ArtReview Magazine, September 2010

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Ryan

Trec a r t i n

Ta k i n g t h e

Real World to another planet Plus reports from

Beijing, Hong kong, istanBul

visit

RICHARD DEACON HOW MUCH DOES YOUR MIND WEIGH, 2001 STEAMED ASH, STEEL BOLTS, 375 x 365 x 400 CM

RICHARDDEACON IN SALZBURG

HOW MUCH DOES YOUR MIND WEIGH? JULY – SEPTEMBER 2010 HALLE

IN PARIS

TWIST AND SHOUT SEPTEMBER – OCTOBER 2010

S A L Z B U R G A U S T R I A M I R A B E L L P L AT Z 2 T E L : 4 3 6 6 2 8 8 1 3 9 3 FA X : 4 3 6 6 2 8 8 1 3 9 3 9 PA R I S F R A N C E 7 R U E D E B E L L E Y M E T E L 3 3 1 4 2 7 2 9 9 0 0 FA X 3 3 1 4 2 7 2 6 1 6 6

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

MARK MANDERS

HAMMER MUSEUM, LOS ANGELES September 25, 2010 - January 2, 2011

ASPEN ART MUSEUM, ASPEN February 17 - May 8, 2011

WALKER ART CENTER, MINNEAPOLIS June 2 - September 11, 2011

REPRESENTED BY TANYA BONAKDAR GALLERY, NEW YORK & ZENO X GALLERY, ANTWERP

©2003 2004 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. photo : Florian Kleinefenn - Salon d'Hercule / Château de Versailles

MURAKAMI VERSAILLES Château de Versailles

14 September - 12 December 2010

CONTINUOUS PROJECTIONS M A R T I N A RNOLD, GARY BEYDLER, PHIL SOLOMON, FRE D WO R D E N CURATED BY WILLIAM E. JONES

14 SEPTE MBER – 23 OCTOBER

VENEKLASEN / WERNER RUDI-DUTSCHKE-STRASSE 26 10969 BERLIN GERMANY T+49/30/81 61 60 418 WWW.VWBERLIN.COM

BEIJING 04.09.10 – 31.10.10 SHAN FAN HomELAND: PAINTING THE momENT – PAINTING SLoWNESS BEIJING 13.11.10 – 16.01.11 LIU DING

LUCERNE 27.08.10 – 25.09.10 STEPFATHER HAS AN IDEA! XIE NANXING LUCERNE 02.10.10 – 04.12.10 AI WEIWEI

ARTISTS AI WEIWEI - CHEN HUI - DING YI - DU JIE - HE YUNCHANG (A CHANG) L/B - LI DAFANG - LI ZHANYANG - LIU DING - mENG HUANG NIE mU - QIU SHIHUA - SHAN FAN - ANAToLY SHURAVLEV TRACEY SNELLING - JULIA STEINER - NoT VITAL - WANG QINGSoNG WANG XINGWEI - XIA XIAoWAN - XIA XING - XIE NANXING

Shan Fan, “Painting Slowness (Malerei der Langsamkeit) 85 Hours” 2009, detail, oil on canvas, 180 x 180 cm

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

BEING SINGULAR PLURAL

Moving Images from India 26.6. — 10.10.

NEXT SPLASH—COLOR FIELDS, 22.10.10 – 10.1.11 Kabir Mohanty, Song for an ancient land, 2003 — Digital color video with sound Part one, 2003 — 06, 51 min.; part two, 2003 — 10, 59 min. Courtesy the artist

Unter den Linden 13/ 15, 10117 Berlin + 49 (0) 30–20 20 93–0, 10 am — 8 pm, Mondays Admission free www.deutsche-guggenheim.de

Contents

on the cover: Ryan Trecartin photographed by LEIGH LEDARE

September 2010

DISPATCHES 25 Snapshot: Torbjørn Rødland Now See This: Ryan Gander, Joan Mitchell, Michael Krebber, Sam Windett, Claire Fontaine, 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, Guillermo Kuitca, David LaChapelle, Mario Testino Columns: Paul Gravett on the rude health of Viz; Joshua Mack champions ‘the small people’; Axel Lapp on the battle of Kreuzberg; Marie Darrieussecq celebrates photographer Valérie Jouve The Free Lance: Christian Viveros-Fauné asks where all the dystopic art is London Calling: J.J. Charlesworth on the art of oil, fags and war The Painted Word: New colunist, artist Nigel Cooke, offers food for thought The Shape of Things: Bouncing Sam Jacob on his late-capitalist sneakers Letter from Istanbul: John Quin finds art-life on the banks of the Bosphorus Design: Hettie Judah on nationalism Top Five: The pick of shows to see this month as selected by Margot Heller A New Concise Refererence Dictionary of Art Terms: Abasement to Avarice, in high definition by Neal Brown Consumed: Gary Hume’s Marni collection, Seongyong Lee’s tube stools, Puffin at 70, Gert and Uwe Tobias’ print, John Bock’s print, Josh Blackwell’s bag, Melanie Jackson’s newspaper, West London’s torpedo base Digested: Martin Creed, Clay Shirky, The Studio Reader, Chiho Aoshima, Findings on Elasticity, Ashley Bickerton An Oral History of Western Art: In the series finale Matthew Collings meets Andy Warhol

New on ArtReview.com Video Football + art = the extra beautiful game. Yesssss – highlights from the ArtReview Cup five-a-side football tournament: see Juergen Teller save penalties, Idris Khan jink, Hurvin Anderson pass, Ori Gersht run, Mike Nelson dribble and Michael Landy keeping it real; Ralph Rugoff tours New Décor at the Hayward Gallery; Jeff Koons shows us his new car; and a shaky-cam guide to the revamped South London gallery. Audio Woolley Bully – actually Charlie Woolley is one of the nicest people you could ever meet, but whilst that may have reason it’s got no rhyme. In the latest episode of the Charlie Woolley Radio Show our wannabe Alan Partridge talks about the sound and vision of heavy metal music with American artist Frank Haines.

32

Text That’s right, even though it’s a new medium we’ve got oldfashioned words on it as well. Check out the latest reports on events from New York, LA and Reykjavik as well as all the latest artworld news and gossip. Mainly the former.

38

59

66

14 ArtReview

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Contents

September 2010

FEATURES Ryan trecartin 72

Jonathan T. D. Neil enters the young American’s hyperactive, hyper-real world

Machine project 80

Holly Myers meets the members of the Los Angeles collective bringing new verve to institutional critique

Ragnar kjartansson 86 In Iceland, Laura McLeanFerris finds high camp and low melancholia

REAR VIEW Reviews 111

Pavel Pepperstein, Taster’s Choice, Room Divider, Andrew Cross, Liz Magic Laser, Alex Dodge, Christian Marclay, Michael Bevilacqua, Aaron Curry, Joel Kyack, Peter Coffin, Sara MacKillop, Ion Grigorescu, 6th Berlin Biennial, Fabrice Gygi, Melvin Moti, Cai Guo-Qiang, 17th Biennale of Sydney

Art Pilgrimage 94

BOOKS 130

Charles Darwent tries to keep up with Beijing, a city in constant flux

London Calling, Keith Haring Journals, Mr Chartwell, The Case for Working with your Hands

Art Hong Kong 102

THE STRIP 134

Antony Gormley for breakfast, 16 Hong Kong artists for lunch. Mark Rappolt works up an appetite

138 119

80

George Mellie does art

ON THE TOWN 136

Nothing is Forever at South London Gallery; The ArtReview Cup

90

132

OFF THE RECORD 138

Gallery Girl shows off her tan lines and reports back from vacation

137

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16 ArtReview

Editorial

Art

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

Art Director Tom Watt Design Ian Davies [email protected]

Contributors Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, Hettie Judah, Axel Lapp, Joshua Mack, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Writers Laura Allsop, Andrew Berardini, Chris Bors, Neal Brown, T.J. Carlin, Barbara Casavecchia, Alex Coles, Matthew Collings, Nigel Cooke, Marie Darrieussecq, Charles Darwent, Gallery Girl, Rebecca Geldard, Paul Gravett, Sam Jacob, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, Astrid Mania, Holly Myers, John Quin, Karine Tissot, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Neil Wenman

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Contributing Artists / Photographers Tom Haines, Leigh Ledare, Han Lei, Chino Moya, Ian Pierce, Torbjørn Rødland, Superflex, Viz/Graham Dury Interns Suzie Martins, Ksenia Landa

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Reprographics by PHMEDIA. ArtReview is printed by St Ives Plymouth and Roche. Copyright of all editorial content in the UK and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, ISSN 1745-9303, is published 9 times a year by ArtReview Ltd. USA agent: IMS Clevett Worldwide, 19 Route 10 East, Bldg 2 Unit 24, Succasunna, NJ 07876. Subscription price is US $89 per annum. Periodicals Postage Paid at Folcroft, PA. Postmaster: Send address changes to: ArtReview, c/o IMS, 3330 Pacific Avenue, Ste 500, Virginia Beach, VA 23451-2983

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24 SEPTEMBER – 24 19 SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER– 19 NOVEMBER 2010 2010 MONDAY TO FRIDAY 10AM–6PM SATURDAY 11AM–4PM MONDAY TO FRIDAY 10AM–6PM SATURDAY 11AM–4PM



ConTRIBUTORS

september 2010

Nigel Cooke

Manchester-born artist Nigel Cooke is known for his ominous paintings of gloomy psychological landscapes peopled by degenerate characters. He represented by Stuart Shave Modern Art, London, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, and Blum and Poe, Los Angeles. A new monograph on his work is due to be published by Koenig Books this autumn, and he has an upcoming exhibition at Blum & Poe early next year.

Neal Brown

An artist and writer, Neal Brown is the author of a veritable love triangle of books about YBA-era artists: Tracey Emin (Tate Publishing 2006), Mat Collishaw (Other Criteria, 2006) and Billy Childish, A Short Study (L-13, 2008). In 2009 he published Nineteen Raptures (NB Publishing). He curated To the Glory of God: New Religious Art, presented at the second Liverpool Biennial, and this September will be exhibiting in Art Hate, at Galleria Art Hate, London.

Han Lei

Beijing-based photographer Han Lei is known for documenting modern China and the way in which a mixing of traditional imagery and signals of advanced capitalism can be seen in images of individual characters and objects. Han Lei recently had a solo exhibition at Gao Magee Gallery in Madrid featuring images of contorted dancers, soldiers and fat children.

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ArtReview

Leigh Ledare

New York-based artist Leigh Ledare works primarily in photography and video, and is currently exploring motifs around representation, desire, authorship, relational psychology and valences of exchange. Ledare has had solo shows at Andrew Roth Gallery and Rivington Arms in New York, Pilar Corrias in London and Rod Bianco in Oslo. Recent exhibitions include Les Rencontres d’Arles curated by Beatrix Ruf and Hans Ulrich Obrist and PS1’s quinquennnial survey Greater New York.

Chino Moya

A Spanish filmmaker based in London, Chino Moya has been directing commercials, music videos, documentaries, short films – and some other projects that he’s not very sure how to define – for the last seven years. As a director, he puts a special emphasis in casting unusual people, so felt at home shooting and editing the film of the ArtReview Cup.

Tom Haines

Filmmaker and director Tom Haines is based in London and makes music videos – recently for White Denim and Wild Beasts – and documentaries, often on the subject of art, for Tate, V&A and the Barbican. He has made a series of 3 Minute Wonder films for Tate and Channel 4. He is currently developing a short film.

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

When given the Lumix GF1 to test drive, professional photographer David Eustace captured amazing photographs, while the GF1 captured his heart. “It feels like a working camera, a real photographer’s camera, and I just loved the lenses on it. It’s way beyond being a point-and-press camera, but it has the same simple aesthetics if you want to use it like that.” Featuring a D-SLR size sensor, a class-leading fast autofocus system, built-in flash, HD movie mode and a choice of interchangeable lenses, the GF1 has the handling and responsiveness of a D-SLR, in a more compact form. Creative freedom matters.

EVERYTHING MATTERS.

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

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

Alice Neel The De Vegh Twins, (detail), 1975, oil on canvas. Private collection, Washington, D.C.

Alice Neel: Painted Truths Whitechapel Gallery

A portrait of 20th century New York Until 17 September 2010 Supported by:

‘The revelation of the year’ – Laura Cumming, The Observer

Media Partner:

whitechapelgallery.org

DISPATCHES SEPTEMBER

Snapshot 25 Now See This 26 The Free Lance 35 London Calling 36 The Painted Word 38 The Shape of Things 40 Letter from Istanbul 44 Design 46

snapshot

Top 5 48 A New Concise Reference Dictionary Consumed 56 Digested 60 An Oral History of Western Art 66

50

Torbjørn Rødland

‘I expect a snapshot to be as layered and contradictory as the unrushed photographs I do with bigger cameras on tripods. This one I did outside the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, in Los Angeles, 25 June 2009.’ Rødland’s solo show A Black Ant Traveling, at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, 16 September – 30 October, contains no snapshots ArtReview

25

now see this words

Martin herbert

The Public Art Fund has previously given New York such artists’ projects as Olafur Eliasson’s quartet of artificial waterfalls, a replica of Paul McCarthy’s studio tipped on its side and a parade by Francis Alÿs led by a Peruvian marching band.

Ryan Gander (Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park, New York, 15 September – 15 April, www. publicartfund.org) doesn’t typically deal

in carnivalesque or widescreen gestures; but his new commission, The Happy Prince, still promises something viewers will never have seen,  and something that, specifically, queries the assumptions underlying public monuments. Characteristically playful and probing, recursively described as ‘a sculpture of a ruin’ and named after a 1888 children’s story by Oscar Wilde, it’s touted as realising the toppled sculpture

grittily radiant abstractions from mid-century and after are a crib to the shifting sands of art history; once a secondary figure in Abstract Expressionism, she now looks more like a savvy bridge between that movement and lyric abstraction, and (perhaps not disconnected from her estate being represented by Cheim & Reid and Hauser & Wirth) she’s increasingly a posthumous presence; this, her first UK museum show, should be a smasher. Stage two: painting at the end of painting. That

Michael Krebber (Richard Telles, Los Angeles, 18 September – 23 October, www.tellesfineart.com) is an

endgame painter, fond of circular logics, might be ascertained by his last London show: it featured canvases imprinted with the text of a lecture he’d of the title character, a sculpture which, in the narrative, is left deliberately to the imagination: here we can see it, but nevertheless have to put it (back?) together in our minds. Almost simultaneously, the British artist will present another new commission, in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s reading room. Intervals (1 October – 9 January) is a ‘scene of apparent catastrophe’ referencing the relationship between Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Gander loves it when a plan comes apart, evidently. Three stages of painting: first, before it was over,

Joan Mitchell (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, to 3 October, www.rbge. org.uk/inverleith-house). Mitchell’s

with

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ArtReview

clockwise from left: Ryan Gander, The Happy Prince, 2010, courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery, London; Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1968–9, oil on canvas, Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland; Michael Krebber, INT (Green), 2010, surfboard, 6 parts, lacquer, Styrofoam, plastics, metal, dimensions variable

DISPATCHES

Sam Windett, Hologram, 2010, oil on linen, 50 x 35 cm, photo: Diana Hunnewinkel, courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

Viz

The toothiest satire bites hard and deep to extract ‘humor in a jugular vein’, the catchphrase of Harvey Kurtzman’s seminal 1950s Mad comic book. This take-noprisoners attitude mutated British comedy comics, when the Donald brothers unleashed their equally seminal Viz on unsuspecting Newcastle pub crowds in 1979. Part Beano, part punk zine, part Sun letters page, part Jackie Photo Love, Viz may no longer shift a million copies an issue, but in its fourth decade it remains as funny and merciless as ever. That’s because, while the visuals do their job admirably, Viz is above all something to be read. Key to its success are the quality of the writing, honed and edited to glory in our living mother-tongue, as well as the tireless inventing, alongside recurrent favourites, of brandnew, sometimes one-off, characters. So for Rude Britannia, Tate Britain’s summer survey of humour in British art, the Viz team turned James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, their anarchic eighteenth-century cartoonist forebears, into ‘the Regency Twosome’, each competing to be ‘the most biting satirical cartoonist of our age’. In the perfect twist, both rivals lose by pure chance to George Cruikshank, his prize ‘a slap-up feed of egg and chips and sex with Miss Humphrey’, Gillray’s comely publisher. Elsewhere, on four enormous blown-up pages, are Viz regulars the Fat Slags chipping away at the fig leaves on Graeco-Roman statues; old lady Mrs Brady and her friend swooning at the sublime masterpiece of a Black Forest gateau in the gallery café; and spurious readers’ letters, including this one credited to the London Evening Standard’s legendarily haughty art critic, Brian Sewell: ‘My favourite painting is that one of the bloke with his ear cut off. And I like the one of the old-fashioned cart stuck in the canal as well, because it’s dead realistic.’ For more erudite art criticism, Viz corral sweary Roger Mellie to pontificate on the Hogarths and other past masters. A selection of these panels, scattered around the gallery as supplementary captions, are reconfigured for this issue’s Strip. A few framed original artworks from Viz adorn Tate’s walls, but these Geordie japesters maintain a healthy distrust of the artworld. Their parody newspaper exposé ‘£50m Painting “Not as Good as” £8 Telly’ reveals that, when subjects are locked for an hour in a room with Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (1888) and a black-and-white TV, they spend less than five minutes looking at the painting before spending the rest of the time watching whatever is on telly. In a final twist of the knife, Viz quote a devastated ‘Sir Nicholas Serota’: ‘I have wasted my life. All this shit is going in a skip first thing tomorrow, I can tell you.’ words

paul gravett

given on painting, the words floating busily above found comic-strip imagery. But the Cologne-based artist is also a paradoxical one, because that misalignment between language and imagery actually felt mysteriously fertile. In some exhibitions Krebber has barely exhibited anything at all, but he’s eloquent whether gravitating towards nothingness or overflow. And stage three: painting’s uncanny continuation after the end. Two decades

Sam Windett (Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, 3–28 September, www.sieshoeke.com) patrols some of the younger than Krebber,

same painterly margins that Krebber does, but perhaps less questioningly. His canvases, which have an antiqued feel to them, suggesting that the English painter has a few Paul Nash catalogues

scattered around his studio, operate according to a stuttering logic; it’s unclear, seemingly intentionally so, why Windett invests so much in inscribing his ambiguous funnels, lamps and intricate objects that look like surrealist sculptures, their colours somewhere between earthy and exhausted. The result is paintings (and sometimes quirky monochrome sculptural groupings) that can seem, like the quantum-mechanics postulate that is Schrödinger’s Cat, alive and dead simultaneously. Something comparable might be said about the function of activism within the work of shadowy

DISPATCHES

As they struggle to find funding and, more important, new ways to galvanise public support and interest in an era of diminishing resources, the nation’s cash-strapped arts organisations could learn a lesson from BP and its soon-to-beformer chief, Tony ‘I want my life back’ Hayward. Remember that, in June, as oil poured unchecked into the Gulf of Mexico, he took a day off to watch his yacht sail around the Isle of Wight. Meanwhile, ‘the small people’ (in BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg’s unfortunate turn of phrase) who live along the Gulf Coast were unable to earn a living with their shrimping and fishing boats. As Marie Antoinette learned to her dismay, no one likes to be told to eat cake. Big business has a hard enough time staying ahead of consumer fickleness without the insult such gaffes give to deeply held American myths of equality and fairness. And what seemed under assault over the summer was less the environment than America itself. Witness Obama’s comparison of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe to the battle against Al Qaeda. Not even $32 billion – the amount, including a $10b tax credit, that BP has so far set aside for cleaning up the spill and compensating its victims – can correct such a perception. Sadly, many of our arts institutions have similarly – though less disastrously – wrong-footed themselves. For example, the financial meltdown at MOCA LA and the finally (?) resolved saga of the Whitney’s expansion have left these museums on the trailing edge of public sentiment at a time when the national mood is anxious and ill-tempered. Perhaps worse, if culture is widely viewed as elitist in a nation that stints on its children’s education, contemporary art is further tarred by association with a market in which a million seems like chump change. When local and state governments are cutting essential services and unemployment hovers near 10 percent, it’s hard for many to feel like stakeholders in a cultural sphere peopled by gazillionaires or in institutions which, of necessity, festoon galleries and lobbies with the names of the wealthy donors who paid for these grandiose extensions. Overcoming this us-versus-them divide is as essential to our museums as adjusting to reduced budgets and crafting visitor experiences to the requirements of a wired generation. Far from independent challenges, these are complexly interrelated demands which should motivate a total, proactive, synthetic rethink of spending and programming. At a moment when people are seeking new values, encapsulating them can put our institutions on the cutting edge of the public’s imagination. Or they can stay on the lagging edge, where no amount of money will make them relevant. words

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ArtReview

JOSHUA MACK

work tends to pressure various pieties relating to the transformative potential of culture while continuing, like an itch in a phantom limb, to

forestall that potential’s vanishing. Here, a neon that translates fragrantly as ‘the palace of culture is built with dog shit’ decorates a residential building in the touristy campo, while in the gallery the offerings include Counter-Poison (2004), a film journeying inside a derelict building, no longer animated by the living, home to animals, of uncertain future: decline running headlong into unrealised potential. All of which rumination offers

12th Venice Architecture Biennale (29 August – 21 November, www.labiennale.org), an astringent contribution to the

directed by Kazuyo Sejima of Japanese architects SANAA, given that her chosen theme is People Meet in Architecture. Discrete spaces are being given over to each participant – ‘it will be a series of spaces rather than a series of objects’, Sejima said in January: good news for anyone bedevilled by maquette fatigue.

from top: Claire Fontaine, Counter-Poison, 2004 (production still), pasted digital print with CD-ROM, 130 x 92 cm, courtesy the artist and Galleria T293, Naples, and Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice; Piuarch, D&G Headquarters, Milan, 2005-7, courtesy Piovano

New York

Claire Fontaine (Campo Santo Stefano and Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea, Venice, 27 August – 21 November, www. caterinatognon.com). Claire Fontaine’s French collective

from top: Guillermo Kuitca, courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York; David LaChapelle, American Jesus/Thy Kingdom Come, 2010, chromogenic prints, © the artist, courtesy Fred Torres Collaborations, New York

Berlin

Few artists interfuse art and architecture with the

Guillermo Kuitca (Sperone Westwater, New York, 22 September – 6 November, www.speronewestwater. com), whose splintered paintings have previously elan of

Good old ‘gentrification’ is in the news again. The complaints are the same as ever: a) artists and arts institutions fall victim to ruthless investors whose only concern is increasing profit margins and who have no qualms about destroying organically grown communities or artistic livelihoods, and b) artists and arts institutions are complicit in this process and in bed with the investors. It’s a classic Catch-22. In Mitte, C/O Berlin – International Forum for Visual Dialogues is being told to vacate the Postfuhramt on Oranienburgerstrasse: the property is being sold by one investor to another, and the plan is to turn it into a hotel and shopping centre. City authorities are expressing their solidarity with this important exhibition space for photography – it has an interest in providing cultural content in an area where the Berlin art scene got its start after the fall of the Wall, and which is currently being turned into a tourist wonderland. In Kreuzberg there has been opposition to the Berlin Biennale’s use of a former department store on Oranienplatz as a site for the exhibition, partly due to the fear that it will focus the interest of the wealthy on this part of town, and lead to the turning out of its current inhabitants. Pamphlets featuring photographs of the perceived main culprits, the biennial’s director, Gabriele Horn, and its curator, Kathrin Rhomberg, as well as email addresses and private phone numbers, were fly-posted all over Kreuzberg in the opening days of the show. Neither of these developments is really surprising. Both institutions are indeed instruments of gentrification and attract support because of it (coincidentally, the 2nd Berlin Biennale used the Postfuhramt as an exhibition site in 2001). What’s notable is how the protesters in Kreuzberg seem to underestimate how far gentrification has already progressed and to overestimate the active involvement of arts professionals. And how, in the case of the biennial, they seem to have fallen for the antiquated perception of Kreuzberg as a contested ‘other’, as a venue that lends credibility to the works and acts as social critique in itself. Klaus Biesenbach, the Berlin Biennale’s founding director and a regular contributor to its catalogues, writes that ‘with regard to extending context and space, the inclusion of Kreuzberg [is a] major matter’. For biennial director Horn, ‘the transnational dynamics and everyday transactions [of Kreuzberg are] fundamental for present and future realities of a mobile society’. Yet like the ‘ironic professionalism’ of the biennial’s exhibition design, which appears to be simply cobbled together and photocopied (ie, undesigned), Kreuzberg is only a picturesque backdrop to the show, a photo opportunity. The opening party on Oranienplatz, to which all the neighbours were duly invited, remained a meeting of the usual suspects; it could just as well have happened in Mitte. words

axel lapp

incorporated blueprintlike elements to offer a tumbling, enveloping sense of inhabiting folded, concertinaed three-dimensional space. It’s apt,

then, that the Argentinean artist is inaugurating his gallery’s new Foster + Partners-designed space at 257 Bowery, where recent works interlacing imagery from maps, floor plans and thorns – and offering what the artist glosses as an ‘explosion of [modernist] chronology’, a kind of temporal simultaneity – are accompanied by Kuitca’s major modular piece Le Sacre (1992), featuring geographic maps from randomly selected places around the world painted onto 54 vertically hung mattresses. They’re Not Just Glamour Photographers Dept:

David LaChapelle (Tel Aviv Museum of Art, to 23 October, www.tamuseum. com) takes a break from shooting the cover for

(seriously) Mariah Carey’s Christmas album to continue his brinksmanship affair with

supersaturated and knowingly exhausted kitsch or, as his photographs of Michael Jackson as Jesus or an angel or Naomi Campbell personifying The Rape of

DISPATCHES

Mario Testino (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, 21 September – 9 January, www. museothyssen.org) for reinventing the wheel.

credit is due to

In the aptly titled 54-work show All or Nothing, his models have haute couture on and then they have nothing on, and this ‘reveals the process and implications involved in the process of removing one’s clothes to become naked’. You’ll never look at one of Testino’s Pirelli calendars the same way again.

Paris Valérie Jouve is a photographer of my generation, born just after the war in Algeria. Trained as an anthropologist, she interrogates the cohabitation of cities and people. I say ‘cohabitation’ because when looking at the photos it’s very difficult to know whether it’s the city that lives in people, or people in it. The next photo is of a face. Although many of the photos are taken in and around the Middle East, it’s often difficult to name the exact place. Cities are building sites made up of rooftops peppered with clumps of resistant vegetation. Seasons are palpable, even if it appears as if the colours are always a little faded and dusty – whites and greys, green, red and pale yellow. Glass is often present – as is the sky, as empty as a blank wall. No exoticism. You think of a continent, of a vast city that has emptied the surrounding countryside, drained it of humans. Here is a permanent urban population, all immigrants – people who had once come to the city. Or maybe the city came to them, was built around them to offer, in its huge right angles, traces of their own wanderings. Cities are not stage props, and humans are not decorative. Valérie Jouve feels close to Roberto Rossellini, who worked with people he came across, rather than with actors. Jouve asks them to ‘reconstruct their character’ in ‘enacted images’. It is a different game, a pose that is, more than anything else, a suspended moment, a contemplative pause. In Jouve’s photos to ‘inhabit’ is an all-encompassing activity. She doesn’t stop at sociology – her photos border on a sort of tragic theatre: you can only be when you are somewhere. In 2010, this means composing with the city, the polis. In her current exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, she quotes Hannah Arendt: ‘Politics means the bond between two men; it is not inherent to mankind, man is not of a political essence…’ She chooses to let this word float between two concepts, ‘in movement’. The idea of limits, omnipresent in her work, is particularly visible here. Mosques and churches seen from afar, pines and dry earth at the foot of antique walls, blue eyes bursting from a brown face, the woman with free-flowing hair and a Mona Lisa smile, the veiled woman in a shabby square that could be a Paris suburb. Whether Jouve takes photos in Naples, Jerusalem or Ramallah, she leaves these places – all seen so many times on television – deliberately anonymous, and in the process conveys the extreme melancholy of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. En Attente, an exhibition of work by Valérie Jouve, is on view at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, through 13 September words

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ArtReview

marie darrieussecq

Mario Testino, Claudia Schiffer, German Vogue, Paris, 2008, © the artist

Africa are here described, ‘Postmodern Pop Photography’. (Even that title feels like a calculated affront to the sensibilities.) And

THE FREE LANCE

Signs Taken for Wonders As America teeters between the doldrums and apocalypse, the art establishment offers a model of ‘pluralistic ignorance’

torture to Tea Party douchebags – is ripe for kooks, alarmists, rabble-rousers and false prophets. Primed to capitalise on what bard Barry McGuire (the author, since born-again, of 1965 megahit Eve of Destruction) described as a ‘state of confusion’, scheming bamboozlers will assuredly jump the second half of 2010 like Mel Gibson did his Russian rent-a-date (now that’s what I call the passion of the Christ!). As that great opportunist Mao Zedong put it: ‘There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent’. Nature, Aristotle said, abhors a vacuum. But what if, in matters cultural and political, the opposite is true? Namely, that American culture expansively tolerates a black hole of authority and purposiveness beyond all fathomable comprehension? Take New York’s recent exhibitions of young art: fiddling while Rome burns does not begin to describe the mediocrity and insistent misdirection of shows in both museums and galleries this year (PS1’s Greater New York and the Lower East Side are two faces of the same devalued coin, and deserve their own Greek-style bailout). There remains an incredible paucity of art interested in addressing society’s ills – as opposed to, say, other newly minted, jejune art. These vacancies invite interlopers like Shepard Fairey (ugh) and Norman Rockwell to shimmy in the spaces between sense and convention (Normy Normal, the ‘Rembrandt of Punkin Crick’, has a full-dress at Washington, DC’s Smithsonian, drawn from – get this – the collections of

Mass Effects 2, 2010. © and courtesy EA International

words

A general accounting is in order before New York’s culturati waltzes back to school along with all the other smartass kids. America remains involved in two intractable wars; the economic recovery is nosing into territory even optimists wager is double-dip recessionary (reportedly stifling spending by the top 1 percent of US earners this summer); the nation’s unemployment rate continues to malinger around an anaemic 10 percent; and that grotesque plume of oil in the Gulf of Mexico has more than sixty million fervent evangelicals fretting over its alarming likeness to a Bronze Age fish tale gorily told in Revelations 16:3 (‘The second angel poured his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing in the sea died’). If you think that is the only station on the cultural dial to go batshit, think again. Besides Slavoj Zizek’s recently published scorcher Living in the End Times (2010), there are scores of other phenomena that reflect the cultural smoke snaking up from the jammed pulleys and levers of what Alexis de Tocqueville once praised as America’s ‘civil society’. Our age – with its proliferating dystopian entertainments (from a limitless list, consider the 2009 film Metropia and Xbox’s Mass Effect 2), its mirages of self-advertisements construed as bona fide human communications (thanks Twitter and Facebook) and its liberal ‘tolerances’ for everything from institutionalised

Christian viveros-faune

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas). And then there is Bravo’s Work of Art. A reality-television series devoted to hair-gelling what little credibility contemporary art has left, this programme proves, once and for all, that the artworld rarely looks so idiotic as when it conspires to fuck up its own self-portrait. Coined by social psychologists Daniel Katz and Floyd H. Allport in 1931, the term pluralistic ignorance comes to mind when considering what Freud ominously termed Unbehagen in der Kultur – the unease in culture. Defined as ‘a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but assume (incorrectly) that most others accept it’, this social phenomenon has historically proven, like payback, to be a bitch. It abetted segregation in the South during Jim Crow, lent support to the illusion of stability in the Soviet Union and helped peer-pressure millions of coeds into binge-drunk sex way past their inhibitions and better judgement. Presently, it provides the falsehood under which American culture labours mightily to put a good face on its stuttering, punch-drunk mien. A period of stasis where no one believes things are truly in the toilet but everyone thinks that everyone else believes they are is the perfect environment to pretend that old recipes will magically deliver different results. They won’t. It’s high time to face the pain and give hardboiled voice – oh, arties and civilians! – to our discontent. ArtReview

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London calling

oil Sick

Everyone hates BP – but should we be hating the institutions it supports as well?

words

Lucky for Hans and all his chainsmoking conceptualist buddies, tobacco companies weren’t yet the enemy in 1969. Otherwise their attitudes might never have become form, eh? But attitudes change over time, and the widespread chorus of BP-bashing reflects the currency of eco-anxiety in today’s culture. Ignoring for a moment the shameless opportunism of Greenpeace and other activists in jumping on BP’s massive fuck-up to ram home their habitual antipathy to the oil and gas industry, the Tate/BP sponsorship controversy illustrates how easy it now is to cast business and corporate industry – capitalism, in other words – as something utterly disgusting, evil and immoral, and beyond rational or critical debate. So normal is this perspective, in fact, that even those pundits who attempted to defend Tate’s right to take sponsorship money from whomever it chooses found themselves banging the capitalism-is-dreadful drum. So The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones declared on his blog that if art organisations like Tate ‘can get money from Satan himself, they should take it’. Meanwhile, cheeky design critic Stephen Bayley found that corporate sponsors of the arts were responsible for all kinds of atrocities, from Dow Chemicals (manufacturers of napalm for the Vietnam War) to Deutsche Bank (whose financing of IG Farben in the Second World War bankrolled the production of Zyklon B). In other words, taking marketing money from big corporate is a bit like sponsoring hell and the Holocaust! With friends like these, who needs enemies?

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Unwittingly, Jones and Bayley were doing the protesters’ work for them, by buying into the kind of unquestioning moral hysteria that turns a company responsible for an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico into a sort of capitalist Satan/climate-change Hitler. But arguing that art institutions should ‘just ignore it’ and get on with taking ‘dirty’ money in the noble pursuit of showing art merely allows activists like Liberate Tate’s John Jordan to reaffirm the silly idea that Tate is ‘selling its soul’ to corporate interests. Such shrill, all-consuming obsession with transparency and ethical purity is of course impossible to satisfy: there is, after all, always something to complain about in the affairs of big business. As one commentator pointed out, the bank UBS is also a big Tate sponsor – should Tate refuse its sponsorship because bankers currently happen to be everyone’s favourite figures of abuse? Let’s get a bit of perspective here. BP isn’t Satan, but nor does the Tate have a pure ‘soul’ that must be ‘saved’. Such thinking would require a view of art which was naively, ridiculously romantic, verging on the apocalyptic. And neither are people so gullible, so easily led, that seeing a logo here and there somehow strips us of our capacity for critical thought. Taking corporate sponsorship – just like taking public funds from governments that actually go to war and destroy lives – means accepting that you’re not doing politics by making or showing art. To confuse the two would mean every artist and institution bowing down to whatever ethical panic self-righteous activists of every stripe chose to impose on the rest of us. So. I’m off to have a smoke with Hans Haacke. Marlboro Light, anyone?

Tate Britain Summer Party, 2010. © Immo Klinik

If you were looking for art-and-politics controversy over the summer, then the anti-BP protests directed at Tate were breakfast, lunch and dinner served up in one bad-tempered and shouty ready-meal. With funeral-veiled protesters tipping simulated oil down the steps of Tate Britain during the museum’s summer party, celebrating 20 years of BP sponsorship, and other activists releasing dead, oil-slicked birds and fish attached to balloons into the cavernous atrium of Tate Modern, Britain’s most-respected art institution found itself accused of prostituting its reputation to Britain’s suddenly most-hated oil giant. Leading the charge was a long list of old 1960s artworld radicals and other protest artists, who co-signed a letter to The Guardian newspaper sternly declaring that ‘many artists are angry that Tate and other national cultural institutions continue to sidestep the issue of oil sponsorship’. ‘Little more than a decade ago’, they fumed, ‘tobacco companies were seen as respectable partners for public institutions to gain support from – that is no longer the case. It is our hope that oil and gas will soon be seen in the same light.’ The first signatory of the letter was artist Hans Haacke. Haacke, by the way, seems to have forgotten that, 40 years ago, he took part in the now-legendary exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, curated by Harald Szeemann, which was sponsored by – that’s right – tobacco giant Philip Morris.

the painted word

Food for Truth

These days art chat regularly seems to turn to the subject of food and cookery – and it’s not only about whether or not flashy canapés should be served at a private view during a recession. Now the grub itself, and a potential cultural upgrade of its status, has become the subject. With the media already wheeling out that hopeless old question (‘but is it art?’), this marks a sea change in the seriousness with which we take culinary matters. It may have all started three years ago with the artworld debut of Michelin-starred chef Ferran Adrià at Documenta 12 – a long-distance contribution to the exhibition that plucked arty guests out of the crowd for a trip to his worldnumber-one (or -two, depending on your source) restaurant on the Costa Brava, El Bulli. The following year, Britain’s Radio 4 hosted an argument between fish-loving English TV chef Rick Stein and art journalist Tom Lubbock as to whether or not cookery was art (in case you’re wondering – Rick yes, Tom no, but with unconvincing results either way). And last year it was back to Adrià, this time popping up in Flash Art, where he was interviewed by artist Maurizio Cattelan. While the molecular gastronomist was careful to distinguish his craft from other fields, Cattelan gently encouraged him to frame cooking in artworld terms.

influence on art production, with an insistent call for a povertyappropriate modus operandi. In this line of thinking, Damien Hirst’s diamond skull has come to represent art’s collective crime – nowadays, art must atone for past excesses and the hubris of its practitioners. This in turn conceals a guilt about art’s special status as blithely functionless, and therefore excessive: a luxury. As a consequence, the old reactionary demand for authenticity and truth has again arisen, particularly in the blogosphere. It is a defensive call to order that rhymes ascetic production values with the concept of a unique and nonnegotiable ‘calling’. This rustic view – a withdrawal from the immorality of capital into the fantasy of an authentic self – demands that the excesses of yet more material production be offset by a faux morality in the materials themselves. In the past we’ve seen crappy materials words

Is this so surprising? After all, the crossover between food and art is nothing new: since the Ancient Egyptians, art has exploited the symbolic potential of edible goods – as metaphors for aspects of the political, scientific and religious narratives of the times. Indexed to our narcissism, the impermanence of the material lent it the weight of mortality in the symbolic lexicon of still-life paraphernalia. The role of food in art seems to have been often a moral one too, injecting truth into the smoke-andmirrors setup of the wealth-confirming still life. Yet refiguring contemporary ‘culinary art’ as art is not about symbolic fruit and veg – it might have a deeper connection with the mess of relationships between money, art and exhibiting that the economic crisis has left us with. And for good reason. Much has been made of the recession’s

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being symbolically rebooted to cleanse the artistic expression of any surplus self-interest. In our present dismal climate, this logic has had to be taken a stage further. This ontological spring-cleaning is where food comes in. Beyond the elite glamour of high-end cuisine, the artworld’s recent fascination with gastronomy is in fact a strange new take on the historically recurring drive to rusticate production in the face of ruin. Why? It could be that, deep down, cookery represents the most purified applied art – its recession credentials being that its materiality diminishes in a precise and harmonic ratio with the aesthetic experience of it. Could the artworld’s interest in food be a form of envy for an ideal economy art, where for once fiscal involvement is transparent and limited, only affecting the core of the creative process in pragmatic, constructive ways? Food as art, then, represents a mixed blessing – aesthetic frills unfettered by arbitrary market structures yet silently predicated on a crisis-fuelled, reactionary demand for truth, or the most authentic artistic expression for hard times.

Red Mullet Mummy with Chilli, 2003. © Photo: Francesc Guillamet. Courtesy El Bulli, Roses (Girona)

A painter wonders whether too many cooks are spoiling the artworld’s broth

The Shape of Things

The materialisation of late capitalism

words

I got myself a new pair of trainers last week. They’re nothing special to look at – a dullish olive colourway to a classic New Balance 670 – but wow, do they feel strange. Squidgy. Really squidgy. With every step it feels like I’m on a landscape of blancmange. The foamy rubber soles recast the entire surface of the earth in sponge. It makes the very experience of walking seem distant. I’m totally insulated from the physical and tactile sensations of walking – as though it isn’t really me doing it. Now, I’m sure part of this is what the designers intended. One of the points of sportswear is that it should enhance performance. In a shoe, this might mean greater impact resistance, more support from less weight or better shock absorbency so that impact forces are not transmitted to your knee joints or shins – avoiding whatever that thing that serial joggers suffer from is called. But I’m not sure that the existential side effects of this subtle engineering are intended. For if it were, surely trainer slogans like ‘Now with added alienation!’ or ‘Featuring out-of-body, dreamlike technology!’ would be tacked onto the existing (and let’s face it, slightly dull) ‘Seamless fit and top-level performance’. Yet this spongy sensation is not the preserve of classic trainers alone; it’s deeply embedded in all kinds of contemporary experiences – that coating on mobile phones that’s supposed to stop them slipping out of your sweaty hands, for example. It’s impossible to tell whether this stuff feels hard or soft – it’s both at the same time. It’s also extra-matt, sucking light into itself as though it were composed of some sort of dark matter. What I’m getting at is the prevalence of materials engineered into unnatural states in the service of design. Even the foam on the top of a Starbucks latte – such a rich and voluptuous manifestation of milk that it could only come from 40

ArtReview

SAM JACOB

That’s not as farfetched a statement as you might think. Politics and morality have long held a metaphoric connection to our understanding of the material world around us. Stone, for example, represented an immovable foundation of moral truth – a stable, reliable person is ‘solid as a rock’, stone is the material into which God’s big, unbreakable laws were inscribed. Would the Ten Commandments have the same gravitas had they been chiselled into aerated reconstituted stone? Intriguingly, before she aerated British society during the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was part of a team of chemists at food conglomerate J. Lyons investigating methods for preserving the foamy quality of ice cream. Experimenting with injecting air into ice cream, they found that substituting vegetable oil for the naturally occurring dairy fat improved the emulsifying quality of the mix. The ‘improved’ ice cream could hold more air, and hold it for the duration of the freezing process. This swirled-up, foamy frozen mixture of fat and sugar squirted out of machines as a premium product made with less material – an ingenious sleight of hand. In Thatcher the legacies of Mr Whippy soft scoop and the atomisation of society blur into one another as ideological and material twins. ‘There’s no such thing as society’, she famously claimed, unwittingly making good on that Communist Manifesto analysis of capitalism’s transubstantiating effects. So back to me, dumbly boing-boinging down the road with my new trainers. It’s no wonder they feel so odd, when every step is cushioned by the sensation of late capitalism.

New Balance 670. Courtesy New Balance

Rubber Soul

the nozzle of a frightening multinational – has this strange quality of being there but also not, as it evaporates on contact. Foaming is key among these unnatural engineering techniques. It’s enacted on all kinds of materials: some that you expect, like rubber or polystyrene; and some that seem less obvious, like concrete, aluminium and glass. Why? Aeration extends a material’s original qualities, making it lighter, stronger, more flexible, a better insulator or whatever. And crucially for our cash-strapped times, it means using less to do more. So what is this miracle technique? In a nutshell, the process of foaming induces materials into a state of excitement, altering their fundamental makeup. This excited, ephemeral state is frozen at the point just before rise turns to collapse. Performance enhancing? For sure, but it messes with the semantics and pragmatics of materials in a way that is fundamentally disturbing. Foaming adds complexity and ambiguity to materials. Their unexpected behaviour – the disturbing bounce of my trainer – is the record of this making-strange. Substance becomes less physical, filled with miniature voids, not quite there, ghostly. Indeed, my trainers are the perfect demonstration of one of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s most famous pronouncements: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’.

“COMING HOME”

www.dedon.de/treehouse

H aN d wOv E N O u t d O Or f u rN Itur E Cr E atE d w It H w E atHE r-r E s IstaNt dE dON fIbE r

DEDON worldwide: www.dedon.de · [email protected]

letter from ISTAnBUL

Under the Koç

On the banks of the Bosphorus, new art and new institutions reflect a city in full creative flow

which crams in an impressive 160 works by 87 artists; a pristine new showcase for contemporary Turkish art over five spacious floors. Let’s focus in now and see Ayşe Erkmen standing beside her Colours of Letters (2006) – a Bosphorus-blue ‘S’, a daffodil ‘K’ and a muddy coffee ‘R’ adorn the white walls around the central spiral staircase. Primary school nostalgia meets Nabokovian synaesthesia. On this initial confrontation, there’s little here to suggest Orhan Pamuk’s aesthetics of decay, that monochrome 1950s world caught by Istanbul’s great chronicler, not to mention in Ara Güler’s evocative photography. Here’s Pamuk’s cutting institutional critique from The Museum of Innocence (2008), his latest novel: ‘This museum craze in the West has inspired the uncultured and insecure rich of this country to establish ersatz museums of modern art… This despite the fact that we have no culture, no taste, and no talent in the art of painting. What Turks should be viewing in their own museums are not bad imitations of Western art but their own lives.’ Now, one hesitates to contradict a Nobel laureate, but you only live once, so let’s take a shot. Firstly, it is apparent that the Koç collection is the product of discerning and informed choice. Next, one can cite a new generation of talented Turkish painters, such as the conservative-baiting

Taner Ceylan. And Starter, while having work clearly indebted to some Western practice – Fluxus, for one – is not in any sense a bad imitation. Unsurprisingly, given curator René Block’s long association with Fluxus, the show includes a healthy selection of works by George Maciunas et al. But these days, selfimmolating Western art does dim and grim imitations of its own heritage better than anyone (one thinks of Marc Quinn’s recent sculptures). As for viewing Turkish lives, Starter offers many quotidian examples, from Halil Altindere’s subtle manipulation of a Turkish identity card that would deny him his Kurdish origins, to his splendidly surreal Mirage (2008), a videowork about the flooding of an arid Anatolian plain (the result of a dam construction project) as locals pray for rain. Or there’s Cevdet Erek’s SSS (Shore Scene Soundtrack) (2006–9), in which the artist mimics the sound of the sea on a Turkish carpet. Ebru Ozseçen sucks on a giant gobstopper in Jawbreaker (2008), an action alternately erotic and disturbing, given that choking seems imminent. Cengiz Tekin’s Free Kick (2005) is an image of a striker outside the penalty box, about to shoot. His family form the wall – dad with his big tash, mum in a headscarf – a simultaneously amusing and chilling reminder that the

Ebru Ozseçen, Jawbreaker (2008), DVD, object, graphic, cardboard box; Michael Sailstorfer, T72 (2007), photo: Murat Germen, courtesy ARTER, Istanbul

In his pithy and wise book on Istanbul, The Bridge (2008), the Dutch writer Geert Mak quotes a nineteenth-century Turkish reformer highly critical of myopic Western outsiders who view the city ‘through a pair of opera glasses’. So here we are then at 360, the aptly named rooftop restaurant, and I’ve taken my specs off and slotted some lira into a viewfinder. Down below on the main drag, Istiklal Caddesi, witness the punters staring at a curiously unthreatening tank in the front window of the newly opened gallery ARTER. This is Michael Sailstorfer’s T72 (2007), a massive emerald inflatable which sits like a fat toad, its comic gun barrel alternately flaccid and priapic. Here in a converted 1910s city block, we have a preliminary peek at the Vehbi Koç Foundation collection and its first show, Starter,

words

individual, the artist, may have to struggle hardest against the barriers of those closest to him. There is little evidence of Pamuk’s prized hüzün, that Old Istanbul melancholy. The tone of the show overall is ludic – witness the five piano works allied to the space’s five floors, a Fluxus-inspired Italian pun. Apparently Pamuk is intent on building a real Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, filled with everyday objects, a project that could be described as an ersatz version of French artist Christian Boltanski’s practice. Starter, one senses, is of more relevance to Istanbullus today. ARTER’s mission chimes with that of nearby galleries, such as Yapı Kredi Kâzım Taskent, currently showing Esra Ersen’s video Yolcular (2010) of women who have lived in the city’s shantytowns all their lives and are only now being taken to see the sea. These, one can argue, are Istanbul’s new Museums of Experience. Here’s Pamuk again, this time quoting his mother in the early 1970s: ‘Do you really think you can be an artist in a country like this and still keep your pride? To be accepted by people here, who understand nothing of art, to get these people to buy your art, you’ll have to toady to the state, the rich, and worst of all, to semiliterate journalists.’ Times change. The Turkish state now appears tolerant to the provocations, the rich delight in

John Quin

supporting young artists. At nearby Gallery Nev, works currently on show sell for more than €20,000. And they are being bought – this is a bull market. As for semiliterate journalists – well, you can’t have everything. ‘A common aim is to present the Turks not as passive recipients of Western influences, but as parties to a dialogue with the West.’ So says historian Andrew Mango, writing on contemporary Turkish culture, and in support of this, one can cite the Caravaggio- and Bacon-quoting photographic works of Nazif Topçuoğlu. ‘Turks ceaselessly criticise themselves, their habits and their society’, Mango continues. ‘Because the country is trying to Westernise, what Western writers say is desperately important to them… what concerns us is what they read into what they see.’ With this in mind, consider one more work from the Koç collection – Sophia Pompéry’s Lighting Up, Burning Down (2009), where she videos the flaming of a candle at both ends. This could be read as a key metaphor for Istanbul’s art scene in the early twenty-first century: a city on a cultural and geological fault line, and seemingly on creative fire. How long can it last? Starter is on view at ARTER, Istanbul, through 19 September ArtReview

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design

national Style????

I interviewed the late Finnish designer Nanny Still (she died last year, age eighty-three) back in her eightieth year as she watched her life’s work being stripped from her home for a retrospective exhibition. Still was part of the ‘Milan Miracle’ – the generation of Finnish designers who from 1951 swept the board over three successive editions of Milan Triennale glass competitions. The designs of Still and her contemporaries made Finnish glassware the stuff of dreams (albeit industrially produced ones) to Mr and Mrs Postwar Popular Modernist, and they were treated as national heroes in return. Staring at the freshly emptied shelves around her, Still explained the particular circumstances surrounding the rise of Finnish design in the 1950s, from the arrival in the country of Russian glassblowing families to the social circumstances of the time, the concomitant hunger to create something new and the sheer, insomniac slog that went into achieving it. That Finnish Milan Miracle is design’s equivalent to the pneumatic waitress at the local diner getting yanked off the vinyl banquettes by the Hollywood producer and flung up onto the silver screen. The delicious notion that one overwhelming display could overnight brand a country as the absolute wow of now has kept the design festival circuit stocked for decades with well-funded national exhibitions. These touring shows are designed to promote the country’s creative image abroad in the hope of enticing collaborations, investment and export

that make somewhat political reference to national heritage (a halva press that creates patties in the shape of a fortress of the Knights Templar, an ikkat-work thong that plays Istanbul (Not Constantinople), etc), young/female/ethnically interesting designers brought in to fulfil the illusion of diversity and some nondescript chairs and tables that made it onto the display because they were designed by the minister for export’s drinking buddies. None of this does much to promote the good name of design, and yet all of us – designers, curators, festival organisers – take the coin offered by government funding bodies because they’re one of the few sources of reliable income left at the moment. The reputation of nationally sponsored exhibits is now so poor that some designers are seriously worried that their reputation will be tainted by association if they participate, and most curators I spoke with were brimming with off-the-record vitriol. One problem with such exhibits is design’s tricky status – that long sliding scale between arts and industry – which leaves it ill-suited both to soulless export displays and overly conceptual curatorial interventions. Another is that interesting design is often about solving problems. The works on show at last year’s exhibition of design for London at the words

opportunities. As each new September brings with it the new round of festivals, kicking off with Brussels’s Design September and the various London happenings later in the month, it is hard to escape the feeling that – far from becoming increasingly and excitingly diverse – the more countries there are presenting national displays, the more weirdly samey and wannabe everything becomes. Inevitably the national display of Tomdixonistan will, in common with those of Philippestarckislava and Ronaradiña, contain the following: works by one recognisable design name who was – due to some incredibly tenuous connection with the country – judged a national citizen by the curators for the sake of this exhibition, three exhibits of eco-tomfoolery involving some poorly recycled waste materials, two products

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Hettie Judah

Design Museum, titled Super Contemporary, were inspired by overcrowding, noise pollution and dirt – few export ministries wouldn’t be struck with the collywobbles at the prospect of touring a show that described their territory in such terms. One British festival organiser suggested quite frankly that design is such an international discipline these days that, as with football, things immediately became less interesting when you impose national boundaries. There are plenty of countries that are just as hungry to break through today as Finland was in the 1950s, yet decades on the festival circuit seems to have drilled everyone to accept a template of conformist mediocrity. It is hard not to feel that the missing element is neither the talent nor the volition, but the fresh uncompromising vision that comes from having nothing to lose.

BarberOsgerby, Listening Station, 2009 (installation view, Super Contemporary, Design Museum, London, 2009). Photo: Luke Hayes

If design fairs are supposed to showcase national identity, why do they all look the same?

Daniel Pešta Levitation 10. September - 22. November 2010 Muzeum Montanelli Nerudova 13 118 00 Prague 1 Czech Republic tel: +420 257 531 220 www.muzeummontanelli.com

top five

MARGOT HELLER

Director, South London Gallery

1 Real Presences: Marcel Broodthaers and today Kunsthalle Düsseldorf 11 September – 16 January www.kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de The prospect of seeing a Broodthaers exhibition in parallel with one including works by Tacita Dean and the extraordinary but underestimated Joëlle Tuerlinckx is an enticing one. Add to the mix the location of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf – so significant for Broodthaers in the early 1970s – plus a longer and occasionally unexpected list of contemporary artists he has influenced or inspired, and the results should be more than rewarding.

2 Gabriel Orozco Centre George Pompidou, Paris 15 September – 3 January www.centrepompidou.fr Having been privileged to see a number of Gabriel Orozco shows over the years, my appetite for them has grown rather than diminished. I was sorry to miss his retrospective at MoMA earlier this year, curated by Ann Temkin, but the truly elevating experience of seeing Bernhard Mendes Bürgi’s reworked version at the Kunstmuseum Basel provided ample compensation. Orozco is working with a different curator at each of the exhibition’s four tour venues, so I am intrigued to see how it mutates in the hands of Christine Macel at the Pompidou this month, and then of Jessica Morgan at Tate Modern early next year.

3 A moving plan B : Chapter ONE, selected by Thomas Scheibitz Drawing Room, London 16 September – 31 October www.drawingroom.org.uk It can be fascinating to witness firsthand some of the artistic points of reference and inspirations of an artist you admire. If Thomas Scheibitz’s brilliance at merging the illusion of abstraction with signs of figuration in his own work is echoed in his curatorial approach to bringing together drawings by well-known and less familiar names, then this show is sure to sparkle. Chapter TWO, Scheibitz’s simultaneous solo presentation at Sprüth Magers, London, ensures his own voice is clearly audible in this potentially absorbing conversation.

48 ArtReview

4 Lily van der Stokker: No Big Deal Thing Tate St Ives To 26 September www.tate.org.uk/stives As autumn looms, a visit to Lily van der Stokker’s mid-career retrospective at Tate St Ives is guaranteed to brighten up the shortening days. Seven wall works with integral pieces of furniture, plus 40 works on paper, all in van der Stokker’s characteristically decorative style and signature hues, promise a joyous visual feast. This rare chance to see such a significant presentation of her work in the UK is a timely review of her ongoing subversion of established cultural hierarchies.

5 Roman Ondák Salzburger Kunstverein 23 September – 28 November www.salzburger-kunstverein.at Roman Ondák is among the most interesting of a cluster of artists for whom the creation of performative situations, often involving audience participation, is central to their practice. Loop (2009), his turning outside-in of the Czech and Slovak Pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, added to an increasingly significant catalogue of subtly provocative projects made over the past decade. The unpredictability of Ondák’s work is one of its strengths, so there is a good chance that his new piece for the Salzburger Kunstverein will both surprise and impress.

Clockwise from left: Cerith Wyn Evans, Has the film already started?, 2000. Photo: Stephen White, Courtesy White Cube, London Installation shot of Lily van der Stokker’s exhibition No Big Deal Thing. Tate St Ives © Tate 2010 Photo: Steve Tanner

What to see this month by

Sep ne Untilfr1o2 li m £8 on Tickets

Salvador Dalí, Sleep, c. 1937. Private collection © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, DACS, 2010

The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre

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A New Concise Reference Dictionary

aa abasement to avarice

abasement See art fair. abjection See autocannibalism. absurd counterpoint A singularity addition placed

in conjunction within or about a larger work – usually an installation or sculpture – by which the work is given a literal or symbolic difference of subject–object (or scale) values. See anticlimax, cliché, stereotype. academic A nonorgasmic locus of the variant. addict model psychology Much contemporary practice is congruent with a particularising discourse that may be considered a psychopharmacological grammar. Such art is deferential to the displacements of the so-called dimensions of intersubjectivity, and is a metapsychology derived from the pluralistic thinkings of certain philosophers who came to prominence during the 1960s. These thinker-authors shared an experimental usage of the drug Cannabis sativa, and subsequently allowed their mental experiences of nuanced, discontinuous vacillations of meaning to be given a presence in their writings. Artists have been influenced in a secondary or tertiary codependency based on their readings of these writings. See religious impulse. advertising See [email protected] (gallery), [email protected] (corporate & lifestyle). altarpiece Contemporary art has historically offered presentational constructs summoning locus displacement ideas of reverence and homage, often appropriating variant religious object vocabularies, such as the altarpiece and the shrine. Invariably exhibited in near darkness. See cliché, stereotype, religious impulse. amateur conceptual art A relaxing art hobby now greatly popular among millions of people, of all social classes. The contemporary version of watercolour painting. ambition See anus. anaphora A device of visual rhetoric, in which repetitions, sometimes incremental, create a cumulative effect for little apparent effort (or, jocularly, create a vast disproportionality of effort for little cumulative effect). See cliché, stereotype. anticlimax A common effect device in which is made dramatic a (usually) digressive banality, whose technique

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ArtReview

has become a classic stereotype not unrelated to forms of militant apathy of purpose. Residing within this, in what sometimes seems to be an infinity of regressive processes, is the deliberated expiry locus of the shaggy dog story. See absurd counterpoint, futility, infantilism, cliché, stereotype. anus Here is meant the ‘active’ anus rather than the ‘passive’ anus – the active anus being not just the revealed locus of constraint delimitation, but also an ejaculating matrix – a vehicle for displacement interventions of metabolic illimitability. Often confused with abject ‘golden’ faeces, or even completely misidentified with effluence and incontinence. anxiety See abjection. apathy A euphemistic behaviour term, used by or about young artists, that signifies an extreme ambition syndrome. archaism The appropriation of earlier art and design styles is often described as an ironic retro-usage, or fascination homage, but is more properly a stylistic ostentation stratagem masquerading as a false value imprecation. See irony, cliché, stereotype. art An often theoretically lurid novelty transfer-object, constructed or ‘found’ so as to command a confusedly fascinated orienting response. Note: orientation is the initial usage value; biosocially, art is similar to a dog’s bark, or a pig’s grunt. It is, however, as slaughtered flesh that a farm animal becomes valuable. artist See artworld. art fair A system of replicating wooden booths densely situated within an artificially lit barnlike construction. Within the demarcated territory values of each booth is a dealer. The booths are situated on parallel lines that appear to meet at the furthest point of a perspectival infinity. At this point, food may be available for purchase. art magazine A coded validation document by means of which hierarchies of meaning (see artworld) may either be furthered or restricted. See editor. artworld A capitalistic value order system in which the transfer objects known as art are virulently exchanged, so enabling those engaged in the exchange – principally bankers (see collectors) and dealers, served by artists – to acquire forms of social merit. If bankers succeed in gaining sufficient merit from dealers, they may then be permitted to deposit their sperm inside the artists, either vaginally or within the walls of the rectum. ass The locus buttocks area of the critic, in the deep centre of which is the tightly closed anus. autocannibalism See anxiety. avant-garde A term impassively accepted, in a silent but universally respected consensus, as representative of a disabling embarrassment syndrome. avarice A psychological momentum characteristic of art practice that is related to sucking. words

Neal Brown

27th – 30th August

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ABANDON NORMAL DEVICES FESTIVAL OF NEW CINEMA AND DIGITAL CULTURE 01 – 07 OCTOBER 2010 | MANCHESTER

AND hits Manchester this autumn – join us for a curious mix of mind-blowing art, screenings, performances, debates and discussions. Featuring Rafael Lozano-Hemmer | Gillian Wearing | Phil Collins | Ming Wong | Lawrence Malstaf | Chen Chieh-jen

www.andfestival.org.uk Presented by:

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dispatches

Consumed

The pick of things you didn’t know you really needed. Words Oliver Basciano 03

£500 01

£292 04

£90 02

£100 each

01 For their Autumn Winter ready-to-wear collection Marni have teamed up with Gary Hume. Not for the Italian label a slipshod print job on a run-ofthe-mill T-shirt however; instead the company have produced a set of sharply cut, zip-backed, ladies’ tops (note the rustic finish to the sleeve ends), to which the British artist has added his brand of blocked figurative compositions. Consumed’s favourite is the nudecoloured number into which Hume has integrated some kind of running ostrich motif.

02 If their childhood inspirations had come to fruition Frank Gehry would have been a pirate, David Adjaye a gentleman explorer and Antony Gormley the captain of a floating giant peach. Or so their responses to Puffin’s invitation to redesign covers of classic children’s tales indicate. Gehry takes on Treasure Island, Adjaye Around the World in 80 Days and Gormley James and the Giant Peach. Author and illustrator Lauren Child’s wildly sculptural interpretation of The Secret Garden is definitely our favourite though. www.puffin.co.uk

ArtReview

www.nottinghamcontemporary. org

04 Our print choices for this month’s Consumed continue on a macabre bent with the equally disquieting purveyor of the grim, John Bock, who has released an edition to mark his Barbican Curve installation. If the Tobias brothers tap into the folk gothic, then Bock’s horror is more German Expressionist. The print, produced in a run of 100, is taken from Im Schatten der Made (2010), a recent film work, paused and captured as a still in a moment of high, but nonetheless, irreverent drama. www.barbican.org.uk

www.marni.com 56

03 To coincide with their current survey show of Gert and Uwe Tobias’s work, Nottingham Contemporary has four etchings by the Romanian twins, each in an edition of 16, on offer. The brothers’ naïve aesthetic is very much in evidence, simultaneously referencing traditional folk craft and the symmetrical simplicity of modernist colour use. Each of the four etchings depicts a different, sometimes weirdly salivating, creature of grotesque proportions.

John Bock, Im Schatten der Made, 2010. Photography: Jan Windszus (Courtesy: Klosterfelde , Berlin ; Anton Kern, New York. © 2010 John Bock. All rights reserved.

05

07

£20

05

£200

05

06

Price 05 on request

08

£4m 05 Josh Blackwell’s practice weaves together art, craft and design, exposing the limitations of each. For an ongoing series the American artist, who exhibited at Kate MacGarry gallery this year, has been utilising the ubiquitous plastic carrier bag. Blackwell takes the bag, demonised for its lack of environmental credentials, interweaves it with textiles and elevates it above its usual throwaway standing. This limited edition of 12, made for Phillips de Pury, comes with a cashmere finish.

06 The breakthrough for Seongyong Lee’s practice was his development of a process that took flimsy veneer laminate, wrapped it into a tube, and hardened it with glue. With these scaffold elements Lee is then able to construct pretty much any ultra-light design product that takes his fancy, with minimal effort or additional materials. At this rate, just by slotting one tube into another, he could build houses. For the time being we have stools and desks available from Phillips.

07 Melanie Jackson’s recent exhibition at The Drawing Room investigated the Urpflanze. Fictional, the urpflanze is the primal plant that Goethe describes as having all subsequent flora coiled up within it. The exhibition’s research into botany and history, cause and consequence is developed, within this newspaper format publication, through a series of collaborative texts with writer and academic Esther Leslie. Normally priced at £2, a limited edition of 100 come signed and boxed at £20.

08 See that lowered circular area in the foreground of the picture above? That used to be a pool in which torpedoes were spun round at an incredible speed by a robotic metal arm. Who knew that they did such things in leafy West London? Sadly the curved building’s use as a military testing facility is long gone – after World War II the Admiralty sold the base, and it was converted into a private home: The Rotunda, by architects Norman and Dawbarn. And now it’s come back on the market. Bombs away!

www.joshblackwell.com

www.phillipsdepury.com

www.drawingroom.org.uk

www.knightfrank.com

ArtReview 57

dispatches

digested

Findings on Elasticity Ed. Hester Aardse Astrid van Baalen

Aya Takano By Jennifer Higgie Aya Takano’s work is all too easily stranded (in Wikipediaand art-historical-type web entries, as much as via any analysis of its formal qualities) somewhere between the ‘Superflat’ work of her mentor Takashi Murakami and the ubiquitous graffiti-manga of Yoshitomo Nara. But in reality it sketches out a space all of its own. Not just because it comes from a female perspective or displays a certain technical brilliance; but also because her pipe-cleaner-limbed women with Schiele-esque colouring and her lo-fi sci-fi landscapes resist being cartoons. Indeed, they’ve as much in common with the kind of renderings you’d normally associate with European Modernism as they do with Manga. Her characters appear to wrestle with that last form rather than succumb to its seductions. It would be hard to press the case that any of Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki stable are neglected – such have been his efforts to promote them – but there’s no doubt that Takano is worth a deeper look. Mark Rappolt Ed. Perrotin/Kaikai Kiki Co, €40 (hardcover)

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age By Clay Shirky The world that Clay Shirky – one of those new breed of Malcolm Gladwell-type, technomadic, futurology thinkers – lives in, is one that I really hope to be a reality. It’s a nice one, you see, one where people are basically good: ultimately, Shirky says, people are social, creative and altruistic. He argues that capitalism, and so many other perceived norms, assume otherwise, so accordingly we act otherwise. Consumption is a big thing for him. He argues that in the postindustrial age we have much more spare time, which has, up until the networked Internet epoch, been put in the service of watching television. The Internet now gives us the spare time opportunity, with little effort, to create and be social with the like-minded; and hence the generational drop in watching the gogglebox. It takes a lot – too much – effort, to physically mobilise a group of people into an activity, but it’s easy over the web. Shirky gives a ton of examples: the fans of pop-opera singer Josh Groban who set up a autonomous charity entirely operated through their idol’s web forum; web-coordinated protests in South Korea; the practice of ‘lending’ music to perfect strangers; Facebook, of course; and even, at its lowest form, the creating and sharing of ‘lolcats’ on icanhascheezburger.com. One point Shirky falls down on is his refusal to differentiate between physical social contact and online social contact. Surely there’s a big difference between talking to your friend on Twitter and to going to the pub with them? The networked world is indeed a brave, and new glorious thing, but only when harnessed to the material one. Oliver Basciano Allen Lane, £20 (hardcover)

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Ranging from Barack Obama’s ‘unbelievably elastic knowledge’ to pictures of a pig on a trampoline, and featuring the wise words of a condom expert, this book is an extended rumination by artists and scientists on the subject of elasticity. This is the second in a series titled the ‘Atlas of Creative Thinking’, and follows Findings on Ice. If one’s mind is an elastic band, art is a constant test to see if your imagination can wrap itself around a work’s ideas and come back to with something meaningful. Contemporary art is also increasingly elastic, wanting to bring every sort of output into its chilly embrace – education, writing, the Internet, television and science. That’s part of its strength, but, when carried out badly, a nasty headache. The contributions in this book seem to fall squarely into separate spheres – art or science – with little communication between the two, and, as such, the elastic of my mind can’t stretch to figure out who this book might be for and who it might aid. But the pig pictures are nice. And it does come with a giant free elastic band. Laura McLean-Ferris Lars Müller Publishers and Pars Foundation, £30 (softcover) Aya Takano By Jennifer Higgie. © Aya Takano/Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved

It’s what we think you should swallow.

Works by Martin Creed

The Gold of Their Bodies: A Conversation Before Death By Ashley Bickerton and Hans Ulrich Obrist, illustrated by Ignacio Noé If you’ve never wanted to see Hans Ulrich Obrist drunk out of his mind, crawling on his hands and knees through a South East Asian titty bar, then this isn’t the book for you. Graphic artist Ignacio Noé has taken an interview between the Swiss curator and Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton – whose character, as portrayed in his recent Hogarthian work (although the title of this book references Gauguin, the English moralist is equally present), suggests that he’s exactly the kind of person you might well find face down in the discarded underwear at 6am on a Bangkok morning – and turned it into a comic-strip trawl through the wee hours and dark alleys of some Blade Runner-meets-Confessions-of-anEnglish-Opium-Eater-type city. Before anyone’s lawyers step in, Noé has completed the fantasy by making HUO unrecognisable (more like an Italian politician or newsreader) and allowing interviewer and interviewee to phase in and out of Bickerton-style paintings. Should we treat an interview that has this much packaging with suspicion? Yes. But reading HUO has never been as much fun as this. MR Other Criteria, £25 (softcover)

Works is the nearest a monograph can come to biography. Biography publishers normally demand warts and all: the better the details, the better the sales. Here too we get everything, every work Creed has ever made: on page 3, for example, is Work No. 3, a large Frank Stella-like swirl of yellow acrylic on canvas dating from 1986, Creed’s first year at the Slade. The painting marks the start of Creed’s titular numbering system (Creed deemed titling a work ‘No.1’ a tad arrogant) and from this the book makes a steady chronological progression to Work No. 1020, the multimedia ballet Creed staged last year at Sadler’s Wells. The leaving-nothing-out approach is continued in a 20-question interview that reproduces Creed’s divergent answers, every characteristic ‘um… err… aye’, inclused. For Creed, who is uneasy with seeing himself as an artist making art rather than a man who makes stuff that inhabits normal life, this usurpation of the ‘best bits’ model is apt. OB Thames & Hudson, £36 (hardcover)

The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists Ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner The cover image of this new anthology is a wry Rodney Graham photograph from 2007, The Gifted Amateur, which neatly sums up the questions addressed inside. Graham is in a large Playboy Mansion-type house, wearing neat navy pyjamas, cigarette in mouth as he casually drips a glossy bowl of yellow paint onto a canvas propped on the floor. It’s a hilarious fantasy of the artist at work, born out of that other American fantasy: Jackson Pollock’s East Hampton barn. Whilst studio practice might be a reality for many artists, there are equal numbers who spend hours at a desk or in front of a computer. Or something else entirely: Walead Beshty’s contribution tells of a collection of working spaces made up of passenger airlines, Walmarts and hotels, and of a series of transactions and incidents that inform that work which include watching television reruns, looking them up on imdb.com and trying to avoid bad coffee and cheese sandwiches wrapped in cellophane. This is a well-chosen collection of essays from writers and artists with a decidedly conceptual bent, including Daniel Buren, Rachel Harrison, Bruce Nauman and John Baldessari. They tackle a minefield of expectations, presumptions, joys and disappointments about ideological and actual spaces, whose tensions might be conveyed by Francis Stark’s concern that: “Sometimes I think my studio says as little about my work as a basketful of my dirty clothes conveys of what I look like”. LMF University of Chicago Press, £16 (softcover)

ArtReview 61

NewcastleGateshead

Art Fair

Affordable today... Priceless tomorrow

Gallery Applications Now Open

1-3 October 2010 The Sage Gateshead www.ngartfair.com T: 0191 241 4523

LARA ALMARCEGUI 10. 9. – 7. 11. 2010

MANFRED PERNICE TREVOR PAGLEN MARIA BUSSMANN 26. 11. 2010 – 6. 2. 2011

secession Friedrichstraße 12, A-1010 Wien, www.secession.at

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Index au 15/07/10 Informations — [email protected]

fiac.com

21-24 octOBER 2010, grand palais & louvre, paris Official Sponsor

Sektor galleries A: Andersen’s Contemporary Copenhagen, Berlin Andréhn-Schiptjenko Stockholm: Annika Larsson ARNDT Berlin: Ralf Ziervogel Alfonso Artiaco Naples Martin Asbaek Copenhagen B: Jürgen Becker Hamburg Bo Bjerggaard Copenhagen Niels Borch Jensen Berlin, Copenhagen C: carlier | gebauer Berlin Carreras Mugica Bilbao Mehdi Chouakri Berlin Contemporary Fine Arts Berlin Cosar HMT Dusseldorf: Robert Rotar D: Anselm Dreher Berlin E: Andrew Edlin New York Heinrich Ehrhardt Madrid EIGEN + ART Berlin, Leipzig F: Fahnemann Berlin: Imi Knoebel G: Bärbel Grässlin Frankfurt / M. Karin Guenther Hamburg H: Michael Haas Berlin, Zurich Häusler Contemporary Munich, Zurich Herald St. London Hoet Bekaert Ghent I: IBID Projects London Grita Insam Vienna: Peter Weibel Iragui Moscow J: Johnen Berlin

Sektor focus K: Iris Kadel Karlsruhe Georg Kargl Vienna Ben Kaufmann Berlin Parisa Kind Frankfurt / M.: Jorinde Voigt Kisterem Budapest Martin Klosterfelde Berlin Christine König Vienna Johann König Berlin Leo König New York Krinzinger Vienna: Martin Walde Kuckei + Kuckei Berlin Bernd Kugler Innsbruck L: Tim van Laere Antwerp Yvon Lambert Paris, New York: Douglas Gordon Gebr. Lehmann Dresden, Berlin Gisèle Linder Basel Stella Lohaus Antwerp M: Kunsthandel Maaß Berlin Mai 36 Zurich Hans Mayer Dusseldorf Mark Müller Zurich Vera Munro Hamburg N: nächst St. Stephan Vienna: Isa Melsheimer Neu Berlin neugerriemschneider Berlin New Jerseyy Basel David Nolan New York, Berlin Giti Nourbakhsch Berlin Nosbaum & Reding Luxembourg O: Nathalie Obadia Paris, Brüssel

P: Produzentengalerie Hamburg Hamburg R: Rodeo Istanbul: Eftihis Patsourakis Roslyn Oxley9 Sydney S: S.A.L.E.S. Rome Schau Ort. Zurich: Keren Cytter Esther Schipper Berlin Thomas Schulte Berlin Sies + Höke Dusseldorf Skopia Geneva Škuc Ljubljana Fredric Snitzer Gallery Miami )UDQFR6RIßDQWLQR Turin Jacky Strenz Frankfurt / M. T: Team New York Daniel Templon Paris Barbara Thumm Berlin Wilma Tolksdorf Frankfurt / M., Berlin Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Innsbruck V: Van Horn Dusseldorf Anne de Villepoix Paris Vintage Budapest W: Wentrup Berlin: William Hunt Jocelyn Wolff Paris Z: Susanne Zander Cologne Thomas Zander Cologne: Andrea Geyer Zero... Milan: Joao Maria Gusmao + Pedro Paiva

AMP Athens Pianissimo Milan

Niklas Belenius Stockholm Beaver Projects Copenhagen Dana Charkasi Vienna Kunstagenten Berlin DuVE Berlin Museum 52 London, New York

Figge von Rosen Cologne Newman Popiashvili New York Klemm’s Berlin Ambach & Rice Seattle Lüttgenmeijer Berlin Norma Mangione Turin KAI MIDDENDORFF Frankfurt / M. BISCHOFF / WEISS London

Neon Parc Melbourne utopian Slumps Melbourne On Stellar Rays New York IMO Copenhagen PSM Berlin Tanja Wagner Berlin

Jette Rudolph Berlin Laden für Nichts Leipzig Eva Winkeler Frankfurt / M., Cologne MOTINTERNATIONAL London Subject to change

Berlin Exhibition Grounds, Entrance Masurenallee Messedamm 22, 14055 Berlin, Germany T. +49 / 30 / 30 38 20 76, F. +49 / 30 / 30 38 20 60 [email protected], www.art-forum-berlin.de

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART In the last in this series in which the real people who created the historic styles give their eyewitness testimony…

NO 19:

Andy Warhol (born in 1928, died 1987) was the most famous Pop artist of the 1960s. From a successful career in advertising he moved to fine art in his late thirties. His subject was modern life, with characteristic themes including death, celebrity and glamour. The form of his art was extremely various, ranging from paintings, sculptures and photographs to movies, TV shows and magazines. interview by matthew collings

66 ArtReview

Bob Adelman, Andy Warhol at Gristede’s Supermarket, New York City, 1965. © the artist

Andy Warhol

ArtReview What was it like being painted by Alice Neel? Andy Warhol Nice. She wanted to be noticed. She was painting someone famous. I like the way my flabby body and the unnatural angular scarring from when I was shot by Valerie Solanas have a counterpart in Alice’s meandering line and in the way she leaves pictorial space fragmented. That’s all done very sensitively. You don’t know where you are emotionally with that picture. She keeps you jumping. AR How would you sum up the difference between her and you: empathic versus distanced? AW No. I’m about ideas; she’s not. A lot of those portraits of hers from the 1970s are really abstract paintings. You could return to them forever and always find new rhythms. There’s one of two gay guys looking out, and next to them there’s a still life of fruit on a table. There’s a mango or avocado in the bowl. It’s an unlikely emerald-green shade. The balance of the picture is all about that high colour and their eyelines. It’s really got a lot going for it as a cartoon that captures some peoples’ personalities, but also it has its own abstract personality, the features of which are mysteriously syncopated with cartoonish information. So you’ve something really quite visually rich going on. Real energy. I mean, I influenced everything that happened after me, and I don’t think anyone could say that about Alice Neel; but if you think about it from another perspective, say owning that painting or a painting by me, even really great early 1960s ones like Jackies or Marilyns or Elvises or people being poisoned by tins of rancid tuna fish or dying in car cashes or being beaten up by police in race riots – I’d prefer to have that Alice Neel painting. People own my works to impress others, not for the joy of looking. AR If there was a big Warhol show on now, would you go? AW If I did, I’m sure I’d see something interesting, but I wouldn’t have the same excitement at the prospect of going to that as I would about a big show of Matisse. There’s something about the embracing of graphicness, of print, of photography, of shiny objects, that goes with the art of my era; and I think I really sum up the era. But the products are very different to a kind of art where the energy all goes into paint on canvas. My work is great about ideas, about associations and about strategies. But it’s not something you need to go on looking at much. AR Appreciation of you and Alice Neel is actually very close – everyone in the artworld nowadays has to pretend that their inner being is defined by a sense of outsiderness. What do you think that is about? AW Embracing your inner victim. For me it was the emotional register of a certain group, not the whole group – for you it’s the mainstream. In your time actual outsiders aren’t

considered very appealing, and most people in the art world are pretty straight really, pretty obedient. AR What is it you do exactly? AW A certain placement, an eye for cropping, and choosing the right image in the first place. You could say that’s what Matisse does, but those things don’t serve an idea with him, they kind of serve themselves, whereas in my case the idea really is the thing. Celebrity, contemporaneity, the age of mechanical reproduction – these are all buzzwords and phrases that describe the idea. But when I’m doing it, it feels much narrower than that. When you first sense what it is you are probably going to be doing forever, what you are really going to be good and original at doing, what you’ve got that’s different from everyone else, there’s a worry that it isn’t very much. It’s a common syndrome for artists. In any case, before that point you probably think you could do anything, and everything you do hints at all the possible things you could be doing – in fact, all those possibilities are visible in what you’re doing, you feel. This is a common delusion of artists who haven’t found out what to do or found out what defines them. When you hone down to the thing, you accept it’s pretty limited, and it’s exactly at that point that the audience starts to see a lot in it. AR I’m flattered that you’re being so thoughtful and earnest, and not answering my questions with ‘gee’ and ‘wow’ all the time – why do you do that in interviews normally? AW I’m remaining absolutely distant from myself and from the world, and that’s my artistic strategy too. There is some enigma there, I agree – I’m very welcoming in my artistic approach. I let everything in, and I’m very distanced at the same time. AR But your style of communicating doesn’t come before your style of art? It’s an offshoot of the art? AW That’s right. The art has a certain psychology, but that doesn’t mean it’s about great psychological observation. It isn’t. It’s about capturing the moment. Alice Neel said the most exciting thing for her was not the inner character of her sitters or making it clear that the painting was done in a certain decade, but dividing up the canvas – the others are the second and third most exciting things. I think that’s the same order for me too. But the difference is that I’m about noticing that extreme change has taken place, society’s values really are different. I’m not just tapping into a general visual zeitgeist. The whole raison d’être of my stuff is about noticing what’s exactly ‘now’. I’m not about making sure the trappings of the particular decade are there in the picture. I’m about going to the essence. AR What about your films? And silver pillows, and TV shows and so on? Your magazine, your Polaroids, your drawings, your Brillo boxes? You are beloved by posturing ninnies in charge of administering the official structures of the inner

AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART artworld – the type that run the Serpentine Gallery and so on – because you don’t limit your medium of expression; you do all sorts. And because of that, you’ve become the saint of a sort of moronic cult of everything, which the new audience for contemporary art has been conditioned to believe art in general is dedicated to. And students in art schools are taught to believe that too, by middle-aged teachers who suspect it probably isn’t true, but know it’s more than their position as heads of departments is worth if they ever say so out loud. AW Ha, ha – that’s a funny picture of what goes on. AR Do you think doing all sorts goes with outsiderness? AW Well, some people might think the main outsider element is my sexuality, my gayness. But I don’t think my films are really an expression of sexuality. And I also don’t think they’re victim films. My screen-test films aren’t that either. If anything, they are about sexiness in a much more general sense: what will work onscreen. The main thing about movie stars is physical attraction, which comes a lot from simply being physically attractive, so a director is interested in that aspect first, and then interested in less tangible factors, like charisma. AR So your films generally are not gay, you’re saying… AW No, I’m saying their sexuality is very important, but the main thing is a sort of original joining of a particular sexuality with a particular approach to the medium, to technical matters. So with that combination, you’ve got energy, the word I used earlier about Alice Neel’s cartoonery combined with abstract structures. Watching my films, you don’t know where you are, you cannot say what the mood or texture is, or what the content precisely is. At least not easily – Robert Hughes today says it’s only about how thick and shallow I am. Someone else might say, ‘Oh, it’s Warholian!’ Meaning something absurd and funny and sexy and disconnected and modern. It’s very far from War and Peace, is what Hughes is really saying, as if Tolstoy wasn’t an artist constructing something but a summation of thousands of years of cultural achievement. I think when you’re watching a film of mine, there’s no easy way to say what’s happening, and you’re forced to follow the film rather than impose a stereotype reading of what the film is doing. AR Which ones are we talking about? AW That’s a good question. There are at least three phases, in chronological order, from the mid-1960s to the early 70s: avant-garde; parody-Hollywood; and parody-comedy. But the second phase has two phases too – Chelsea Girls is the earlier phase, and Lonesome Cowboys, say, but Flesh and Heat are the later phase. The transition is about actually getting closer to Hollywood values. Whereas the parodycomedy later phase is about backing off from Hollywood simply by embracing a lower Hollywood genre than 68 ArtReview

Hollywood’s main genre of depicting life through sexy people onscreen interacting in fraught love dramas. I don’t really get involved in the whole blockbuster thing that came in with Jaws and which now dominates Hollywood – my version of Jaws is Gone with the Wind. AR Which are the good ones? AW Well, the later ones, parody-comedy, Frankenstein and Dracula, say, are the least good ones, because really it’s clear that Mel Brooks and John Waters are better. Whereas with Flesh and Heat, parody-Hollywood, you’ve really got something in the same league as Gone with the Wind, just done by different means: shambling sexy charisma and daft improvisation instead of big production values, but the same compelling watchability. With phase one, avantgarde, where there are dozens and dozens and dozens of films, again the quality is very high, but the coordinates are different again too: how something is good is maybe more to do with extreme abstract structures, the infrastructure being on the outside, like Cubism. So sexiness is very important, but structure is really what’s happening. Someone having a blowjob, and you’re seeing their face, as direct as that film is, it’s not really about everyone watching it having a hard-on and wishing they were getting sucked off too. Of course that comes into it, but structure and distance and abstraction are just as powerfully present. That’s not because a critical mind would always be aware of those things, but because as art Blow Job is made up of those things deliberately levelled out, or balanced, or all raised to the same height. AR Wow. AW You know, it’s interesting, all artists have critical minds, they’re clear about the critical issues in their own area, and often in other areas too. But then they’re bitchy in what they say, like everyone in any professional sphere can be bitchy. The fact is, artists are not very special. Work is the thing, not the artist, or things the artist says, whether it’s ‘wow’ or something more articulate. We only really say things to promote our stuff and put down our rivals’ stuff. Whereas the work, separated from our lives, our childhoods, our carryings-on, our pungent stories and so on, really is connected to great achievement that goes back centuries. Of course Robert Hughes is right about Tolstoy, he’s just wrong about me, because he’s furious with the mindlessness of the present-day cult of me. AR Well OK, thank you very much – good luck! AW Thank you, Matt. Next month: a new series begins – interviews with art critics from the beginning of time to right now. No. 1 will be authors from the classical era wanking on about the grapes in a painting being so lifelike that real birds actually try to peck them.

Zuzanna Janin, Majka from the movie (Szalen´stwo Majki Skowron / Madness of Majka Skowron), 2009, DVD, Courtesy lokal_30, Warszawa

Zuzanna Janin Majka from the Movie In collaboration with Tomasz Kozak.

August 18th – 31st 2010

Treitlstraße 2, A-1040 Vienna | Daily 1 pm – 12 pm; Sun/Mon 1 pm – 7 pm Info +43-1-521 89-33 | www.kunsthallewien.at www.polnisches-institut.at

feature:

R y a n Tr e c a r t i n

’s

manic hyperrealit y T V soap operas have made him one of America’s most talkedabout young ar tists; but are we looking at the real world or another planet?

wo r ds : J o n at h a n T. D. N e i l

72

ArtReview

feature: ryan trecartin

Ryan Trecartin’s I-Be Area (2007), Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch (his constant collaborator) and a plump coconspirator named Soda Pop are filming themselves inside what looks to be a hotel room or studio apartment. The jump-cut conversation (though it’s not really a conversation) turns to the subject of the end of the world. Soda Pop says she read about it in the news, to which Trecartin’s character responds, “You saw me in the news. What you saw, it was me.” This gives way to all three characters ecstatically chanting these statements like some new-age mantra, all the while looking into a mirror: “Soda Pop! You saw me in the news! What you saw, it was meeeee!” The session ends with Fitch’s character stating that “it’s all about how nobody loves me”, to which Trecartin responds, looking directly into the camera, “No, it’s not, it’s about how the world ended three weeks ago, starting now.” The sensibility here is not unique within Trecartin’s universe, which went bang in 2004, the year the artist graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, and reached its current rate of inflation through standout inclusions in the 2006 Whitney Biennial (about which Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine raved) and the New Museum’s 2009 love letter to youth, The Generational: Younger than Jesus (for which Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker swooned). It brings together most if not all of the strategies that Trecartin uses in I-Be Area as well as the more recent K-CoreaINC.K (section a), Sibling Topics (section a) and P.opular S.ky (section ish) (all 2009): multiple characters played by the same people (avatars, copies, ‘command Vs’) in various states of undress and dress-up, often with body and face and teeth painted, sporting wigs and hats and dyed hair; roughly treated interiors (here objects and surfaces are endlessly open to alteration and defacement, if not defenestration); deft, rapid editing (as Trecartin’s most inspired psycho-caregiver of a character, Pasta, says in an earlier scene: “Your life but better! With edits! With edits!”); and a way with language that finds words slipping along their associative axis (“Being postfamily and prehotel ends today for me”), spoken sometimes with the high-rising terminals pioneered in California’s San Fernando Valley back in the 1980s (and heard now wherever a thirteen-year-old is on a cell phone: “Omigohhhhd!”) or, more often, in the lash-tongued style of the imperious, peremptory queen (for whom every line is a snapping finger). But this particular scene is notable for two further reasons: first, it shows how everything in Trecartin’s world is gathered up into the perpetual present of each character’s ‘voice’ – as when news of the world’s end three weeks prior is condensed into the finality of Trecartin’s “now”; or when Soda Pop’s knowledge of the past is turned into the group’s repetitious chanting in the present. Voice is central. It’s both how the characters hope to register their presence and the marker of how that presence is nothing but a function of the video camera that captures it and the software that mixes and manipulates it. The best demonstration of this comes in Sibling Topics, when Henry, a character played by Holcombe Waller, riffs on some lines delivered by Trecartin’s Auto Ceader, who then stops the manic flow of the scene, as if stepping out of character, to ask for a repeat performance. It’s a momentary exchange, but as Henry treats the viewer to another vocalised riff, with the camera moving in for a closeup, we realise that one’s voice is the only thing that can guarantee screen time. And second, this scene offers one of the only moments when we catch sight of the video camera itself, and here as it is 74

ArtReview

being wielded by Trecartin. I mention this not to suggest that in this instance we might be witnessing some eruption of modernist reflexivity but rather to point out the one feature of that digital camcorder which would seem both to underwrite and to thematise, in part if not as a whole, Trecartin’s work to date: the flip-out, swivelling or otherwise articulating LCD screen, that nifty little feature that lets you film yourself filming. Not reflexivity, then, but reflectivity. It’s not for nothing that this scene plays itself out in front of a mirror. Perhaps it is coincidental, but the year LCD screens were first incorporated into video camcorders – 1992 – was also the year that saw the debut of MTV’s The Real World, and thus the emergence of ‘reality’ television in the US (itself made possible by wide access, after 1989, to new nonlinear video editing tools). The coincidence is worth attending to, because MTV’s hit show (24 seasons and counting) introduced its American audience to – indeed the show’s very success hinged upon – what it called the confessional: segments in which cast members would sequester themselves in a makeshift closet where they could offer up, to a tripod-mounted camcorder no less, their most private thoughts on the more public absurdity just outside the door. With its stationary frame and change of resolution signifying that there was no other operator behind the scene, that this person was indeed truly alone and what we were witnessing was this person’s true self, the camcorder and the confessional form opened onto that psychological ‘reality’ which the show’s producers brilliantly realised would be so necessary to sell the so-called reality that was being documented by the show’s ever-present camera crews – call it the American psyche in the age of 24/7 media. It also seems necessary to acknowledge that the early 1990s were, as the sociologist Thomas Streeter labels it in a 2005 essay of the same name, ‘the moment of wired’ – that is, the moment when a particular conjuncture of information technology and a certain technophile professional class with time on its hands saw the online landscape unfold, or rather unzip, like some secret secondary level in a video game, one that models the original ‘real’ game but promises new and occult knowledge for those whom John Perry Barlow called ‘natives of the future’. That future had an address, which Barlow famously listed as ‘Cyberspace’ (a term itself adapted from sci-fi visionary William Gibson). So the mass consumption

A s Trecar tin’s mos t inspired psychocaregiver of a character, Pasta, says in one scene: “ Your life but better! With edits! With edits! ”

of reality television, with its introduction of the confessional form, and the mass migration into cyberspace coincide; and it’s worth conjecturing that the former prepares the ground for the latter’s second incarnation – that is, for Web 2.0: the rise of social media, with its increasing inducement to publicise private life (along with its correlate, the privatisation of the public sphere). Now, the role that video played within the ‘reality’ of reality television has become manifest in the ubiquity of the online video blog, which is itself nothing other than the apotheosis of the confessional form – and this is the form in which Trecartin has professed greatest interest; it also offers the indigenous context for his work, which one really should watch on Trecartin’s YouTube channel and, more recently, in HD on Vimeo. In the gallery setting, the works’ blistering edits attract attention but rarely hold it; their distraction is more easily indulged when plugged into a laptop while reclining on a couch. Yet the confessional form also marks the persistence of what was long ago identified as video’s very medium, which is not its technology, but rather narcissism. From the very beginning, video served as a mirror for its artists, one which enclosed their bodies between camera and monitor, and so produced the artist’s ‘self’ as a function of feedback. It was within this closed loop of feedback, now standing as a figure for the logic of the burgeoning mass media, that, as Rosalind Krauss put it in 1976, ‘consciousness of temporality and of separation between subject and object are simultaneously evacuated’. >

Lest we think that the combination of LCD screen and camcorder, of monitor and camera, would squeeze the artist out of the infinite regress of that feedback loop and place him back into some concrete relation with the world, we need only remind ourselves of that scene in Trecartin’s I-Be Area, where no objects or subjects exist except within the perpetual present of the camcorder’s frame: “It’s about how the world ended three weeks ago, starting now”. For all that seems new in Trecartin’s work, his medium, particularly as it is figured within his impressive series of recent videos, remains very much what it was found to be during its first decade of use after 1965. Yes, the technology and channels of distribution have changed radically since that time, but this only goes to show how a medium cannot be reduced to its physical or technical supports alone. All of the critics who want to see in Trecartin some ‘fresh’ or ‘youthful’ or ‘energetic’ new contribution to a stultifying artworld are looking into the mirror of his videos and finding the projections of their own fantasies staring back. What we are witnessing is a feedback loop in which history has no purchase (only purchasing power). History, then, would suggest itself as the means of accessing what might be interesting and urgent in Trecartin’s work, and this requires working against a very odd and rather specific amnesia. Because, inasmuch as no shortage of critics have mentioned those filmmakers from the 1960s and 70s whose sensibility Trecartin is seen to share, filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith and the young John Waters (figures of whom Trecartin claims to have been largely ignorant when he began making videos), there has been shockingly little mention of the one word that describes that sensibility – and describes it exactly, I want to say – nor has there been any mention that I have found of the one figure whose first significant critical achievement it was to have articulated that sensibility – and articulated it exactly, I want to add. The word for that sensibility is ‘camp’, and its earliest and most insightful champion was, of course, Susan Sontag. Why the amnesia? Is it the fact that Sontag died at the dawn of Web 2.0 – of MySpace (became a social networking site by 2004), YouTube (online in 2005) and Facebook (founded in 2004 and open to a public beyond corporate and educational institutions in 2006) – which has kept her out of mind? No Facebook page, no life, online or otherwise? Again it is surely coincidental that A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), widely regarded as Trecartin’s breakout piece, marks both the year of Sontag’s death and the 40th anniversary of the publication, in Partisan Review, of her own breakout piece of criticism, ‘Notes on “Camp”’. Yet sentence after sentence of that piece reads as if it were directly addressed to Trecartin’s enterprise, which is nothing more, and nothing less, than a pure embodiment of a straight-up camp sensibility (not ‘postcamp’; not ‘neo-camp’): Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘person’ and ‘thing’.) Camp discloses innocence, but also, when it can, corrupts it. In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve. Camp… cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much’. What Camp taste responds to is ‘instant character’… and, conversely, what it is not stirred by is the sense of the

There has been shockingly little mention, among critics, of the one word that defines Trecar tin’s sensibility: camp

feature: Ryan trecartin

development of character. Camp taste is by its nature possible only in affluent societies, in societies or circles capable of experiencing the psychopathology of affluence. Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness. Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation – not judgment. This is probably where Trecartin’s particular camp sensibility departs from Sontag’s assessment: his is a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation and of judgement. This is what ‘camp’ has become 45 years on: an air kiss and a bitch-slap at once. The elasticity of ‘family’ in Sibling Topics (section a), or the assault on ‘identity’ in I-Be Area and its multiplication in K-CoreaINC.K (section a), or the rough handling and gleeful destruction of so much stuff (glassware, cars, sets, bodies) in P.opular S.ky (section ish) – it’s all an implicit condemnation, while at the same time it can’t be bothered to take the time to exhibit any kind of ‘care’ at all. Sontag no doubt sensed this tendency in advance, because it is manifest in what she claimed as that ‘ultimate Camp statement’, a statement that I will adopt as my own in order to say of all that Trecartin & Co have done: ‘it’s good because it’s awful’. Work by Ryan Trecartin is on view in Any Ever, at MOCA Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, through 17 October, at the Liverpool Biennial, 18 September – 28 November, and in 10,000 Lives, the Eighth Gwangju Biennale, 3 September – 7 November

works (in order of appearance) Any Ever, 2010 (installation view, the Power Plant, Toronto), with Ready (Re’Search Wait’S), 2009–10, HD video, 26 min 49 sec I-Be Area, 2007, video, 1 hr 48 min Two stills from P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009, HD video, 43 min 51 sec Two stills from Ready (Re’Search Wait’S), 2009–10, HD video, 26 min 49 sec Two stills from Roamie View – History Enhancement (Re’Search Wait’S), 2009–10, HD video, 28 min 23 sec all works Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York

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feature:

Bringing speed metal recitals, free haircuts and slumber par ties to their cit y’s ar t museums, Los Angeles collective

Machine Project

are developing a new, af firmative approach to institutional critique.

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is a one-room storefront with an uneven floor and a messy basement, lodged between a coffee shop and a nonprofit film centre in the traditionally Latino, now glaringly hipster LA neighbourhood of Echo Park, with two official employees and a handful of interns fronting a loose consortium of artists, musicians, writers, scientists, computer geeks and historians whose collective activities in the organisation’s seven years of operation – performances and readings, workshops and classes, offsite projects and the occasional exhibition – have done more to reframe the question of what artmaking means in LA than those of any other single institution. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, by contrast, is an encyclopaedic institution in the grand old style – the largest west of the Mississippi – with more than 300 employees and 100,000 valuable objects contained within a seven-building, 20-acre campus along a shiny stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, not far from Beverly Hills. One very boisterous Saturday in November 2008, these unlikely bedfellows came together – on LACMA’s turf, of course, since major museums aren’t, as a rule, mobile – but with unprecedented intimacy. In a show it titled A Field Guide to LACMA, Machine Project wound into the museum’s deepest nooks and crannies – into passageways and elevators and forgotten galleries and balconies not even the security guards knew how to access – to present more than 60 performances, events and workshops over the course of a ten-hour period. The

machine project

artists were mostly Machine Project regulars and the projects, though calibrated to the new, strange world of the museum, were emblematic of its sensibility – which is to say experiential, generally collaborative, adept at bridging multiple fields of knowledge, and inclined toward offbeat pedagogical experiments. Casey Rentz walked the distance between Machine Project and LACMA (6.4 miles), trailing a very long piece of string. Nate Page transformed the museum’s main entrance into a ‘Mission Control Bunker’ complete with napping areas, constructed from neglected materials in LACMA’s storage vaults. Cheryl Cambras led a workshop in the crocheting of birds for the purpose of adorning Chris Burden’s iconic installation of lampposts. A speed-metal guitarist played for one minute every hour beneath a full-scale replica of a gothic arch. Haircuts were offered to live accompaniment, and a dance party staged in the museum’s ‘loneliest gallery’. It was a remarkable undertaking, for its audacity of scale as much as for its content. Instigated by LACMA’s then photo curator Charlotte Cotton, and falling close on the heels of the opening of BCAM, the museum’s new contemporary wing, it seemed to bode well for a brighter, fresher Michael Govan-era LACMA. Even more notable, however, was what it revealed, or perhaps affirmed, in Machine: the ambition, integrity, and frankly the power to hold its own in such a context. Furthermore, it packed the house. In a world where success can be difficult to measure, it was undeniable

in this case – and sure enough, an invitation of even larger scale followed for Machine, this one from the Hammer Museum: a consultancy devoted to designing a public engagement residency at the museum, funded by a grant from the Irvine Foundation, of which Machine then became the first recipient. It will remain in residence through the end of this year. This seemingly unlikely meeting of minds – two of LA’s most powerful cultural institutions with one of its most freethinking – is due largely to Machine’s unique combination of geniality and determination. The institutional persona it’s crafted – a fairly direct reflection of the disposition of its key players, primarily its founder and director Mark Allen – is disarming in its populism, and strikingly clear-spoken in its objectives. While museums and galleries continue to speak in lofty, often clumsily academicised language, Machine’s weekly newsletters read like notes from a friend. (All come signed: ‘Love, Machine’.) This is not, on the surface – or even, perhaps, fundamentally – a threatening presence. Allen, who studied with Michael Asher at Cal Arts in the late 1990s, would be the first to admit he’s putting a soft spin on notions of institutional critique. “All those things are obviously hugely influential in my work,” he says, “But because it’s a different cultural moment, I have a different agenda, a different mission.” (As Anthony McCann, a poet and frequent Machine collaborator, put it in a conversation with Allen that appears in the Field Guide catalogue: “It wasn’t run wild at the museum day. It’s not about critiquing the museum, breaking all the rules that we can break. It was something that burst

forth out of the given ground of the museum’s contradictions and out of Machine’s just happening to be invited to be there at that time.”) What’s driving Allen is a fascination with how the museum works – organisationally, socially, spatially, sonically – and, in the case of the Hammer, a tinkerer’s interest in making it work better. “How does the museum create physical space for nontraditional projects?” he asks. “How does it create conceptual space? How does it create infrastructure and process? It wasn’t set up to do those things. A lot of my work in the first third of the residency has been developing process. So, if you wanted to come and, you know, juggle flaming basketballs in the courtyard and in the lobby and in the bathroom, who do you need to talk to about that? Part of that process is unearthing all the different stakeholders in the museum. Who has to know about the project? Who has to approve it? What impact does it have on facilities, on security, on the registrar? Those roles and what those people have to do are already fairly well defined for these traditional projects and they all have to be looked at again when you try to do something in the hallway. Who owns the hallway?” The investigation of odd, interstitial spaces and their governance has been a pivotal aspect of both the LACMA show and the Hammer residency. Machine stages concerts and readings in the Hammer’s cloakroom – now christened the Little William Theater – for one or two visitors at a time. It’s installed ping-pong tables on an unused mezzanine. Working in collaboration with artSpa, it staged a ‘Dream In’ in the museum’s courtyard: a slumber

“ the museum has ‘ the God voice’ –you don’t know who is speaking”

feature: Machine Project

party for 180 people. Sound is another pivotal aspect. Experimental music has long been a pillar of Machine’s programming, in its own space and elsewhere, and that continues at the Hammer under the curation of composer and sound artist Chris Kallmyer. In addition to concerts in the cloakroom and the courtyard, Machine periodically offers visitors a ‘Live Personal Soundtrack’ – essentially a pair of headphones with a guitarist attached, to follow you around the galleries. In autumn, every museum visitor will be given a bell to wear – a sound piece “composed of just people walking around”. The interest, as Allen describes it, is as much strategic as artistic. “Museums are really oversaturated on the visual channel and typically undersaturated on the sound channels,” he says. “So it’s like a bandwidth that’s available. We’d like to try to do things with smells, too.” At root, the spatial and the sonic explorations come down to the same fundamental question, one that cut deeply through most of the LACMA projects as well: how to penetrate those regions – whether physical, conceptual or psychological – that have been abandoned, restricted, or overlooked, so as to jar the perceptions of those who encounter them? “Something I’m very interested in conceptually is how this project affects the institutional voice,” Allen says of the Hammer residency. “The museum has what I call the God voice. The museum speaks and you don’t know who that is speaking but it says something, there’s a sign that tells you to do this or tells you to do that. It’s like the aggregation of a sensibility. And then you have shows by artists and they articulate their subjectivities. There’s no confusion between the two. If you see a bad painting, you’re not like, that Hammer Museum doesn’t know how to paint. Right? These projects that attempt to change how people experience the museum are experimenting with voice. How does the museum greet you? How can you manipulate or change that?”

It is not, fundamentally, a political project. Indeed, it follows, in many ways, that classic trajectory by which the heated demands of one generation give way to a kinder if potentially more nuanced exchange: institutional critique shifting into institutional interrogation. What seems problematic in such a scenario has less to do with the terms of the inquiry, however, than its necessary limitations. The art museum is a convenient vessel for these kinds of experiments – and Allen continues to field offers for museum exhibitions and other such projects, in addition to keeping up programming in the Echo Park space – but a rarefied world with a particular audience, antithetical, in many ways, to Machine Project’s genre-bending, specialty-bridging character. “I would love to do something for the HR department of an insurance company,” he says. “But they don’t really have thousands of dollars to bring in people to do that. I mean, in a way that would be more interesting to me. I don’t necessarily feel like what we do is specifically about art museums. It’s more about different fields of knowledge and experience and how people use space and relate to each other and that seems applicable towards broader ends.” Surely someone could underwrite such a grant? The possibilities are tantalising. Machine Project’s residency at the Hammer Museum continues until the end of the year; Machine will also take part in the Glow Festival, Santa Monica Beach on 25 September works (in order of appearance)

Gothic Arch Speed Metal, 2008, part of Machine Project’s A Field Guide to LACMA, 2008. Arch replica by Christy McCaffrey and Sara Newey; speed metal performed by Mark Richards and Alexy Yeghikian. Main photo: Dorka Hegedus. Inset photo: Bernard Brunon Heather Locke and Andrew McIntosh performing within the Little William Theater at the Hammer Museum cloakroom, 2010. Photos: Emily Lacy. Daniel Brummel performing within the Little William Theater, 2010. Photo: Ann Hadlock Nate Page, Mission Control Bunker, 2008, part of A Field Guide to LACMA. Main photo: Sidonie Loiseleu. Overlayed photo: Scott Mayoral all works courtesy Machine Project

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feature:

Painting the same model for months on end, singing a single romantic song for hours, or assembling music from par ts played by solo musicians stranded on mountains, 

Kjartansson

Ragnar

makes ar t

that ’s as au fait with endurance as any first-generation performance ar tist, and several times more fun. But, there’s more to his mischievous exaggerations of creative obsessionthan meets the eye.

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feature: Ragnar kjartansson

of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde describes a studio ‘filled with the rich odour of roses, and… the heavy scent of lilac’. In the midst of this perfumed atelier lie well-spoken men, smoking on divans, or creating works of art. But the centre of everything is a portrait of that ‘young man of extraordinary personal beauty’: Gray. To cut a long story short, Wilde describes a scene that is the epitome of the bohemian artistic life. It’s precisely the scene that Ragnar Kjartansson had in mind when he developed The End – Venezia (2009), at the Icelandic Pavilion during last year’s Venice Biennale. Albeit with a few twenty-first-century updates. The characteristically grandiose performance project saw Kjartansson setting up studio in a large Venetian palazzo by the Grand Canal. Each day, for six months, he painted a portrait from life of a slim young man wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos (even in chilly November). There’s no doubt the scene was one that Wilde would have enjoyed, although the perfume may not have been quite to his liking. When I visited it was filled with the rich odour of cigar smoke and the heavy scent of stale ale. For while the atmosphere was louche and baroque, the room was lined with empty beer bottles and filled with the smoke of Kjartansson’s cigars. Ultimately, he appeared to be performing the role of the bohemian artist rather than being it. And, in many ways, the bohemian persona is a fantasy, as Kjartansson knows only too well: “When I was younger, I was going to be an artist bohemian, but you just end up doing Excel spreadsheets and emails.” However tongue-in-cheek or light-hearted it may appear, any project involving 182 continuous episodes of repetitive daily action is a serious matter. That becomes apparent looking at the paintings that Kjartansson produced, which were recently exhibited at Luhring Augustine in New York. These are rather forlorn images of a pale, melancholic, lonely man, stripped, bored and vulnerable, and sick with the booze and damp around him. He lies with his head near a bucket one day, whilst on another, in the dreary autumn of the project, he is sick with the flu and can’t come to be painted. That day, the painting is of an empty sofa, in a dark room, dripping with miserable brown paint and soggy loneliness, any ‘heavy scented lilacs’ now a distant memory.

at the beginning

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But Kjartansson is by no means all gloom. On the night before I’m scheduled to visit his studio in Iceland, I see the artist give a short performance in an empty building near i8, his gallery in Reykjavik. Dressed in dapper 1950s rockabilly attire – a white coat with black piping and a silky white ribbon tie – the artist plays a small set of songs, singing to his guitar. The performance has several high-camp touches, including a firework attached the guitar that is set alight (during, if I recall rightly, a song about Satan). Most memorably, in the midst of a sing-a-long rendition of ‘I Will Always Love You’, a bare-chested saxophonist appeared, wearing thick glasses and oiled up to within an inch of his life, to play the requisite overblown sax solo from the Whitney Houston recording. This gets all the good-natured laughs it deserves, and the spirits in the room are very high. That day, Kjartansson had just moved to a new studio in Reykjavik, and it’s possibly significant that on this evening he keeps joking that he is going to “try to make it look like a studio”, for my visit the next day. No need to fake it, I say. “But, no, I have to!” he replies. It’s less about faking it, I suppose, than taking on all the expectations surrounding the figure of the artist or musician, and ramping them up into an ecstatic register. This is a feature that has characterised a series of the artist’s recent works, beginning with God (2007), a video work that sees the artist dressed as a 1950s matinee idol, with neat, smoothed-down hair and a tuxedo. Accompanied by a full orchestra, and playing on a stage lined with silken magenta curtains, he sings “Sorrow conquers happiness”, over and over again, for half an hour, as the musical arrangement builds and swoops. Whilst the lyric is inevitably melancholy – a small truth about life – the piece is also incredibly funny. In Schumann Machine, performed at 2008’s Manifesta 7 exhibition in the small Italian town of Rovereto, Kjartansson built a shack decorated with a façade of burning flames. In the intimate space within, the artist recited Schumann’s Dichterliebe song cycle – a romantic, but also cynical account of the dramatic pain and suffering of a ‘poet’s love’ – accompanied on the piano by regular collaborator David Thór Jónsson. It was performed eight hours a day for two weeks. Such works are always positioned slightly out of time – they are not quite nostalgic, but the costumes and sets somehow allow a level of emotive performance that seems as though it might be forbidden in the present. The glee that these works take in exaggerating romanticism and misery allows Kjartansson, like a Shakespearean fool, to say something serious, because the highly inflated emotions in his performances are always at the point of puncture. In fact, Kjartansson’s performances and films are very enjoyable to watch, something that marks them out from huge rafts of performance art work. When discussing the artists that influence him he mentions works by Marina Abramovic and Chris Burden. I suggest that part of their legacy was the performanceart clichés of suffering and endurance, and making the viewer feel uncomfortable, and that this seems opposed to the experience of seeing his own work. “This is the essence of what I wanted to do”, he replies. “To change that thing. It is as hard as those performances, but I try to take a theatrical approach to make it look easy. Like: ‘Ha ha ha! I’m enjoying myself, in opera!’ But then again, it is also really physically testing.” It’s a harder job, I suggest, to create endurance performances that are enjoyable to be around. It’s pretty easy to make people feel uncomfortable. “I really like the fourth wall, the comfort zone”, he agrees. “I get embarrassed when it’s broken. I like to do performance art where the viewer is in a safe zone.”

“ I try to take a theatrical approach to make it look easy. Like: ‘ Ha ha ha! I ’m enjoying myself, in opera! ’ ”

>

feature: ragnar kjartansson

Don’t feel too safe, however, for this is a luring tactic: a toobright mask. Kjartansson’s projects are linked by their concern with repetition as well as endurance, and their joyful campiness only thinly veils Freudian fort/da concerns. This is most obvious in his film series Me and My Mother (2000; 2005; 2010; –). Shot every five years (the third has just been completed), they feature the artist’s mother repeatedly spitting in his face. Kjartansson’s mother is an actress, his father a director, and so he was “babysat”, as he puts it, by the theatre. Spitting in his face is one of the worst things he could ask her to do, and so, as he suggests, she is on the one hand “being very nice to her artist son by doing this”, whilst on the other “just doing another job”. While this (and its repetition) might transform being spat on into a complex pleasure, there is a morbidity to the work, “Maybe my mother is not going to be alive in ten years?” the artist says. “Am I going to be alive? It’s a doomy feeling. It’s a memento mori.” The trope of enhancing our ability to enjoy life by forcing us to confront its brevity is also present in Kjartansson’s two projects for Venice. When the daily painting project finished and the room filled with works, it was November; the artworld had gone, there was no one there to see it: when you’re finished, you’re on your own. The second project, The End – Rocky Mountains (2009) was a multiprojection musical installation featuring lonely musicians, dwarfed by the landscape of the Canadian Rockies, playing individual parts of a musical arrangement that was finally synchronised and put together in the Venetian installation, far away. Kjartansson has been a member of several bands, most notably lead singer of Trabant (an electro glam-rock quintet). But since Trabant split after a particularly hard-going pub tour of England a few years ago, he seems more comfortable putting his music into his artwork rather than keeping the two things apart. The aesthetic of the Rocky Mountains film, of musicians alone in the elements, is repeated in one of the artist’s most recent works, The Man (2010), also shown in the Luhring Augustine exhibition. The man in question is Pinetop Perkins, who, at ninety-seven, is the oldest living Delta bluesman. In the film he plays his piano for nearly an hour, alone in a field close to his home in Texas. Kjartansson met him a year ago. “He is a complete blueprint of American cool culture. I shook his hand, and I’ve never been so starstruck.” For all that, Perkins is completely in his own world now, repeating the

same songs and tics over and over, a characteristic that is surely a draw for an artist so interested in repetition. Between songs he repeats the same jokes, the same little comedy riff and a “he he he, awwrighht”, and the same complaints about his old piano being out of tune (it’s not). The repetition has a kind of lonely stillness to it. A whole world is now just a man. Wilde began his preface to …Dorian Gray with the words‘the artist is the creator of beautiful things,’ and as Kjartansson prepares for a joint exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum and Carnegie Museum of Art he is planning to devise a performance that will not include himself, but rather his three nieces who have been performing with him from an early age. Blonde, and, as he puts it, banally beautiful, they will lie in the grand Hall of Sculptures every day on their own giant divan of sorts, reading Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath and constantly singing a harmonic melody that they have devised based on the 1954 poem ‘Song’ by Allen Ginsberg. Surrounded by the cold dead marble of busts and statues, dead faces that someone has tried to preserve, the living, breathing girls will be singing in sweet voices for six hours a day that ‘the weight of the world is love.’ Kjartansson’s work is included in Scene Shifts at Bonniers Konsthall, 29 September – 9 January; the artist will stage a new performance at the Dramaten Theatre, Stockholm to coincide with the exhibition

works (in order of appearance) The End – Venezia, September 2009 (performance shot). Commissioned by the Center for Icelandic Art. Photo: Rafael Pinho Schumann Machine, 2008 (performance shot, Manifesta 7). Photo: Wolfgang Träger Me and My Mother 2010, 2010, HD video, 20 min. Photo: Tómas Orn Tómasson God, 2007, DVD, 30 min. Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna and the Living Art Museum , Reykjavik. Photo: Rafael Pinho Two stills from The End – Rocky Mountains, 2009, five-channel HD video installation The Man, 2010, HD video, 49 min. Photo: Tómas Orn Tömasson all works Courtesy the artist, i8 Gallery, Reykjavik, and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Open for Great Art

Ai Weiwei cycling in his studio garden

Art Pilgrimage:

Nothing stays still in Beijing. Tra d i t io n a l b u i l d i n g s g e t to r n down, and ar tists priced out of studio spaces are forever in search of new ones. It ’s a disorienting situation, so what bet ter ar tistic response than a vastly expensive lavator y and a room full of fog? wo r ds : c h a r l e s da rw e n t p h otog r a p h y: h a n l e i

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Art Pilgrimage: warsaw

the opposite house is,

this and preceding pages: Ai Weiwei cycling in his studio garden; Beijing’s Caochangdi neighbourhood facing page (clockwise from top left): Three Shadows Photography Art Centre; Old China’s traditional architecture; Artist Xie Nanxing’s works at Galerie Urs Meile; Galerie Urs Meile; Galerie Urs Meile artistic director Nataline Colonnello with Urs Meile; New China’s Rem Koolhaas-designed CCTV Headquarters; artists Rong Rong & Inri at Three Shadows; Three Shadows

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by a distance of many miles, the finest hotel I have ever stayed in. It is effortlessly minimalist, but not in a way that makes you feel you have wandered in off the street smeared in excrement. Every drawer has another lovely thing in it: starched cotton bathrobes, bamboo combs, All the Plugs of the World including one that hooks up your iPhone to your cinemasize TV. I think. Then there are the presents. Each evening, you come home to find a little something in your suite, with what looks like a handwritten Post-it note stuck to it. I smudge one with a licked finger: it is handwritten. On Monday there are vintage postcards, on Tuesday a jellied facemask which, applied for 20 minutes, leaves you looking like Joan Rivers. I imagine a small person in a faraway room whose sole job it is to think up gewgaws for Opposite House guests and stick notes to them. On my last evening, I hurry home to find the note stuck to the book I have been reading. It apologises for removing the boarding pass marking my page and replacing it, my trembling fingers discover, with a sliver-thin fillet of sandalwood. It seems that the faraway person shops for each of us individually. Things start to get creepy. Ah, yes: art. If the Opposite House is New China, then what is happening across town, in Caochangdi, on Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, is pretty much Old China. Ten years ago, the city’s contemporary artists, lately evicted from the inner suburb of Yuanmingyuan to a very, very outer suburb in Tongzhou, colonised a 1950s industrial complex called Dashanzi or, less poetically, Joint Factory 718. Of the various abandoned buildings there, one, SubFactory 798, became the centre of the new art scene and gave its name to what is now an officially tolerated Art Zone. Red-flagged communism sitting alongside red-toothed capitalism in the Chinese economic model, District 798 has found itself prone to the same market pressures as Hoxton. When artists move in, so do galleries. When galleries arrive, so do cafés and clubs and shops selling the kind of nice things you find in your room at the Opposite House. Then rents go up – by around 300 percent in the case of Dashanzi. Artists of the stamp of Ai Weiwei, the best-known (he’ll be filling Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London in October) and maybe the best of the new generation of Chinese artists, quickly found themselves priced out. Ever the pioneer, Ai took himself off to a studio cum compound further out of town, in the onetime village of Caochangdi. Its steel gates are spray-painted with Ai’s trademark yellow middle finger raised in a fuck-off sign, aimed possibly at property developers and possibly at the police of the People’s Republic of China. Neither has been good to him, the former forcing him serially to move on, the latter beating him so badly last year that he was left with a clot on the brain. In spite (or perhaps because) of all this, other artists and the gallerists who show them followed Ai to Caochangdi. Among the galleries is that of Urs Meile, the Swiss dealer who has some claim to being the man who took Chinese contemporary art to the West. Like the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre a few dusty streets away, the Galerie Urs Meile was designed by Ai. Both buildings are clad in local liver-grey brick, the Three Shadows’s in a faux-dilapidated pattern that makes it look like a hutong house and thus – the People’s Republic being unsentimental folk – ripe for bulldozing. Isabelle Holden, who runs Three Shadows, walks me through the gallery, laid out around a central garden with flowering >

Art Pilgrimage: BEIJING

this page (clockwise from top left): Pace Gallery; CCTV Headquarters; 798 District; two installation views of Zhang Huan’s Free Tiger Returns to Mountains, 2010, Pace Gallery facing page (clockwise from top left): 798 District interior; artist Liu Wei’s studio; Liu Wei with his work at his studio; Liu Wei’s studio; two Beijing street scenes

98

ArtReview

ArtReview 115

this page (clockwise from top left): Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA); artist Tie Ying with his work at his studio; Tie Ying’s studio; Xu Longsen; work by artist Xu Longsen; all other images UCCA facing page: Feelings Are Facts, 2010 (installation view), UCCA

Art Pilgrimage: warsaw

trees. There is a small but functional library, funded with foreign aid, and a storeroom/archive, ditto. Holden pulls out sliding racks of work from earlier shows, including Ai’s little-known New York Photographs, taken while he was studying at Parsons in the 1980s. The whole thing has a faintly collegiate air, miles away from the razzmatazz of Dashanzi, with its Pace Gallery and plastic dinosaurs and shops selling frappuccinos. The Three Shadows is a nice place to be, and I recommend you visit it; although you should do so before 2013, when it will likely have been torn down. For the Beijing authorities, predictably, have decided that Caochangdi – with its unpaved alleys of scratching dogs and noodle stalls and red-cheeked babies – is in urgent need of redevelopment. There is form for this. To muted wails from Western conservationists, acres of Beijing’s hutongs have already been bulldozed to make way for highrises. The city’s property values have skyrocketed, and Caochangdi is on the main road from the centre of town to the airport, more or less. But the feeling persists that the real reason for wiping out the suburb is artists such as Liu Wei, who followed Ai Weiwei out of town in 2004. Much favoured by Charles Saatchi, Liu’s work is subversive in a way that is hard to pin down. A lot of it – the Indigestion series (2004–5), say – shows a morbid interest in poo. Then there is Love It! Bite It! (2005), the world’s monuments recreated in dog chews. In Liu’s studio, once a van repair shop, frowning women are restitching the Potala Palace in Tibet. Where Ai gets up the authorities’ noses by confronting them directly, Liu has found a way of working that is clearly political, except that it is impossible to say why or how. There are no up-yours fingers painted on his gates, and he has so far avoided being beaten by the police. But his studio will disappear with the rest of Caochangdi even so, and the question of where he will go next elicits a rueful shrug. Certainly not to District 798, whose main attraction, the not-for-profit Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, is the reason for my visit. The centre, opened in November 2007 by Weight Watchers millionaire Guy Ullens, owns the world’s foremost collection of Chinese contemporary art: straight ahead is Ai Weiwei’s Chandelier (2002), which set Ullens back $657,000 in 2007. But UCCA also has its problems, being widely criticised for

cultural imperialism and having lost four directors in under three years. Rumours abound that Ullens wants out. It is UCCA that paid for my Air China luxury business class ticket and my room at the Opposite House, ostensibly so I can see Feelings Are Facts (2010), a new collaborative work by Olafur Eliasson and Ma Yansong. Director of the super-hot Beijing practice MAD Architects, Ma makes work which, like Liu’s, is clever and prone to taking the piss. One reason the authorities say they tear down hutongs is that their courtyard houses lack lavatories. MAD’s answer to this is the Hutong Bubble, a bolt-on dunny cum staircase in a polished steel pod. The Bubble is shiny, beautiful and, I have no doubt, stratospherically expensive: an absurd response to the absurdity of what is going on in Beijing. Quite how Ma’s metallic wit will sit with Eliasson’s cable-stitch environmentalism, I cannot quite imagine. Opening night is packed with what look like art students. Eliasson starts first, with slides of his Berlin studio and recent work. Then Ma make his pitch, in Chinese, although – as a Yale graduate and ex-employee of Zaha Hadid – he speaks fluent English. The carousel flicks through MAD’s projects: apartment blocks in Toronto, an ideal city in Mongolia. Suddenly an image flashes up of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Before you can register it, the slide is gone, replaced by another of the Hutong Bubble and a development on the South China Sea. Nobody moves, nothing is said, no one mentions it in the Q&A afterwards. And Feelings Are Facts? UCCA’s new work is trademark Eliasson, a large room-within-a-room filled with fog dyed in aciddrop colours, its curved floor rising gently at one end. The DanishIcelandic artist makes it hard to say which way is up, and you can, if you like, read that metaphorically. Unlike his 2003 Tate Weather Project, this piece is boxed in, hidden away. That, too, seems like a metaphor. As to Ma’s contribution to Feelings Are Facts, I assume it is the installation’s plywood chamber, the box for this Chinese box trick; a piece of window dressing intended to show that the Ullens is not culturally imperialist. The message we’re meant to take away from Beijing – the reason for those first class tickets and the suite at the Opposite House – is that, art-wise, East and West get along just fine. And what of Ma’s aberrant slide, or the bulldozers at Caochangdi? I just don’t know. ArtReview 101

feature:

In the first of a trilogy of repor ts

Hong K o n g , our

from

intrepid

repor ter meets a Tu r n e r P r i ze w i n n e r at breakfast, ponders the significance of his prandial habits and wonders whether he’s going to meet some ar tworld losers in chapter t wo.

wo r ds : m a r k r a pp o lt

102 ArtReview

‘Would you like a copy of the Financial Times?’ It’s 8.55am on the first public day of the third instalment of Art Hong Kong and I’ve just sat down at a breakfast table with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Antony Gormley and two others. In five minutes Hans Ulrich and I are due to head off on a whistlestop tour of Hong Kong artists’ studios; Antony has just flown in from Australia and last night, alongside White Cube sidekick Tim Marlow, won an Intelligence Squared debate on the motion ‘You don’t need great skill to be an artist’. When it came to the audience vote, Hans Ulrich (teamed up with The Economist’s Sarah Thornton), who was against the motion, lost. Today’s FT features an interview with Gormley. I said no, but the waiter brought me one anyway. Everyone at the table is reading their own copy. Except for Antony, who’s curing his jetlag (and perhaps the aftermath of his victory celebrations) via the breakfast buffet. Bizarrely the newspaper article – an interview with the paper’s art critic, Jackie Wullschlager – is part of the ‘Lunch with the FT’ series (in which the venerable organ buys its subject lunch). Antony had vegetable risotto in a Camden gastropub; he’s tucking into some bacon in Hong Kong. Jackie informs us the risotto was the cheapest thing on offer. It cost £9.50 and included morels, peas, broad beans, basil and Parmesan. Jackie is keen to suggest that an artist’s diet reflects their art; her point, inasmuch as there is one, seems to be that ‘his uncompromising conceptual focus is matched by asceticism at lunch’. I don’t know what the bacon means – in any case, Antony might already have consumed some of the dim sum or congee that I passed on the way in. Last night, during the great debate, Marlow was playing to the audience by dangling a kangaroo scrotum Gormley had bought him as a souvenir of his trip to Oz. What did that mean? I end up muttering commisulations and then we head off.

Perhaps the breakfast highlights the fact that now that Hong Kong is becoming an ‘art place to be’, there are two sides to this year’s fair. The Western megastars and their galleries are in: Damien Hirst has a solo booth and one of his formaldehyde pieces featuring a skull and dove just sold for a reported $2.6 million to a buyer from Taiwan, there’s an allover sprinkle of Gormley and Julian Opie, while the familiar blue-chip galleries such as White Cube, Lisson Gallery, The Modern Institute, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Galerie Lelong, Emmanuel Perrotin, Lehmann Maupin, James Cohan, Arndt, Leo Castelli, Sperone Westwater and Marianne Boesky all have booths. The quirky local galleries that made last year’s fair such a blast are being drowned out. Every fashion house and anyone on the social scene is hosting or attending the parties. It’s a dilemma for fairs like this – how to balance the big buck with the local flavour that makes this different from any other art fair round the world. While you can barely move in the fair on the public days, the Hong Kong Contemporary Art Biennial – founded in 1975 and on show over the bay at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, and apparently the main outlet for contemporary art in the territory – is deserted. Most of the Western visitors to the fair are completely unaware that it exists. Or if they do know, most don’t care. Any ‘Eastern’ discoveries they make will probably be at spaces like Hanart TZ and Osage, or, at the fair, in the form of works by established artists such as Yoshitoma Nara’s standout cargo box installation at Tomio Koyama Gallery and a revealing solo presentation of Aya Takano at Perrotin. Revealingly, although Hong Kong businessman David Tang provided much of the entertainment at last year’s Intelligence Squared debate, all of the speakers this year were from the West. That looks like being reflected in the much-hyped HK$21.6 billion West Kowloon Cultural District – a new cultural and entertainment development – which will occupy a massive 40 hectares of the island and designed to attract (presumably wealthy) cultural tourists from around the globe. It has Graham Sheffield, formerly of London’s Barbican Centre, as its chief executive officer and Lars Nittve, formerly of Tate Modern and the Moderna Museet, will be executive officer of M+, the art museum that will be its centrepiece. Following an interview with the Swede, Hong Kong’s Standard had this to say: ‘Admitting to a lack of understanding of the local arts scene, the 30-year veteran said he will liaise with local stakeholders soon after he takes office next year.’

One presumes he’ll be ‘liaising’ with the hugely influential not-for-profit space Para/Site (who are helping to organise my impending studio tour). The other day, in keeping with the bizarre layering of eastern and western art scenes, they hosted a talk by Hans Ulrich Obrist, which took place within an exhibition documenting an East–West dialogue between artists-cumarchitects Vito Acconci and Ai Weiwei, in which the curator described his own involvement – mainly via Western institutions – in art and architecture crossovers. Whatever the Acconci–Weiwei discourse had been was lost in the double filter of having been turned into an exhibition that then hosted a talk about a parallel, but ultimately not directly related experience. Let’s hope West Kowloon, whenever it happens, doesn’t do the same. Breakfast and lunch with the FT? And a double filtered brew? Time for some action. And now we’re going truly local, even if we are climbing into an air-conditioned Mercedes, heading into the maze of skyscrapers and the studios beyond. Next month: Outsiders – the studio marathon and the Hollywood star

works (in order of appearance)

Intelligence Squared Asia May 2010 debate photos courtesy Intelligence Squared Asia Installation shots from ART HK 10 Photos: Gareth Brown

Elemental Susan Derges Texts by Mel Gooding, David Chandler, Charlotte Cotton, Christopher Bucklow, Mark Haworth-Booth and Martin Kemp ISBN 978-3-86930-150-1

Marc Jacobs Advertising 1998 - 2009 Juergen Teller 576 pages, 700 colour plates Clothbound hardcover with dust jacket ISBN 978-3-86521-715-8

Sign Painting Project Francis Alÿs 300 photographs, four colour printing thoughout ISBN 978-3-86521-290-0

Contraband Taryn Simon

Before Colour William Eggleston

ISBN 978-3-86930-134-1

With an essay by Dave Hickey 200 pages, 152 quadratone plates ISBN 978-3-86930-122-8

Works on Paper David Lynch

Past Present Peru John Cohen

528 pages, 500 plates Four colour printing throughout ISBN 978-3-86930-103-3

Two clothbound hardcover books One album with 3 music CDs One album with 5 film DVDs ISBN 978-3-86930-103-7

Lewis Baltz WORKS

Outside Inside Bruce Davidson

Text by Hans Ulrich Obrist 500 pages, 1075 colour plates

Ten volumes housed in a slipcase Containing reissues of Baltz’s most significant books as well as four unpublished projects ISBN 978-3-86930-114-3

Three clothbound hardcover volumes housed in a slipcase 944 pages, tritone plates throughout ISBN 978-3-86521-908-4

Steidl Books

available at all good bookstores & online at steidlville.com

Regent’s Park, London 14–17 October 2010 www.frieze.com

Tickets available from +44 (0) 871 230 3452 www.seetickets.com

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

Media partner

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

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

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

Main sponsor Deutsche Bank

issue no.01 vol.xvii

ALSO In this issue: Scrambled eggs: Market and Culture W 

INTERNATIONAL FAIR OF CONTEMPORARY ART IN TORINO • 5-7 NOVEMBER 2010 • OVAL lingotto fiere

This year artissima is moving to the Oval, a pavilion built for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Turin. The pavilion consists of a single large hall of approximately 20,000 square metres with a vast undulating glass wall in which the various sections of the fair will be held.The fair will have two main parts: one dedicated to the participating galleries, who will appear in the main section or in the present future or new entries sections; the other part will be the curatorial programme and its numerous related events. Both parts will relate to and complement each other.90 galleries from Italy and abroad, chosen by the Selection Committee, will appear in the main section. Furthermore, this year the number of new entries will rise from 20 to 30 galleries, all of which have opened since 2005 and will be taking part in artissima for the first time.

Discovery and Re-discovery W

Main Section W

Contamination vs. Dispersion W

A group of young artists, presented by their galleries in a special exhibition area inside artissima, has been invited by a team of international curators: Mai Abu ElDahab, Richard Birkett, Thomas Boutoux and Luigi Fassi (coordinator). present future will take the form of a small exhibition of emerging artists – a showcase for public and critics. During the fair, a jury of international critics and curators made up of Richard Flood, Polly Staple and Adam Szymczyk will assign the illy present future award to the most significant project.

Athens); Dadamaino (Carlina, Turin); Noël Dolla (Dominique Fiat, Paris); Koji Enokura (McCaffrey, New York); Franco Guerzoni (Nicoletta Rusconi, Milan); Jan Håfström (Fruit & Flower Deli / Andreas Brändström, New York, Stockholm); Carmen Herrera (Arratia, Beer, Berlin); Paolo Icaro (Massimo Minini, Brescia); Michel Journiac (Patricia Dorfmann, Paris); Birgit Jürgenssen (Hubert Winter, Vienna); Maria Lai (Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin); John Latham (Lisson Gallery, London); Bob Law (Thomas Dane, London); Adolf Luther (401contemporary, Berlin); Anna Maria Maiolino (Raffaella Cortese, Milan); Antoni Miralda (Senda, Barcelona); Hitoshi Nomura (McCaffrey, New York); Gianni Pettena (Enrico Fornello, Milan); Sylvia Sleigh (I-20, New York); Goran Trbuljak (Gregor Podnar, Berlin); Gil J.Wolman (Lara Vincy, Paris).

by the architectural collective raumlaborberlin that will take the form of a life-size maquette of an exhibition space designed to facilitate cross-fertilisation between different disciplines.Housed within the fair, this large structure will contain a number of spaces for the various areas of art explored: dance, cinema, literature, design and education.A ‘project within a project’, the house of contamination will act as a study for a future museum or cultural centre – a practical prototype that will be experimented with during the fair. sections in this programme include: all the rest is literature,

a literary salon curated by Vincenzo Latronico; the dancers, a dance programme curated by Anthony Huberman;

thinking through cinema

[Deep Red], a series of reinterpretations of the cult film of the same title, curated by Benjamin

The traditional fair catalogue format will be transformed into three publications, each performing a different function: a small diary with details about the participating galleries and artists; a ‘do-it-yourself’ catalogue to be put together during artissima, which will be received as an empty folder for visitors to fill with fact files and other literature produced by the galleries and section curators; and palinsesto, a magazine to be published in early October, which will contain information about the fair and its participants. The magazine will feature esCook and Mike Sperlinger; urban genoma says by the curators of the project, a series of interdifferent sections together views with the mayors of with project descriptions, large cities about their role illustrations and backstage as cultural and urban deanecdotes regarding this signers, curated by Joseph complex event. This year’s programme, Grima and Pedro Reyes; poesia in forma di rosa typography, a project (Poetry in the Shape of a consisting of the applicaRose), takes its title from tion and explication of a the book of poems pubnew font by Dexter SinisSPONSORED BY lished by Pier Paolo Paso- ter; pickpocket almanack, lini after his cinema debut. an imaginary travelling It focuses on visual artists university organised by -65+(A065,;690564<:,0 who also find expression in Joe del Pesco and 9LNPVUL7PLTVU[L other creative disciplines Dominic Willsdon. 7YV]PUJPHKP;VYPUV such as architecture, design, *P[[nKP;VYPUV literature, cinema and dance. *HTLYHKPJVTTLYJPV artissima 17 will investigate KP;VYPUV these boundary worlds and *VTWHNUPHKP:HU7HVSV -VUKHaPVULWLYS»(Y[L attempt to discover what 4VKLYUHL*VU[LTWVYHULH conditions may best lead *9; to a greater integration of 4HPU7HY[ULY the arts.

A new feature in 2010, back to the future is a special section of the fair that will include a series of monographic exhibitions by artists who were active in the 1960s and 70s and have not received the attention they deserve in recent decades, but whose works are of particular relevance today owing to their affinity with current practice.The exhibitions will contain works produced solely between 1960 and 1979.This section is a time machine that brings into the present what had been a future in the past – in other words, what the avant garde was doing in the 1960s and 70s.For this purpose, a Scientific Committee has been established, whose members are: Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, and Director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan; Christine Macel, Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Jessica Morgan, Contemporary Art Curator, Tate Modern, London. It has selected 24 projects: Nanni Balestrini (Giacomo Guidi & MG, Rome); Gianfranco Baruchello The dedicated multi-arts (Michael Janssen, Berlin); programme will be held at Bill Bollinger (Häusler the house of contaminaContemporary, Zurich); tion, a temporary project Vlassis Caniaris (Kalfayan,

1


Listings Museums and Galleries United States, New York DOOSAN Gallery 533 West 25th Street NewYork, NY 10001 [email protected] Open Tue – Sat 10–6 Nakhee Sung 2 Sep – 16 Oct The Pace Gallery 32 East 57th Street T +1 (212) 421-3292 Tue – Fri 9.30– 6 Sat 10-6 www.thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace 17 Sep – 23 Oct The Pace Gallery 534 West 25th Street T +1 (212) 929-7000 Tue–Sat 10 – 6 www.thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace 17 Sep – 23 Oct 545 West 22nd Street T +1 (212) 989-4258 Tue – Sat 10 – 6 www.thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace 17 Sep – 23 Oct 510 West 25th Street T +1 (212) 255.4044 Tue – Sat 10 – 6 www.thepacegallery.com 50 Years at Pace 17 Sep – 23 Oct Michael Werner Gallery 4 East 77th Street New York, NY 10075 Open Mon– Sat 10 – 6 www.michaelwerner.com [email protected] L&M Arts 45 E 78th Street New York, NY 1007 T +1 (212) 861 0020 Open Tue – Sat 10 – 5.30 [email protected] www.lmgallery.com Damien Hirst: The Medicine Cabinets 28 Oct – 11 Dec UNITED KINGDOM, LONDON Albemarle Gallery 49 Albemarle Street, London W15 4JR T +44 (0)20 7499 1616 [email protected] Colectiva Figurativa Espanola 10 – 30 Sep

Alexia Goethe Gallery 7 Dover Street, London, W1S 4LD T +44 (0)20 7629 0090 www.alexiagoethegallery.com Alexander de Cadenet Life-Force 24 Sep - 19 Nov Barbican Gallery Barbican Centre, Silk Street London , EC2Y 8DS T +44 (0)20 7638 4141 www.barbican.org.uk [email protected] John Bock The Surreal House to 12 Sep Camden Arts Centre Arkwright Road, London NW3 6DG T +44 (0)20 7472 5500 Jim Hodges to 5 Sep FAS (Fine Art Society) 148 New Bond Street, London W1S 2JT T +44 (0)20 7629 5116 www.faslondon.com [email protected] Jason Martin : The Roaring Forties 15 Sep – 7 Oct Herald Street 2 Herald Street, London E2 6JT +44 (0)20 7168 2566 [email protected] www.heraldst.com Pablo Bronstein from 18 Sep Simon Lee Gallery 12 Berkeley Street, London W1J 8DT +44 (0)20 7491 0100 www.simonleegallery.com Barbaric Freedom to 11 Sep White Cube Gallery 25-26 Mason’s Yard, London SW1Y 6BU +44 (0)20 7930 5373 www.whitecube.com Darren Almond: The Principle Of Moments 3 Sep – 2 Oct Whitechapel Gallery 77-82 Whitechapel High Street London, E1 7QX +44 (0)20 7522 7888 www.whitechapelgallery.org Alice Neel: Painted Truths Until 17 Sep

UNITED KINGDOM Cornerhouse 70 Oxford Street, Manchester M1 5NH T+44 (0)161 200 1500 www.cornerhouse.org T +44 (0)20 7638 4141 Unrealised Potential/ Unrealised Projects Until 12 Sep Abandon Normal Devices 1 Oct – 7 Oct

Tim Van Laere Gallery Verlatstraat 23-25 2000 Antwerp T +32 (0)3 257 14 17 www.timvanlaeregallery.com Xavier Hufkens Rue Saint-Georges 6–8 1050 Brussels T +32 2 6396730 www.xavierhufkens.com Group exhibition 9 Sep – 23 Oct

Eastside Projects 86 Heath Mill Lane, Digbeth, Birmingham, B9 4AR T +44 (0)7976 403 696 T +44 (0)121 771 1778 www.eastsideprojects.org [email protected] Jennifer Tee Sept – Nov 2010

ZENO X GALLERY Leopold De Waelplaats 16 B-2000 Antwerp T +32 32 161 626 zeno-x.com Raoul De Keyser 9 Sep – 16 Oct

Ikon Gallery 1 Oozells Square, Brindleyplace Birmingham, B1 2HS ikon-gallery.co.uk T +44 (0) 121 248 0708 This Could Happen To You: Ikon in the 1970’s Until 5 Sep

Muzeum Montanelli Nerudova 13 118 01 Prague T +42 025 753 1220 www.muzeummontanelli.com Daniel Pešta: Levitation

AUSTRIA

atelier clot bramsen Atelier Clot Bramsen, 19 rue Vieille du Temple, 75004 Paris T +33607968552 www.pia-myrvold.com Pia MYworLD 18 Sept – 23 Oct

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Mirabellplatz 2, 5020 Salzburg T +43 662 881 393 www.ropac.net Sylvie Fleury 29 Aug – 25 Sept kusthalle wien Halle 1, Halle 2 Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien www.kunsthallewien.at Galerie hubert winter Breite Gasse 17 A-1070 Wien T +43 (0)1524 09 76 www.galeriewinter.at Belgium Galerie Almine Rech 20 Rue de l’Abbaye B-1050 Brussels T +32 26 485 684 www.alminerech.com Galerie BaronianFrancey 2 rue Isidore Verheyden 1050 Brussels T +32 25 12 9295 www.baronianfrancey.com

czech republic

FRANCE

Fondation Cartier 261 Boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris T +33-1-42185650 www.fondation.cartier.com Beat Takeshi Kitano to 12 Sep FIAC Grand Palais & Louvre Paris www.fiac.com Galerie Almine Rech 19, rue de Saintonge 75003 Paris Tel +33 1 45 83 71 90 www.galeriealminerech.com Galerie Olivier Houg 45 Quai Rambaud 69002 Lyon T +33 4 78 42 98 50 olivierhoug.com

Chateau de versailles 78000 Versailles T +1 30 83 78 00 www.galerieperrotin.com Murakami Versailles 14 Sep – 12 Dec Galerie ThaddAeus Ropac 7, rue Debelleyme 75003 Paris T +33 1 42 72 99 00 www.ropac.net GERMANY BUCHMANN GALERIE Charlottenstrasse 13 10969 Berlin www.buchmanngalerie.com DEUTSCHE GUGGENHEIM Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin T +49 (0)30 20 2093 www.deutsche-guggenheim.de Being Singular Plural to 1 Oct VW (VENEKLASEN/WERNER) Rudi-Dutschke-Str. 26, 10969 Berlin T + 49 30 81 61 60418 www.vwberlin.com Continuous Projections: Martin Arnold, Gary Beydler, Phil Solomon and Fred Worden, curated by William E. Jones 14 Sep – 23 Oct Greece Frissiras Museum 3 Monis Asteriou Plaka, Athens T +30 2103 234678 or +30 2103 316027 www.frissirasmuseum.com Iceland i8 Gallery Tryggvagata 16 101 Reykjavík T +354 551 3666 www.i8.is ireland IMMA (Irish Museum of Modern Art) Royal Hospital, Military Road, Kilmainham, Dublin 8 T +353-1-612-9922 www.imma.ie Graphic Studio: 50 Years in Dublin from 8 Sep

ITALy ARTISSIMA 17 International Fair of Contmporary ArtTurín www.artissima.it 5 – 7 Nov

MUSAC – Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Castilla y Leon Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24 24008 León T +34 987 09 00 00 www.musac.es

Cardi Black Box Corso di Porta Nuova 38 20124 Milan T+39 02 45 478 189 www.cardiblackbox.com Painting Extravaganza Oct 2010

Switzerland

Collezione Maramotti Via Fratelli Cervi 66 Reggio Emilia T+39 05 22 382 484 www.collezionemaramotti.org Jacob Kassay: Untitled to 3 Oct

Kunsthalle Zürich 16, rue du Simplon 1207 Geneva T +41 227 005 151 www.kunsthallezurich.ch

GALLERIA PACK Foro Bonaparte, 60 20121 Milan T +39 02 86 996 395 www.galleriapack.com Matteo Basilé Sep 2010 MAXXI- Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo Via Guido Reni, 4A 00196 Rome T +39 06 32 101 829 www.maxxi.beniculturali.it Riccardo Crespi Via Mellerio n° 1 20123 Milano T +39 02 89 072 491 www.riccardocrespi.com NETHERLANDS GRIMM FINE ART Keizersgracht 82 1015 CT Amsterdam T +31 (0)20 422 7227 grimmfineart.com Nick van Woert: She Wolf 4 Sep – 23 Oct SPAIN GALERIA HELGA de ALVEAR c/ Doctor Fourquet 12 28012 Madrid T +34 91 468 0506 helgadealvear.com Helena Almeida 16 Sep – 30 Oct

Galerie Bertrand & Gruner Limmatstrasse 270 CH-8005 Zurich www.bertrand-gruner.com

migrosmuseum für gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 Postfach 1766 CH-8005 Zürich www.migrosmuseum.ch Galerie Urs Meile Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne T +41 (0) 41 420 33 18 www.galerieursmeile.com Xie Nanxing: Stepfather has an idea! 5 Sep – 5 Nov Ai Weiwei 2 Oct – 4 Dec Turkey Sakip Sabanci Museum Sakıp Sabancı Cad. No:42 Emirgan 34467 İstanbul T +90 212 277 22 00 www.muze.sabanciuniv.edu China Galerie Urs Meile No. 104, Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang, Chaoyang District, PRC - 100015 Beijing Tel: +86 (0) 10 643 333 93, www.galerieursmeile.com Homeland: Painting the Moment - Painting Slowness 4 Sep – 31 Oct

HONG KONG 10 CHANCERY LANE GALLERY G/F, 10 Chancery Lane, SoHo, Central, Hong Kong T +852 2810 0065 Open Tue – Sat 10– 6 [email protected] 10chancerylanegallery.com iPRECIATION Modern Shop LG3, Jardine House, 1 Connaught Place, Central, Hong Kong T +852 2537 8869 ipreciation.com THE BIRCH FOUNDATION ArtisTree, 1/F Cornwall House, TaiKoo Place, Island East, Hong Kong T +852 2810 0065/852 6280 2309 [email protected] Open 10 – 8 www.thebirchfoundation.com japan TOKYO GALLERY + BTAP 7F, 8-10-5 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061 T +81-3-3571-1808 [email protected] www.tokyo-gallery.com Hiroyuki Matsuura: Super Acrylic Skin – Sweet Addiction 1 – 25 Sep TAIWAN Da Xiang Art Space 15 Boguan Road, North District, Taichung, Taiwan T +886-4-2208-4288 www.daxiang.com.tw Curated by Zhang Yu: Back to the essence-from ink painting to ink to 26 Sep BRAZIL Galeria Fortes Vilaca Rua Fradique Coutinho 1500 05416-001 São Paulol T +55 11 3032 7066 www.fortesvilaca.com.br Galeria Luisa Strina Rua Oscar Freire 502 01426-000 São Paulo/SP T +55 11 3088 2417 www.galerialuisastrina.com.br

ArtReview 109

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Rear View September

Reviews Books The Strip On the Town Off the Record

ArtReview 111

REVIEWS:

UK

People in the artworld get nervous when the art on the walls appears to be pointing back at the situation it finds itself in, at the conditions that govern the exchange and circulation of its meaning. No more so than when, in an age of globalised art markets and shifting geopolitical power, the art is pointing to the friction between the chic transnationalism of the global artworld and the more fraught local realities of any one cultural–national scene. So Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein’s From Mordor with Love lampoons Western prejudices about Russia’s ‘rogue state’ society and culture, presenting a parodic suite of geometric abstract paintings that can only be contemplated while listening to growling, juddering death metalbacked rap by the artist, which is playing loudly on the gallery PA. According to Pepperstein, a BBC documentary on JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings books (1954–5) suggested that Mordor (the cursed domain of the tyrant Sauron) was a coded stand-in for Russia. Well, if that’s what you think From Mordor with Love of us, suggests Pepperstein, here we are – From Mordor with Love. “You think we are goblins/No, we are much worse than them!/You think we are jokers/ Cocksuckers and motherfuckers from the gloomy land living with no glam!” taunts Pepperstein, while you try to make sense of a painting like English Square (all works 2010), a black and yellow Union Jack with a Malevich-style square at its centre. Across the top is scrawled ‘Britains never never will be slaves!’ in blood-red, the crappy spelling revealing the voice of the outsider as it ventriloquises the nineteenth-century nationalism of Rule Britannia. In USA Square the black square replaces the white stars and blue ground of the Stars and Stripes, while the red and white stripes are overwritten with lyrics from Pepperstein’s incessant, obstreperous rap. Cultural identity, nationhood, political history and art history are here reforged in a furnace of comic bad taste, of the insubordinate foreigner giving the imperial hegemon the finger – Malevich’s black square operating as a sort of confused nostalgic badge of (Soviet) Russia’s once-pioneering position in the artistic avant-garde. But Pepperstein’s conflation of European constructivist geometry and American hard-edged abstraction also serves to pit the effete elitism and political indifference that this Modernism came to represent against the raucous, unsophisticated demands of all those who were excluded from its increasingly rarefied discourse. And to complicate things even further, Pepperstein infects his geometric designs with little spirals or curlicues – a form consistently rejected by modernist rationalism, and tangled up, perhaps, with the medieval antimodernism of reactionaries like Tolkien. Pepperstein’s posturing is of course cheerful in the knowledge that the hegemony of ‘us’ Limeys and Yanks has largely passed, while the sideways glances towards Russia’s shadowy world of international oligarchs – with their dirty fingers in the art market! – are the splutterings of nations no longer sure of their place in the world. Join the club, seems to be the artist’s message. Downstairs, The Dying Gangster depicts a bloodied man slumped against a set of declining bar graphs. On his hat is written ‘Capitalism’, while his erect penis, facing back at him, wears a helmet marked ‘Russia’. Caught up in the gears of politics, money and glamour, it’s hard for art to stage the politics of being the loser this well, and Pepperstein is a very winning loser. J.J. Charlesworth

Pavel Pepperstein

The Flag of Mordor, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. Courtesy Regina Gallery, London & Moscow

112 ArtReview

Regina Gallery, London 29 June – 1 September

reviews: UK

Tasters’ Choice

For years, art and design have colluded in collectors’ homes, but only the chosen few have been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of it. With Tasters’ Choice Stephen Friedman has changed that, turning what is usually private over for public scrutiny. Six collectors, including the influential Cindy and Howard Rachofsky, Susana and Ricardo Steinbruch, and Joel Wachs, were invited to each select works by four artists who play an important role in their collection. Six domestic environments were then fashioned using the artworks and furniture selected by the interior designer and dealer Vance Trimble. The result is a series of installations rendered as domestic spaces - an entrance hall, a library, a sitting and dining room, and a bedroom – that are divided between the gallery’s two main spaces. In the ‘Library’ a bookcase by Mogens Koch runs alongside a chaise longue by Arne Vodder. A Poul Kjaerholm chair slips comfortably into place under a Nanna Ditzel desk. Three ink on paper drawings by Paul Chan (all 2009) sit on the wall above the desk. This would make for quite a neat installation if it wasn’t for the large and powerful collage by Thomas Hirschhorn and Marcus Steinweg (2007) on the opposite wall to Chan’s drawings, striking a marked contrast with the rest of the installation in both style and mood. The ‘Sitting Room’ is more unusual as a whole, since the scene that is set – including another Kjaerholm chair, a Tapio Wirkkala table and a couch by Illum Wikkelsø, this time contrasted with a spatially disorienting painting executed in bold hues by Franz Ackermann (1996) – feels as though it is being observed by a Styrofoam and paint camera by Tom Friedman (2010), as if the installation was a setup for a photo shoot for an interior design magazine. While each of the installations uses one artwork to create a formal tension with the rest of the artworks and designs in its grouping, the exhibition is at its most interesting at this precise point: when an artwork is used to create a jog in perception and context by seemingly commenting on the premise of the exhibition as a whole. At the very least, Tasters’ Choice is an Stephen Friedman Gallery, London inspired take on the ubiquitous summer group 12 June – 17 July show of gallery artists staged by many galleries. At most, it does have a deeper agenda: to represent the private aesthetic predilections of collectors whose influence on museums through their donations as patrons and roles on boards is ubiquitous. A decade or so ago this subject would have been ripe for an institutional critique by Andrea Fraser or Fred Wilson. While a repetition of those techniques would be farcical, at times it would have been interesting to see more of a tension between the different approaches the collectors have, highlighted by more of the artworks producing some kind of reflexive comment on the installations. As it was, the stylist had done his job a little too well and the exhibition was perhaps a little too smooth. Alex Coles

Collector Dimitris Daskalopoulos’s selection of works for the ‘Library’. Photo: Stephen White. © and courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

ArtReview 113

REVIEWS: uk

Wilkinson, London 2 July – 15 August

Room Divider One enters this group exhibition – on what it is that makes Modernism so different, so appealing today – with the expectation of being in safe hands, for it’s been curated by writer and critic Michael Bracewell. Even so, the experience is akin to a cool breeze down the back of the neck in a post office queue. Bracewell’s reductive approach to the job of ‘auditing’ the movement’s major themes and motifs gives one the sense of order imposed, a route through the historical mire, despite the diversity of the selection, which includes Italian product design and a ballet score. This is not a survey-style exhibition, but rather an intuitive response to the circularity of our preoccupation with the modern and the sense of (time) fracture its reinvention evokes. Bracewell situates the viewer between American and European sensibilities via two text fragments: from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) and from the sleeve note of Roxy Music’s debut album, Roxy Music (1972). Both speak of the difficulty of locating the present at the point of cultural turn. A 1936 photograph of a Black Mountain College performance taken (and likely inspired) by tutor and Bauhaus artist Xanti Schawinsky, meanwhile, offers a Venn-diagrammatic glimpse of the past as if to summon a flavour of the era’s legacy: the perceived romance, perhaps, of a comparatively politically engaged and contextualisable period of interdisciplinary experimentation. In the starkly organised downstairs space, this sense of dislocation and the viral nature of appropriation central to the exhibition are brought into physical play. In Hanna Schwarz’s spare film I Love the Body (2009), an androgynous woman strikes avant-garde theatrical poses in the punk/new wave-revivalist spirit of contemporary music videos. On an adjacent wall, Tim Head’s squirming grid of computer data in real time (Sweet Bird, 2004) brings to mind the condition of light on the closed eye – extraordinary pixelations that seem born of machinic, as opposed to biological, processes. The narrator of Simon Martin’s 2006 film on Memphis Design’s classic 1981 114 ArtReview

Carlton room divider, in the upstairs project space, describes the influence of design on the everyday as if some form of cultural contagion, creating “a place of perpetual refurbishment and all-purpose vernacular”. An actual Carlton in the main gallery lives up to the role prescribed as totemic exhibition centrepiece, its spikily retro, half-decorative, halffunctional laminate surfaces offering associative segues into the various designs for life all around. Christoph Schellberg creates a stylistic contradiction out of the pursuit of trends (for both craft and mass-produced objects) with his neighbouring panelled screen, for each apparently naff ceramic-tile formation has been lovingly reproduced in squares of batik (St Barth, 2010). While Linder’s charred LP, on which cover-girl Karen Carpenter appears with flowery innards (Charming Maid, 2007), also reminds of the market and other forces shaping what it is we ‘see’. One might take any single work here and extract some sense of ‘now’ from it, but Bracewell’s point appears less about the modern shape of things than the compulsion to locate it. If looking for a map, however, one could do a lot worse than Richard Hamilton’s graphic interior Chiara and Chair (2004) – its disappearance point (a ballistic blob in the middledistance) describing, perhaps, that attempt to separate the many layers of self and high- and low-cultural reference. Rebecca Geldard

Room Divider, 2010 (installation view). Photo: Peter White. Courtesy Wilkinson, London

reviews: UK

Andrew Cross The Solo

The Solo, 2010. Photo: Stuart Whipps

Ikon Eastside, Birmingham 1 July – 25 July

Time is mobilised weirdly in Andrew Cross’s art. The English artist’s photographs and videos of trains and railways and, recently, locations for 1970s rock festivals – now silent green fields – feel wedded to the past but situate one in the present, in an expectancy only a shade away from tedium. It’s fitting, then, that his two-screen film, The Solo (2010), takes as its locus a historical phenomenon which has cleaved many an audience between rapture and regret: the drum solo. If Cross delights in the unhip – or at least the questionable or maligned, like trainspotting – then in Carl Palmer, whose soloing is this film’s burden of action, he may have found his perfect subject. The ‘Palmer’ in 1970s progressive rock supergroup Emerson, Lake and Palmer, voted the tenth greatest drummer of all time by Rolling Stone (they put the guy from Rush first; let’s debate!), Palmer is seen here spotlit in a black room. His kit is the flashy, many-segmented, most probably heavily sponsored sort that the world’s tenth best drummer deserves, replete with weirdly shaped and decorated cymbals and the sticksman’s signature spread over double kick drums. As Palmer rolls out a multipart solo for around 40 minutes, and as we realise the Ikon’s second space is seat-free, we’re transported – back, if we’re old enough – to that special moment in the gig where it’s time to use the toilet or (for some people) to get really, really excited. Disastrously for hipsters, Palmer makes it interesting. Man and instrument are impressively fused: Palmer, caressing and pummelling his kit, evidently knows intimately what it can do. Moving from a rat-a-tat solo for snare to an intricate, gamelanlike movement for cymbals to an all-out rock assault where his hands outpace the shutter speed, he reminds one that drummer jokes (eg, how can you tell when the stage is level? The drool is coming out both sides of the drummer’s mouth, ho ho) don’t account for the fierce maths aptitude and mind-bending coordination you need to smash skins and metal really well. Palmer, particularly without Keith Emerson going theatrically berserk at the keyboard, is a phenomenon – or he must be if he can make me sit on Ikon’s cold floor for three-quarters of an hour. Then, with a final fussy ping, it ends: no context, nothing. You’re left with your thoughts, which are going to be at least partly about taste, sincerity and knowingness. Art – classy filming, and the self-aware context of Cross’s work – here makes Palmer a serious proposition rather than a punchline. And in any case, he isn’t really one any more: among those bearded Brooklyn musicians who constitute contemporary rock’s avant-garde, difficult time signatures, song-suites and prog-style gestures are now de rigueur. The Solo is thus as much about time’s relentless loops as anything; but its most salient moments might be those where a viewer is bored. At those points, the imprisoning one-way street of video art – you can’t fast-forward it, you probably haven’t got a seat – finds its reflexive analogue in precisely what is represented here. Meanwhile, oblivious to all that, Palmer gearswitches with wizardly grace into another passage of 9/8 on the ride cymbal and 5/4 on the kick, and unleashes a hailstorm of flam paradiddles. Martin Herbert

ArtReview 115

REVIEWS:

USA

Chase, 2009-10 (production still), digital c-print, 30 x 46 cm

Liz Magic Laser Chase

Derek Eller Gallery, New York 21 May – 26 June

In Liz Magic Laser’s new video Chase (2010), an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s play Man Equals Man (1926), she fiddles with the Venn-diagram boundaries of relational aesthetics and theatre to create a new categorical sliver that, though not entirely fleshed out, does feel like novel territory. Laser successfully manages to harness Brechtian ideals in both the concept of the work and in the fortunate accidents that she incorporates as part of her delivery. The video, which runs slightly longer than two hours, consists of a series of clips of solo actors executing their lines in various Chase ATM lobbies and vestibules across New York City; the clips have been spliced together to recreate Man Equals Man as a whole. Laser has enlisted the help of friends, dancers and professional actors to play the parts of four soldiers in British colonial India who, after vandalising a temple, forcibly recruit a naive passerby to replace the comrade among them who has injured himself in the act. What follows is the transformation of a dullard into a killing machine. One of Brecht’s top concerns in this play is the fungibility of human life in contemporary society, and Laser’s choice of location perfectly serves this purpose. The actors’ reliance on the particularities of their respective sets (many aim their lines directly at the machine consoles), as well as their interactions with strangers passing through, create layers of subtext that buoy the narrative. The entire video is peppered with brilliant moments of double entendre and comedic punning, as when the character Jesse Mahoney ‘wounds’ himself in trying to extract his finger from the bank-card slot that grants entry to the ATM vestibule, or when Uriah Shelley is moving through the revolving doors below a giant blue Chase sign and declares, “This is a shocking establishment!” Laser makes full use of her locations to steer the narrative in the direction of agitprop, further sharpening Brecht’s original lines into arrows aimed at the international banking industry (the source of so many recent societal ills) or a more general Orwellian ‘corporation’. The execution is not without its drawbacks. The sound is frustratingly problematic, verging more than occasionally on the inaudible or indistinguishable. Jump cuts make not only for a disjointed audio narrative but also, as the frame shifts with every change in speaker, a tiresome one to follow visually. It would have been a good idea to subtitle the piece, a simple and effective way to ever-so-lightly draw a safety net beneath a delivery that falters at times given the experimental nature of the shooting. Nevertheless, it may be that the slight dismantling of the delivery is what allows for the effectiveness of Laser’s fortuitously loaded meanings. While flawed, this ambitious piece provides an entertaining, if lengthy, experience over which to consider whether man does really equal man or, here literally, machine – always a topical issue, and never more than today. T.J. Carlin

116 ArtReview

reviews: USA

Visitors to 438 Union Avenue may be surprised to note that scrappy gallery Klaus von Nichtssagend appears to have gone the way of other mid-noughties Brooklyn establishments, replaced by a white-on-white outpost of Apple-esque technology prototypes, courtesy of artist Alex Dodge and his registered LLC, Generative. There, on a grey trade-show carpet within a perimeter of recessed fluorescents, a visitor can lounge prone on a massage table and lose not a New York multitasking minute, thanks to a suspended computer workstation, or admire the sheen and finishing of Wearable Interface (GEN-1J) (all works 2010), a ‘cross-seasonal jacket’ equipped with onboard processor, USB ports and microphones, which provides real-time responses to a user’s environment, be it a wooded terrain or (likelier) rooftop cocktail party. The fibrous Haptic-Synth shirt, which would have been at home in the S/S 10 Rick Owens collection – or antique undershirt emporium – gains in the way of chic from an allover grid of touch sensor ‘cells’, which users can programme to pair with specific devices. Good looks notwithstanding, aesthetics is but a hook to get this shirt onto the consumer body, and get the consumer back in touch with her nonvisual faculties. An accompanying rubber widget, customised to fit a user’s hand and fingers, conjures a porcelain joystick as conceived by a medieval votary. Better that the future be cold-cast in the fetishes of the past, in other words, than stitched into the black leather and vinyl that made Keanu and Carrie-Anne such pedantic dystopians. Sociotechnological immersion, our lifestyle brands now insistently promise, will lead the way to utopian possibility – though that road, it must be said, will be paved with products. In this sense, Dodge’s exhibition does an admirable job of capturing the ambivalence that many of us feel at the fact that ours is a future to be consumed, and that our relationship to the key Generative companies offering this up can no longer be tenably polarised along the little man/big man axis. This complexity is aptly conjured by Dodge’s occupying a position that is not wholly satirical, critical or fannish. To the artworld’s long history of performative corporatisation, he delivers the real deal, through actual incorporation; and through exacting personal and collaborative labour, he produces prototypes for interfaces that are potentially realisable – and that pass for big-budget design-studio fare. These efforts go some distance to qualifying the potential cynicism that could attend to this thinly veiled parody, which only strains tolerance in Ringo Newton, a 3D animation that has an apple drop and roll across a white background, disclosing Generative’s logo. Indeed, Dodge’s meticulous work adds an inspiring quality to these often deeply considered prototypes, jogging us anxious consumers with the slightest bit of fancy. Tyler Coburn

Alex Dodge

Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn 11 June – 19 July

Sleep Talker (Dream Interface GEN-1Y), 2010, cotton/poly blend outer, elastic, coated cotton lining, nylon webbing, stainless steel snaps, Teflon stranded wire, 50 pin D-sub connector, stereo headphones, 25 x 18 x 28 cm

ArtReview 117

reviews: USA

In a quote introducing this show, Christian Marclay asserts that he ‘make[s] music the way a visual artist would’, implying both that he understands sound, a medium which he has used since the late 1970s, in a way different from self-identified musicians and that his conception and use of music are inflected by his conception of fine art. The usual critical and curatorial approach to his career looks at things the other way round, investigating the artist’s interest in the slippages which occur when the aural is translated into systems of visual codification. So this exhibition’s stated aim, of examining Marclay’s creation of sound through his graphic production, offers a fresh, and potentially revealing, way to understand his multivalent work. In one of its most effective arrangements, the fourth floor of the museum has been transformed into a platform for scheduled and impromptu performances based on exhibited works. These include videos in which geometric forms have been superimposed on clips of inundations and explosions from Hollywood flicks; images of the Liberty Bell paired with Duchamp’s Large Glass (1923); and several of Marclay’s ‘graphic’ scores: collections of found objects – boxes, ephemera, clothing – decorated with often nonsensical musical notations, which can be shuffled to create the bases for musical interpretations. While the exhibition excels as a museum-based performance festival – energised and compelling during live sets – it fails to develop a case for Marclay as a visual artist. Tightly focused on the graphic quality of the scores and videos – which come off more as documents than discrete works – and on the artist’s interest in quotation and onomatopoeia, it overemphasises strategies of appropriation and punning wit that quickly become monotone and obvious. Keen viewers might intuit the connection between, say, John Baldessari’s work and Marclay’s altered clips from commercial films, or the Pop and conceptual heritage behind the ‘whomps’, ‘bams’ and ‘zings’ Marclay has culled from comics for a recent set of prints. How might these precedents, among others, inform the artist’s visual sense and consequently his conception and use of sound as a medium? How might the latter then engender a more holistic understanding of the former? Also left unexplored are Marclay’s specific visual choices. He betrays, for example, a consistent interest in destruction as evidenced by the cribbings from comic books and films, and in early performances involving the smashing of vinyl LPs. How does this interest inform the often aggressive, urgent quality of Marclay’s music? How does it relate to his tendency to atomise and recombine sound in his performances? As Marclay clearly conceives of music as a participatory medium, what does his work say about the social impact of the aetheticisation of violence, or more complexly, its more positive and creative potentials? Joshua Mack

Christian Marclay Festival

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1 July – 26 September

Screen Play, 2005, single-channel video projection, black-and-white with colour, silent, 29 min. © and courtesy the artist

118 ArtReview

reviews: USA

Michael Bevilacqua makes no apologies for his semiautobiographical paintings, which also reference the music of the Ramones, Placebo and virtual band Gorillaz, and mix in cartoon characters, screenprinted and stencilled elements, collage and text. While his earliest work was decidedly hard-edged and somewhat decorative, his recent attempts at breaking up his compositions have proved fruitful. Like Sigmar Polke before him, Bevilacqua is interested in the materials and techniques of painting, although by no means has he forgotten his roots, which include growing up in central California in the 1970s and having the chance to see bands like the Dead Kennedys play in a high school cafeteria. Bevilacqua’s paintings succeed because they don’t focus entirely on any one flavour and are more of a mashup of styles and meaning. The Tragic Souls (all works 2010), for example, includes a stencilled version of the skull logo of the band the Misfits. It’s an image that has been used by other artists, most notably Banks Violette, but here Bevilacqua pairs it with a collaged photo of Picasso, a silkscreened background and broad sweeping brushstrokes. The ultimate effect is that of an artist attempting to connect various life experiences and influences, rather than the narrower focus of Violette’s work. Looking at Bevilacqua’s earlier, more graphic paintings, one would assume that they are planned in advance, or composed on a computer, but in fact the artist never begins with drawings or sketches. So although his new works look more organic, it was a natural progression for him, and to his credit, he didn’t Placebo Effect get stuck in a commercially viable style and play it safe. Bevilacqua draws upon Andy Warhol’s technique of using screenprinting as a brush, most effectively in Rise and Fall, which depicts the legs and feet of the cartoon character Popeye atop his downed nemesis, Bluto. Formally, a yellow and black background is separated from a turquoise and black area by horizontal rainbow-coloured lines, with the phrase ‘rise and fall’, written in the cut-out letters of a stereotypical ransom note, appearing as the central element. The long painting Placebo Effect, which is also the title of the exhibition, has some of the most accomplished painterly passages on view. Bevilacqua, who has said that the character 2-D of Gorillaz (as drawn by Jamie Hewlett) is a stand-in here for one of his children, repeats the graphic in different forms across the length of the work, successfully representing the idea of a body and mind in constant flux. On the surface Bevilacqua’s work resembles an updated version of Pop art, but he actually uses this imagery as a cryptic language about himself, his family, his art and his internal struggle to achieve a balance between these worlds. These paintings then may serve as a form of therapy for the artist, while also playing the role of doctor, offering the viewer something to feel good about. Chris Bors

Michael Bevilacqua

Gering & López Gallery, New York 10 June – 20 August

The Tragic Souls, 2010, acrylic, screenprint and collage on paper, 76 x 56 cm. Courtesy Gering & López Gallery, New York

ArtReview 119

reviews: USA

Aaron Curry

Two Sheets Thick

Surfaces sweat and ooze. Moisture beads up in plump droplets all over walls, sculptures, collages and paintings. It’s as if Aaron Curry’s art can’t help perspiring when put on display and exposed, naked, to the viewer’s inspection. The exhibition space has been recast as a humidified chamber with balls of liquid seemingly free-floating in space – or inversely, as a gallery-size carbonated beverage. Either way, a haptic awareness of moist skin emerges through illusion. Covering the gallery’s interior like tiled wallpaper, wrapping the flat wooden shapes of three large sculptures and colonising his works on paper, Curry’s silkscreened trompe l’oeil drops of liquid are so pervasive that the image of perspiration actually becomes a kind of camouflage that hides works in plain sight, cloaking them in a unified field of mutual thawing. Where they aren’t silkscreened, droplets well up like tears in little studded clusters on the isolated patches and smears of roughly painted gouache that surround the central globular blobs of his collage-paintings. Condensation is not only an evocative hallmark of Curry’s imagery; it also describes his fascination with collapsing illusions of dimensionality. Depth appears precariously and only from certain angles. Aptly titled Two Sheets Thick (though it could have just as easily been called Two Sheets Thin), the exhibition elaborates on the artist’s characteristic reduction of sculptural volume to hard, thin skeletal shapes and rigid perpendicular planes distinctly reminiscent of Calder and suggestive of the organic, surrealist abstractions of Tanguy, Arp and Miro. His approach to sculpture grows out of his affinity for collage as the layered accumulation and stacked, slotted intersection of planes of cut-up thinness. In fact, several works in the show (all Untitled, 2010) are hybrid configurations of three-dimensional sculpture next to discrete wall-mounted collage. While several are hyperbolically coloured (hot pink, orange and highlighter-yellow) and fetishistically finished in powder-coated aluminium (Curry’s production value and fabrication costs have skyrocketed of late), the best new sculptures are pieced together out of flat wooden panels cut into sweeping crescents and amoeboid bodies that have been silkscreened over with the aforementioned droplet pattern. Foreground and background merge as these chameleonlike structures disappear into the walls, playing hide-and-seek in their surroundings. Curry chooses a vaguely obscene and polymorphic form of abstraction as the pivot of his show’s dimensional slippage: bones fit into holes, vertebrae and fins lock into parallel notches, teeth protrude and floppy breasts or droopy scrotums straddle various pointy limbs. There’s lots of interpenetration and tongue-in-groove kinds of joints, all beaded with the image of sweat. Two Sheets Thick seems then to refer as much to a hardness in bed as a buildup of material layers, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles implying an erotic aspect to Curry’s preoccupation 5 June – 7 August with split perception (abstract/trompe l’oeil, depth/ flatness, visible/invisible). Surely it is no accident that sex is such a strong implicit presence in what is also the artist’s most monied and posh exhibition yet at his gallery. Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

Two Sheets Thick, 2010 (installation view). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

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reviews: USA

Joel Kyack

Superclogger

LAXART, Hammer Museum, and various venues, Los Angeles 1 June – 25 September

Traffic can be murder in LA. News plays the same story over and over, and all the other radio stations seem to be on commercial break. The broken air conditioner belches out hellishness, so the window’s down. Some baby’s breath of wind keeps it down, though the grate and screech of the highway, along with the dust and smog, almost make it worth closing again. You’re baking in the constipated heat of the summer, stuck between two freeways on an arching cloverleaf, bored fingers thrumming the sticky leather of the steering wheel, waiting for a break, any break, in the traffic. An unmarked truck with a cab creaks open its back window. A shoddy, handwritten cardboard sign is held out: tune in to this radio station. FM dials shift over. A play begins. It’s a puppet show, felt-faced and handoperated. No names but those of the characters. This is not an advertisement or some kind of media stunt, familiar enough in LA. Nothing is being sold. The people of LA, stuck in their cars, go nuts. Cell phone cameras flash from driver-side windows, and cars angle sharply for a better view. The plays are rather sad, but not without humour. A black intellectual makes an unsuccessful pass at his assistant, two immigrant construction workers sing of ice cream castles, feather canyons and the inevitability of change in a Joni Mitchell tune (Both Sides Now, 1967) turned duet, Lee Hazlewood bemoans the price of success and a snobbish talking shrub gets murdered by a ten-year-old boy. Too many art folks make bland concessions to LA being a city of cars. Usually this involves slapping an image on a billboard, which no matter how many times it’s tried, never seems to get any better with age. But this is different. The plays are produced by artist Joel Kyack, who has finally made an artwork that suits the distinctive character of the city. Kyack has produced four miniplays to be performed by puppets from the back of his truck when stuck in traffic, the dialogue and music sent out on a weak FM radio signal. Each play, from about four to seven minutes long, features some singing and people dealing with failure, frustrated desire, being stuck. The tales are told with a literate humour and function well as plays, but even better as an artist’s strange gesture about what public art can be. Rather than heavy metal sculpture plunked onto a corporate plaza or defanged 1960s radicalism passing as community art, public art can be this, a whimsical gesture thrown into the stream of the unfortunate grind of life in LA. Unexpected and unexpectedly great. A break in the traffic. Which then shifts. The truck disappears into a sea of cars, their chrome glittering in the California sun. Andrew Berardini Superclogger (Rush Hour - 210 East - Pasadena), 2010. Photo: Anthony Lepore. Courtesy the artist and LAXART, Los Angeles

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REVIEWS:

Europe

Continuing his ludic exploration of perception, representation and the legacies of art history – and conceptualism in particular – Peter Coffin’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin featured half a dozen sculptures, a neon wall work, a video and a light projection, all of which revolved either directly or indirectly around the art of the past. Testifying to high production values, a heterogeneous curiosity and a certain scientific complexity, many of the works in the show were made with the help of specialists from varying fields and disciplines. As such, and as frequently happens around the American artist’s work, you had the feeling here of beholding a selection of toys, personally conceived by a big sophisticated geek of a kid with the help of so many experts (a plausible The Colors Are Bright definition of postconceptual art?). For instance, while puzzling out the multitudinous and reflective forms in Untitled (Sculpture Silhouette Suite) (2010) – three horizontal pedestals featuring 39 laser-cut chrome silhouettes of artworks from the Pompidou’s collection, here flattened into diminutive shades of the museum’s Platonic ideals – a round, roaming table bearing a pyramid of champagne glasses was liable to bump into you. This was Untitled (Champagne Pyramid) (2010), which mechanically drifted around the gallery on wheels. You could almost hear the squeals of joy of some hidden child, thrilled by the consternation produced by his improbable and highly fragile moving object. Incidentally, if the former work was perversely evocative of Fischli & Weiss’s Suddenly This Overview (1981), then the table positively smacked of Robert Breer’s kinetic sculptures from the 1960s and 70s. Meanwhile, other works quite literally played with light: Untitled (RGB) (2008) consisted of a DVD projection of three large dots of colour – red, green and blue – antically shifting across a wall, and Untitled (Neon Knot 8_20) (2010) tied a neon into a knot. Perhaps the most compelling work in the show, by virtue of its simplicity and splendid art-historical pedigree, was Untitled (Slow Motion Campfire) (2009). The work was just that: a low, 1:1 scale DVD projection of a campfire, seen in slow motion. Visually hypnotic as only fire can be, the piece was no doubt a homage to Jan Dibbets’s 1969 TV as a Fireplace. Originally broadcast on Gerry Schum’s legendary Fernsehgalerie (Televsion Gallery) in the late 60s, Dibbets’s intervention treated late-night TV viewers to a sudden and inexplicable transformation of their TV sets into pseudo-fireplaces for 15 minutes. Here, Coffin decontextualised (and revitalised) the intervention, extending it indefinitely. References and quotes aside, perhaps the conceptual legacy that most saliently informs Coffin’s practice is the question: can this be art? It’s an enquiry he often puts a spin on, offering it less to the world than to himself, as if it were a personal challenge: can it be done? Of course, the most obvious danger of such a question is its proclivity towards mere spectacle – a danger that becomes more and more real as production values escalate, and one that Coffin does not always sidestep. Chris Sharp

Peter Coffin

Untitled (B. Nauman, Model for Trench Shaft and Tunnel), 2010, and Untitled (J. Beuys, Fat Chair), 2009, powder-coated aluminium, dimensions variable. Courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris

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Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris 20 March – 7 May

reviews: europe

The overwhelming impression gained on entering Sara MacKillop’s solo show at the Salle de Bains is one of quietude. The British artist makes subtle work using found items such as books, old record sleeves and office stationery to create formal arrangements that focus on the materiality of these objects. The gallery is sparsely punctuated with several carefully positioned works that reflect the meticulousness of their making: Book Pages (all works 2010), for example, features the faded pages of a book layered painstakingly over one another in a graduated fashion, and subsequently mounted and framed. The only page visible in its entirety is the empty back page, divesting the work of any literary content and allowing the viewer to concentrate solely on the arraying, texture and age of these yellowing sheets of paper. Exercise Books (French Version) is an MDF trestle table and a collection of brand new French exercise books, one balanced delicately over the table’s edge. The pages of these empty books, all open at the middle, bear different patterns: some just lines, for writing; others more complex gridding, for maths and sciences. Altogether they present a quietly arresting setup, coolly vacant of any suggestion of schoolwork, with MacKillop again homing in on the materials and their design features. On the floor opposite the table, and arranged around a corner leading to another gallery space and another show, are two hardback books, their covers decorated in modernist blocks of grey and green. As with the other books in the show, there is no indication of title or content. The exhibition is filled with such quiet, formal echoes. One end of the gallery features a tangled roll of stickers for reinforcing hole-punched paper (Reinforcement) and two stretched-out, uncoiled telephone-cord key rings in blue and yellow attached to each other and suspended from the ceiling (Keyrings). These works, with their spooling, corkscrewing properties, find their reflection in the opposite wall, which is covered in mushroom-coloured wallpaper bearing a swirly design. Its application is far from neat: the patterns don’t quite match up, and in the bottom left-hand corner is the original roll of wallpaper, still attached to the piece mounted to the wall. None of it is careless, however: the roll echoes the round eyelets in Reinforcement, while the swirly patterns on the wallpaper, though irregular, look very similar to the elongated key rings. Mounted on the wallpaper, and on the white wall next to it, are frames bearing crumpled, yellowing record sleeves. There is little hint, despite these echoes, of overdetermination in the show. This is down not just to its unobtrusiveness but also the fact that MacKillop allows for irregularities: things not quite matching up, or teetering over the edge, or resting at imperfect angles. Nor are the retro aesthetics – the record sleeves and decidedly 1970s brown wallpaper – arch. They are instead presented as Addendum the aesthetics of the everyday, albeit in some cases the everyday of 30 years ago, hinting at but not shouting their obsolescence. If the title Addendum implies the addition of a postscript – an extra page – it is likely to be empty of words, and instead constitute another unit in the artist’s aesthetic language. Laura Allsop

Sara MacKillop

Salle de Bains, Lyon 21 June – 31 July

Wallpaper, 2010, adjusted wallpaper, 2010. Photo: Eric Tabuchi

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reviews: europe

As a hotspot for contemporary art, Berlin is becoming quite exhausting. In May, for example, an intense Gallery Weekend was followed just a month later by the opening of the Berlin Biennale, forcing most galleries to come up with two shows in a row that would please the critical eyes of both visiting curator and collector. Not a problem for dealers with the good fortune of having an artist in this year’s biennial – a perfect occasion for a companion gallery show – but with just over 40 artists participating, chances of being in this group were slim. Among the lucky few is Gregor Podnar: Romanian national art saint Ion Grigorescu’s videos Sleep (2008) and Washing (1976) were selected for the biennial, and Grigorescu’s first solo show in Germany followed. Born in 1945, Grigorescu developed his oeuvre under Nicolae Ceausescu’s dictatorship and against the bylaws of a state-sanctioned aesthetic, one that necessitated praise for both the progress of socialism and Ceausescu himself. Grigorescu’s response to this ideologically overdetermined art was to retreat into its opposite: the private spheres of his family and body. He has also been an attentive and sometimes secretive observer of everyday life, training his camera on the social, economic and architectural ruins of his country. In so doing, his work evidences not only an artistic but also an ethical attitude which contributes to its growing success today. The show at Podnar, which suffers a lot from its uninspired presentation, focuses on films and videos – some works in their own right, others offshoots of performances. With the 16mm Trap, Trap of Horseshoes originating in 1975, this exhibition is also something like an overview of Grigorescu’s camera-based oeuvre. And it is rich in strong metaphors. Town and Earthquake (1977) shows the artist’s footage of Bucharest’s destruction: the natural disaster, however, seems to symbolise a much greater catastrophe that has hit the country. There is no political explicitness in this or any other work. It is rather the lack of comment, and the poor, almost antiquated quality of the black-and-white film, which conveys this atmosphere of paralysis and stagnation – an atmosphere that is also manifest in recent works. The short loops Going I and Going II (both 2008) find a person walking without advancing, while Scaffolding (2010), with its continuous scenario of constructing and dismantling, displays a contemporary version of the Sisyphus myth. Greek mythology is also the theme of works like Oedipus (1994), based on ‘family performances’ of the ancient tale. A Western viewer might see these works as predecessors of Guy Ben-Ner’s approach. But in Grigorescu’s oeuvre, family is not a stand-in for society and its dialectics; rather it is a counter project to socialism’s all-pervasiveness. When one reads this work as an antithesis to (or eschewal of) official Romanian aesthetics and ideology, particularly its Oedipus the Wanderer cult of the father, the myth of Oedipus takes on a strong political tone. Despite all these potential implications, Grigorescu’s art appears almost unfazed by the dramatic changes of 1989, and this is another story told in Podnar’s exhibition: the work may have lost much of its subversive impact, but none of its stubborn existential dimension. Astrid Mania

Ion Grigorescu

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Trap, Trap of Horseshoes, 1975, 16mm film, 2 min 17 sec. Photo: Marcus Schneider. Courtesy Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin & Ljubljana

Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin 12 June – 4 September

reviews: europe

6th Berlin Biennale ‘Reality’ and our strained relationship with it form the professed basis of the 6th Berlin Biennale, curated by Kathrin Rhomberg. In her catalogue introduction, she takes it as assumed that our lived experience is increasingly unreal, a multifaceted fabrication that is a prerequisite for a well-oiled capitalist society. Judging by its overwhelming dominance in the exhibition, documentary film is seen by Rhomberg as the preeminent medium for mirroring our surroundings in the hope of delivering some sense of insurrectionary fracture. In their film Beyond Guilt #1 (2003), Ruti Sela and Maayan Amir interview young Israelis in club toilets; in the midst of both soliciting and encouraging sex acts, the artists turn the conversation to politics and conflict. It’s a jarring combination, and one that possibly best fulfils Rhomberg’s aims for the particular medium’s inclusion. Conversely, Mark Boulos’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008) – the juxtaposition of two films, one a slickly produced interview with a Niger Delta anti-Big Oil guerrilla and the other a portrait of an open-outcry trading floor on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange – seems contrived and unsubtle. As a whole, the biennial is too big, with too many durational works harping on the same angry message with an overtly self-assured attitude (there are, for example, at least five works which take protest as their central motif). Surely utter conclusiveness – as evident in the Boulos work and others in a similar vein – is the greatest asset to the fabrication Rhomberg fears? The real standout works – for there certainly are some – contain a nonjudgemental deconstruction of our given or assumed reality. Phil Collins’s 30-minute Marxism Today (Prologue) (2010) profiles various former schoolteachers of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, who not only suffered the ubiquitous turmoil of East and West Germany’s unification but found their profession obsolete. The participants explain how in a matter of days they became, in the words of one, “nothing but a capitalist consumer… which

Various venues, Berlin 11 June – 8 August was fine, I just had to learn how to do it”. It emphasises how fragile our assumptions concerning normality can prove to be. In Metamorphosis Chat (2010), Ferhat Ozgür deconstructs the deceptive nature of appearance as he films his mother swapping her traditional Turkish way of dressing with a more Western-oriented friend. The result, while maintaining a sweet charm, again argues in this context that most things we experience constitute a facile disguise, easily disrobed. These works succeed because there is a subtlety and lightness of touch to them; they don’t seek to provide any answers. It is an approach evident too within Sebastian Stumpf’s Tiefgaragen (2008), whose film montage of garage doors mechanically opening and closing raises questions about the legitimacy of borders, property and prescient timing. Challenging these steady automated mechanisms, a man runs in from out of frame and rolls under the doors just in time, 1970s TV cop-style. It proves a hypnotic spectator sport, and one that allows the viewer space to meditate on the work’s theoretical possibilities. The show-stealer, however, is a multimonitor survey installation of George Kuchar’s ongoing Weather Diaries film series (1985–). It portrays the artist as a savant outsider figure, at odds with normal manners, as he documents – with lo-fi exuberance – his travels in the nowhere space of motels, chasing weather patterns across Ohio. Funny, freaky and postulating tedium as a potential way out of our factious lives, it maintains that a search for reality – outside of the patently assumed – does not have to be so deathly earnest. Oliver Basciano

Sebastian Stumpf, Tiefgaragen, 2008, video projection, HDV, colour, sound, 12 min 36 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Kleindienst, Leipzig

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reviews: europe

Fabrice Gygi

Galerie Francesca Pia, Geneva 8 May – 17 July

At the entrance of the gallery are three columns, nothing more. Their particularity consists in their off-white colour, the nylon straps that secure their bases and the fact that they are, in fact, made of vinyl tarpaulin stretched from ceiling to floor. Columns (1993) was the first work Fabrice Gygi executed using this material. After all these years, there’s been no diminishment in its authoritarian demeanour, its classy, frigid neatness. The work has travelled through time without ageing, without losing an ounce of its effect: these columns, full of emptiness, remain heavy with the weight of their symbolism and perfectly in tension with the architecture of the gallery, positioned centrally in the space as if they were the Genevan artist’s masterpiece. Since then, tarpaulin has taken many forms and served many purposes in Gygi’s work: stretched over armatures, formed into tents and structures, covering large mattresses, serving as a backdrop or as an enclosure for vegetation. He has used this blank, sterile material in a number of imposing and monumental installations, but in this latest exhibition the columns are presented alongside a series of more recent works, on a much smaller scale: silver pendants and linocut prints highlighted with dashes of ink. Keyed to a more human scale – reflecting the artist’s concern with controlling his production from inception to realisation – this work seemingly offers a way for Gygi to return to fundamental questions of making; and to sideline, for a time, grand installations or constructions that require complex management and delegation. The silver pendants were conceived and made by the artist, and their forms derive from the formal vocabulary Gygi is known for: punchbag- or bomblike shapes punctuated with spikes, spheres pierced with holes. It’s a jeweller’s geometry that might be worn with a chain or on a leather strap. Even more detached and ethereal are the linocuts, hung in a line across the wall. Here black circles proliferate in a floating abstraction characterised by a sense of lightness and suspension, while other shapes appear rendered in flat areas of single colour. No longer implicating the body of the spectator, these works on paper offer themselves as manifestations of a vivid and colourful renewal. Between silver jewellery and coloured linocut, this latest exhibition gets back in touch – not without pragmatism – with the business of making works which are fully objectlike, in order that they might insinuate themselves into private collections. It’s a change of direction that also has the effect of allowing more room for the viewer: Gygi has effectively given up territory in order to reinvest in a more intimate dialogue, predicated on colour, suppleness and play. And in this context, those rigid columns lose a little of their tension, reminding us that they are, in fact, made of little more than air. Karine Tissot

Columns, 1993, tarpaulin, straps, wood, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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reviews: europe

From Dust to Dust, 2010 (installation view). Photo: Hugo Muñoz. Courtesy Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento

In his 2004 book La Polvere nell’Arte (Dust in Art), Italian art historian and critic Elio Grazioli traces a mesmerising history of dust across centuries of art. Grazioli sets the status of this virtually invisible matter, bonded with life and death and time since the Book of Genesis (‘For you are dust, and to dust you shall return’), as Fondazione Galleria Civica, Trento ‘between substance and metaphor’. Dust, he 25 June – 5 September writes, is ‘a support which retains some traces From Dust to Dust of the process which produced it, but does a support really exist without the trace?… Time creates a short circuit in our thoughts and imagination: past, present and future are always deduced in retrospect or by anticipation from the traces stratified in a support. The time of dust is this short circuit’ (writer’s translation). From Dust to Dust is the title Melvin Moti has chosen for his exhibition at the Fondazione Galleria Civica (coproduced with Wiels, Brussels, where it premiered). It is an exquisite display that works as an exercise in visibility, trying to capture a subject beyond the capacity of the human eye; but also as an invitation to time travel, transporting the public through a series of ‘period rooms’. Here, by proceeding among artefacts and hypertextual references, inwardly collecting impressions and echoes, layer upon layer, the spectator becomes the trace-retaining support. The exhibition, curated by Andrea Viliani and Elena Lydia Scipioni, opens with a carved-wood lectern (Bookstand, 2009) holding Moti’s artist book Dust (2010). One could say the exhibition is the book – as in Borges’s ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (1941), where the labyrinth created by Ts’ui Pên is itself a novel. In Moti’s text, an extended meditation on dust that spans stargazing, Victorian hygiene, Edgar Allan Poe and the television series Six Feet Under (2001–5), the artist retraces the origins of the white cube – the uncontaminated, spotless, clinically neutral modern gallery space. The book lies open at a colour reproduction of the Peacock Room (1876–7), created by James McNeill Whistler for the London mansion of the shipping magnate Frederick Leyland (now in the Freer Gallery, Washington), an early example of the ‘installations’ Whistler used to call arrangements and considered ‘pictures in themselves’. The walls of the Fondazione are lined in different shades of moiré fabric, like the original room, depicted also in four blown-up photo details, blurred by a layer of glass engraved with moiré patterns in 14k gold dust (Moiré, 2009). Among other finds stands a nineteenth-century cameo of Charles Cros, the unsuccessful bohemian inventor of the Paleophone, an instrument that would have recorded the human voice for the first time had Edison’s phonograph not arrived in the months between its conception and execution. The core piece, again titled Dust (2010), is a hypnotic 12-minute digital animation (transferred to 35mm film) by Jean-Marc Gauthier of dust particles whirling and assembling as if in space or deep space, like the atoms in Lucretius’s first-century BC poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). Two drawings in what Moti calls ‘fugitive reds’, which underwent an artificial ageing treatment to look more than a century old, lead to an actual Portrait of Mary Barnardiston (ca. 1755), by Sir Joshua Reynolds, famous for his lifelike complexions – the result of his experiments with colours, turning relentlessly paler and ghostlier over the years. The last room is empty. In his artist book, Moti writes about living in the Financial District of New York, around the corner from Ground Zero, where ‘the giant dust cloud’ of 9/11 ‘still casts its shadow today’. ‘Nil fieri ex nihilo, in nihilum nil posse reverti’, wrote Lucretius: nothing can be produced from nothing, nothing can be reduced to nothing. Barbara Casavecchia

Melvin Moti

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reviews: shanghai

The archetypal modern metropolis, Shanghai has become a mecca for those who desire rapid, consumption-driven living. So, by way of an antidote, what better inaugural exhibition for the new Rockbund Art Museum than Peasant Da Vincis? Skilfully and provocatively curated by Cai Guo-Qiang and spread across various sites, it serves particularly as a counterpoint to the contemporaneous Shanghai World Expo (with its promise of a ‘Better City, Better Life’), where countries and companies exercise their political, economic, technological and cultural strengths. A strong sense of humanism fills the air as one enters the sculpture court and foyer, and encounters robots, monsters, planes, helicopters, submarines and racing cars. The result of a 12-month collaborative project between Cai Guo-Qiang and ten Chinese peasant workers with no formal training (Tao Xiangli, Li Yuming, Cao Hengshu, Xiong Tianhua, Wang Qiang, Xu Bin, Wu Shuzai, Wu Yulu, Du Wenda and Tan Chengnian), these feel like hybrids of Tatlin-esque flying machines and the improvised street art of Francis Alÿs. Yet these humble readymades contain a profound sense of ambition and optimism. They encapsulate the grand ideals of the transformation of millions of rural people into city-dwellers – a result of China’s relentless modernisation – and their huge contribution to the urban development that now overshadows them. Though crude and simple, and the product of individual focus, the inventions have an incredible, intimate appeal that overpowers any sense of nostalgia and speaks of rich social and cultural heritages. In the foyer hangs the wreckage of Tan Chengnian’s Cheng Nian No. 3 – a self-designed homemade biplane – after its fatal trial flight in April 2007. The salvaged engine and documentary video eulogise the work’s creator. Such artworks allude to the personal stories of ‘peasant da Vincis’ all over China and the courage they exercise in pursuing their dreams. An active production studio run by Wu Yulu and his family turns the third-floor gallery into a quirky spatiotemporal installation: included are five robots commissioned by Cai Guo-Qiang to emulate iconic modern artists’ gestures: the dripping of paint by Jackson Pollock, the dragging of female nudes across blue pigment by Yves Klein, the spitting of water by Bruce Nauman. With humour, the work ingeniously defies basic engineering principles while critiquing the art market’s consumerist mechanics. In the neighbouring National Industrial Bank Building, Tao Xiangli’s 20m-long site-specific aircraft carrier serves as a screening venue for Our Century (1983), Cai Guo-Qiang, Yves Klein’s Living 2010, work commissioned Artavazd Peleshian’s epic silent black-and-white essay-film recounting the failures behind Soviet Brush, by Cai Guo-Qiang and created by Yulu using metal, electronics, space expeditions. And in the nearby bank vault, Romanian director Andrei Ujica’s landmark Wu secondhand materials. Photo: Lin film Out of the Present (1995) chronicles the story of cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, trapped in the Yi. Courtesy Cai Studio, New York Mir space station for ten months between 1991–2 during the Soviet Union’s collapse. Both works convey Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai the bravery and hardship involved when humanity explores unknown territories, and share an idealistic Cai Guo-Qiang: Peasant Da Vincis 7 May – 25 July pioneering spirit. Yet there is a contrast between the totalitarian power of the former Soviet Union and the individual Chinese peasant, such that the paired films encourage the public to ponder the social, political and cultural issues of our era. Sprayed directly upon the museum facade, a slogan greets visitors: ‘What’s important isn’t whether you can fly’. Written in Chinese calligraphy, a throwback to propaganda banners and billboards from factories in rural China, it’s followed by a second slogan on the museum plaza’s north wall: ‘Never learned how to land’. The combined text installations pinpoint the issues around which this exhibition revolves: where and how will the now ‘flying’ Chinese economy – and its urban development – settle? And how will this new cultural order allow for the continued existence of its peasant da Vincis? Neil Wenman

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reviews: sydney

17th Biennale of Sydney The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age

In his Sydney biennial, artistic director David Elliott brings together ideas about cultural shifts and globalisation, colonialism and personal memory. Starting out from Australia’s own history as a landscape of colonial oppression, and the still-disadvantaged status of its indigenous people, he’s using art as a lens to look at other communities – in Asia, the Americas and Africa – and also at the wider effects of migration and cultural exchange. Take, for example, Fiona Pardington’s Ahua: A Beautiful Hesitation (2009), at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA): large-scale photographic portraits of lifecasts made in 1840 of prominent Maori chiefs and owned by museums in Paris and Auckland. These suggestive photographs bridge times and worlds. They resurrect a long-lost, longforgotten visual memory of these men, who can be seen as people and so quite differently from when they were cast and collected as anthropological samples. Similarly negotiating Eurocentric histories are paintings by Christopher Pease and Kent Monkman, who mimic nineteenthcentury colonial depictions of foreign lands and people – in Australia and North America respectively – yet represent very different and subversive power structures; or the drawings of Annie Pootoogook, who, in the presumably naive idiom of folk art, depicts the contemporary lives of Inuit communities. Distributed across many venues in the Sydney Harbour area, the 17th Biennale is a multifarious show that is at its best where Elliott is closely following his set theme, bringing together pieces from all over the world and telling local stories within a universal history. Despite some outstanding pieces, the exhibition at MCA, in downtown Sydney, feels somewhat crammed and disjointed, and the installations around the Opera House and in the Royal Botanic Gardens are quite obvious examples of ‘public art’ (ie, playful and inoffensive). But everything comes together at Cockatoo Island – a postindustrial former penitentiary and military site a halfhour’s boat ride from the city – where the works seem more responsive to their environs and the thematic. Out here, the exhibition is scattered around the disused industrial or domestic spaces, and even in some underground tunnels. Much is made of cultural exchange and cultural specifics. In Christian Thompson’s video Gamu Mambu (Blood Song) (2010), a Dutch classical singer performs a song in the nearly extinct Australian language Bidjara, part of Thompson’s heritage; in a large factory space, Kader Attia’s Kasbah (2010) turns corrugated iron sheets and wooden pallets into the roof of an Arab settlement. The exhibition’s centrepiece, however, is a nine-screen, 50-minute video installation by Isaac Julien. Ten Thousand Waves (2010) juxtaposes the fate of a group of Chinese illegal migrant workers who drowned in England’s Morecambe Bay in 2004 with prevailing imagery of China in the West. Here Julien relates scenes from contemporary Shanghai to documentary footage of the search for the victims, and sets that in a context of cinematic images: period dramas set in China’s Golden Age or in prewar Shanghai. Maggie Cheung plays the main character in these scenes, which recreate tropes from her most famous films. Yet the layers of historic representations overlap, and so visual connections develop between the green-screen filming process that allows Cheung to ‘fly’ and the colour of the water in which a man is floating. Julien brings together both sides of economic globalisation, the migrant victims as well as the riches of Shanghai, and juxtaposes these with the popular image of China that is largely informed by its cultural production and exchange. Since it’s far from the only piece here to address sociopolitical concerns, a stroll across Cockatoo Island makes for a dense cultural travelogue. Axel Lapp

12 May – 1 August 2010 Various venues, Sydney

Christopher Pease, Law of Reflection, 2008–9, oil on canvas, 123 x 214 cm. Private collection. Photo: Tony Nathan

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REVIEWS:

Books at the academic institution where I currently work, somebody recently came up with an ‘initiative’ called ‘the creative campus’, its mission apparently ‘to cultivate an aspirational learning environment in which ideas are shared and innovation promoted’. Vacant unmeaning verbs aside, you’d think some of that stuff might be ‘ongoing’ at a university already, no? As Matthew Crawford points out, ‘creativity’ is nowadays routinely applied as a salving gloss on the reality of tedious and irritating office work. The fabled ‘knowledge economy’ has turned out to require and ‘promote’ no knowledge at all – it is in fact merely the immaterial achievement of the thoroughly infantilised and passive workforce dreamed of by F. W. Taylor a century ago in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911) and pioneered on the production lines by Henry Ford. The Case for Working with Your Hands proposes itself as spirited – a favoured adjective of Crawford’s – counter to the moral and intellectual pauperisation of the modern worker, but also to his (for he is, oddly, always male in this book) increasing financial impoverishment. Traditional trades, involving actual manual labour, now often pay better than the desultory info-wrangling that passes for work for most of us. Crawford’s book is both an argument about the inherent value of work that requires manual skill and a timely fillip to a middle class suddenly shafted by its own aspirations. The Case… is in part, then, a practical elaboration of a point made by the sociologist Richard Sennett – whose 2008 book, The Craftsman, explored the intellectual expansiveness of the focused act of making – and, dispiritingly, a rather pompous and soppy rant about the historical waning of certain blokeish pleasures. Crawford is at times a perfectly sensible, if unexceptional, critic of a modern (American) education system that privileges vague migratory skills over training in specific tasks. It’s only by submitting ourselves to an external rigour, he contends, that we ever learn to think and invent for ourselves. It’s an ancient argument, swiftly exhausted and hard to do much else with unless (as Crawford blithely announces he’s not going to do) you expand your scope to a wholesale history of the long-term dematerialisation of labour and the progressive sundering of work and compensatory leisure. (As Adorno once put it, can one imagine Nietzsche knocking off early for a round of golf?)

The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work Is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good Sadly, Crawford is just not up to the historical and philosophical task he sets himself. Instead, his book quickly devolves into an account – by turns viciously dull and unintentionally comic – of his own initiation into the ‘spirited’ and manly world of, essentially, advanced DIY, or (as he puts it) ‘being master of your own stuff’. We learn, at amazing length, about the teenage Crawford’s vexed but touching relationship with his beat-up VW Beetle, and how he eventually mastered (there’s a lot of ‘mastering’) the recalcitrant machine. Before long he’s engaged in ‘forensic wrenching’ and we’re being subjected to sentences such as this: ‘The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy.’ No doubt. This metaphysics-of-the-oily-rag stuff is pure camp, and hard to take seriously as some kind of latter-day Emersonian doctrine of self-reliance. Worse still is the tone of masculine triumphalism that attends Crawford’s little Pooterish vignettes of achieved manual skill and authentic being-in-the-world. To be fair, this is partly a matter of the author’s weird prose style, pitched in that underexplored stylistic realm between Jeremy Clarkson and the Book of Mormon. Whether he’s writing about ‘the wad of cash in my pants’ or eulogising our old friend ‘the spirited man’, Crawford seems determined to bully and bore in equal measure. (There’s a very peculiar reference to some ‘senior harpies’, who seem to be simply some women exasperated by Crawford’s sexist guff at an academic conference.) A serious and engaging book remains to be written about the intellectual and sensuous pleasures of making and fixing, and about the usurping of such pleasures by empty and abstracted labour, but we’ll have to wait for an artist, or Barbara Ehrenreich, to write it. Brian Dillon

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By Matthew Crawford Viking, £16.99 (hardvcover)

in the last lines of London Calling Barry Miles concludes: ‘There will always be cutting-edge activity but bohemia has been globalized. Now, more than a location, the underground is a state of mind.’ It’s an elegiac sign-off to an exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, ramble through five decades of the hidden and not-so-hidden life of unorthodox London, of the transition from the old bohemian Soho of the late 1930s, through to the explosive jubilation of the hippie counterculture of 60s ‘Swinging London’ and into the more battered decades of the punk 70s and New Romantic 80s, finally washing up on the shores of the coke-snorting YBA 90s. Miles, the inveterate scenester of 1960s London, cofounder of the Indica Bookshop and Gallery, cofounder of the legendary underground newspaper International Times, attempts to shape a continuous account of nonconformist, unorthodox, repressed London through the lives and anecdotes of its denizens. It’s an odd sort of historical account, surveying the vivid, bizarre and eccentric characters who made their homes in Soho and Fitzrovia, while paying equally obsessive attention to those hidden, indoor spaces, semiprivate, semipublic, that his protagonists populated; as Miles puts it, ‘the role of London as a magnet and its pubs and clubs as energy centres’. But it’s a schema that works, because what Miles manages to present, without quite explaining it, is an account of the way ideas people had about how they were going to lead their lives – ideas at odds with the dominant culture – took shape in the urban fabric of the city, to the point that they came to threaten the very coherence of orthodox British society. And all this happened, remember, in a patch of Central London little more than two miles across.

London Calling: A Countercultural History of London Since 1945 It’s to Miles’s credit that while he revels in his own period of greatest engagement – the high-water mark of late-1960s underground London - he excavates the disappearing recesses of prewar Soho with care and interest. Miles describes a world primarily made up of literary types, poets and painters, smoke-filled and drink-sodden, famous and forgotten – Dylan Thomas, Tambimuttu, Francis Bacon, Henrietta Moraes, John Deakin, the French Pub, the Colony Room, the Gargoyle Club, the Mandrake. A hidden world, behind closed doors, where anyone who didn’t quite fit in could go to make some kind of life for themselves: hedonism in buttonedup post-Victorian Britain, especially of the queer sort, could still put you in prison. As Miles reels through the years, turning one way towards the avant-gardes of modernist art and the other to the growing energy of popular music as the focus of the counterculture, what emerges is a story of previously hidden activities expanding into a network of ever more confident claims on the fabric of the city, in which the critical, revolutionary and pleasure-loving values that might typify any notion of a counterculture took shape, allowing greater numbers to participate: no progressive jazz without jazz clubs such as Ronnie Scott’s, no avant-garde writing without avant-garde bookshops such as Better Books and Indica, and no alternative art without alternative galleries such as the ICA or the Arts Lab. In these terms, Miles’s account comes to a sort of crescendo with his recollections of the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream, the huge concert-rave held at North London’s Alexandra Palace in 1967. After that, the censorious, prurient, paranoid British establishment went on the offensive, terrified by the rising tide of licentiousness. It’s here that London Calling starts to lose its pace: while many freedoms were won out of the energies of the postwar counterculture, it’s striking how much ‘square’ British society continued to deny other freedoms – the freedom to take drugs, the freedom to rave, dance or drink in unlicensed places. London Calling, in the final instance, is a reminder that absolute freedom of expression, even in Britain today, is a right that remains unrealised. J.J. Charlesworth

By Barry Miles Atlantic Books, £25/$27 (hardcover)

reviews: books

‘i believe that I am totally influenced by my immediate environment at any given time’, artist Keith Haring confesses in a diary entry written in 1978, while still a student at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He’s a sheep! Furthermore, we’re later informed, he doesn’t talk much and is easily inhibited. Yet by the end of the following year, in the midst of a rather sudden fetish for poetry (influenced by exposure to the work of John Giorno and William S. Burroughs), he’s composing verse about flicking through some porn and recognising a ‘nice cock’ belonging to a guy he met on Christopher Street. What should we conclude? That he’s: a) utterly lacking in self-knowledge; b) an unreliable narrator intent on creating the myth rather than revealing the truth; or c) an earnest, naive and complex guy trying to find his place in the world – like most of us in our youth (Haring was twenty-one at the time of his poetry spurt)? Originally published in 1996, six years after the artist’s death from an AIDS-related illness, Haring’s journals, while sporadic in nature, chronicle his progress from hitchhiking at the age of eighteen to see the Grateful Dead, through his rapid rise to fame and then a growing awareness of his mortality (worrying that he may have AIDS, then finding out he does). In this last respect – as a chronicle of the creative life of a gay man in the 1980s – Haring’s journals stand alongside Derek Jarman’s majestic diaries. Now Haring’s account is republished as a Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition. The deluxe bit means an introduction by the current darling of American ‘street’ art Shepard Fairey, who’s described as the man behind ‘the graphics that have changed the way people see art and the urban landscape’ – an epithet more properly belonging to Haring himself. The bizarre implication of this is that Haring, whose estate and foundation still license his work for use on everything from posters to trainers, is no longer relevant in his own right or write. You can skip the Fairey bit, though, because the journals prove that, 20 years after his death (at the age of only thirty one), there’s plenty about Haring that’s of interest now. One of the enduring themes that runs through the journals is Haring’s exploration of the relationship between artist and viewer. In the early years it’s presented as a struggle between satisfying himself (and a view of himself in relation to masters such as Rothko, Matisse) and catering to a general, everyday ‘public’. ‘I am intrigued by what people see as the function of art in their own lives’, he writes. ‘And as the creator and supplier of their art, it is necessary to consider their lives as well as my own.’ It’s a struggle that he would come up against throughout the rest of his career. But it’s also one of the things that makes Haring’s work enduring: it’s something that everyone from museum directors to art students has to grapple with.

Journals

In the early years he’s struggling with his art and writing this: ‘I was constantly doubting the relevance of these drawings… they seemed at some points to be nothing more than stylised symbols from the English alphabet’. By 1989 he’s in Milan confidently writing this: ‘Did some photos for a German spaghetti book. (Portrait of me with a drawing I made out of spaghetti we ordered from room service.)’ And complaining about the Tate selling posters of his work but not buying any of it for their collection (when Richard Flood reviewed the original publication, he referred to this as a problem of ‘respect’). You could argue that in the age of Takashi Murakami’s Louis Vuitton stores, this kind of thing is all in the past, but Haring’s work remains a stranger to the Tate collection, and you know that Banksy and Fairey will never make it, either (the former had to smuggle a work in himself). The museum store, however, is quids in with the kids, selling books about all three. Indeed, even though his statement about being influenced by his environment may suggest that he’s influenced by every passing fad – the most common dismissal of street art by art historians (and presumably Tate’s acquisition committee) is that it’s a product of fashion rather than an enduring cultural production – there’s a remarkable consistency to Haring’s approach as described in the journals. In the later years he may be travelling round the world painting murals everywhere from Madrid to Tokyo and hanging out with artists such as Andy Warhol, George Condo, Yoko Ono and his sleb buddies like Madonna, but even in 1989 he’s still writing about the influence of Brion Gysin, Giorno and (by now ‘Bill’) Burroughs. And he never forgets the guys on Christopher Street. Mark Rappolt 132 ArtReview

By Keith Haring Penguin, £14.99/$20 (softcover)

and a concept meet in such a powerful way that each feeds on the power of the other in order to take shape. Winston Churchill’s ‘black dog’, his description of the powerful depression he experienced through his life, is one such expression. Artist Rebecca Hunt’s debut novel, Mr Chartwell, imagines this black dog as a noxious character, a six-foot-seven Labrador-like dog who calls himself Black Pat, and describes a week in the dog’s dealings with two individuals, meek Westminster librarian Esther Hammerhans and the aforementioned Churchill on his retirement from Parliament in July 1964. Rather than completely externalising depression, the doglike character of Mr Chartwell emphasises the relationship between faithful animal and the owner who unwittingly summons him. As Churchill puts it to the dog: ‘I understand that we share a wicked union’. As the narrative begins, the dog arrives at Esther’s home in Battersea to rent a spare room, and much of the book hangs around the contrasting relationships that the black dog has with his new charge, the mousy girl, and his old companion, the pugnacious wartime prime minister. While Black Pat’s war with Churchill is like that of two old foes – he chews rocks constantly in his ear, blocks the light from windows and lies on him to keep him down – his approach to lonely Esther is more seductive, an attempt to lure her into bed and keep her there. It is this relationship

sometimes a metaphor

Mr Chartwell that is the most compelling, as the darkness represented by the animal begins to seem like an old friend. Esther and the dog’s relationship also has the horrible sense of events that take an absurdly nightmarish turn. When Esther arrives home one day, Black Pat announces ‘with a ringmaster’s arm’ that he has built ‘a barbecue’ by burning wood in the garden. He barbecues a dirty dead coot for her, and then her late husband’s gardening boot, flirting with her while drinking gin and tonic from a watering can. Hunt’s narrative shares some similarities with Nicola Barker’s epic novel Darkmans (2007), likewise set in England’s South East, and likewise featuring a chilling character created out of an ageless concept (in Barker’s case ‘history’ is played by a kind of ancient, hellish, jester). However, Hunt is a less-experienced novelist, and the plot and characters here less complex. In fact, the book is rather short and sweet, a blackly comic parable for small triumphs. Black Pat’s invisibility to those who don’t suffer from depression, combined with the primness of the 1960s setting, sometimes creates the impression of a children’s imaginary-friend-causing-havoc story, albeit with the shades drawn. That said, Hunt obviously has a talent for metaphor herself: ‘She knew he had heard it, a nude and unashamed truth rolling there’. Depression, by its very nature, doesn’t fit in a catchall; each experience is as individual as the sufferer. Perhaps ‘black dog’ has stuck as an expression because medical descriptions of mental health problems are nebulous and ill-fitting; nervous breakdown, hysteria and manic depression have all been dispensed with, in favour of – the current official medical term – bipolar disorder. The idea of the relationship between dog and owner takes its cues from the natural world rather than presenting depression as clinical and unnatural in a way that can be quantified, and is also a reminder that the human need for storytelling extends from a desire to pass on helpful advice and lessons as much as a desire for entertainment. As a study of a metaphor that can tailor itself to an individual, the novel only strengthens the black dog as a stand in for a medical term, and perhaps, as Churchill might say, forearms us for a time when we might have to do battle with it. Laura McLean-Ferris

By Rebecca Hunt Fig Tree, £12.99 (hardcover)

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Viz/Graham Dury

on the town:

24 June

Nothing Is Forever, South London Gallery

11 July

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ArtReview: The Cup, sponsored by Nike, London photography ian pierce and Chino moya & tom haines

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South London gallery A Photographer Dan Holdsworth and British Art Show cocurator Lisa Le Feuvre B  Artists Ernst Caramelle and Gary Woodley C South London Gallery trustee Helen Thorpe and her PA, Natalie Hitchcock D  Architect Tom Emerson and gallerist Nicholas Logsdail E Artist Mark Titchner F  Design critic Emily King and Frieze’s Matthew Slotover G  South London Gallery director Margot Heller and Arts Council England’s Andrew Nairne H  Artist Paul Morrison I Artist Sam Porritt J Artist Julie Verhoeven K Artist Dan Perjovschi L  Art dealer Stephen Somerville, Siobhan Davies Studios’s Franck Bordese and art advisor Sara Pearce M Artist Jeremy Deller N  Gallerist Alison Jacques and artist Jane Simpson O Artist Yinka Shonibare, MBE ArtReview: The Cup all clockwise from top left: 1  Germany: photographer Georg Rulffes, photographer Heiko Prigge,  artist Idris Khan, artist Adam Holmes-Davies, photographer Juergen Teller (c), artist Brad Butler 2  USA: DZEK’s Brent Dzekciorius (c), art director Daren Ellis, artist Charles Avery, designer Michel Charlot, musician John Maclean, Herald St’s Nicky Verber

3 Netherlands: photographer Dennis   Schoenberg, Thomas Dane’s Tom Dingle, artist Jamie Shovlin, photographer Robi Rodriguez, artist Ori Gersht (c) with his children,  artist Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, 4  Brazil: artist Sam Dargan, ArtReview’s Tom Watt (c), artist William Daniels, artist George Young, curator Paul Wombell, Maureen Paley’s Tom Woolner 5  Spain: artist Adam Broomberg, artist Sam Griffin, artist Oliver Chanarin, Time Out’s Ossian Ward (c), artist Kieron Dennis, Herald St’s Ash L’Ange, artist Giorgio Sadotti 6  France: artist Hurvin Anderson, Thomas Dane’s François Chantala (c), Outset’s Nick Aikens, ArtReview’s Allen Fisher, Courtauld Institute’s Jim Harris, Maureen Paley’s Andrew Miller, Victoria Miro’s Ross Taylor 7  England: artist Michael Landy, photographer Julian Germain, photographer Nick Waplington, artist Ryan Mosley (c), artist Gideon Rubin, Paradise Row’s Nick Hackworth, artist Darren Almond 8  South Africa: artist James Ireland, artist Mike Nelson (c), Rokeby’s Ed Greenacre, artist Misha Hollenbach, artist Ben Sansbury, publisher Robert Violette with his son, collector Carl Kostyal (reclining)

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Wednesday, August 18, 2010 15:16 Subject: off the record Date: Wednesday, August 18, 2010 15:15 From: [email protected] To: Conversation: off the record

A summer of becoming, as Lacan would put it, what we shall have been. Like a migrant wandering the liminal interstices of a fragmented and unevenly globalised world, I spent hot, dusty months travelling and pondering the state of international art. Sitting on Surin Beach in Phuket, wearing a Roksanda Ilincic swimsuit, I debated what the legacy of recent Chinese art was with a curator of the last Shanghai Biennale. “What was the theme of TransLocalMotion really all about?” I asked. He stroked my foot and I sipped a Nine Dragons Cocktail. “It means huge studios for artists in Beijing and Shanghai that in a downturn are difficult to heat”, he murmured as only a wily Oriental might. A few days later I thought I spotted Sadie Frost but chose instead to approach a European who professed on her business card to be part of an interdisciplinary collective. “Can you explain what it means for Manifesta to be in dialogue with North Africa?” I asked her. She looked puzzled. “Well, I do like Momo, my dear. Is that neon vest you’re wearing from American Apparel?” It was – these interdisciplinarians have a great eye. “But we live in a precarious age”, she added, an observation which reminded me of a trip earlier this year to Bondi Beach, where I spied an Orlando Bloom-alike looking askance at a deep-fried Mars bar at George Dimitrios’s seafood shop. I had wandered in affecting a beach-bum look with a Quicksilver rash vest deliberately mismatched with lurid bikini bottoms to meet a leading Australian curator who talked me through the 17th Biennale of Sydney. We mulled over curator David Elliott’s wise words at the inauguration of the show: “The European Enlightenment is over”. Kant, I thought. Or something which sounded similar, as I had that very day started reading Johann Winckelmann’s Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst. What was to happen to the ideal of ‘noble simplicity and quiet grandeur’ Winckelmann speaks of if Elliott is correct? Are we to be invaded by hordes of barbaric indigenous artists filling our museums with once-transient sand paintings now conveniently transferred onto canvas for conservation and sales reasons? My mind went numb. Weeks went by. As Proust observed, time passed, and little by little everything that we had spoken in falsehood in that dear little seafood shop became true (Proust left out the bit about the seafood shop, obviously). I found myself stoned out of my tiny mind on Calangute Beach, wearing my Missoni bikini and wondering what the filthy Western capitalist artworld would do to the innocent Hindoo natives who strolled up and down in front of me, some dressed simply in rags and flip-flops and others confusingly in D&G bikinis with super-high Louboutin stilettos. Would they give up making their tribal artefacts to create huge colourful fibreglass sculptures? I cast my mind back to a disturbing realisation I had on Macaroni Beach, in Mustique, about the development of the São Paulo Biennial. What would happen to those kooky Aztec-style-y spears that filled lesser-known countries’ presentations now that national presentations have been categorically discarded? What is this ‘cup of sea to sail in’ that the curators are talking about? Was my Marni necklace statement enough, or did I also need to take out my Anya Hindmarch raffia clutch? What type of biennial names one of its sections I Am the Street? Finally, in the last days of summer, I headed home to the glorious shores of England. The madness of globalisation receded as I donned a hefty Breton-striped Boden tankini and headed to the Mariners Pub in Rock in search of Sam Cam and Prince William. I found neither. But the next day I travelled north through the green fields of our nation to the Tatton Park Biennial. Surely in dear England I could escape the incessant drone of half-digested postcolonial theory that was being regurgitated in the rest of the world like Bataillean sludge oozing out of the solar anus? After all, it’s not many biennials that get written up in Harper’s Bazaar as a top country pursuit over the summer. I entered the grounds. A banner proclaimed ‘Framing Identity’. I turned and ran as fast as my flat Hermès leather sandals could carry me before crumpling into the arms of a recently fired Sheffield Forgemaster. We held each other closely and cried wordless, endless tears. GG

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