one another, creating a central tangle of primary colour. Krut engenders these innocuous beige vegetables with a menacing air and a hint of arrogance. Signifying both fecundity and decay, these pranksters appear complicit in a joke that concerns the haphazard nature of life, its pitfalls and our inevitable demise. An exhibition of work by Ansel Krut is on view at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, 15 January – 13 February

above: Tulip & Lily, 2009, oil on canvas (framed), 110 x 80 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London facing page: Giants of Modernism #1 (Vortex Head with Pipe), 2009, oil on canvas (framed), 76 x 61 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London

The exhibition is funded by

With the kind support of

Eating the

Universe Food in Art

010 2 y r a u r 9 – 28 Feb f

r 20 0 e b m e v o 28 N le Kunsthal

Düsseldor

Thomas Rentmeister, without title, 2007 / © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2009

The Kunsthalle Düsseldorf is supported by

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Grabbeplatz 4, D-40213 Düsseldorf, www.kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de Tue – Sat, noon – 7 pm / Sundays and public holidays, 11 am – 6 pm / New opening hours to begin in January 2010: Tue – Sun, 11 am – 6 pm

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18/11/09 18:17:49

Manifesto

by Greg Bogin

Greg Bogin was born in 1965 in Flushing, Queens, within view of the New York World’s Fair, when the promise of a happy, modern future was in the air. He later attended New York’s Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, receiving a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. Bogin’s work is informed by the mundane and the ordinary that surrounds us and infiltrates our subconscious. Logos on the sides of trucks, supermarket signage, IKEA catalogues and highway markers are all sifted through and distilled into the emblematic, and vaguely familiar. Bogin creates from the everyday detritus of our collective peripheral vision the inverse of the commonplace. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. He lives with his wife, Kyrie, in Greenwich Village and works in Brooklyn.

Fiera Internazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea

International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair

26/29 Marzo 2010

March 26/29, 2010

Leonardo da Vinci, Sala delle Asse, Castello Sforzesco, Milano, ristrutturazione Studio BBPR, 1956. Foto: Armin Linke

feature:

Paul McCar thy’s installations, videos, sculptures and drawings picture contemporar y America as a hysterical themepark , controlling its citizens by indulging appetites for violence, infantilism, sex and fast food. Here, to coincide with the unveiling of its newest attraction, ‘ Pig Island ’, we explore a world awash with ketchup gore and brimful of butt plugs. w o r d s : m a r k r a pp o l t ph o t o g r aph y : l e i g h l e d a r e

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W elco m e to t h e J u n g l e

At approximately the same time as Paul McCarthy was completing the final pages of his Pig Island publication in Los Angeles, I was standing outside Jungle Island, just off the MacArthur Causeway in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Despite its proximity to six lanes of pretty much constant highway traffic, Jungle Island proudly boasts that it’s a ‘lush tropical jungle’, ‘home to such animal wonders as a 900-pound liger [a lion crossed with a tiger] and our famous twin orangutans’ (would anyone but their mother know?). But there’s no time to be worrying about these creatures, because soon we could also be having a close encounter with ‘the planet’s most lethal bird’ or a run-in with a bunch of ‘feisty baboons’. Weirdly, the reason I was standing outside Jungle Island in the first place was related to an art fair. On leaving the NADA extravaganza at the Deauville Beach Resort in Miami Beach and reaching for a fair guide by the exit, I’d accidentally grabbed the Jungle Island brochure instead. And between the invitation to ‘discover my wild side’, and the fact that animal islands were on my mind at the time, somehow I found myself on Parrot Jungle Trail, just outside the Jungle Island gates. D i scov er Yo u r W i l d S i d e

There are obvious relationships between a number of McCarthy’s recent productions – perhaps most explicitly the enormous multimedia installation (made in collaboration with son Damon McCarthy) Caribbean Pirates (2001–5) – and themeparks. Indeed, in some ways they both provide a chronicle of sorts of the rise of the modern movietainment industry: from Walt Disney’s dictum about every street in Disneyland needing to have an eye-catching ‘weenie’ (a reference to the sausages dangled off-camera in order to make

McCarthy takes the themepark , exaggerates it with cocks, butt plugs, implicit violence and kitchen condiments, and drops it of f in a sanitised gallery

dogs jump in movies) – in his installations McCarthy deploys this advice to the literal and metaphorical letter – to James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), with its narrative about a life lived via prosthesis and proxy (a soldier infiltrating the enemy camp via an avatar), and a plot that mirrors and references the fabrication of the film itself (soon-to-be-digitised actors operating in a ‘set’ of absent digital effects). Aside from the fact that many of McCarthy’s installations seem to have grown out of the detritus and production debris of his studio floor, there’s a sense in which he, like Cameron, fuses mediated experiences (in McCarthy’s case, imagery derived from themeparks, magazine and Internet editorials, and Hollywood productions) with lived experiences – often, in the case of the artist’s output, the most common sexual or cloacal ones. Indeed, building on an evident fondness for DIY culture and household sauces, for example a homespun take on Hollywood pugilism featuring a boxing-gloved McCarthy repeatedly punching himself (the video Rocky, 1976); or the untitled photograph of a grimy bottle of Daddies Tomato Ketchup, from the artist’s Props series, that was on view at Miami Beach’s Bass Museum during last December’s art fair/funfair, McCarthy seems to bring the carnivalesque atmosphere of the themepark into a domestic setting. Beyond the sauces, consider works like the sculpture included in LaLa Land Parody Paradise (2005), which features miniature pirate-pixies fucking contented pigs, the action taking place beneath a canopy of palm trees whose foliage is represented by a series of dinner plates. If Jungle Island sanitises the rainforest, adds a few penguins and vultures, and drops the whole thing off in an urban motorway lay-by, then there’s a sense in which McCarthy enacts an inverted parallel: he takes the themepark, exaggerates it with cocks, butt plugs, implicit violence and kitchen condiments, and drops it off in a sanitised gallery space. It’s popular culture consumed (as, let’s face it, it’s intended to be) and shat out – a return of the repressed in high art, complete with the anxiety caused by protagonists (both the ‘characters’ in the sculptures and the artist in the process of making them) who seem to enjoy being in McCarthy’s scenarios, while the generally rancid atmospheres of those installations provoke an equal and opposite reaction in the viewer: disgust. M ee t t h e N ati v e s

Back in Jungle Island, we’re invited to admire cockatoos riding miniature bicycles, to ‘gasp as a trainer dives into the water where alligators await’, and to ‘discover what makes our lemurs so lovable and our penguins so cool’. The wildlife, in short, is anthropomorphised into a series of ‘characters’ with the kind of qualities – lovability, cuteness, coolness or, in the case of the alligators, sociability – that might make them a winner on American Idol. The barriers we normally think of as separating ‘us’ from ‘them’ are erased. In this respect the themepark utilises a trait that the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin recognised (in his analysis of the work of Rabelais) as a fundamental base of the riotous medieval carnivals, which were powered by the levelling forces of sexual innuendo, role reversal and laughter. ‘Carnival does not know footlights’, he writes, ‘carnival does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators’. (The counterpoint to this being that in official or ‘real’ life, status is always on display.) At Jungle Island, every visitor becomes a Doctor Dolittle and every animal a personality capable of answering back. ArtReview 63

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In McCarthy’s work, presidents, Santa Claus, Snow White, Angelina Jolie, foodstuffs, consumer culture, pigs and representations of the artist himself are mashed up to similar effect. (In the case of Static (Pink), 2004–9, exhibited this summer at Hauser & Wirth Zurich and featuring a piggy-pink George W. Bush copulating with a pig in the midst of a pile of pig- and Bush offcuts, the conflation and flow between forms is particularly explicit.) If it seems that everything can worm its way into McCarthy’s work, then there’s a suggestion that everyone can too. And like in the medieval carnival or themepark, ordinary shitting, fucking human beings are raised to the status of kings and queens, while kings and queens are demoted to that of ordinary shitting, fucking human beings. T h e J u n g l e a n d B e yo n d

He highlights a certain joy in being a willing – as opposed to unwitting – victim of modern swinehood, wallowing in a mess of marketing, advertising and general consumerism 64

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It’s almost impossible to think of Pig Island without recalling the adventures of Odysseus and the witch-goddess Circe recounted in Homer’s Odyssey: Circe lived on an island not unlike Jungle Island, where various wild animals (lions, wolves, etc) hung out in a strangely tame state. Odysseus’s crew arrived and were wined and dined by Circe, and in the process drugged and then transformed into pigs. Odysseus eventually rescued them, but then stayed, together with his crew, for a further year of feasting, drinking and romping with Circe, who turned out to be OK. It’s easy to see parallels between the tale of Circe and the way in which McCarthy documents both the horror of man’s (and, generally, it’s very much man’s rather than woman’s) descent to the level of swine, and also his delight – at first perverse, but then natural in its infantilism – at wallowing in it. (In this respect, James Joyce’s reimagining of The Odyssey in Ulysses, 1922, particularly Leopold Bloom’s adventures in Dublin’s red-light district, frequent pig-related vocabulary and descriptions of pork-product consumption, forms an interesting bridge between the Greek epic and McCarthy’s work.) What McCarthy also highlights is the fact that there’s a certain joy, too, in being a willing – as opposed to unwitting – victim of modern swinehood, wallowing in a mess of marketing, advertising and general consumerism). Jungle Island isn’t that bad. And what’s so wrong with pigs? After all, they’re all prospective organ donors, and there’s many a tale of how the smell of cooked human flesh is comparable to the smell of roast pork. It ’ s S h ow ti m e

When I arrived back in England, an interview with an American Idol auditionee was being broadcast on the radio. Having made it through to the last 40 contestants, he had apparently been required to submit to an interview with a private detective, during the course of which he was asked to reveal whether or not he had ever had a threesome, and if so, of what genders that unholy trinity had been comprised; whether or not he had ever taken drugs, and if so, which ones; and last but not least, whether or not he was gay. Perhaps, if it’s possible to reduce a vast volume of interconnected work, created over an extended period of time, to something as simple as a ‘theme’, one might say that, like the medieval carnival, McCarthy’s apparently anarchic fantasies actually highlight their opposite – social conformity, policing and moral control.

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As the tribulations k i k i sm i t h d o e s n o t st o p w o r k i n g , at least during waking hours. So when I go to interview her in the Lower East Side townhouse where she lives and works, I am not surprised to see her at work while answering my questions, but I am amazed to observe the procedures she can undertake while giving her full attention to her verbal responses. As she speaks, she cuts strips off a sheet of black-printed paper. Then she rips the strips and begins pasting them down onto a white sheet. At precise stages in this pasting process, she adds three blue stars and a bird. Gradually I see she is making a collage of a bird in a cage. To see art being made in the midst of lived life is revelatory. “I’m very attracted to recombining images”, she explains, “cutting them up and reconfiguring them. I’m also very interested in contingency – that things have a temporal relationship to one another, like set design, or a story.” Daily enterprise has become an important subject in Smith’s recent work, and it forms one theme of Kiki Smith: Sojourn, opening in February at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. For many artists such a show would be a major event, but Smith is on a roll: this is her third museum show in New York during the last six years. Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, and Things was seen at MoMA Queens in 2003–4, and she had a travelling retrospective that finished at the Whitney in 2006–7. Unlike those exhibitions, however, her latest offers a very different way of conceiving of exhibitions and artmaking. Smith’s early work, created during the late 1980s, was transgressive – an untitled piece from 1987–90 (now in the MoMA collection) features a row of large silvered-glass containers with Gothic lettering purporting to indicate the contents of each: blood, pus, semen, vomit, sweat, etc. Another sculpture, Tale (1992), shows a naked woman on all fours with a long trail of shit (or maybe a bloody intestine) hanging from her anus. Much of Smith’s work of this time was based on her study of Gray’s Anatomy, and fragmented limbs, entrails and bodily fluids were favourite subjects. The digestive tract fascinated her. But from the beginning, her choice of materials transformed these shocking images: what was considered ugly or unspeakable, when created in bronze or terracotta, attained the status and communicative force of a substantial work of art. Smith’s choice of materials and handmade facture generated empathy for her subjects, rather than repulsion. She has often worked with taboos, not only the harsher ones that artists such as Karen Finley and Andres Serrano attacked or played with in the Reagan–Bush years. More recently, Smith has found ways to reinterpret women’s issues in aesthetic terms, using more subtle forms of transgression and sometimes challenging accepted feminist views. For centuries, women, in giving birth, were considered by men analogous to the earth that nurtures life and,

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of age replace those of youth, Kiki Smith ’s latest work turns to subtler taboos wo rds : v i n cen t k at z

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accordingly, their duties were to be limited to childbearing and family. Feminist and poststructuralist writers and artists in recent years have attempted to dismantle this concept in order to reveal it as an apparatus of economic and political oppression. Smith, in contrast, has embraced an identification of woman with nature, taking pride in that perceived relationship in works such as My Blue Lake (1995), a photogravure of the artist’s head, seen simultaneously from all angles, whose colours and elongated indentations of flesh engender the feeling of the body turned into landscape. Community and collaboration have been essential for Smith. She lived in a communal house for a while in San Francisco and was part of Collaborative Projects, or Colab, which took over a building in Times Square in 1980 for the famed Times Square Show. “I am not someone living in serial monogamy”, she explains, “so to have a community to be in relationship to is not a bad version!” The communities that appeal to Smith are organic, not constructed, which is why she prefers the Lower East Side to Chelsea. Smith has often been attracted by underdog, marginal figures: “There were these camp-followers in wars, and they would make these very temporary, makeshift villages – as tailors, prostitutes, barbers, scribes… Maybe like a refugee camp. You have this very temporary society, and then it disperses and moves on, or it tragically stays together. They’re incongruous things that come together for a given moment. I like constructing shows like that, so the pieces are like characters in a play.” In the 1990s Smith became obsessed with domesticity. Using rough materials found in her house or on the street, she recreated objects from daily life, in particular women’s lives – things that women have made or lived among over the centuries. The colonial and postcolonial period of North America became a source of interest for her, and she introduced associated objects and imagery into her work. In Through a Hole (1995) she made bronze casts of tea doilies, which she saw as “cosmic mandalas under your teacup”. A seismic shift in Smith’s work took place in 2005, when she agreed to do an installation, entitled Homespun Tales, at the Querini Stampalia foundation in Venice. The family who owned the palazzo had decided to open it to the public; one floor would become a library and a second would display Sèvres porcelain and paintings by Pietro Longhi. The third floor had been stripped bare to become, in Smith’s words, “someone’s fantasy of a contemporary art space”. This disturbed Smith, who was becoming more and more interested in lived-in space: how people construct the spaces they inhabit, the particular objects and decorations they use, and how much of that is decided by women. Smith resolved to turn the Querini Stampalia exhibition space into her own take on domestic space. To do this she worked for months, creating pieces that could serve as beds, bureaux, chairs, tables and artworks. She brought a crew and spent weeks painting large-scale wall decorations, using stencils, and designing the curtains of a four-poster bed. Never literal, Smith’s works combined elements from American colonial history within an imagined eighteenth-century European context, while insisting on a completely contemporary energy in digital animations and her slightly-smaller-than-lifesize nude women covered in silver glitter. The proliferation of materials was a statement in itself: materiality as an aesthetic. An element of potential violence remained in the combinations of little girls and animals. 70

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In 2008, the Museum Haus Esters, in Krefeld, Germany, invited Smith to perform a similar intervention within a Bauhausstyle brick residence designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928. She agreed, using a silk needlepoint embroidery produced in 1783 by a Connecticut woman named Prudence Punderson as a narrative model. It depicts a room in which images of childhood (a cradle), life (a woman drawing at a table) and death (a coffin) serve as an allegory for the plain and difficult life of a woman artist. At a recent talk in Brooklyn, Smith joked that she thinks of herself as a spinster, but a spinster who receives visitors. For the Brooklyn exhibition, an elaboration of her concept for Krefeld, Smith has constructed rooms that fill the boxlike Sackler main gallery. As in Punderson’s needlepoint, there is a sequential flow to Smith’s exhibition. The rooms have a similarity to rooms in a home. However, the correlation is abstract and the progression metaphysical. It begins with a work titled Annunciation (2008), a figure of uncertain gender in cast aluminium, seated on a bench with one hand raised, surrounded by suspended birds that seem to be simultaneously flying and trapped within meshes of small slats. The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary is referenced, but Smith also speaks of artistic inspiration as a kind of annunciation, so the Virgin Mary here can be seen as standing in for the artist. Some of Smith’s figures are more overtly erotic. Search (2008) features a coquettish young woman, made of cast aluminium with a patina of white and yellow gold leaf. She is seated on a bench, with a bird perched on her outstretched hand. She is in her underwear, and both the look on her face and her body’s floating quality spark an atmosphere of expectation: a prelude to love perhaps but also to further results on life’s path, as the

Smith is reinterpreting women’s issues in aesthetic terms, sometimes challenging accepted feminist views

feature: kiki smith

to love perhaps but also to further results on life’s path, as the exhibition makes clear. The exhibition continues with a series of large-scale figure drawings on Nepal paper in ink, litho crayon, graphite and glass glitter. What is intriguing in these personages is how they bend definitions. Difficult to pin down, they are ethereal in effect. Circumstance (2008) depicts a young, somewhat androgynous, seated figure. Is Smith trying to tell us that she is an angel? I would certainly believe it. The human figures reference the stories of this world, but they are going somewhere else. In the final room, a small unpainted wooden coffin rests on a drop-leaf table. Nearby, two large drawings depict ominous black coffins, closed and open. The coffin from Punderson’s needlepoint becomes a sculptural presence in Smith’s installation. In one drawing, a figure is seen mashed inside one of the coffins. There are flowers on a chair, and another chair is empty but for a pair of eyeglasses, left to remind us of the person just gone. Glass dandelions are visible inside the wooden coffin. The exhibition comes to a quiet end. This is difficult work. It takes on hard topics, as Smith’s work always has. Only then it was the difficulty of being young, of kicking against the pricks. Now it’s the difficulty of becoming old, of facing death, of recognising that, after all is said and done, there is only silence. When asked about the title of the exhibition, Smith says her favourite name of all time is Sojourner Truth, the self-given name of Isabella Baumfree, the heroic former American slave, abolitionist and women’s rights activist. The name resonates with Smith because Sojourner was a complex woman who renamed herself poetically, choosing words that allude to a lifelong quest. Later, as I walk home from the Integral Yoga market on West 72

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13th Street, thinking of Smith’s women, I pass a woman sitting on the concrete in front of a church, her face devoid of expression. I continue to the corner and wait for the light. The light changes. I walk back to her and ask if she would like a banana. “Please”, she replies. I give it to her and walk back to the corner. Why did I decide to go back? Maybe Smith’s work has made me more aware of people I would not usually notice. What makes anyone decide to do anything? I remember something Smith said about artwork that day while she was cutting and pasting: “You put your energy [into] doing the work part that’s necessary to manifest it into the world, but in terms of what comes to your mind or becomes evident to pay attention to, that’s freely given. It’s like the annunciation: you’re sitting around, and a little bird comes to you and tells you what to do, and you accept it.” The site-specific installation Kiki Smith: Sojourn is on view at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art from 12 February through 12 September

IMAGES (In order of appearance) Kiki Smith’s worktable, 2009. Photo: Vincent Katz Silver Bird, 2006, ink on Nepal paper with silver gouache, mica, glitter, graphite, 184 x 148 cm. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Annunciation (detail), 2008, cast aluminium, 156 x 81 x 48 cm. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Messenger III (detail), 2008, cast aluminium, white gold and gold leaf, 80 x 108 x 107 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Walking Puppet, 2008, papier mâché with muslin, 203 x 76 x 102 cm overall. Photo: Volker Dohne. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Messenger III (detail), 2008, cast aluminium, white gold and gold leaf, 80 x 108 x 107 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Tree with Bird, 2009, ink on Nepal paper with palladium leaf, 183 x 178 cm. Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York Open Coffin (on table), 2008, ink on Nepal paper with lithographic crayon, 244 x 266 cm. Photo: G.R. Christmas. © the artist. Courtesy PaceWildenstein, New York

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17/12/09 14:39:35

feature:

Christian Boltanski on gambling with his life and

getting an

audience to feel his pain

wo rds : Ch a r l e s Da rw en t

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ArtReview

The Closerie des Lilas is a surprising place to be handed a death sentence, and Christian Boltanski – plump, chuckling and unstoppably happy – is an unlikely man to do the handing. “You are unique”, chortles Boltanski, leaning back on the plush banquette of this haunt of Breton and Cézanne, “but in two generations, nobody will remember you. Nobody! You will disappear, pouf! All my life, I’ve tried to stop this happening, which is why my art is a failure: you can’t stop people disappearing. You yourself, you cannot be preserved.” Gee, thanks, Christian. And so, inevitably, to a Tasmanian cave. From the beginning of January and for (maybe) the next eight years, visitors to this cave will be able to watch Boltanski going about his daily studio business, which apparently mostly consists of watching daytime TV and reading back copies of Marie Claire filched from his wife, the artist Annette Messager. Of course, Boltanski will not be there in the mirthful flesh; rather he will be spectrally projected via a bank of four video cameras installed in his atelier in the dingy Paris suburb of Malakoff. The work, as yet unnamed, was the result of a meeting with an Australian Internet gambling magnate, and is itself something of a gamble. Having hit on a price, the collector – “I do not remember his name”, says Boltanski, with an evasive wave of the hand – has offered to pay it in 96 monthly instalments until Boltanski’s death. If Boltanski’s death comes before January 2018, the Tasmanian will have had himself a bargain; if after, then it is Boltanski, sixty-five last September, who will clean up. “It is simple”, France’s most famous living artist says with a shrug. “He believes I will die before eight years, and I do not. It is very interesting, this idea of chance, no? The older you get, the stranger, it seems, this idea that tomorrow you do not survive. The man in Tasmania, he is the devil, maybe, eh? He told me he has never lost. He lives alone in this huge garden, 12 kilometres by eight, he collects Egyptian mummies, gold – what do you call them? – gold discs. And now Christian Boltanski!” Boltanski rocks with silent laughter. “I feel like Marie Antoinette, you know? Saying to her bourreau, the man who cuts off her head: ‘One more minute, please’. One more minute!” Morbid? Well, perhaps a tad, but morbid with a point. Boltanski’s life began as a game of chance: the son of a Catholic Corsican mother and a Jewish father who, by the time of the artistto-be’s birth, in September 1944, had spent four years hidden under the floorboards of the family flat in Occupied Paris. If Boltanski’s work has been concerned with dipoles for 40 years now, then it is not altogether surprising. Above and below, outside and in, Jewish and Christian, French and not-French: these things have appeared in his art as dark and light, objects and shadows, living and dead, and, preeminently, truth and fiction (or as Boltanski prefers to

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feature: Christian Boltanski

put it, truth and lies). Heads and tails seems a logical extension of this tendency, not to say its logical conclusion. “Whoever wins, the cave will be my last work”, Boltanski says, cheerily. “I will die in Tasmania.” In the meantime, though, there is work to be done. Next July, Les archives du coeur, a collection of the recorded heartbeats of 20,000 members of the public, will open on the Japanese island of Ejima. Although Boltanski speaks airily of this – “It is like a photoalbum, no? ‘Tonight I’ll listen to the heartbeat of my uncle’” – there is an apocalyptic feel to Archives, like the collection of seeds bunkered down on Spitzbergen against nuclear war. Speaking of his 2002 installation at the South London Gallery, Les abonnés du téléphone – an encyclopaedic collection of the world’s telephone directories – the artist says he was pleased to find that there was a pizzeria on St Helena. Survival takes many forms in Boltanski’s world, none of them heroic. And then there is Monumenta 2010. Given his distaste for the monumental, handing Boltanski a commission to fill the main aisle of Paris’s Grand Palais seems brave. Monumenta’s last two takers were Anselm Kiefer and Richard Serra, both apostles of the big: Kiefer stuffed the space with his trademark crumbling towers, Serra with vast slabs of oxidised steel. Boltanski’s approach will, as you’d think, be different from these. “My first idea was to put nothing in the space at all, it is so beautiful”, he says. “But the public at the Grand Palais is different from the public at Beaubourg. I didn’t want people to take the metro to Franklin Roosevelt and then say, ‘Ouf! These artists are so stupid!’ So I’m going to use clothes, old clothes – it will be very, very cold, it’s in January, and I’m going to refuse to let them have

heat. It’s important for people not just to stand in front of my work but to be inside it. I want them to say, ‘This is terrible, I want to escape.’” If the impulse is overwhelming, Boltanski’s chilly audience can take itself off to the dowdy exurb of Vitry-sur-Seine, to the MAC/VAL contemporary art museum. It is possible to imagine a space less like the Grand Palais, but not easy. Here Boltanski will install a contrapuntal second part to Monumenta, called Après la mort, thus variously undermining the work’s monumentalism. “I tell little stories without words”, Boltanski says, “but I want to destroy what I’ve written. Fragility is very important, I think. For me, I want people to say: there’s a lot of dead people in his work.” His friend, coeval and fellow artist Bertrand Lavier walks by, and Boltanski waves to him. “In [19]68, when we were starting out, it was clever people who ran art; now it’s rich people. I said to Bertrand at lunch, I said, ‘You know, Bertrand? Our time, it is over.’” Monumenta 2010 is at the Grand Palais, Paris, from 13 January to 21 February works (In order of appearance) Christian Boltanski, Jean Kalman, Frank Krawczyk, Pleins Jours, 2004–5, Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Photo: M.N. Robert and A. Markul. © ADAGP Christian Boltanski, Les Abonnés du Téléphone, 2000. Photo: Marc Domage/Tutti. All rights reserved Christian Boltanski, Halifax Projects, 1995 (installation view, Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds), mixed media, dimensions variable. © ADAGP. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York & Paris

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Obscured in Nina Canell ’s weird science is a metaphor for the pleasures of beholding art wo rds : Ch r i s s h a r p

It seems to be an unwritten rule that any work of art featuring water is bound to enchant. Maybe it has something to do with how unstable, fleeting and formless a substance it is, and consequently how consummately it contradicts the old Latin aphorism ars longa, vita brevis. The work of Berlin-based Swedish artist Nina Canell is certainly no exception to the water/enchantment axiom – especially given that it is preoccupied with precisely the quality that generally does make water so captivating: its constant transformation. Take Five Kinds of Water, Canell’s recent solo exhibition at the Hamburg Kunstverein: one work, Perpetuum Mobile (2400 KG) (2009), starred water both as a material – or rather substance – and as agent of transformation. In this work, the liquid contained in a round tin tub is made to disperse throughout the air by way of ultrasound: a mechanism vibrates so rapidly that it turns the water into a mist, and the mist in turn gradually permeates and hardens a nearby collection of cement bags into concrete. As if to underline the hidden, sonic nature of the work, the process is periodically amplified and broadcast throughout the space by loudspeakers. Perpetuum Mobile… bears out a claim often made about Canell’s work, as existing ‘somewhere between object and event’. ArtReview 79

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The motivation for the piece seems to belong to the private logic typically reserved for the truly driven, the eccentric or the certifiably mad In fact, many of the artist’s pieces seem to be less sculptures than eccentric science experiments conducted with flea market dreck and spare parts, or demonstrations of an obscure, questionable nature, inspired by such démodé ideas as Sir William Crookes’s conception of radiation as a state of matter, demonstrated in Canell’s use of waveforms (those within or outside human perception) as a sculptural material in her prizewinning Art Statement at last summer’s Art Basel. And while there’s much to be said about the ungainly and highly textured beauty of these works, sometimes just figuring out how they function or what they are doing can become a metaphor for the joy of looking at art, the way that, say, the teleological unfolding of Fischli & Weiss’s The Way Things Go (1987) – a not-so-distant relative of Canell’s beguiling concoctions – is a joy to behold and puzzle through. Take for instance Anatomy of Dirt in Quiet Water (2008). Also featuring water, this bit of weird science, which is arrayed along the floor in the form of speakers, pipes, cords and a ramshackle wooden armature, presents three different ways to amplify the sound of a small piece of wood, which turns via an electric motor atop a piece of vertical plumbing: first directly, then through a bowl of water and finally through transformation into flickering light. Any mystification with regard to meaning is eclipsed by the initial mystification of what this piece is actually doing. But the wherefore, the motivation for this piece, aside from discreetly enacting a series of phenomenological transformations, seems to belong to the private logic typically reserved for the truly driven, the eccentric or the certifiably mad. While there is a mood of playful, let’s-see-if-this-works experimentation to what Canell does – comparable to the dry and understated glee of Roman Signer’s often explosive let’s-seewhat-happens sculptures – such playfulness is coherently unified by a very individual formal vocabulary, replete with certain motifs,

along an axis of a specific set of interests which are informed by the materials she uses. From the recurrent, nonlinguistic use of neon – a gas contained in glass tubing, and which interests Canell for just that reason – to various kinds of electric, small-fry machinery, to conductors such as bones and water, and finally to sound, which is harnessed and manifested in any number of ways with her regular collaborator, experimental musician Robin Watkins, the materials have a way of coming back time and again. I am tempted to say that a common trope is the conjunction of the organic with the inorganic, but given Canell’s oddly earthy sensibility and her penchant for analogue artefact, everything she touches tends to take on a weirdly organic allure. A torn scrap of green plastic bag held against a wall by the air blown from a small black electric fan atop a plunger (Sleep Machine, 2008) should not look natural, or somehow wholesome, as neither should her sculptural, earthbound constellations, composed of pots overflowing with mists, or her medleys of amorphous neon and various and sundry objects. And yet her work betrays none of the chilly remoteness often known to dog the use of technology in art. It is marked by a tactile and, inevitably, human warmth. That said, something inhuman, if not mystical, would seem to be astir in Canell’s inspired tinkerings. Of the optical order of composed invocations, or ritualistic arrangement, the sculptures blur into a kind of scientific or materialistic shamanism, without, however, getting bogged down in heavy symbolism. If Beuys or any Arte Povera artists ever cast a shadow over Canell’s practice, they do so from a healthy distance, largely limiting their penumbral presence to a series of visual cues. But this is not to say the work doesn’t court such charmed ambiguity – which, along with other things (see above), manages successfully to draw and keep many a bewitched viewer under Canell’s spell.

works (In order of appearance) Perpetuum Mobile (2400 KG), 2009, water, bucket, steel, cement, mist-machine, amplifier, hydrophone. Courtesy the artist and Konrad Fischer Galerie, Berlin & Düsseldorf Sleep Machine, 2008, broom handle, plastic bag, electric fan, cable. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin Winter Work, 2009, stick, stone, neon, 2000 V, 130 x 45 x 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin To Be Hidden and So Invisible (21000 Hz), 2009, sublimated watermelon, speaker, function generator, amplifier, cable, wood, 23 x 92 x 26 cm. Private collection, Vincenza

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Horror stalks humour in Maurizio Cat telan’s fair y taleinf lected imaginings of warped kidulthood wo rds : B r i a n d i l lo n

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In Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio – a somewhat darker tale than the 1940 Disney movie allows (for one thing, Pinocchio manages, early on, to kill the annoying cricket with a hammer) – the hero travels through the night on a talking donkey and arrives at dawn in Playland. In this puerile utopian republic, populated entirely by boys aged between eight and fourteen, time is said to accelerate as life is given over entirely to such pastimes as singing, leaping, hoop-trundling, riding wooden horses and clucking like a hen that has just laid an egg. In a universe where play is held to have the highest (in fact, the only) value, history vanishes in a ‘bedlam’ populated by sentient objects and chatty animals rather than humans – in the world of the fable all ontological categories may be scandalously upended. Of course, Collodi’s wooden protagonist is only able to experience such liberation because he has been hewn into being by the carver Geppetto. It was this nagging debt to the creative father that Maurizio Cattelan had in mind when he titled his version of Pinocchio Daddy Daddy (2008): the piece was first shown as part of theanyspacewhatever at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in autumn 2008. Floating facedown in the pool at the bottom of the Guggenheim’s spiral ramp, the lifesize, brightly painted figure might have been pushed over the edge by its jealous progenitor or strayed too far in search of adventure and pitched to a precipitous end. But if Daddy Daddy is the latest of Cattelan’s comic adversions to the anxiety of influence – previous works have invoked Lucio Fontana and Joseph Beuys – the ultimate suspicion must be that Pinocchio has drowned himself in passive-aggressive fury at the father’s historical priority. The little timber innocent turns out to be a monster of ego and resentment. Critics have a hard time deciding exactly how to describe Cattelan’s own combination of candour and guile. The conceptual personae by which an artist of such playfulness and spite is usually known don’t seem to fit: he is not quite the clown, the jester, the magician, the protean trickster or the heroic subversive. (In an interview with Alma Ruiz in 2002, he demurred: ‘I’m not trying to overthrow an institution or to question a structure of power. I’m neither that ambitious nor that naïve. I’m only trying to find a degree of freedom.’) Perhaps he is best viewed as a figure from a fable – his Pinocchio is one more Cattelan avatar that bears a strong resemblance to the long-nosed artist – or the author of slyly contrived fairytales that (like most fairytales) conjure pathos and cruelty in equal measure. The most recent of his works to return to his long-standing interest in piteous animals and warped infants suggest he is something like a postconceptual Collodi. Cattelan’s kids have been among his most controversial inventions. His Untitled (2004), a trio of wide-eyed prepubescents

feature: maurizio cattelan

hanging from a tree in Milan’s Piazza XXIV Maggio, famously attracted the ire of an athletic citizen, who fell from the tree while trying to dismantle the work. The sculpture Him (2001) – a kneeling, waxwork Hitler in boyish garb – provoked uneasy thoughts about prior forgiveness for future crimes. But the most comically unnerving of these diminutive horrors is surely Charlie (2003), the motorised boy, with Cattelan’s face, who trundled his tricycle round the 50th Venice Biennale – he had already appeared, in Charlie Don’t Surf (1997), with his hands nailed to a school desk, gazing out a window of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin. If Cattelan’s art is a kind of sanctioned fidgeting or play, he knows too that complete freedom might be its own punishment: regarding Charlie, he says: ‘Even if he’s playing, he’s being forced to play; his freedom’s been taken away in either case, so it doesn’t make much difference.’ Readers of Pinocchio will recall that the proper punishment for a boy who shirks work for play is to be turned into a donkey: the favoured fairytale image of pure drudgery and dolour. (The hapless ass is also an allegory of holy innocence: as witness Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au hasard Balthazar, with its doomed, tragicomic donkey.) Cattelan’s several taxidermied donkeys and horses have something of the fable’s most dismally down-to-earth animal: the legs of the suspended horse in his Novecento (1997) have been elongated by gravity, while the donkey in Untitled (2002) has been upended by the weight of its load. But fairytale animism also promises a sort of creaturely utopia, explicitly broached by the artist in early works such as Love Saves Life (1995), based on a tale of the Brothers Grimm in which a rooster, cat, dog and donkey band together to escape their cruel owner. Cattelan’s animal communities are inevitably shadowed by horror, however: at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2008, for example, he showed two kindly stuffed Labradors guarding a tiny yellow chick, or possibly about to devour it. What all of this play with the twisted figures of fable amounts to is a strain in Cattelan’s art that explores the ambiguities of enchantment. Its more contentious aspect is the way he presents the iconography of religion as something out of Grimm or Collodi, a succession of miraculous or unfortunate incidents of obscure and hilarious import. (La Nona Ora, 1999, is just the most well known: the figure of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite.) For his intervention at the Synagogue Stommeln Art Project in Pulheim-Stommeln, Germany, in 2008, Cattelan mocked up a female crucifixion on the wall of the Old St Martin’s Church. And at Portikus, Frankfurt, the previous year, it was the figure of a levitating woman atop a tree, hands outstretched in pious assumption. Or was she just another character out of a familiar fairytale: Mary Poppins tricked up in the pose of an airborne Virgin? The scurrilous miracle of Cattelan’s art is to have left the question up in the air. Cattelan’s upcoming show at the Menil Collection, in Houston, will include his Untitled (2007) – another of his pitiful horses: this one strung up with its head buried in the gallery wall – and the most outré of his recent pieces: a row of saluting arms extending from the wall and teasingly titled Ave Maria (2007). But the show also promises a series of sculptural responses to the museum’s surrealist collection: Cattelan, the boyish late protégé of Surrealism, no doubt turning gleefully on his forefathers. Work by Maurizio Cattelan is on view at the Menil Collection, Houston, from 12 February to 15 August

works (In order of appearance) Him, 2001, polyester resin, wax, garments, 101 x 41 x 53 cm, edition 2 of 3 + AP All, 2007 (installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2nd floor), group of nine sculptures in white Carrara marble, 30 x 100 x 200 each. Photo: Markus Tretter / Kunsthaus Bregenz Untitled, 2007 (installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz), two taxidermied dogs and one chick. Photo: Kunsthaus Bregenz La Nona Ora, 1999, polyester resin, natural hairs, accessories, stone, carpet, dimensions variable Charlie Don’t Surf, 1997, polyester resin, natural hairs, accessories, stone, carpet, dimensions variable Untitled, 2004, resin, fiberglass, fabric, hairs, height 115 cm each. Photo: Attilio Maranzano Charlie, 2003, tricycle, steel, varnished, natural gum, resin, silicone, hair, fabrics, 80 x 85 x 56 cm. Photo: Zeno Zotti All images Courtesy the artist and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris & Miami

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Art Pilgrimage:

Copenhagen When it comes to climate change, there are reasons to keep watching the Danish capital long af ter the summit: it’s a cit y that’s fostering a number of intriguing new platforms for contemporar y ar t. As its galleries populate the big international ar t fairs in ever greater numbers and its ar tists increasingly make their presence felt in museum exhibition schedules, Copenhagen, wonder fully free of many other cit y’s ar tworld ‘at titude’ problems, is an impor tant place to obser ve – and visit.

w o r d s : J e n n i f e r T h a tc h e r ph otog r aphy: s ach a m a r i c

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feature: facing page: main entrance to the freetown of Christiania this page, main image: Daniel Richter: Love Parade, 2009, installation view, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard. Clockwise from top left: Marcel van Eeden: Gruenewald Drawings, 2009, installation view, Galleri Bo Bjerggaard; Daniel Richter, Untitled, 2008, at Galleri Bo Bjerggaard; the view of Copenhagen’s meatpacking district from the terrace of Galleri Bo Bjerggaard

facing page: artist Helmut Stallaerts at Baronian Francey

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Art Pilgrimage: Copenhagen

this page: Karriere bar, neon sign by Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset and lights by Olafur Eliasson facing page, main image: Superflex, Lost Money (detail), 2009, at Nils Stærk. Clockwise from top left: Maiken Bent: Every Room Has a Smell, 2009, installation view, IMO; artist Maiken Bent; artists Superflex; Jonathan Monk: Book and Poster, 2009, installation view, Galleri Nicolai Wallner; David Shrigley, Beginning, Middle and End, 2009, at Galleri Nicolai Wallner

i n c o n t r ast t o w e alt h i e r ,

haughtier Sweden, Denmark feels like it has to deal more with the tensions and consequences that come with the flux of living in a globalised economy – immigration, social issues, recession – while negotiating the difficulty of maintaining the once-proud Scandinavian model of social democracy. This is what makes Copenhagen the gateway between Scandinavia and mainland Europe; and so it’s not surprising that the story of Copenhagen’s art scene is also one of migrations and homecomings. Carlsberg is one of the oldest and biggest sponsors of art in Denmark, and was brewing beer for 161 years in the Valby area on the outskirts of Copenhagen before moving to new premises in 2008. It has since supported the transformation of the old site into a new cultural and residential quarter, which is now home to leading commercial galleries Nicolai Wallner and Nils Stærk. Wallner, a pioneer of the contemporary gallery scene during the early 1990s, represents people ranging from homegrown stars such as Elmgreen & Dragset, Joachim Koester and Jeppe Hein, to international artists such as Dan Graham, Jonathan Monk and Douglas Gordon. He paved the way for other spaces to join him in founding a new arts district on the site, where Wallner and Stærk (whose equally

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stellar artists include Torbjørn Rødland, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Superflex and Miriam Bäckström) benefit from large exhibition spaces and a pioneering spirit of cooperation. The commercial galleries have been joined in the 2,000-squaremetre former garage by a new artist-run space, IMO, and BKS Garage, a showcase for the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, creating a new arts centre for the city that reflects the entire spectrum of artistic development from the cradle of university to um… well… commercial success. Talking of commerce, drinking is big business in Denmark. For the visitor to Scandinavia, Copenhagen is the last-chance saloon before the weird teetotalism of the other Nordic countries. Smoking is big too, and the intimate pubs of Copenhagen are chokingly smoky for citizens of countries where such pleasures are banned. And in this too art plays a central role, for Jeppe Hein’s bar, Karriere (a family affair – run with the artist’s sister Lærke Hein; their father often working the bar), is one of the coolest drinking spots in town. That might not be your first impression, however, for the bar is located in the middle of Flæsketorvet, the rather starkly functional meatpacking district of Copenhagen, which, unlike its New York equivalent, is still where meat gets packed.

By the standards of other metropolises, it seems a desolate spot for a night out, but the real reason to go is the site-specific work by more than 30 artists, including a Dan Graham sculpture outside, the Cocktail-style neon sign designed by Elmgreen & Dragset (and which gave the bar its name), Danish-born Olafur Eliasson’s sci-fi artichoke lampshades, a gently moving bartop by Hein himself and a cheeky intervention in the toilets by Danish duo Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing (AVPD). It’s not where you’d expect to find a complex, psychologically unnerving artwork, but the best word of advice is: don’t be in a rush to get to the loo, unless you know your way… Like the galleries in the Carlsberg building, Karriere is also at the centre of a thriving arts scene. Not just because the bar publishes its own tabloid-format art magazine and uses a percentage of its profits to fund an arts grant, or because Hein also curated State of the Art, a show of emerging artists at last year’s Art Copenhagen (he’s a busy boy, by the way, having, at almost the same time, developed a travelling circus in the style of Alexander Calder and installed a retrospective at the ARoS museum in Arhus, Denmark’s main port city), but also because the meatpacking district is home as well to

this page, main image: Christina Hamre, Sailing Off, 2009, in The Mask, Group Show, at Galerie Mikael Andersen. Clockwise from top: The Mask, Group Show, installation view, Galerie Mikael Andersen; gallerist Mikael Andersen; Galerie Mikael Andersen’s Christian Rud Andersen facing page, clockwise from top: V1 Gallery interior; Wes Lang: Going All the Way for the USA, 2009, installation view, V1 Gallery; V1 Gallery’s Jesper Elg and Mikkel Grønnebæk

Art Pilgrimage: Copenhagen

the Bo Bjerggaard and V1 galleries. And as at Carlsberg, there’s a sense here that opposites attract. Bjerggaard represents Denmark’s most celebrated painter, Per Kirkeby (now seventy-one and the subject of a recent retrospective at Tate Modern) as well as international heavy-hitters like Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Jannis Kounellis, Erwin Wurm and Jonathan Meese; V1 Gallery has a more grungy vibe, with a focus on emerging artists (among them the excellent Mads Lynnerup and photographer Søren Solkær Starbird, who has built an international reputation for his portraits of musicians) and a commitment to street art (having been the first gallery in Scandinavia to show work by Banksy, Faile and Shepard Fairey, among others). Down Bredgade, contemporary art galleries nestle between mid-century antique shops. This street in central Copenhagen underwent a revival recently when Martin Asbæk set up his own space as an extension of his parents’ gallery at no. 23, and galleries like Mogadishni moved here from more remote areas, echoing the shift from East to West End seen in London over the past couple of years. David Risley went one further, migrating from Vyner Street in London’s Bethnal Green to Bredgade in April 2009. Risley, whose programme mixes local artists

(among them the much admired Ann Lislegaard) with a number of stalwarts from the gallery’s London incarnation, seems contented with the move, which allows him to show artists Dexter Dalwood and Ryan Gander, who may well have been off-limits in the proprietary British capital; people are more relaxed here, Risley says, and the collectors committed and interested. A couple of doors down, we meet Christian Rud Andersen from Mikael Andersen, a long-established gallery that has been in this spot since 1989. The gallery had a reciprocal relationship with Berlin’s Max Hetzler gallery in the 1990s, which allowed it to show Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen. Now the big boom in new Danish art – especially painting, with international exports like Tal R and John Kørner – has been good for its mostly painting-based stable of artists, although the gallery continues its German connection, having opened a Berlin branch in September 2007. Christina Wilson, further up Bredgade, has reservations about the Danish art market. She echoed many gallerists’ concerns when she suggested that Danish collectors have a relatively modest budget, buying works up to a limit of around kr40,000, or just under £5,000 – not high when compared internationally.

Wilson believes that young female artists find it harder to get shown than their male counterparts in Denmark – which might explain the tongue-in-cheek title of her recent group show, It’s Raining Men. Her stable includes important women artists, like Sophie Calle and Kirstine Roepstorff, whose theatrical multimedia collages were included in the first Copenhagen quadrennial, U-Turn, in 2008. She doesn’t hate male artists, though – she also represents the increasingly popular filmmaker Jesper Just. The younger galleries and project spaces are vehemently indisposed towards painting and good taste – desperate to shake off the enduring historic legacy of the CoBrA group, that turn-of-the1950s European movement of avantgardists that stretched from Copenhagen via Amsterdam to Brussels. Alongside the slightly younger Kirkeby, the Danish painter Asger Jorn, one of CoBrA’s founding fathers (and later a bankroller of the Situationists), casts a long shadow over Danish modernist art. Many of the artists showing at Beaver Projects display a nostalgic love of craft – a product of fondly remembered free afterschool clubs. Mette Vangsgaard’s current show features some disturbing ceramic vignettes, sure to give even Grayson Perry > ArtReview 91

facing page, main image: Paul McDevitt: Bile and Manias, 2009, installation view, Martin Asbæk Gallery. Clockwise from lower left: Paul McDevitt: Bile and Manias, 2009, installation view, Martin Asbæk Gallery; two installation views of Christmas Group Show, 2009, Galleri Christina Wilson; the storeroom at Galleri Christina Wilson; Ulla von Brandenburg, Bänder (detail), 2006, in Christmas Group Show, Galleri Christina Wilson

Art Pilgrimage: Copenhagen

this page, main image: artist John Kørner. Inset: gallerist David Risley

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Art Pilgrimage: Copenhagen clockwise from top: Chiharu Shiota, Ein Ort (A Place), 2009, in The World Is Yours, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Faith, Hope and Love – Jacob Holdt’s America, installation view, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Shilpa Gupta, Flapboard, 2008, in The World Is Yours, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

the creeps. Owner Marie Dufresne, who opened the gallery while still working on her MA, offers a complex explanation of the gallery name – something about the work ethic of beavers – but giggles at the punning potential of a site that once housed Scandinavia’s largest porn publishers. On the other side of town, in trendy Vesterbro, members of artist-run space Koh-i-noor also seem proud of its seedy past: before becoming a gallery the venue was a brothel, before it became a hash club and then a studio. Koh-i-noor was once the world’s largest diamond, and the name conjures up an era of colonial opulence, but also cheap curry houses. It’s an ironic set of references for a shoebox gallery in an immigrant area that is also undergoing regeneration. The artists claim to be the only ones in the area not to paint over the graffiti across their storefront (the locals are not always fans of the avant-garde). The group met at Funen Art Academy in Odense, one of three art schools in Denmark, and arguably the most open to concept-based work (the others are the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and Jutland Art Academy in Aarhus). The Copenhagen art scene seems to be going through an important period of expansion, as more artist-run spaces open, and galleries relocate to fancier areas like Bredgade, upgrade to huge spaces in the 94

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old Carlsberg brewery or set up in cheap areas like the meatpacking district or out in the docks, as has Andersen’s Contemporary. Yet when it comes to contemporary art institutions, Copenhagen lags behind. Neither the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, behind the Royal Academy, nor the experimental Kunsthallen Nikolaj, located in a former church, has established a strong international reputation. It’s little wonder that the ever-ambitious Nicolai Wallner is currently talking up plans to found a kunsthalle in the city. But in terms of what exists right now, the critics’ choice is likely to be Malmö Konsthall, across the bridge in Sweden, but run by a Dane – Jacob Fabricius, previously a freelance writer and curator. Fabricius sings the praises of the Swedish attitude to contemporary art, the great art school in Malmö and the fact that cool galleries are moving there from Stockholm – all of which should provide some healthy competition for Copenhagen. In Denmark, the best-known museum remains the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, a private foundation a half-hour away by train, and an unbeatable destination, with its stunning 1950s architecture and seafront location, apparently enjoyed as much by the staff, who, curator Anders Kold boasts, often hold swim-meetings in summer. Visitors look happy, too, as they

stroll around the sculpture garden or load up trays of herring and salad from the best buffet of our trip. Kold says that artists used to hate the rustic brick floor and wooden ceilings, but now they love it again; that perhaps it’s reassuring. Back in Copenhagen, our taxi driver refused to take us all the way to Danish art collective Superflex’s studio in the working-class district of Nørrebro, claiming there had recently been daylight shootings on that street. Over the past few years, government attempts to crack down on drugs have had the reverse effect, moving dealing away from its safe and locally managed distribution network, and prompting gang-related violence across the city. Superflex’s anticapitalist film The Financial Crisis (Session I-V) (2009) satirises the language of trauma used by media commentators via a hypnotist, who draws viewers deeper and deeper into economic disaster. Originally screened as part of Frieze Projects in London last autumn and now on show at Nils Stærk, it takes on new meaning in the context of Copenhagen’s climate-change summit. With the London and New York art markets suffering, and Berlin feeling more and more like the overspill from Shoreditch, Copenhagen’s humbler attitude hides the fact that it is quietly becoming a serious contemporary art capital.

Listings Museums and Galleries United States, New York

UNITED STATES

UNITED KINGDOM

AUSTRIA

ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES 18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 T +1 212 734 6300 Open Mon– Sat 10-5 [email protected] acquavellagalleries.com James Rosenquist: The Hole in the Center of Time and The Hole in the Wallpaper 18 Feb - 19 Mar

Art Los Angeles Contemporary 7176 W. Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90046 T +1 323 851 7530 fairgroundsllc.com artlosangelesfair.com 28 - 31 Jan

AXIS Round Foundry Media Centre Foundry Street, Leeds T +44 (0)8453 628 230 axisweb.org The online resource for contemporary art

CHRISTINE KOENIG GALERIE Schleifmuehlgasse 1A A-1040 Wien christinekoeniggalerie.com

Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art 37 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019 T +1 212 517 2453 etnahem.com DOOSAN Gallery 533 West 25th Street NewYork, NY 10001 [email protected] Open Tue-Sat 10-6 Tulbulent O’Clock 11 Feb - 13 Mar Kaikai Kiki New York 5-17 46th Road Long Island City, NY 11101 T +1 718 706 2213 english.kaikaikiki.co.jp PACEWILDENSTEIN and Pace/MacGill 534 West 25th Street New York T +1 212 929 7000 pacewildenstein.com pacemacgill.com Richard Misrach 15 Jan - 20 Feb PACEWILDENSTEIN 545 West 22nd Street New York T +1 212 989 4258 pacewildenstein.com Zhang Huan: Neither Coming Nor Going To January 30 Sterling Ruby: 2TRAPS 5 Feb - 20 Mar PACEWILDENSTEIN 534 West 25th Street T+1 (212) 929-7000 open Tue - Sat 10 – 6 pacewildenstein.com Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive 5 Mar - 10 Apr

UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON ALEXIA GOETHE GALLERY 7 Dover Street, London W1 T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 alexiagoethegallery.com Lionel Scoccimaro: Photographs 22 Jan - 12 Mar BLACK RAT PRESs 83 Rivington Street London EC2 T +44 (0)20 7613 7200 blackratpress.co.uk CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY An offsite exhibition at Sphinx Fine Art 125 Kensington Church Street London W8 T +44 (0)20 8947 6782 thecynthiacorbettgallery.com TATE BRITAIN Millbank London SW1 T +44 (0)20 7887 8888 tate.org.uk/britain GALLERY IN CORK STREET 28 Cork Street London W1 T +44 (0)20 7287 8408 galleryincorkstreet.com Roy Pickering, Charles Hustwick: A New Landscape 22 - 27 Feb Louise Blouin Foundation 3 Olaf Street, London W11 ltbfoundation.org MADDOX ARTS 52 Brook’s Mews London W1 T +44 (0)20 7495 3101 maddoxarts.com THE WAPPING PROJECT Wapping Hydraulic Power Station Wapping Wall, London E1 T +44 (0)20 7680 2080 thewappingproject.com

BRIDPORT ART SCENE St Michael’s Studios, Bridport, Dorset T +44 (0)1308 424582 bridport.org CASS SCULPTURE FOUNDATION Goodwood, Chichester West Sussex T +44 (0)1243 538 449 sculpture.org.uk CORNER HOUSE 70 Oxford Street Manchester T +44 (0) 161 228 7621 cornerhouse.org CERI HAND GALLERY 12 Cotton Street, Liverpool T +44 (0)1512 070 899 cerihand.co.uk Bureau des Visceralists : Spasticus Artisticus 15 Jan - 27 Feb ISENDYOUTHIS.COM Lamper Head, Conworthy, Totnes T +44 (0)1364 653 208 Art slideshow, artist portfolio gallery guide, exhibition guide & artist directory Lemington spa art gallery & museum Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Lemington Spa, CV32 4AA T +44 (0)1926 742 700 Edmund de Waal: water-shed 22 Jan - 11 Apr WOLVERHAMPTON ART GALLERY Lichfield Street Wolverhampton T +44 (0) 1902 552 055 wolverhamptonart.org.uk Vered Lahav: Sleepless to 23 Jan TATE LIVERPOOL Albert Dock, Liverpool T +44 (0)1517 027 400 tate.org.uk/liverpool

Galerie Krinzinger Seilerstaette 16 1010 Wien Kader Attia: Po(l)etical galerie-krinzinger.at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Mirabellplatz 2 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 ropac.net Elger Esser 22 Jan - 16 Feb SAMMLUNG VERBUND Am Hof 6a, 1010 Wien sammlung.verbund.at DONNA: Feminist Avant-garde of the 1970s 19 Feb - 16 May Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 galeriewinter.at Brigit Jürgenssen: Body Projections from the 1980s 14 Jan - 6 Mar Belgium Galerie Almine Rech 20 Rue de l’Abbaye B-1050 Brussels T +32 26 485 684 alminerech.com Gregor Hilderrandt, Daniel Lergon 14 Jan - 12 Feb Kris Martin, Matthieu Ronsse 18 Feb - 20 Mar Franz West 25 Mar - 22 May Sophie Von Hellermann: Project Space 23 Apr - 22 May Galerie BaronianFrancey 2 rue Isidore Verheyden 1050 Brussels T +32 25 12 9295 baronianfrancey.com Galerie Rodolphe Janssen 35, rue de Livourne 1050 Brussels T +32 2 538 0818 galerierodolphejanssen.com Jean-Luc Moerman 14 Jan - 20 Feb

Listings Museums and Galleries United States, New York ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES 18 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075 T +1 212 734 6300 Open Mon– Sat 10-5 [email protected] acquavellagalleries.com James Rosenquist: The Hole in the Center of Time and The Hole in the Wallpaper 18 Feb - 19 Mar Edward Tyler Nahem Fine Art 37 West 57th Street New York, NY 10019 T +1 212 517 2453 etnahem.com DOOSAN Gallery 533 West 25th Street NewYork, NY 10001 [email protected] Open Tue-Sat 10-6 Tulbulent O’Clock 11 Feb - 13 Mar Kaikai Kiki New York 5-17 46th Road Long Island City, NY 11101 T +1 718 706 2213 english.kaikaikiki.co.jp PACEWILDENSTEIN and Pace/MacGill 534 West 25th Street New York T +1 212 929 7000 pacewildenstein.com pacemacgill.com Richard Misrach 15 Jan - 20 Feb PACEWILDENSTEIN 545 West 22nd Street New York T +1 212 989 4258 pacewildenstein.com Zhang Huan: Neither Coming Nor Going To January 30 Sterling Ruby: 2TRAPS 5 Feb - 20 Mar PACEWILDENSTEIN 534 West 25th Street T+1 (212) 929-7000 open Tue - Sat 10 – 6 pacewildenstein.com Joseph Beuys: Make the Secrets Productive 5 Mar - 10 Apr

UNITED STATES

UNITED KINGDOM

AUSTRIA

Art Los Angeles Contemporary 7176 W. Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90046 T +1 323 851 7530 fairgroundsllc.com artlosangelesfair.com 28 - 31 Jan

AXIS Round Foundry Media Centre Foundry Street, Leeds T +44 (0)8453 628 230 axisweb.org The online resource for contemporary art

CHRISTINE KOENIG GALERIE Schleifmuehlgasse 1A A-1040 Wien christinekoeniggalerie.com

UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON ALEXIA GOETHE GALLERY 7 Dover Street, London W1 T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 alexiagoethegallery.com Lionel Scoccimaro: Photographs 22 Jan - 12 Mar BLACK RAT PRESs 83 Rivington Street London EC2 T +44 (0)20 7613 7200 blackratpress.co.uk CYNTHIA CORBETT GALLERY An offsite exhibition at Sphinx Fine Art 125 Kensington Church Street London W8 T +44 (0)20 8947 6782 thecynthiacorbettgallery.com TATE BRITAIN Millbank London SW1 T +44 (0)20 7887 8888 tate.org.uk/britain GALLERY IN CORK STREET 28 Cork Street London W1 T +44 (0)20 7287 8408 galleryincorkstreet.com Roy Pickering, Charles Hustwick: A New Landscape 22 - 27 Feb Louise Blouin Foundation 3 Olaf Street, London W11 ltbfoundation.org MADDOX ARTS 52 Brook’s Mews London W1 T +44 (0)20 7495 3101 maddoxarts.com THE WAPPING PROJECT Wapping Hydraulic Power Station Wapping Wall, London E1 T +44 (0)20 7680 2080 thewappingproject.com

BRIDPORT ART SCENE St Michael’s Studios, Bridport, Dorset T +44 (0)1308 424582 bridport.org CASS SCULPTURE FOUNDATION Goodwood, Chichester West Sussex T +44 (0)1243 538 449 sculpture.org.uk CORNER HOUSE 70 Oxford Street Manchester T +44 (0) 161 228 7621 cornerhouse.org CERI HAND GALLERY 12 Cotton Street, Liverpool T +44 (0)1512 070 899 cerihand.co.uk Bureau des Visceralists : Spasticus Artisticus 15 Jan - 27 Feb ISENDYOUTHIS.COM Lamper Head, Conworthy, Totnes T +44 (0)1364 653 208 Art slideshow, artist portfolio gallery guide, exhibition guide & artist directory Lemington spa art gallery & museum Royal Pump Rooms, The Parade, Lemington Spa, CV32 4AA T +44 (0)1926 742 700 Edmund de Waal: water-shed 22 Jan - 11 Apr WOLVERHAMPTON ART GALLERY Lichfield Street Wolverhampton T +44 (0) 1902 552 055 wolverhamptonart.org.uk Vered Lahav: Sleepless to 23 Jan TATE LIVERPOOL Albert Dock, Liverpool T +44 (0)1517 027 400 tate.org.uk/liverpool

Galerie Krinzinger Seilerstaette 16 1010 Wien Kader Attia: Po(l)etical galerie-krinzinger.at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Mirabellplatz 2 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 ropac.net Elger Esser 22 Jan - 16 Feb SAMMLUNG VERBUND Am Hof 6a, 1010 Wien sammlung.verbund.at DONNA: Feminist Avant-garde of the 1970s 19 Feb - 16 May Galerie Hubert Winter Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 galeriewinter.at Brigit Jürgenssen: Body Projections from the 1980s 14 Jan - 6 Mar Belgium Galerie Almine Rech 20 Rue de l’Abbaye B-1050 Brussels T +32 26 485 684 alminerechgallery.com Gregor Hilderrandt, Daniel Lergon 14 Jan - 12 Feb Kris Martin, Matthieu Ronsse 18 Feb - 20 Mar Franz West 25 Mar - 22 May Sophie Von Hellermann: Project Space 23 Apr - 22 May Galerie BaronianFrancey 2 rue Isidore Verheyden 1050 Brussels T +32 25 12 9295 baronianfrancey.com Galerie Rodolphe Janssen 35, rue de Livourne 1050 Brussels T +32 2 538 0818 galerierodolphejanssen.com Jean-Luc Moerman 14 Jan - 20 Feb

think.21 rue du Mail 21 Brussels 1050 T +32 2 537 87 03 think21gallery.com Tim Van Laere Gallery Verlatstraat 23-25 2000 Antwerp T +32 3 257 14 17 timvanlaeregallery.com Adrian Ghenie to 16 Jan Xavier Hufkens Rue Saint-Georges 6–8 1050 Brussels T +32 2 639 6730 xavierhufkens.com Sterling Ruby to 14 Jan Padraig Timoney 22 Jan - 25 Feb ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 B-2000 Antwerp T +32 32 161 626 zeno-x.com Bart Stolle to 16 Jan Kees Goudzwaard 22 Jan - 27 Feb NETHERLANDS Galerie Paul Andriesse Gebouw Detroit/ Detroit Building Withoedenveem 8 1019 HE Amsterdam 25 or 30 years Galerie Paul Andriesse to 22 Jan GRIMM FINE ART Keizersgracht 82 1015 CT Amsterdam T +31 (0)20 422 7227 grimmfineart.com Curated group show 16 Jan - 6 Mar VAN ABBE MUSEUM Bilderdijklaan 10 , Eindhoven T +31 (0)40 238 1000 vanabbemuseum.nl Lissitzky+ 19 Sep–2 Sep 2012 GERMANY ARNDT & PARTNER Invalidenstraße 50–51 D-10557 Berlin T +49 30 280 8123 arndt-partner.de Bereznitsky Gallery Heidestraße 73 10557 Berlin T +49 (0)307 008 1256 bereznitsky-gallery.com

CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS GALERIE Am Kupfergraben 10 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 288 7870 cfa-berlin.com DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 20 2093 deutsche-guggenheim.de Utopia Matters 23 Jan - 11 Apr GALERIE TRAVERSÉE Türkenstrasse 11 80333 München Periodic Table curated by Katalin Timár: Dora García - Jan Mech - Martin Schmidl - Nick Crowe - Nika Radic - Stefan Nikolaev to 16 Jan

Galerie Guy BArtschi rue du Vieux-Billard 3a 1205 Geneva T +41 22 3 100 013 bartschi.ch George Rousse/Daniel Canogar to 15 Jan Galerie Urs Meile Beijing-Lucerne Rosenberghoehe 4 6004 Lucerne T +41 414 203 318 galerieursmeile.com Greece ART ATHINA art-athina.gr 13 - 16 May ITALy

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf Grabbeplatz 4 40213 Düsseldorf Eating the Universe. Vom Essen in der Kunst to 28 Feb

ARTEFIERA ART FIRST Quartiere fieristico di Bologna Viale della Fiera, 20 40127 Bologna T +39 051 282 111 artefiera.bolognafiere.it 21 - 29 Jan

LUMAS Berlin Hackesche Höfe Rosenthaler Straße 40/41 10178 Berlin T +49 (0)30 2804 0373 lumas.com

Federico Luger Via Domodossola 17 Milan 20145 T +39 026 739 1341 federicolugergallery.com Nicola Uzunovski to Feb 8

WENTRUP Gallery Tempelhofer Ufer 22 10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg Berlin janwentrup.com Berlin – Paris 15 - 23 Jan

Galleria Massimo De Carlo via Giovanni Ventura 5 20135 Milan T +39 02 70 003 987 massimodecarlo.it Sol Lewitt 27 Jan - 13 Mar

SWITZERLAND Galerie Bertrand & Gruner 16, rue du Simplon 1207 Geneva T +41 227 005 151 bertrand-gruner.com Sage Vaughn 11 Feb - 27 Mar Galerie Eva Presenhuber Limmatstrasse 270 P.O. Box 1517 CH-8031 Zürich Hugo Markl 15 - 23 Jan

Galleria Continua Via del Castello, 11 53037 San Gimignano T+39 0577 943 134 galleriacontinua.com private views to 30 Jan

Galleria Francosoffiantino Artecontemporanea Via Rossini 23 10124 Turin T +39 01183 7743 francosoffiantino.it Tania Bruguera/Linda Fregni Nagler/Cesare Pietroiusti to 23 Jan Galleria Massimo Minini Via Apollonio 68 25128 Brescia T +39 030 363 034 galleriaminini.it Sabrina Mezzaqui Galleria Poggiali e Forconi Via della Scala, 35 50123 Florence T+39 055 287 748 poggialieforconi.it Galleria Riccardo Crespi via Mellerio n° 1 20123 Milan T +39 (0)289 072 491 riccardocrespi.com Marcelo Moscheta to Jan 23 Galleria Lorcan O’ Neill Via Orti d’Alibert 1e 00165 Rome T +39 06 68 892 980 lorcanoneill.com Ivan Malerba to Jan 20 GALLERIA PACK Foro Bonaparte, 60 20121 Milan T +39 (0)286 996 395 galleriapack.com Miltos Maneta/Masbedo/Zhang Huan to Jan 23 MiArt International Modern and Contemporary Art Fair miart.it 26 - 29 March

Galleria dello Scudo Via Scudo di Francia 2 37121 Verona T+39 045 59 01 44 galleriadelloscudo.com Gianni Dessì to May 27

Monica De Cardenas Via Francesco Vigano’ 4 20124 Milan T +39 02 29010068 monicadecardenas.com Chantal Joffe to Jan 30

Galleria Franco Noero Via Giolitti 52A 10123 Turin T+39 011 882 208 franconoero.com Gianni Dessì to May 27

Prometeogallery Via Giovanni Ventura 3 20134 Milan T+39 02 2692 4450 prometeogallery.com Giuseppe Stampone

listings: museums and galleries

FRANCE Fondation Cartier 261 Boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris T +33 1 42 18 56 50 fondation.cartier.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 galleriacontinua.com to 30 May Galerie Laurent Godin 5, rue du Grenier St Lazare 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 71 10 66 laurentgodin.com Sven t’Jolle/Michael PattersonCarver to Feb 6 Galerie Lelong Paris 13, rue de Téhéran 75008 Paris T +33 1 45 63 13 19 Open Tues–Fri 10:30–6 Sat 2–6:30 galerie-lelong.com Ryan Mendoza to 30 Jan

Galeria Elba Benitez San Lorenzo 11 28004 Madrid T+34 91 308 0468 elbabenitez.com GALERIA HELGA de ALVEAR c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 28012 Madrid T +34 91 468 0506 helgadealvear.com Ettore Spalletti/Marcel Dzama 14 Jan - 13 Mar Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industrial Los Prados, 121 33394 Gijón T +34 985 133 431 Open Wed-Mon 12-8 laboralcentrodearte.org MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Castilla y Leon Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 24008 León T +34 987 09 00 00 musac.es Yorgos Sapountzis 30 Jan - 28 Mar MALTA

POLAND

United Arab Emirates

Gallery f.a.i.t. ul. Karmelicka 28 31–128 Kraków fait.pl

Carbon 12 Dubai A1 Quoz 1, Street 8 Alserkal Avenue, Warehouse d37 Dubai T +971 50 464 4 392 carbon12dubai.com info@ carbon12dubai.com Open Sun–Thu 12–7 Farzan Sadjadi: “Between a rock and a hard place” 18 Jan - 20 Feb Tobias Lehner: “Pluton” 25 Feb - 21Mar

Russia XL GALLERY 105120 Moscow, 4 Siromiatnichesky per 1, Winzavod T +7 495 7758373 Open Tue–Sun, 13–19 xlgallery.ru Japan KAIKAI KIKI GALLERY Motoazabu Crest Bldg. B1F 2-3-30 Motoazabu Minato-ku Tokyo 106-0046 T +816 823 6038 Open Tues-Sat 11-19 kaikaikiki.co.jp Scai the Bathhouse Kashiwayu-Ato 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku Tokyo 110-0001 T +813 3821 1144 scaithebathhouse.com China

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin 76, rue de Turenne 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 16 79 79 galerieperrotin.com Hernan Bas/Johan Cretin to 13 Mar

Jason Lu Portobello Court St. Teresa Square Marsascala T +356 7933 3338 jasonlu.com PORTUGAL

Artside Gallery P.R. China, Gallery Artside, PO Box 8503, No.4 Jiu Xianqiao Road, 798 Art Zone, Chaoyang district T + 86 10 5978 9192 artisde.org

Galerie Almine Rech 19, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris Tel +33 1 45 83 71 90 galeriealminerech.com Wall & Floor – Group show to 13 Feb

Cristina Guerra Rua Santo Antonio à Estrela 1350-291 Lisbon T +351 (0)21 395 95 59 cristinaguerra.com

Ov gallery 19C Shaoxing lu Shanghai 20002 T+ 862 15 465 7768 ovgallery.com

DENMARK

SINGAPORE

Galerie ThaddAeus Ropac 7, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 72 99 00 ropac.net Marcin Maciejowski/Sandra Vasquez de la Horra to 9 Feb

Galleri Nicolai Wallner Ny Carlsberg Vej 68 OG 1760 Copenhagen nicolaiwallner.com Jeppe Hein 29 Jan - 29 Mar

GALERIE EVE No 5 Tank Road Nagarathar Building #04-03, 238061 T +65 9099 3965 Open Thu–Sun 12–6 galerieeve.com

SWEDEN

KOREA

SPAIN

Moderna Museet Slupskjulsvägen 7–9 Stockholm Dalí Dalí Featuring Francesco Vezzoli to 17 Jan

GAAIN GALLERY 512-2 Pyungchang-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul 110-848 T +82 2 394 3631 gaainart.com

CAC Malaga C/ Alemania, s/n 29001-Málaga T +34 952 12 00 55 cacmalaga.org

TOURISM DEVELOPMENT & INVESTMENT COMPANY P.O. Box 126888, Abu Dhabi T +971 2 406 1501 Open Sun–Thu 8:30–5 artsabudhabi.ae Disorientation II to 20 Feb Taiwan SOKA ART CENTER TAIPEI 2F, No. 57, Dunhua South Road Sec. 1, Taipei, 10557, Taiwan T +886 2 2570 0390 Open Tue– Sun 11–9 soka-art.com Eslite Gallery 5F, No. 11, Songgao Rd., Taipei 11073, Taiwan T+886 2 8789 3388 ext. 1588 Open Tue–Sun 11–7 [email protected] eslitegallery.com Cai Guo Qiang to 21 Feb Turkey Beyaz Art İz Plaza Giz, Kat:19 D:70, Maslak İstanbul – TURKEY T +90212. 290 70 50 [email protected] beyazart.com

ArtReview 97

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Rear View January/ February

Reviews Books The Strip On the Town Off the Record

ArtReview

99

REVIEWS:

UK Bridget Riley

Timothy Taylor Gallery, London New Paintings, Wall Paintings and Gouaches 7 November – 19 December As you enter the space of the paintings (two canvases and two murals), it is possible to detect a distinct mood or tone embedded in the works. Perhaps I should say both distinct and yet curiously in-between. Not that this is a sign of weakening powers: quite the contrary. I’m inclined to say that this is work which is confident of drawing upon combinations of formality and sensuality, release and refrain, structural clarity and intuitive insight, in ways that produce an art confident of its own persuasive presence – and a truly eventful exhibition. It might be tempting to wonder, of such an exacting practice developed over 50 years, whether the work manifests any sense of a late style; it does not. Riley’s art has instead assumed a more complex posture. If I think of the words employed to designate the principal sensations of her work, it is a language often given over to singular, even frontal states of reception: ‘dazzle’, ‘throb’, ‘rhythm’, ‘orchestration’, ‘constellation’, ‘tone’, ‘pulsation’. But what can be detected in these recent works is a concern with more complex passages of reception, which emphasise a counter-rhythm or even ‘counter-inhalation’. In this regard the paintings assemble their resolve out of a complex series of gestures which defy overhasty generalisation. What I find myself dwelling upon is the idea of painting embodying the principle of pulsation, something which is far from being solely a modernist preoccupation. I think of the Sung painter Mi Fei and the extraordinary feeling of (breath) resonance within his landscape paintings; the chromatic passages of Cézanne; the dark, brooding vibrational intensities of late Titian; the cutouts of Matisse. And from there I start to feel in Riley’s paintings the possible distillation of these sensations, drawn from the process of sustained engagement with such predecessors. It’s not that we might look at one or other particular work in order to appropriate qualities, but rather to allow such works to assume a force within the making of Riley’s work. On a simple level, there are distinct traces of Matisse and Cézanne in circulation here, but there is also a relation to the (invisible) reserve contained in the art of painting, and with it, the desire to find the measure of this reserve. So yes, these are paintings of great singularity, distinctly within Riley’s style, confident in their powers, but they also contain the memory of forces that might diminish, or render slight, such reception, thus assuming a risk. Perhaps it is possible to suggest that these paintings face an archaic desire contained within a vision outside of a solely modernist programme. To evoke such an archaic desire means pointing towards a world unbound by representational thinking, a world that, rather than being seen, is instead intuited and invested by ‘what is’ (the meaning of being). If we can claim that the emergence of representational thinking coincides with the ascendance of common sense, then what kind of sense precedes common sense? This pursuit of sense has invariably been at the foundation of painting because of the way it evades the grids and networks of intelligible reduction and representation. Painting resides within what is peculiar, private and singular, as opposed to the general, plural or common, and as such is not dominated by the principle of identity that would anchor it firmly in place. Simply put, painting asks that we suspend our position in front of its self-exhibition, set aside our preoccupations, in order to draw evidence for that which is other to our common sense. Painting announces, even in advance of its appearance, a gesture of violence against what is assumed to be known, seeking what is wild or untamed difference instead. Finally, you can’t have a feast for the eyes without the trace of pathos, perhaps the pathos that is born out of talking too much, seeing with excess and missing sense. Riley is both discreet and exacting as an artist, careful to deliberate on that which can be indicated, step by step, and always with rhetoric pushed aside. Even though we can say she is a methodical painter, her thinking is not conditioned by method but rather is evidence of the formation of vision. Sartre once said that Giacometti’s sculpture cut the fat out of space; one could use the structure of such a thought to claim that Bridget Riley has cut the general out of painting. Jonathan Miles

Changing Places, 2009, oil on linen, 166 x 210 cm. © the artist 2009. All rights reserved. Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, and Karsten Schubert, London

100 ArtReview

ArtReview 101

REVIEWS: uk

Exhibition #1

Museum of Everything, London 14 October – 23 December

The Museum of Everything, a cheerfully lo-fi space dedicated to so-called outsider art just north of Regent’s Park, happened to open during the Frieze Art Fair. Its grotto-like rooms, DIY aesthetic and hand-painted graphics, and the work it contains could not have been more different from the art fair in full swing at the other end of the park. In its treasure trove of work, some by well-known outsider artists (Henry Darger; Jean Dubuffet protégé Vicens Gironella) and some by the less well known (twenty-seven-year-old Austrian Leonhard Fink), the Museum of Everything suggests multiple meanings for the term ‘outsider art’ and questions the notion of the museum as a space dedicated to a strictly defined type of cultural heritage. The artists whose work is on show are positioned outside the parameters of official culture, partly because of their afflictions, partly because they are unschooled, but mostly, it seems, because what they produce is created without a market in mind. The exhibition makes clear the debt contemporary artists owe to their outsider counterparts, and each work is accompanied by a text from a range of creative professionals, including artists and curators. Tracing the influence of Morton Bartlett’s family of dolls to Grayson Perry’s work, for example, is fascinating. Bartlett, born in the US in 1909, was obsessed (much like Darger) with little girls, and created dolls he would lovingly personalise with hand-stitched clothes; his private world, enthralled by ideas of femininity, closely resembles Perry’s relationship to alter ego Claire. Ed Ruscha writes touchingly of the work of Sam Doyle, a laundry worker who painted the inhabitants of South Carolina’s St Helena Island. Yet even without these recommendations, the works speak for themselves. William Scott’s painting of a sprawling metropolis almost entirely populated by spindly skyscrapers indicates skill as well as a highly developed imagination (countless works in this exhibition picture imaginary cities, or alternate and frequently – in the cases of Darger, Bartlett and Calvin and Ruby Black – diminutive communities). Meanwhile Judith Scott’s hanging sculptures, ordinary domestic items buried under layers and layers of knotted threads, indicate a meticulous and thorough process, the result of an internal necessity. The prevalence of found objects is not dissimilar in practice from that of thousands of artists working within the official realms of art production. One criticism of the exhibition is that there is not enough space to give justice to such complex and intricate works. Some exhibits – such as the fantastical figures by Indian artist Nek Chand, part of a huge project in Chandigarh, and a sequence from Darger’s masterwork, In the Realms of the Unreal – get their own rooms. However much is lost in a high-ceilinged exhibition room, with many works simply hung too high up the wall to be fully appreciated. Intriguing subthemes emerge from the show, such as folk art’s ties to outsider art, for example, but these could be further explored. However, as this is a Museum of Everything, implicit in which is a broad and inclusive brief, the criticism is a minor one. Ultimately, it is precisely this approach that makes the space such a welcome antidote to the ‘official’ artworld. Laura Allsop

Henry Darger, Untitled (Mascot Girl Scout 35th Grade), 1940-60s, carbon tracing, collage, pencil, watercolour on paper, 31 x 20 cm. Courtesy Museum of Everything, London

102 ArtReview

reviews: UK

Duncan Campbell

Make It New John, 2009 (installation view). Commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella, London, Chisenhale Gallery, London, Tramway, Glasgow, and the Model, Sligo. Photo: Andy Keate

Chisenhale Gallery, London 13 November – 20 December

I might as well park it out front: to most people, the name DeLorean will forever be linked to time travel – specifically to the car modified for that purpose by ‘Doc’ Brown in the Back to the Future films (1985–1990). In Duncan Campbell’s film Make It New John (2009), we travel back to the late 1970s, when flamboyant American motor industry supremo John DeLorean elected to manufacture his new company’s only car – the DMC-12 – in West Belfast. The film effectively plays out in three acts. The first of these sketches a social and political context for the development of DeLorean Motor Company: black-and-white footage seemingly borrowed from a 1950s feature film shows a bored boy, perhaps representing the young John DeLorean, in his suburban home. As we shift to colour advertising footage, laughing young people surf and toss Frisbees, while a Beach Boys-pastiche soundtrack extols the virtues of the Pontiac GTO. Images of gas-station signs then give way to maps of the Gulf and soldiers languishing in the desert, in clips that Campbell must have taken from news sources. Those familiar with Campbell’s work will also be familiar with his method of collaging diverse archival material to construct narratives riddled with doubt and ambiguity. For much of the middle section of this film, his touch is relatively light: we might almost be watching a 1980s documentary about the establishment and subsequent collapse of the DeLorean company. Initially backed by a Labour government hopeful of integrating a Protestant and Catholic workforce, DeLorean was abandoned by Margaret Thatcher’s government, which refused to bail out the failing company. Make It New John repeatedly describes impossible aspirations and frustrated expectations. The car’s low-slung, brushed stainless steel body and iconic gull-wing doors, for instance, promised effortless speed and elegance to “horny bachelors” (as one character says in the film). In fact, the car was reportedly very heavy and handled like a pig. As Make It New John progresses, DeLorean increasingly looks like a man tired of lying about the health of his company. When, in the final passage of the film, we realise that the five workers being interviewed are in fact actors shot on specially graded 16mm film, the shift at first seems incongruous, even misguidedly deceptive. But we have been watching lies, or fictions, from the start. The visiting British dignitaries, the American salesmen boasting about the car’s popularity and the aggrieved workers leaving the factory: all are performing for the camera, with varying degrees of innocence or mendacity. As the film winds to a close, the interviewees gradually excuse themselves, until just one remains, shifting awkwardly in his seat. His name is John. The female interviewer clumsily elicits a confession of loneliness, and the story of the sweetheart who changed her mind, though “that was all many years ago”. Clichés of narrative and class representation begin to creak at the sides. Campbell’s film ends as a tale of two Johns, each equally implausible, and each ultimately failing to ‘make it new’. Jonathan Griffin ArtReview 103

reviews: UK

Catherine Story Pylon

Carl Freedman Gallery, London 14 October – 5 December

There is nothing lush or welcoming in Catherine Story’s paintings and objects; a few arid, dusty, sandy tones, some barely formed shapes. Someone in a hurry might pass over them as another addition to the Tuymansesque school of bleak and brown, of distanced subjects rendered in colours that themselves deny painting’s more voluptuous tones. But Story’s quiet and austere paintings on paper are stranger than current fashion, and their paradox lies in how their muted, stunted subjects generate a sense of closeness and presence, however vague and lacking in detail they at first appear. Story’s subjects are of weirdly degraded shapes that have little to offer. The ‘pylon’ of the show’s title turns up twice, once on its own, in Sweetwater III (all works 2009), and as part of a pair in Arrowhead; not as the intricate lattice of metal you might expect, but as rudimentary approximations of the main volumes that make up a pylon’s basic shape – a tapered pyramid joining an inverted triangular frame, with odd prongs at the top corners. They’re like ghosts of shapes, not embryos about to develop into something more complex, but relics in which the detail has been stripped out, as if worn away by history. Cinema is a sort of brown, art deco corner cabinet, or a bunker – it’s hard to decide – with a sightless aperture in its corner, facing you blankly. Bluebird (IV) is a little blue chunk standing on a sort of blunt foot, its surface contoured with stepped ridges, a vague echo of overlapping feathers, perhaps. Story’s subjects, then, are attempts to represent the minimal conditions of making a representation of an object – a ground, some shadow, a bit of modelling. As if to guarantee that her pictures are indeed of something, little plaster and clay ‘models’ of what appear in the paintings are dotted around. Bluebird (IV) is a view of 8, sitting quietly on a shelf nearby. The spherical lump that appears in Planet X is present on the floor before it. Story’s paintings, one discovers, are representations of things that themselves are partly lacking in identity, themselves representations of other objects arrested in mid-fabrication, or objects that barely look like anything at all. In the absence of anything else to look at, however, Story’s attenuated forms become densely there. In many of the paintings the paint has been mixed with a bit of sand or sawdust, as if to deliberately wrong-foot the possibility of representation, and reassert the claim of matter over illusion, by using matter which is itself formless, coming from the wearing away of more distinct materials. Story adds little notes of explanation to the titles, though these are too detailed to really anchor the titles to their subjects. But this is Story’s point, of course: to make painting about what it means to represent, at the same time as failing to represent. Ghosts, made of concrete… J.J. Charlesworth

Dire Wolf, 2009, oil on paper, 69 x 48 cm. Courtesy the artist and Carl Freedman Gallery, London

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Incidence, 2009, Diasec mounted c-type print, 133 x 166 cm. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

Anne Hardy There is a recognisable contemporary-art genre which has its beginnings in Nicolas Poussin’s practice of fashioning precise clay figures then carefully lighting them before rendering them in paint. The genre’s contemporary manifestation is practised by a number of artists who validate artificially created worlds by their transcription into another medium, as if the act of ‘mapping’ one medium onto another confers authenticity on the subject. In recent decades artists such as Gregory Crewdson and Thomas Demand (photography), Saskia Olde Wolbers (video) and Neil Gall (painting) have deployed this strategy in their art in order to exercise precise, and at times obsessional, control of the imagery which informs the finished work. Anne Hardy has been working for a number of years within this genre, constructing intensely elaborate ‘photo sets’ over several months before carefully photographing them with a medium-format camera and wide-angle lens. Constructed from the detritus of the skip and the secondhand shop, her subterranean shooting ranges, cavelike weight-lifting dens, chalky snooker hall backrooms, déclassé telephone booths in cheap hotels and balloon-strewn party aftermaths appear to be the subject of the artist’s compelling large-format photographs. But these wholly invented and constructed spaces are anything but realistic portrayals of actual environments. There is as much artifice here, though not as overtly disclosed, as one finds in Jeff Wall’s iconic work The Destroyed Room (1978), and indeed there is a close resonance between Hardy’s and Wall’s practices; it appears ultracontemporary but in fact engages in sophisticated game-play with the history of painting – Wall’s room was directly inspired by Eugène

Maureen Paley, London 9 October – 22 November Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (1827), and Hardy first studied painting at Cheltenham before her MA in photography at the Royal College of Art, London. Hardy’s interiors are claustrophobic, cloying and sinister, like the apartment of an OCD sufferer who is unable to throw anything away or an obsessive collector of ephemera that others would class as rubbish. There is a disturbing allusion in many of the works to the hidden inner sanctum of the serial killer as it might be found in a whole subgenre of Hollywood films. The set design for these lugubrious interiors has become a trope of the contemporary cinematic, where the killing ground, with its cluttered and filthy interior – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974/2003), Seven (1995), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) – stands in for the stage-set carnage that is the twenty-first-century legacy of a derailed Western foreign policy as much as the confused, multilayered and fragmented environment of the contemporary, derealised psyche. Our enduring fascination with artificial worlds, from the nineteenthcentury popularity of the diorama to the current obsession with virtual reality – The Matrix (1999), CGI, the rebirth of 3D cinema – has at its root the very nature of our perception of reality, the fact that although the world we perceive is generated from sensory information, what we actually experience is a constantly updated cerebral model. Hardy’s images are so compelling because they remind us of the uncanny artificiality of reality. Richard Dyer

ArtReview 105

reviews: UK

David Hockney

1960–1968: A Marriage of Styles

Frances Stark

But What of Frances Stark…

David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 cm. Photo: © Tate, London 2009. © the artist

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Nottingham Contemporary 14 November – 24 January

For me David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash (1967) will be forever associated with the house of my school friend Amy (a clip-framed poster print hung on pale aqua walls, surrounded with black-and-chrome furniture), for, like many, I’m more familiar with reproductions of that image than I am with the painting. It’s a British image of a particular LA fantasy that hangs in a suburban house. Those reproductions, however, are startlingly different to the painting, which provides the crescendo to 1960–1968: A Marriage of Styles, one of two opening exhibitions at Britain’s newest regional art gallery, Nottingham Contemporary. While the poster is flat and still, the painting is full frozen movement: a highly charged moment of disappearance, following a period in which Hockney strongly asserted himself, as an artist and as a gay man. In the expressionism of Hockney’s early paintings, such as We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961), smudgy painted landscapes of pinks, browns and maroons are populated by figures with huge plaintively pink heads and mouths that gape, lick and smile with longing. Hockney borrows the words of Walt Whitman to enwrap the two clinging boys in a protective blanket. As the exhibition continues through Hockney’s move to LA, bodies are covered in streams of water or in modestly draped bedsheets, as in Hockney’s etchings illustrating the poems of C.P. Cavafy (1966). It’s a startlingly fresh, experimental exhibition full of Hockney’s vision and voice. But what of Frances Stark, standing by itself, a naked name, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? is an exhibition also delicately focused, as Stark often is, on the difficulties of asserting the self. Stark’s work is mainly composed of collage works, such as Modestly Becoming (2007), in which a line-drawn figure resembling the artist hides behind butterfly wings that are decorated with glossy private-view cards. Texts lifted from the likes of Emily Dickinson, Henry Miller and Witold Gombrowicz appear in these paper works, and the texts often appear to fly away like birds, or take solid form, though they also seem like safety blankets for the artist. Remembering Hockney’s protective covering of his subjects, we see several images of Stark doing the same for herself. Though we are always aware of Stark, she is hiding. In a generous, yet aggrandising move, she has created a new collage work in relation to Hockney for this exhibition. A hand holds a pair of legs, some musical notes, the words ‘corps humain’, silver paper and a photocopied text on American literature explaining the difference between Walt Whitman’s ‘I’ and that of Emily Dickinson. We are always aware of Walt, the writer explains, as a character, a personality related to the ‘I’, but Dickinson’s ‘I’ is less personal, more universal. If Walt is David, then Emily is Frances. Knocking all four of the artists into new light, in one delicately complex move, Stark’s work permits one to see that the bodies of the artists are all present, no matter who claims to be hiding. Laura McLean-Ferris

reviews: UK

Lyon Biennial The Spectacle of the Everyday

Various venues, Lyon 16 September – 3 January

Hou Hanru, a man with a reputation for strongly authored biennials (his previous outing was in Istanbul two years ago), has staged Lyon’s tenth biennial under the banner of The Spectacle of the Everyday. Oxymoronic semantics aside, the central thesis proposes that we live in a world now defined and motivated by spectacle, from the politics of shock and awe to the sublime of international economic systems; the internationalism of media to the advent of spectacular art events such as the biennial itself. As the spectacular is everyday, is there anything commonplace? Adrian Paci’s film of romantic pastoral scenes, Per Speculum (2006), is a key work. It seems analogous to the spell that biennials try to weave and that Hanru seeks to break. A group of children are reflected in a large freestanding mirror set up in the landscape. Just when the viewer begins to make fairytale connections, a reflected boy takes out a catapult and smashes the mirror. Our understanding of spectacle as ‘otherworldly’ is false and needs to be broken, it implies in this setting. Readymades, revelling in their elevated status, make a frequent appearance: Michael Lin’s What a Difference a Day Made (2008) features the entire contents of a Shanghai hardware store, displayed museologically in exposed packing cases. The work allows the audience to consider the globalised nature of the objects, invoking the geo-economic networks that surround cheap, mass-produced buckets or brushes, both in terms of how far they have travelled in their transit cases, from inception to shop to gallery, and in the international familiarity they convey. In a similar juxtaposition, Takahiro Iwasaki creates mountainous landscapes from piles of towels and wires them up with a minute infrastructure of pylons, pavilions and telecom towers (Sculptures, 2001–8); Alan Bulfin’s Killing Hur (2007) depicts extreme violence mediated through the pixelated blur of his sister’s videophone; and Mark Lewis’s understated video portrait of a New York street scene, Cold Morning (2009), is a catalyst for spiralling thoughts on social exclusion and the falsity of recognised metropolitan motifs. Hanru makes obvious use of Guy Debord’s conception of spectacle. At a basic level Hanru’s theoretical debt explains the presence of a great many politicised art collectives in the show: Société Réaliste’s fake website and resulting installation EU Green Card Lottery (2009), for example, or the autonomous city created by Xijing Men. Yet it goes further. Debord’s claim that we have become passive accumulators of merchandise – ‘the total occupation of social life’ – is passé in recent theory, nowhere more clearly than in Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘society of extras’ in Relational Aesthetics (1998). Yet Hanru eschews the bombastic interactive installation of recent biennials for works much more in keeping with the original Situationist claim. In doing so, he seems to be formulating a poised refutation of Bourriaud’s claim, the tenure of which the Frenchman prolonged via Höller and Eliasson, familiar names on the biennial circuit, in his own curation of Lyon’s 2005 edition. Yet simultaneously Hanru places this refutation within the critical framework of Bourriaud’s maligned Altermodern experiment, at Tate Britain’s triennial exhibition earlier in 2009. As such, despite some expected duffs in a show of this scale, the Lyon Biennial proves an enjoyable international curatorial tit-for-tat. Oliver Basciano

Michael Lin, What a Difference a Day Made, 2008, replica of a Shanghainese store, 17 crates, 5-channel DVD projection. With the support of Council for Cultural Affairs, Taiwan and the Taiwan Cultural Center in Paris. Photo: Blaise Adilon. Courtesy the artist and Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai

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REVIEWS:

USA The humorous, provocative art of Olaf Breuning is tough to define, since he has fearlessly used just about all possible media in his work. This newest grouping of sculptures, wall drawings and photographs, however, seems less reliant on the outrageous tackiness of his previous work and more like a sad-sack, introspective artist making things for himself in his humble workshop. Filling the first two rooms of Metro Pictures are sculptures and wall drawings that are essentially enlargements of small pencil drawings the artist made while spending five days alone in his room aboard the Queen Mary II. The wood sculptures, generally made of small pieces that are fastened together and painted black, have a playful quality, although it is clear the artist is also dealing with issues of self-doubt, failure and depression. The sardonic Wheel of Death (all works 2009), presenting the possible ages of someone’s lifespan in the form of a vertical roulette wheel, and Life Is a Rollercoaster are downright grim. The wall drawings, projected from small originals and painted with black paint are essentially crudely drawn cartoons. Similar to David Shrigley’s and Dan Perjovschi’s drawings, their charm is in their simplicity. Yes/No is the most overtly comical and sexual, with the word ‘no’ written on a man’s face while the word ‘yes’ rests along the length of his erect penis. Although both rooms are full of hit-and-miss pieces, the overall grouping succeeds on a purely formal level. The cohesiveness of the installation seems a bit cautious compared to his previous show at the same gallery, in 2008, when audacious ceramic and mixed-media sculptures, drawings and photographs coexisted in the same room. Investigations into paint’s physicality, visual impact and relationship to art history take up the third, smaller gallery, whose walls are painted black to contrast with the first two rooms. The framed c-print Bridget features a voluptuous female model painted black and lying on her side, with thick pours of yellow, green, blue and red paint dripping down her body, while Color Drip I is essentially the same work with thinner paint stripes and no model. Grid Drip, a painted sculpture that was then photographed, brings to mind the chequerboard lines of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–3). Recalling Yves Klein, stain painting and the canvases Niki de Saint Phalle shot with a .22 calibre rifle back in the 1960s, Breuning revels in the optical qualities of pure colour, using simple but effective methods to emphasise its intense materiality. The drop-dead gorgeous Colour Bubbles relies on lighting rather than paint to achieve a similar, though more delicate, effect on floating soap bubbles; and allowing the lights themselves to be clearly visible at the top of the composition is comparable to other Breuning photos in which the staging is revealed. Nothing in Small Brain Big Stomach is as memorable as Breuning’s dark and surreal narrative video Home (2004), but for an artist with a startling number of solo shows per year, it is obvious this guy is in overdrive. Chris Bors

Olaf Breuning

Small Brain Big Stomach

Metro Pictures, New York 29 October – 5 December

Small Brain Big Stomach, 2009 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, London

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reviews: Usa

Lydda Airport, 2009, urethane and epoxy, 77 x 156 x 33 cm. Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York

Emily Jacir Dispatch

Alexander and Bonin, New York 28 October – 28 November

It’s hard, in an age so weary of world travel, to recall the pride and prestige that once attached to airports. The case of Lydda Airport should remind us: built in Palestine in 1936, when the territory was under the British Mandate, it was captured by the Israelis in 1948 and renamed Lod; in 1974 it became Ben Gurion International Airport, after Israel’s first prime minister. The loss of Lydda not only stripped the Palestinians of prestige but also prefigured many other losses; and it supplies the inspiration for a new film by the Palestinian-American artist Emily Jacir. Lydda Airport (2009) has been largely furnished from archival images to create a period drama with a spare narrative that takes us back to the time when the airport was under construction. Aircraft manoeuvre on the tarmac before a nascent terminal; a dewy-eyed woman awaits an arrival with a bouquet of flowers. The mood evokes the faded glory days of early air travel, of wartime love and loss on the margins of Europe; all of which is made more romantic by a palette of silver, pewter, ash and grey – it’s a five-minute Casablanca (1942). Jacir says that further inspiration came from some real, failed arrivals at Lydda: the disappearance of a plane over the Gulf of Oman, and another occasion when a woman was deputised to welcome aviator Amelia Earhart, who never arrived. These references don’t really come through, but the film remains a success by virtue of its atmosphere of stalled movement and interrupted history. And these themes are stressed in an accompanying sculpture, which is based on images of the original architectural model of Lydda – a plan for an airport which would further the Palestinian drive for statehood, both of which have come to nought. Very different in tone is Stazione (2009), a project Jacir devised for last summer’s Venice Biennale. She proposed to provide a series of Arabic signs to translate the names of prominent vaporetto stops, but the Venetian authorities cancelled the project abruptly, and without explanation. So Jacir has reconstructed it, and presents it here principally through a series of altered photographs of the floating stops, with the Arabic in place. Art so rarely gives political offence nowadays that one is tempted to commend Stazione for that alone. Indeed, one is so accustomed to art which, like Lydda Airport, turns wispy and romantic when it inclines towards politics and history, that Stazione is refreshing. But unfortunately one doubts, as Jacir disingenuously claims, that her purpose was to highlight the Arab heritage of the city: there were surely many other ways of doing this which would not have antagonised the authorities. It is no feat to expose Islamophobia in the West: the goal should be to frustrate it, not to solidify it. Morgan Falconer

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reviews: USA

Futurist Life Redux

Anthology Film Archives, New York 16 November

Futurist Life Redux obviates the compelling paradoxes of Performa 09’s larger project: to playfully resuscitate a historical avant-garde’s brief yet uncompromising love affair with the ‘future’. In tandem with Performa’s appropriation of F.T. Marinetti’s ‘Futurist Manifesto’ (1909) as a template for the biennial, curators Lana Wilson from Performa and Andrew Lampert from Anthology Film Archives attempt a contemporary reconstruction of the long-lost Futurist film Vita Futurista (Futurist Life, 1916), which adopted many of the tenets outlined in ‘The Futurist Cinema’ manifesto from the same year. Railing against early cinema’s imitation of sentimental, historicising Italian theatre, ‘The Futurist Cinema’ dictates that cinema must ‘detach itself from reality’ and abandon itself completely to dynamism, abstraction and sensations. ‘Futurist cinema… will become the best school for boys: a school of joy, of speed, of force, of courage, and heroism.’ It is ironic, then, that many of the shorts in Futurist Life Redux revel in the quotidian — the ungainly reality of the Futurists’ future. After assigning, via lottery, 11 segment-synopses to 13 contemporary video artists, Wilson and Lampert gave the participants small budgets and six weeks to film. Playing with descriptions like ‘the dance of geometric splendor’ and ‘how the Futurist sleeps’, the resulting 11 short films tease a movement drunk on its own hubris. For his video Why Cecco Beppe Does Not Die (all videos 2009), Ben Coonley substitutes a lethargic, somewhat fat housecat for a Futurist actor, whose disembodied, droning vocoder voice discusses the technological innovation of a pixelated scratch-and-sniff oval floating from side to side on the movie screen. It renders technological radicalism — used by the Futurists to attack bourgeois culture — humorously bourgeois itself. For his film Futurist Lunch, Michael Smith reverses his Vita Futurista scene synopsis, which describes how several young Futurists mock the old-fashioned way an elderly bearded man eats lunch. Partly inspired by the Coca-Cola Company, which bears a great responsibility for propagating today’s familiar Santa Claus imagery, Smith and Haddad superimpose a colour Santa Claus over black-and-white images of smokestacks, gravestones and hungry street children. In Futurist Lunch, what was once a harbinger of the past becomes a harbinger of the new. Subject to the throes of modernisation, this ‘new’ is made more of the same. Hinting at the repercussions of ‘factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke’ that Marinetti spoke of so ecstatically in ‘The Futurist Manifesto’, the videos in Futurist Life Redux tend to render our ‘communication age’ humorously humdrum and meek; awash in geeky digital special effects, lo-fi camp and abject humour, the videos are funny and slapstick, but they also take a sober if fantastical look at the reality of the Futurists’ valiant ‘future’, one that is clearly no panacea. David Everitt Howe Chameckilerner, Conversation with Boxing Gloves Between Chamecki and Lerner, a segment of Futurist Life Redux, 2009, production still. A Performa commission with SFMOMA and Portland Green Cultural Projects

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Nummer twaalf: Variations on a theme, the King’s gambit accepted, the number of stars in the sky and why a piano can’t be tuned, or waiting for an earthquake, 2009 (installation view), video, 40 min, edition of 8 + 2AP. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer

Guido van der Werve

Marc Foxx, Los Angeles 24 October – 28 November

In Guido van der Werve’s 2007 video Nummer acht: Everything is going to be alright, the black-clad artist walks slowly in front of a hulking icebreaker. The walk is a gentle gesture, the ship so large and ominous, the background so definitively white and desolate: it is a deadpan triumph of the artist over forces much bigger than himself. Van der Werve’s current outing, a video precisely titled Nummer twaalf: Variations on a theme, the king’s gambit accepted, the number of stars in the sky and why a piano can’t be tuned, or waiting for an earthquake (2009), continues the small gestures in monumental landscapes, but this time I’m not sure everything is going to be alright. It’s not that anything bad happens; in fact, very little happens at all over the course of its 40 minutes. The video begins with the moves of a predetermined game played by van der Werve and the chess grand master Leonid Yudasin on a special chessboard cum piano of the artist’s devising. The artist, speaking in a voiceover, describes the impossibility (by many millions of years) of anyone ever playing every possible chess game. Each move of this game with Yudasin registers in a chess notation of letters and numbers (eg, ‘24. Qxc6’) on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. A small orchestra in the back of the room where the game is being played works its way through a score written by van der Werve (a composer by training). Both the notation and score carry on throughout the film. The second part shows van der Werve wandering through the wilderness near Mount St Helens, ostensibly to reach a point where he can start counting stars, which, given his own estimations, is humanly impossible by years best measured in exponents. The third part brings us to a diminutive shed on the edge of the San Andreas Fault, where van der Werve explains the impossibility of tuning a piano given a tonal hiccup called the Pythagorean comma. At the end, the melancholic music swells to a finale, the artist exits the shed, a helicopter pulls away, rendering him tiny beside the meandering fault line in the monumental landscape. Conclusion: mankind is a small, rather unimportant cog in the big, beautiful machinery of nature, and yet we still try. The actions of Nummer acht and many of the other earlier numbered pieces are those of isolated gestures: turning against the turn of the world at the North Pole, five ballerinas pirouetting out of a van after it has slammed into the saddened artist, van der Werve constructing a spaceship in his living room. They sometimes grow more complex, but their joy is in their simplicity and their very sly humour. Without humour, as it feels in Nummer twaalf, the grand becomes grandiose, and the impossible gesture looks less like a delightful trick played against overwhelming forces and more like the mathematical deliberation of a predetermined chess match, one played without much joy. Andrew Berardini

ArtReview 111

reviews: USA

Dianna Molzan

The Case of the Strand

Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles 8 November – 9 January

Dianna Molzan’s paintings are simply astonishing. While firmly grounded in the materials and structural format of painting — canvas, linen, stretcher bars, oil paint, brushes and palette knife — Molzan constructs singular, nonfigurative painting-objects, sculpted after abstractions of 1980s-era textiles, fashion, furniture and Memphis Group ceramics. She values thing-ness over imagery, sculptural questions of solidity, mass, volume, holes and textural pattern over pictures. The eight works (all Untitled, 2009) in her first solo show in LA share basic rectangular dimensions and a calculated reduction of compositional activity, but each has its own highly distinct character and is unlike the rest, the result of a considered limitation of component parts and restricted palettes, which prioritise pale hues and often dark, subdued tones. Beginning with a medium-size stretched canvas (61 x 51 cm), she regularly cuts into or builds onto the picture plane, constructing literal depths and forming each work around a strange and potent interiority: strategically sited cavities, gaps, protrusions and concealed hollows give her work peculiar body. Perforating the fabric ground of several paintings, Molzan reveals the stretcher bars’ exposed rectilinear armature as a crucial feature. Green, blue, orange, violet and mauve spots of oil paint have dripped from the crisply cut edge of an abbreviated abstract expressionist-style painting, staining the raw wood of the frame’s bottom bar. The abrupt truncation has a sly humour, seeming to parody the romantic tropes of supposedly expressive splotches and authentic smears by cutting them off at the knees while also lampooning a mythos of the pure, starving artist who can’t afford enough canvas to cover her stretcher. One of the most bizarre and captivating works looks like a blank section of segmented chocolate-brown adobe, with a bulky upper ledge of exaggerated thickness stepping down to at least half its elevation in the painting’s lower region. Two turquoise lines trace the edge of this topographical shift like piping. Its unexpected, top-heavy awkwardness is oddly riveting, and its geometric simplicity has a bluntness and chutzpah that is characteristic of Molzan’s restrained yet striking sensibility. There are no spontaneous, accidental or expressive gestures here, yet each object is powerfully human and full of a handcrafted charm reminiscent of Ree Morton’s playfulness or Vincent Fecteau’s formal wit. Molzan balances contained and carefully orchestrated regions of apparent chaos – whole panels strewn with tangled strands of canvas or speckled all over by colourful sprays of paint — with sharply taped-off, hard-edged graphic punctuations. Meticulously executed details generate visual tension where, for instance, one shape of colour ventures out alone around the corner of a threedimensional form, or a line stops short of touching a canvas’s edge. The reduction of visual forces at play in any given work amplifies their effect and contributes to the condensed hardness several of the paintings convey, one in particular having the surface appearance of countertop laminate or concrete. Molzan’s objects speak as much of the countless private hours of sustained mental exertion — looking, considering, not-acting — in the studio as they do of the relatively few physical interventions evidenced on canvas. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Untitled, 2009, oil on linen, 61 x 51 cm. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Overduin and Kite, Los Angeles

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Pool at Uday’s Palace (from the Breach series), 2009, digital c-print facemounted to Plexi, 182 x 243 cm (unframed). Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Richard Mosse The Fall

Jack Shainman Gallery, New York 19 November – 23 December

There is a trio of photographs in Richard Mosse’s debut exhibition that would seem to tell the whole story. What we might call the central panel of this triptych, Pool at Uday’s Palace (all works 2009), shows a team of seven marines, some sitting, some standing, some reclining poolside at what is left of Uday Hussein’s onetime getaway on a hilltop in Iraq. The panorama behind the men is spectacular. The parapet of the pool terrace runs parallel to the top and bottom edges of the image, which tells us Mosse is a formalist. But he’s not so much of one as to disregard a decisive moment. One reclining Marine, helmet off, legs crossed, has his arms raised, palms up and head cocked to the side as if to say, ‘Fuck it, can’t we enjoy ourselves?’ The gesture is directed at one of the soldiers standing at left, whose own slightly inclined stance betrays a stern authority and disapproval: ‘Get your fucking Kevlar back on’. The scene is worthy of Watteau, but this is obviously no fête galante. There’s rubble in the pool and not a shred of green — plus, we’re in a world without women. Whatever is libidinal about it comes in the embrace of death. This is confirmed in what I’ll call the left panel of the triptych, Foyer at Uday’s Palace, which pulls the camera back five metres and under a stone balcony. The attention of five marines still in the scene is held by something down in the landscape. One marine is crouched at the parapet with rifle raised. Everyone’s helmet is on. Column at Uday’s, the third panel of the triptych, finds the camera panned to the right. Two of the balcony’s denuded columns (due to shelling) are now front and centre. The empty pool rushes in at the left, and one of the palace’s destroyed walls frames the right. The rest is rubble, a decapitated outbuilding, empty ridges, blue sky. What about that pool? In the central panel it looks huge, given that it bleeds off the bottom edge of the image, its end accelerating out of the frame. But pull the camera back a bit, as Mosse has done in the other two photographs, and the pool narrows, even appears rather middling. When I say these photographs tell the whole story, that is because they reveal the centrality of this depth-of-field distortion to Mosse’s work on the whole. We see it in the photographs of airplane wreckage, such as C27 Beaver Creek and 727 Santo Domingo. And though it is not present in the photographs of the impossibly shotup wrecks of cars that Mosse captured also while embedded with the US military, these objects’ own distortions, and the sandstorm atmospheres that envelope them, would seem to reproduce that formal trick here at the level of content. It would seem safe to say that with this body of work, which he shot while on the first year of two-year Annenberg Fellowship, Mosse opens up a new and promising chapter in the analytic of the sublime. Jonathan T.D. Neil ArtReview 113

reviews: Europe

LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón Feedforward – The Angel of History 22 October – 5 April In Walter Benjamin’s poetic formulation, ‘progress’ (in the historical materialist sense of the term) is conceived of as a violent storm blowing out of a bygone Paradise, through the debris-ridden present and into an unforeseeable future. It is the storm that propels Benjamin’s angel of history unwillingly forward while leaving in its wake the sky-high heap of rubble, wreckage and catastrophe that is the collective past. It is a storm that blew Benjamin himself to smithereens not long after he wrote such words in the spring of 1940. It is a storm that presumably has not yet run its course. Taking Benjamin’s formulation as its point of departure, the vast, sprawling and thesis-driven group exhibition Feedforward – The Angel of History positions itself as nothing less than an examination of the state of the world in the aftermath of the twentieth century – a toxic waste-like aftermath that the twenty-first century must somehow deal with, even as it continues to release its toxins. To carry out this examination, curators Christiane Paul and Steve Dietz have assembled 29 hefty works – a heft both physical and intellectual – by 27 different artists or artist collectives, distributing them throughout the cavernous chambers of LABoral into sections with portentous labels such as ‘Symbolic Language’, ‘Wreckage’ and ‘Countermeasures’. This is exhibition as essay, and as essay, Feedforward (unlike, say, Benjamin’s On the Concept of History) tends towards the academic – yet this qualification need not be understood in the negative sense as usually applied to fine art, but rather in the laudable sense of intellectual rigour, thoroughness and accomplishment (and yes, a certain degree of dryness). At the same time, an intense and vivid spirit of political engagement pervades the majority of the work exhibited, a political engagement rooted less in historical theory than in current events and firsthand material – interviews, open-source information, Internet archives and wartime video footage from cameras attached to soldiers’ helmets. Finally, within the exhibition’s overarching structure, the individual artworks on exhibit are just that – individual, and works of art – well chosen, well crafted and well exhibited (in the architect Angel Borrego’s diaphanous exhibition design). For instance, Nonny de la Peña and Peggy Weil’s ongoing Gone Gitmo (2007–) uses Second Life technology to immerse spectators/participants in a simulation of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, thereby visualising a type of information that the notoriously secretive camps make such great efforts to hide. Hasan Elahi’s Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2006 (2009) consists of a large transparent polycarbonate sheet onto which a map of the world had been etched. Pinpointing on the map the 330 acknowledged sites around the world where the US government has intervened with military force since the nation’s inception, Elahi enlisted marksmen to fire .22 calibre bullets at each, literally and symbolically embedding the subject matter within the artefact. And Cao Fei’s 20-minute, single-channel video Whose Utopia (2006) follows the processes of manufacture within a lightbulb factory in the Pearl River region of China, interspersing images of workers at their workstations and assemblyline positions with sequences of angel-like dancers and musicians in those same spaces with those same workers. The blend of documentation and fantasy yields an element of protest that is even greater for remaining implicit; ultimately, Whose Utopia seems to recognise not only the difficulties but also the inherent self-respect and dignity of the workers portrayed – very potent propaganda indeed. George Stolz

Margot Lovejoy, Storm from Paradise, 1999, single-channel video projection, installation, sound. Courtesy the artist

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Fire Island Story, 2009, mixed media, 50 x 70 x 16 cm. Courtesy Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin

Gianfranco Baruchello La Formule

Gianfranco Baruchello is a gardener. And maybe the practice of gardening, or the creation of a garden, isn’t so far from his approach as a visual artist. After all, garden art is governed by rules and conventions, by ideology even. The arrangement of flowers and bushes requires knowledge and experience; it may follow spontaneous intuition or planned manner, aesthetic or pragmatic or even ethical considerations: a garden is the product of many acts of selection and combination. All of this could also be said of the eighty-five-year-old Roman artist’s drawings, paintings and collages, even of some of his films. His works are cerebral gardens in the sense that they assemble writing, maps, glyphlike representations of objects, cutouts, tiny objets trouvés – all selected and combined in an associative manner, seen through the artist’s mindset or subconscious filter. Even though Baruchello’s paintings may reach the respectable dimensions of 200 x 200 cm, their icons and words are tiny. One cannot ‘look’ at these works: they need to be read, deciphered, traced, even though there is no safe passage through them, let alone an entry point. But what a pleasure getting lost in them! Take Incertezza del Possibile (2006), a pencil drawing on cloddy Hanji paper, depicting body parts, animals and furniture, some of which are linked by diagrammatic arrows or bear multilingual comments on a particular landscape or on art. As conceptual as these works may seem, they are visually incredibly appealing, owing to their minute detail and the sheer abundance of imagery and language. Then there are these almost surrealist little moments when, for instance, two men carry a stretcher with a giant

Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin 13 November – 20 February fish through a landscape of words and body parts (Fire Island Story, 2009). These works ignite the intellectual pleasure of exploring a universe that is just beyond understanding. Even though Baruchello claims to have found ‘the formula’ that explains and links all of his works – hence the title of the show – he is far from revealing it. It is never translated into a ‘theory of everything’ that would satisfy the curiosity of the viewer. There are, nonetheless, some clues. There are traces of Baruchello’s interest in geopolitics. In fact, his work repeatedly recalls Oyvind Fahlström’s practice. In Aïcha (2004), for example, Baruchello draws a world map that morphs into vacuum cleaners, combined with scenes of labour and production. And then there are references to and images of Baruchello’s own working method, when intestine-like shapes turn into maps, channel systems, brain structures or all of these together. And then there is the actual garden, a work created for this show, one that reveals its inner logic: Giftplanzen, Gefahr (2009) consists of two flowerbeds with poisonous plants – some of which also have medical or hallucinogenic properties. The installation is completed by a series of drawings loosely elaborating on these plants, their ambiguous beauty and their cultural value. Baruchello’s other works may be less dangerous, but they are by no means less intoxicating. On the contrary. After decades when this work was only available in small doses, it’s time for a Baruchello binge. Astrid Mania

ArtReview 115

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Sequences

Spartacus Chetwynd, Feminism, Little Tales of Misogyny, 2009, performance. Courtesy the artist and Sequences, Reykjavik

116 ArtReview

Various venues, Reykjavik 30 October – 7 November

Now in its fourth year, Sequences marries the busy schedules of Reykjavik’s many arts organisations, encompassing local artists’ initiatives such as Gallery Dwarf and Lost Horse, and transnational institutions such as Nordic House. Increasingly liveness is valued in art festivals – it’s what lends a sensation of authenticity to an experience and binds it with place. Sequences 2009 equates liveness with the pan-European festival of Carnival, with pageant and masque. It entertains live art, actions, performance, sound and theatre-based rituals – parading an international ensemble of mummers and dumbshows intent on turning the world upside down. At the theatre end of the spectrum, Hrafnhildur Hagalín and Steinunn Knútsdóttir’s Room 408 (all works 2009) used Internet telephony to blend online and live performance, generating a drama featuring actors based in different countries. The short play involved an improvised interview with two police inspectors, one played by an actor based in Helsinki, the other in Reykjavik – leaving much of the narrative, which hovered around an accident in the West Fjords, for the audience to piece together. Finnish performance group Oblivia’s Entertainment Island 1 slithered between modern dance, generative music and motivational speaking (think Tom Cruise in Magnolia, or on Oprah). Other performances were more notational, taking their cues from musical composition. Magnús Pálsson is celebrated as a master of this approach in Iceland. Loosely based on the Burning of Njáll saga, Pálsson’s Taðskegglingar used a simple score comprising onomatopoeia and mnemonics to create a rich synaesthetic dramaturgy. Performed by the Icelandic Sound Poetry Choir, it managed to combine the visual and sonic into a sculptural liturgy. The palaeographic orientation of Pálsson’s work, with its echoes of settlement myths and related folk etymologies, is a key ingredient of much contemporary Icelandic art, a critical regionalism echoed in Sigurður Guðjónsson’s performance relating to the Icelandic death metal scene as much as in Icelandic Love Corporation’s Black Swans installation of sculpture and video, related to the unlikely phenomenon in its title, at the Kling & Bang gallery. Egill Sæbjörnsson and Marcia Moraes performed The Mind, an idiosyncratic lecture on manifestation, a lesson on the magical power of images reminiscent of Bruce Haack’s proto-electro children’s music. Incorporating animated doppelgängers, The Mind plays nonsense games with mind/body monisms and dualisms – extending the video animation of Sæbjörnsson’s solo show Spirit of Place and Narrative in the Reykjavik Art Museum into the realms of live cabaret. There’s a political dimension to many of these vaudeville acts, most notably Feminism, Little Tales of Misogyny, by the Spartacus Chetwynd Mime Troupe, and the Icelandic Love Corporation’s Vitaskuld, Auðvitað! Bjarni Massi’s documentary Sirkus featured performances and events staged at the downtown bar reconstructed by Kling & Bang during the 2008 Frieze Art Fair. This casts a different light on postcrash Reykjavik. While still closed, the Sirkus venue hasn’t quite yet been condemned, a monument to the fortitude and ingenuity of the city’s creative community against the insipid myopia of speculators. A number of projects extended this critique, including the PPPTPC Institute’s satires on investment-led millenarian mania, such as www.icelandtrain.com or Reykjavíkurvasakver. Andrew Burgess’s Movie Material was projected directly onto the mothballed Tónlistarhús (Concert & Conference Centre) – a ‘destination icon’ white elephant that is the most potent symbol of developers’ cultural and economic folly. Others sought to occupy the service-sector vacuum, taking it back into public service. The American Meat LCC set up a free burger stand to help festival revellers say ‘farewell to the flesh’ (carne vale). Parfyme’s One Letter Delivery Show offered to deliver giant postcards anywhere in Iceland, speak with the recipients and return with their response, all for a measly six krona. They are reportedly still on the run from the Communication Workers Union. Neil Mulholland

reviews: Europe

Deadline

‘We don’t know anything about this passing on’, wrote Rainer Maria Rilke in a poem included in this show, ‘it never shares with us’. Deadline gathers the late production of 12 artists struggling with the unknown, 12 bodies of work full of the sense of imminent departure. When faced with death, each fought back in his own way. In three videos displayed alongside one of his celebrated Cellules, Absalon shouted, ran and masturbated frenetically, proclaiming one last time his right to live. Robert Mapplethorpe, too weak to work with models, repeatedly shot marble ephebes, male beauty triumphant, eternal. Martin Kippenberger chose to confront his heroes; in his series Jacqueline: The Paintings Pablo Couldn’t Paint Anymore (1996), he literally stepped into Picasso’s shoes by picturing the Spanish master’s widow. His approach was radically different in the series which opens this exhibition, Das Floß der Medusa (The Raft of the Medusa) (1996). If still challenging the old masters – in this case Géricault – Kippenberger had gone from death-dodger to victim (the artist was to die of cancer a year later), relentlessly representing himself as a castaway, his body uncannily twisted. James Lee Byars died in Cairo in 1997. He had heard of Egyptian ‘goldblowers’ able to fashion the precious metal like glass and wanted them to blow a sphere the size of his heart. Gold was a way to the infinite. In his performance The Death of James Lee Byars (1994) at the gallery Marie-Puck Broodthaers in Brussels, a gold-clad Byers lay still in a space entirely lined with gold leaves, before leaving five diamonds – one stone for each of his body’s extremities – on a sarcophagus as the trace of the event. This spectacular display has been recreated for Deadline. It’s a golden nook; a kitsch, theatre prop-like door to the afterlife. The artist embraced death in all its sublime absurdity. The last works: maybe not the best works, nor the works the artists will be remembered for, simply those that marked the end of the line. Such a position in an artist’s chronology gives to any piece a pathetic undertone that inevitably shapes its reception, at times rendering poignant Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris the works that one would have otherwise quickly dismissed. Hans Hartung’s large abstract paintings 16 October – 10 January may not be particularly thrilling, but they are seen in a different light when one learns that the painter used a transformed agricultural pump to apply the paint from his wheelchair; likewise the contributions of Gilles Aillaud, who clumsily represented flocks of birds with his one good arm. The painter, renowned for his images of captive animals, chose at the end of his life to give them the sky as their only limit. Deadline could have been gimmicky or contrived, but it is instead infused with a genuine sense of profundity. It throws light on unfamiliar facets of several well-known artists and opens up a space for the viewers to momentarily confront their own impermanence – a potent and much-needed experience in a society so disposed to hiding death. Coline Milliard

Hermes, 1988, gelatin silver print, 50 x 60 cm. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York

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Aaron Curry, Thomas Houseago Twofacetwo

Veneklasen/Werner, Berlin 9 October – 19 December

Twofacetwo is a continuation of Two Face, an exhibition concurrently presented at Ballroom Marfa by two of the institution’s recent one-month residents: American Aaron Curry and UK-born Thomas Houseago (both live in Los Angeles). The artists met in 2005 on a plane ride across the US and discovered common interests that included popular music, Picasso and the human form; here in Berlin they inaugurate this revamped fiveroom gallery space, which was formerly (and rather laxly) run by Michael Werner’s son, Julius. The opening sculpture by Houseago immediately forces the visitor to duck, luring him through the low arch of Plaster Gate I (all works 2009), a massive chunk of redwood endowed with primitively fashioned carvings of human figures. These seem to laugh and grimace at the viewer, who senses that a step through the archway marks a passage into an enchanted land. Fittingly, on the other side stands a larger-than-life dark brown bronze sculpture, Untitled (Lumpy Man or Milan Bronze), also by Houseago and reminiscent of a cross between one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents and Roald Dahl’s BFG. The heavy metal figure looks as though it is buckling under its own weight, about to slouch and shuffle across the floor. Although it is always impressive to be confronted with an eight-foot anthropomorphic figure, being greeted by a giant seems almost unsurprising in this enchanted setting. Facing it is Large Standing Figure, Berlin, which, with its white gypsum covering and rickety industrial wiring, lends a welcome contrast to the well-grounded bronze. On one wall, a primitive mask-shaped canvas in black and white, along with two sculptures of faces on raised supports, remind us of Houseago’s artistic influences: Picasso, Giacometti, Surrealism and rock album covers. Another totemically carved redwood gateway, Wood Gate I, stands at the end of the large room. It marks our exit out of the wonderland and, at the same time, our entrance into a room that for the first time brings colour into the exhibition. Immediately, the gaze is drawn towards the red paint in the abstract-surrealist drawings by Houseago which line the gallery walls: a suitable backdrop for Curry’s large semiabstract yet strangely figurative sculptures fashioned from sheets of wood or steel slotted into one another. The lines on Untitled remind us of the raw, graffiti-like marks that characterised some of Curry’s earlier work. However, here the artist seems more ‘in control’. The line and the smooth surface of the works, married with abstract cubist shapes, à la Matisse or Picasso, point to a decisive shift away from anything like an unmediated expressiveness. Twofacetwo is a small, well-curated exhibition, bringing together harmoniously a selection of perfectly executed works. This precision, however, comes at the price of innovation. These works are living-room friendly; they profess nothing new. In fact, although both artists are only thirty-seven, their work already seems to belong to the canon, many of them essentially viewable in the Modernism sections of our museums, where they bear the names of Ernst, Giacometti, Flanagan and numerous others. David Ulrichs

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Aaron Curry, Untitled, 2009, unique silkscreen and collage on paper, 280 x 210 cm. Photo: Roman Maerz. Courtesy Veneklasen/Werner, Berlin

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Mantua’s Ducal Palace is a perfect place for a touch of that dizzying response to beauty, Stendhal’s syndrome. Combining a brick-built castle with the historic residence of the noble Gonzaga family, it boasts more than 500 rooms (alongside loggias, corridors and inner courtyards) and works Arte In-percettibile by Pisanello, Giulio Romano, Rubens, plus the magnificent frescoes of Andrea Mantegna in the Camera degli Sposi, a tour de force of Renaissance perspective reaching its climax in the famed ceiling oculus, with courtesans and winged cherubs looking down on viewers, blue sky above. Asked by the cultural heritage soprintendente and curator Filippo Trevisani to install a series of older and new works in the palace, Stefano Arienti (born in 1961 on a farmstead in Asola, a small town a few kilometres away) has characteristically chosen to downplay all expectations of bombastic arm-wrestling with the Old Masters, à la Koons in Versailles. Instead he adopts a deflating, subtly ironic strategy, a hide-and-seek approach that allows him both to playfully challenge the iconic power of High Art, and to reactivate the magic of this place, no matter how commodified by mass tourism. By camouflaging his works within and around the palazzo – the thin and multicoloured Corde Sospese (Hanging Ropes, 2009) inscribe the perimeter of the charming Giardino Pensile; the giant, Zen garden-like Lucertola in Cortile (Lizard in the Courtyard, 2009), made of cobblestones, becomes visible only from the windows on the first floor – Arienti guides the viewers to the rediscovery of lesser-known architectural wonders. The rococo Kaffeehaus, for example, which houses Turbine (1987–2009), seven small, conical sculptures obtained by neatly folding, origami-like, the pages of a set of art, fashion and architecture magazines. Or the forgotten Galleria dei Fauni, location of Corda di Carta da Giornali (Rope of Newspapers, 1986–2004). Or the Sala dello Specchio, where Monteverdi used to play for the dukes every Friday night and which now contains Tenda di Manet (Manet’s Curtain, 2004) and Ninfea: Dettaglio N.7 (Water Lily: Detail N.7, 1991): two reproductions of signature works by Manet and Monet that Arienti brings down from their elevated position by ‘reframing’ and ‘repainting’ them using zippers and coloured Plasticine. Hanging on a wall of the Cortile di Santa Croce, Ailanto Oro (2009) marks the entrance and sets the pace of the show; it’s a 16-metre-high painting (in black ink and gold acrylic on white scaffolding fabric) of an ailanthus tree – the ornamental Chinese ‘tree of heaven’. Seen from a distance, it echoes the slender profiles of the courtyard’s columns, all crowned with Corinthian capitals, decorated with leaves of acanthus. But despite the assonance, ailanthus is a very different, contemporary plant, an invasive weed almost impossible to eradicate, common in vacant lots throughout the world and also known as ‘ghetto palm’ or ‘poverty tree’. All the materials and supports Arienti commonly uses (paper, spray paint, rubber balls, Plasticine, posters, books, plastic snakes, glasses, all of which are employed here) are deliberately cheap and poor – Arte Povera being just around the corner when he started working as an artist, self-taught, in Milan in the mid-1980s. By choosing to act like an undetectable, apparently deferential ‘space invader’, engaging the viewer in a less rhetorical and passive relationship with his works, Arienti debunks the myth of art history and its compulsive worshipping. His Cartoline (Postcards, 1990), their art-historical imagery carved in large sheets of white polystyrene foam that are graced with the elegance of Japanese screens, turn an inventory of ostensibly sublime masterpieces into what they are often reduced to: souvenir reproductions for tourists to bring distractedly home. Barbara Casavecchia

Stefano Arienti

Ducal Palace, Mantua 9 September – 6 January

Turbine, 1987–2009, folded printed paper (from fashion, art and architecture magazines), 7 parts, dimensions variable. Photo: Ferdinando Scianna. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview 119

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Mohammed Ossama, Step by Step, 1979 (film still). Courtesy the artist and Istanbul Biennial

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11th International Istanbul Biennial What Keeps Mankind Alive

Various venues, Istanbul 12 September – 8 November

The 11th Istanbul Biennial (organised by Ivet Curlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović, who work in Zagreb as the curatorial cooperative What, How and for Whom?) – is a challenge to the big-budget, too-similar exhibitions which have passed for innovation on the biennial circuit of late. These reflect, as the curators see it, an ‘all-encompassing system of cultural industry’, itself a manifestation of how the now-ascendant neoliberal model engenders a ‘facistoid system’ in which conformity driven by consumption and profit has become the ruling ethos. If a healthy dose of Marxist critique informs the curators’ understanding, it’s no surprise that Bertolt Brecht’s commitment to art as revolutionary tool serves as a countervailing model of cultural engagement. Brecht believed that art must constantly question existing power structures and, in answering the question the biennial’s title poses (it is taken from The Threepenny Opera, his 1928 play), would encourage (in his thinking, socialist) revolution. In this context, the biennial catalogue functions as a manifesto. A model of transparency, it charts the ages, genders and nationalities of the participating artists and offers comparisons of the GDP of their countries of origin, suggesting new ways in which the exhibition, and the relationships between economics and culture, can be understood. It also indicates that only 1 percent of the show’s budget of €2,050,299 was contributed by commercial galleries and that only 22 of the 70 participants enjoy dealer representation. This latter figure probably reflects the curators’ stated suspicion of commercially successful artists. It is also low because more than 60 percent of the artists included come from countries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where the commercial art market remains nascent. That the work of these artists rarely appears on the international survey scene suggests, in part, just how much commerce determines what passes for cultural information these days; and as a counter, or parallel, to more standard understandings of Modernism, the biennial points to a history of conceptual and political engagement from the 1950s forward in these regions. In Tamás St. Auby’s film Centaur, shot between 1973 and 75 in Budapest, workers in factories and passengers on public transport appear to discuss the uses of labour and theory in oppression. The disconnect between their dull, mechanical actions and the ideas which should give their work meaning reveals how the system reduced people to automatons rather than empowered them. Mohammed Ossama’s 1977 movie, Step by Step, examines the relationship between poverty and paternalism in a rural Syrian village and the governing ideology of repressive Pan-Arab socialism. The Russian collective What Is to Be Done? skewers post-Soviet Russia as a tragic farce of cynical alliances between starry-eyed idealists and self-serving profiteers. These works, among the many other inclusions which catalogue a litany of disasters – human trafficking, organised crime, the Israeli occupation of Palestine – situate the biennial in a region where the abuse of power and the failure of neoliberal reforms are matters of daily urgency. But what is being compared, both in the criticism of neoliberalism and in the positioning of Brecht as a counterweight to it, is an ideal failing as it is put into practice and an ideal that has remained wholly in the realm of the theoretical. The most nuanced work, including that cited above, probes the disconnect between theory and its realisation in an effort, not at apology, but at revealing the moral inconsistencies and equivocations that seem inevitable when ideals are applied to life. Artur Zmijewski’s Democracies (2009), a multiscreen installation of video shot at public demonstrations from across the political spectrum, portrays its subjects as cacophonies of conflicting voices that threaten to drown each other out. The liberal state, in its efforts to protect the rights of all parties, risks paralysis. In revealing the impasse, the piece suggests a solution in forgoing selfish interest and pursuing higher moral common-denominators. Much in the show, however, simply rehashes new left orthodoxies. In the catalogue, for example, the curators describe Igor Grubić’s East Side Story (2006–8), which includes video of antigay violence during Pride celebrations in Zagreb as a demonstration of the ways homophobia has become ‘a substitute for the seemingly suppressed hatred against ethnic minorities in post-war Yugoslavia’. While many of the slurs recorded in the footage link antigay and ultranationalist sentiments, this analysis simply theorises away the clear animus the piece documents. Worse, for all their revelations, Bureau d’Etudes’s diagrams charting oppressive ‘hidden structures of finance and world governance’ posit a conspiracy between the Jews and the Masons, an old saw beloved of the Nazis, among other conspiracy theorists. Such assertions simply prove that the left has its pieties, too; and that inherited dogma risks being as presumptuous, and Eurocentric, as the new world order the biennial intends to critique. Joshua Mack

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REVIEWS:

Books

p h i li p g u st o n , i n an o f t - r e p e at e d q u o t e (itself borrowed from John Cage), advised that ‘when you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the artworld and, above all, your own ideas… But as you continue, they start leaving one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.’ For the most part, the painters included in Bob Nickas’s Painting Abstraction survey are those for whom the artists of the past never leave. Ghosts are more likely to stick around on the canvas. It goes without saying that the past weighs more heavily on painting than it does on other artforms, but Nickas, who here provides a ‘definitive survey of the new wave of innovation in abstract painting’, featuring 80 of the ‘most vital painters’ worldwide, suggests that the ‘history of no other form of painting may have weighed as heavily on its practitioners as that of abstraction’. Thus there is much art about art, painting about painting, abstraction as found object, and Nickas is right when he suggests in the introduction that discussions of ‘pure’ abstraction and representation do not make sense when speaking about the ‘hybridized, self-aware, and conceptual paintings we routinely encounter today’. The artists whom you would expect are here: Christopher Wool, Wade Guyton, Philip Taaffe and Tomma Abts, as well as a host of less well known artists and those who have lately become touchstones for a younger generation, such as Mary Heilmann and Alex Hay. This survey devotes roughly three large images of paintings made within the last five years and a page of text to each of the 80 artists selected.

Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting Each of the essays accompanying the artists is thoughtful, and takes seriously the responsibility of addressing this ‘heavy’ history, and finding a place for artists within it, among a jumble of references that veer from Peter Saville’s record designs for New Order and Joy Division (in the cases of Philippe Decrauzat and Francis Baudevin), to Charles Burchfield (in the cases of Chuck Webster and Lisa Beck). The same names appear, however, several times: the slalom that most negotiate is marked by the poles of Stella, Reinhardt, Riley, Malevich, Albers. The essays are also heavily based on studio visits, and the upshot of this is that the book is often New York-centric: New York artists haunted by New York ghosts. On the other hand, there is an intimacy about the writing, and the artists, that one does not expect from a large, heavy hardback ‘index’. Nickas is stepping over landslides of books and papers in Richard Aldrich’s studio, eating in a restaurant near Deitch Projects with Xylor Jane or watching Mark Grotjahn pausing in bright sunlight to talk about his grandfather’s drawings of flowers and the Golden Gate Bridge. And perhaps this is the element that lifts the book beyond a standard survey: Nickas knows that these paintings, interviews, essays and studio visits are both a record of a new generation of painters and an evocation of a specific time. Laura McLean-Ferris

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By Bob Nickas Phaidon, £45/$75 (hardcover)

a fragment from one of the artist’s notebooks appears: ‘One would like to think that one carried/sculptures inside oneself, just like/ Enrico Caruso with his voice.’ The image is a striking one, and is particularly germane to much of Muñoz’s work: for instance, to the sculptural installations that so often conjoin motifs of the human body and human voice (albeit usually in a way that sabotaged any notion of genuine human communication), or to the sound and radio pieces that employed the peculiar qualities of disembodied speech issuing from unseen speakers as a means towards exploring the hidden facets of sculptural space.

i n t h e o p e n i n g pag e s o f j uan mu n o z : w r it i n g s /e sc r it o s

Juan Muñoz: Writings/Escritos Curiously, the above-cited fragment is presented in this book almost as if it were a drawing – undated, included neither in the table of contents nor in the list of writings, floating on the page with the original line breaks respected. Yet while curious, on a certain level this presentation is quite apt and even illuminating as a point of entry to the whole. For indeed, the cumulative effect on the reader of the variegated texts in Juan Muñoz: Writings is that, for Muñoz, writing seems to have functioned in relation to his larger programme much as a sculptor’s drawing is usually held to function in relation to their sculpture: a place to test and develop ideas that will be executed elsewhere in different media, a place to experiment and invent, a place where the boundary between fact and fiction can be productively blurred, a place where uncertainty can be admitted and even fostered, a tentative place. Juan Muñoz: Writings – judiciously edited by Adrian Searle, who also provides an insightful introductory essay – is not overlong, with Muñoz’s writings totalling only about 125 pages (in both English and Spanish). But the writings range widely, spanning nearly 20 years and including essays, statements, lectures, poems, dramatic dialogues and notebook fragments. The poetic interjections are arresting in their delicacy and technique. The extended pieces of writing, such as ‘Segments’ and ‘Isabella Steward Gardner Museum Lecture’, while impressive, are relatively few. The majority of the texts are short essays, sometimes little more than flourishes – but carefully constructed flourishes, laced with ambiguity and obliquity, peppered with erudition and kept piquant by Muñoz’s constant ‘fabulations’. Searle’s comments with regard to one of the longer essays – that it is ‘an intersection of ideas, a composite of references, a sort of map of Muñoz’s thoughts about space’ – might equally well apply to the entirety of this valuable book. Perhaps most surprising is how many of the texts – and how many of the most delightful – were previously unpublished, such as ‘Hypnotising Time’, Muñoz’s marvellous description of a Spanish bullfighter who masqueraded as a statue in the bullring, hiding in plain sight from the raging bull. Whether the bullfighter indeed existed, or whether he existed as Muñoz describes him as having existed, is moot: the scant three pages of Muñoz’s text create a strange and memorable vignette, and at the same time transform that vignette into a weird sort of credo about Muñoz’s thinking on sculpture and public space. It is impossible not to wonder how – how far, and in what directions – Muñoz might have developed as a writer, had he lived longer. George Stolz

Edited by Adrian Searle Ediciones de La Central, €29 (softcover)

reviews: books

j ac q u e s r an c i e r e isn’t short a dinner invitation or two right now. It’s not every day that the artworld decides to adopt a new philosophical leading-light, so judging by the list of international arts institutions and universities at which Rancière has presented previous versions of these essays, it’s clear that he has become the latest French thinker to make the crossover from the academy to the artworld, reorienting his output from social theory towards questions of art and aesthetics. This latest collection of essays betrays the looser, more public mode of address that comes of rehearsing your ideas with an enthusiastic public rather than pondering them studiously in the university, and while the book could do without the rather weak and inconclusive opening essay, it nevertheless allows Rancière to pursue his critical attack on postmodernism’s vulgar and simplistic understanding of how art relates to politics, with more focus on specific contemporary artists and artworks. Those VIP biennial invitations are paying off, then. Rancière is at his best when confronting the dead end that now affects ‘critical’ artistic strategies, especially those that promise to mobilise the viewer to action. In ‘The Misadventures of Critical Thought’, Rancière writes mockingly of the fact that while radical post-1968, postSituationist artists have sought to reveal our implication in, say, the Vietnam War in the juxtaposition of images of atrocity and consumerist decadence, it has not led to an upsurge in political action from those who encounter such art. On the contrary, we have ended up with a culture that has largely assimilated such strategies; cultivated spectators are supposedly capable of recognising the messages secreted in the seductive images of the capitalist spectacle. Rancière hammers home the point that the postmodern approaches to consumer culture assume that other people are the dupes and ‘we’ are the ones who have ‘seen through’ the illusion. ‘Forty years ago, critical science made us laugh at the imbeciles who took images for realities and let themselves be seduced by their hidden messages. In the interim, the “imbeciles” have been educated in the art of recognising the reality behind appearances and the messages concealed in images.’ It is we, Rancière implies, who are the ‘imbeciles’.

The Emancipated Spectator A fresh approach, then, to art’s political capacity needs to rethink what political space is in a period when old reference points no longer function. In ‘The Intolerable Image’ Rancière considers how the intolerable experiences of political violence and war can no longer be assumed to be adequately ‘representable’ by accusatory images. He argues that ‘the intolerable image in fact derived its power from the obviousness of theoretical scenarios making it possible to identify its content and from the strength of political movements that translate them into practice’. Images cannot, without a political culture, be assumed to do the work of politics on their own. The problem for Rancière throughout The Emancipated Spectator is renegotiating aesthetic agency and potential political agency in artworks at a time when there is no substantial political narrative to act as ‘guarantor’ of political meaning. Rancière’s approach is to insist that artworks, by their nature, present what is possible, rather than actual, in human subjectivity. Art, in short, proposes that society can be remade, because art shows that subjectivity can be remade. But this leads to a recurrent motif in The Emancipated Spectator: untethered from the responsibilities and duties of an overbearing political critique, art today can rediscover the aesthetic ‘potentiality’ that human beings possess – the stress consistently falling on this potential and not on its realisation. Rancière remains an illuminating philosopher of the politics of aesthetics, but he is only that – a philosopher, waiting for a new politics to come. J.J. Charlesworth

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By Jacques Rancière Verso, £12.99 (hardcover)

20 y e ar s of annual lectures given in memory of the art, architecture and design historian and critic (as you’ll see, it’s difficult to summarise the full range of his operations in anything other than an awkward turn of phrase) Peter Reyner Banham (although if we started calling people who operated with a similarly open portfolio ‘a Banham’, that awkwardness could be avoided and his greatness acknowledged in one fell swoop). It also, as his widow, Mary Banham, explains in her foreword to the book, acts as the Festschrift that Banham never had: he died, in 1988, having retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz and prior to taking up a new post at New York University, therefore being in the kind of inbetween state – when it came to the institutional responsibility for putting together an academic tribute – that Banham himself might have enjoyed writing about. Perhaps it’s more proper to talk about a Gedenkschrift, then; the point, at any rate, is that the easiest way to summarise this book is as a collection of 19 essays haunted by Banham’s ghost – a kind of Casper the Friendly Ghost, for the most part, although there is the very odd occasion – notably a slideshow by Archigram’s Peter Cook – where he pops up as more of a poltergeist.

t h e b an h am lec t u r e s c e le b r at e s

The Banham Lectures: Essays on Designing the Future

Edited by Jeremy Aynsley & Harriet Atkinson Berg, £27.99/$49.95 (hardcover)

So who was this Banham guy? Well, for many he ‘invented’ design history and criticism as a discipline, and promoted an acceptance of technology and consumer culture as part of ‘high culture’ – consequently, as the editors of this book put it, ‘validating the popular’ and expanding the reach and potential impact of architecture and design. He was also, as anyone who read the last issue of ArtReview will know, a regular contributor to this magazine during the early 1950s, when his offerings might range from a review of the latest show at London’s Gimpel Fils gallery or an article on Courage-brand beer paraphernalia to yet another homage to Le Corbusier, a review of an exhibition of Old Masters or first impressions on the futuristic Skylon tensegrity structure at the 1951 Festival of Britain. It’s appropriate, then, that a similarly wide range of subjects have wormed their way into this collection, among them the graphic design and movie work of Saul Bass, the influence of Flash Gordon on American car design, Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon’s ‘kitchen debate’, the dissemination of the built form through postcards and the female ‘characteristics’ of vacuum cleaner design. Among the highlights of the collection is the late, great architect Cedric Price berating Daniel Libeskind for wanting his buildings to last forever when instead he should be embracing doubt, ‘calculated uncertainty’, contemporary astrophysics and string theory: ‘I am always interested in reducing the intellectual gap between what I am doing as an architect and what the general run of clever people and advanced society in general is concerned with, and working on’, Price writes. Banham, you feel, would have appreciated that sentiment, although he might not have been so quick to exclude the not-so-clever people and not-so-advanced society from those he should be ‘hip’ to. When it comes to the lowlight of this book, the fact that ‘Peter Would Enjoy This’ – Cook’s flimsy collection of images plus captions (mainly of his own current work at the time of giving the lecture) – comes across as some way short of stunning is perhaps due to Tim Benton’s preceding account of the brilliance of the image combinations deployed by Le Corbusier and Banham in their lectures. It’s a theme picked up by fellow architecture historian Beatriz Colomina as she recalls the aftermath of a Banham lecture in New York: she picked up the lecturer’s notes to find that they consisted of nothing more than a list, headed ‘left’ and ‘right’, indicating a slide order. So here’s a slideshow taken from the book’s colour plates: Banham wearing a cloth cap and a dinner suit, riding a Moulton folding bicycle through London in 1960; Banham wearing a cowboy hat, medallion and shades, riding through an arid landscape near Death Valley on a collapsible chopper bicycle in 1980; a terror-stricken Philip J. Fry from the animated TV series Futurama (an illustration, appropriately, from Price’s essay) clutching the waist of the one-eyed, purple-haired mutant Turanga Leela as they speed round a thirty-first-century city on a jetpowered hover Vespa; an engineer and his crash-test dummies. What this book really documents is how Banham’s retrofuturist-hippy-chic-experimentalist approach has expanded and mutated, and how it lives on. Mark Rappolt

the strip: by Barron Storey

126 ArtReview

on the town: 2

28 November

X-Initative closing party, X-Initiative, New York

6 December,

Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative gala dinner, Royal Opera House, London photography conrad ventur and ian pierce

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x-initiative A Rhizome/New Museum’s Lauren Cornell and Le Tigre’s JD Samson b  Curator Massimiliano Gioni, Friedrich Petzel Gallery’s Vera Alemani and Peter Blum Gallery’s Simone Subal C X-Initiative advisors Howard and Barbara Morse D Artists Space director Stefan Kalmar and Light Industry’s Thomas Beard E Gallerist Paula Cooper with gallery director Steve Henry F Artist Hans Haacke and gallerist Elizabeth Dee G Foxy Production’s Michael Gillespie and John Thompson, and former Elizabeth Dee director Jenny Moore H Critic Claire Bishop and CUNY Graduate Center director & curator Linda Norden I Artists John Lovett and Alessandro Codagnone J Artist Emily Roysdon and curator Cecilia Alemani K Artist Mika Tajima and Artforum’s Alex Scrimgeour L X-Initative’s David Shull

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ROLEX 1 Writer Wole Soyinka 2 Film directors Stephen Frears and Mira Nair 3 Artist Rebecca Horn and Rolex Protégé in Visual Arts Masanori Handa 4 Writer Hanif Kureishi 5 Rolex CEO Bruno Meier 6 Writer A S Byatt 7 Choreographer and dancer Astad Deboo 8 Choreographer Trisha Brown 9 Composer Michael Nyman 10 Dramatist Kate Valk with actor Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, film director Celina Murga and writer Tara June Winch 11 Musician Gilberto Gil 12 Whitechapel Gallery director Iwona Blazwick and gallerist Maureen Paley 13 Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota 14 The Ambassador of Honduras and his wife (far right), with musician Aurelio Martinez and his mother 15 Film director Joel Coen 16 Musician Rufus Wainwright 12 17 Actor Frances McDormand

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Thursday, December 10, 2009 11:12 Subject: off the record Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009 03:03 From: [email protected] To: Conversation: Climbing the greasy pole

Power, power, power. It’s everywhere, isn’t it, my art-honeys? There’s the ArtReview Power 100, there are the slavish imitators in the popular press, there’s the jostling to get those special dinner invites, there’s the mauling to get the last warm beer in Hoxton Square, there’s the inevitable weeping in the Red Lion pub on the shoulder of a welcoming older dealer. It’s all a bit tawdry, frankly, and Gallery Girl is more interested in the H&M/Jimmy Choo collaboration and working out how many pairs of Gap tweed winter shorts one really needs. However, my artist and curator friends who didn’t make it onto any power list have been hankering after my advice these past few weeks on how to climb the greasy pole of the artworld to its summit, the legendary academic art journal Scene & Herd (apparently this used to be called something really dull, like Forum – or is that a swingers magazine, ed?). So I’ve put together some top tips: follow these, and there’s a good chance you’ll chart at number 97 in our next Power 100 (before dropping into obscurity for a couple of decades): 1. Make a participatory artwork that is sort of ironic but more importantly involves the whole of the New York artworld congratulating themselves on how great they are and by extension how great you are. This worked for dear Rob Pruitt, with his marvellous ‘Rob Pruitt’ Guggenheim awards. Back in the 1990s, Pruitt was somewhat unfairly ostracised by the New York artworld for a collaborative installation at Castelli that made some ironic points about people of colour. But now he’s everyone’s darling, through listing all the great and the good in New York, saying how they all deserve awards in an ironic way and then giving them those awards in a nonironic way to make it seem superclever. The aforementioned academic art journal Scene & Herd magazine said that ‘it was the cool lunch table of the art world celebrating itself’. 2. Book a table at the cool lunch table of the artworld celebrating itself: Rochelle School, tel +44 207 729 5667. Make sure to do lots of celebrating and high-fiving between the courses of raw carrot and quail. 3. Throw out the cool lunch tables of the artworld celebrating themselves and turn the Rochelle School into an X Factor-style studio to make a television programme that’s cheekily named after yourself. School of Saatchi was filmed largely in Rochelle School so that its art-power mentors, such as Matt Collings and Tracey Emin, could at least break off from shouting at the young hopefuls to eat quail at the cool lunch table of the artworld celebrating itself (oh do keep up). 4. Make a participatory artwork that is knowing and reflexive, but more importantly involves the whole of the London artworld looking clever and intelligent. Then exhibit it in the entrance of a major art fair so they can marvel at how clever and intelligent they look and by extension how clever and intelligent you are. This worked for dear Ryan Gander with his We Are Constant project at Frieze, a moving group portrait that featured Sir Nicholas Serota, Adrian Searle, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Candida Gertler, Sarah Thornton, Thea Westreich and many more good ordinary denizens of the artworld. 5. Be Cay Sophie Rabinowitz. She may have only lasted a few months in the cauldron of Basel, but featuring in Gander’s installation and being pictured on the red carpet of Pruitt’s work surely means that she is the most important person in the art universe. 6. Gatecrash the Frieze/Tate/Outset dinner on 21 January at Tate – can there be a more powerful holy trinity of art power chowing down at the same time? Best bet for crashing is to go as a staff member from the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, as no one has any idea what they really look like. Anyway, that’s enough tips for now, art lovers. The real question I want to leave you with is: can we at home carry off Balenciaga’s daring move of unveiling black dotted-net tights of the type last fashionable in 1987? I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell willing to find out! GG Page 1 of 1 130

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