Curating Discourse

Laura Bartlett Gallery 2008

2009-02-03T09:21:00.000-08:00

written by Tom Trevatt

With the close of Lydia Gifford’s recent exhibition this November Laura Bartlett celebrated one year in existence in her narrow slice of space in Clerkenwell. Situated between two buildings this oddly shaped sliver is a seemingly impossible place in which to mount an exhibition, yet Bartlett has managed to make it work. Focussing on discovering younger or lesser known artists, she has carved out a dedicated stable of rising stars such as Becky Beasley, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, Lydia Gifford, Stefan Burger and Sophie Macpherson. Resistant to certain formal displays, the narrowness of the space has provoked some very specific responses from the artists invited to show there. Beier & Lund, for example, wedged a number of long objects between the walls; fishing rods, garden forks, walking sticks, bits of timber, all borrowed from a 68 year old man.

One year’s programme at any gallery comprises such diverse operations and opposing forces that any survey resists homogenisation. One must be aware that an adequate reading of the accumulation of material and outputs produced during a year requires a plurivocal approach, not to mention an indepth analysis. What inevitably results from such an enterprise is a series of assumptions and part-truths alongside more informed judgments of what curatorial concerns the gallery owner herself has. However, given the strange relationship any commercial gallerist has to what might be named a curatorial practice, it seems inappropriate to assume such strategic authorship. Yet, especially with Laura Bartlett, I would argue this is not the case. One could argue that the commercial sector increasingly allows a much greater curatorial freedom than that allowed in public galleries and museums. As Bartlett herself proves what is called curation is not a universal paradigm; to argue she has a ‘practice’ as such would be wrong. Or, rather to argue she has a sustained investigation of particular claims, counter claims, hypotheses, theories, provocations and the like, would be wrong. What Bartlett does express in her role, however, is a sensitivity to specific situations. As she invites only a small number of artists each year we could embark on an adequation that would link these practices together, yet I would suggest that any such endeavour necessarily underestimates the diverse practices collected together. Bartlett’s position is a curatorial one, one with a particular freedom to manoeuvre afforded to her by the market, but not one that is determined either by specific requirements, due to funding for example, or institutional pressure, or more general requirements such as an answerability to a populous or the state.

What is curious, then, about particular commercial galleries is their use of the relative autonomy granted to them by their position within the market. The freedom of capital gives them a very specific relation to art practice more in the model of a small independent gallery, but with an extremely inflated budget. How this is utilised critically is of real interest. Artists exhibiting within a commercial gallery, of course, have a bipartite relation to the art world; both within it and at the same time expected to be critical of it. But as commercial objects do their position within the market flatten or de-radicalize the critique?

Adorno suggests that the solution of critical art is not to refuse commodity, as this would just weaken art, marginalising it in a world where commodity dominates, or positioning it as the yet to be commodified (to oppose the dominant ideology runs the risk of being recuperated into it). His argument would be that the artwork must mount a critique out of its role as commodity by a subversive mimesis of it. Adorno asserts that the art object is both autonomous art and commodity, both destroyed by and a product of capital, both its critique and its ideology. It is this exact possibility that commercial galleries such as Laura Bartlett provide. Today critique is no longer easy to spot. The political content of work is diminished, not so much because there isn’t the taste for it, but that the lessons of history have been learned. Capital is flexible, it is able to accumulate and accommodate. Any direct attack against capital merely strengthens it. What is required now is a different conception of critique, not dependent on direct opposition, radicalised politics or the anti-commodity. The space it would seem to embark on this is inside these small galleries. Exactly because they are involved in the movement of capital the artwork has the possibility to exist both as commodity and its critique.

8th December 2008, London

Mie Olise Kjaegaard - Ruins of the Future, Standpoint Gallery 2008

2009-02-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

written by Tom Trevatt

Kjærgaard’s reclaimed timber plank construction leads mutely into the gallery. Elegant yet nebulous, the wooden alleyway describes an opening and a long deep recess rather than a pathway. Lodged in the back of the recess is the disproportionately large lift, still occasionally in use, utilised by Kjærgaard to house the small projection of her recent film work, Into The Pyramid (2008). Beyond the lift is a further construction out of the same timber planks, similarly horizontally slatted and screwed together with small black screws. Although neat and well made the whole structure is haphazard and precarious, threatening to fall and engulf you at any moment. At the back of the gallery the wooden slats give way to an amorphous tangle of material, rope, wooden fruit boxes, the legs of a strange figure, a badly made kite or small hang-glider model all sat atop a rusty bike. This element of Kjærgaard’s installation is in collaboration with the other artist in the show, Mary Mattingly, and engages in a very different register than her previous installations. Although seemingly chaotic and ad hoc, on closer inspection, Kjærgaard’s structures belie her architectural training. Carefully poised on the edge of collapse they suggest a hasty addition, the provisional and anxious constructions of humans on the brink of extinction, of fleeing tribes or dilettante tree house builders. However, despite not being fixed into the floor or ceiling at any point, these planks have been sawn specifically for this space and as such are wedged firmly and screwed securely to each other, producing a surprising rigidity. Accompanying the installation are four large scale paintings depicting further imagined wooden structures, a grand piano, a typewriter and one of her ongoing obsessions, a boat.

Arguably, the key to Kjærgaard’s practice lies in a conjunction between the sea and the land, the paintings of boats depict them left perched on high ground at low tide, and her wooden platforms and houses are shown balanced on precarious stilts or in the crooks of branches high in the canopy. In fact, one could go so far as to suggest that the sea and land in her work are conjoined also in their absences. Boats without water and houses without foundations suggest a fiercely fluctuating tide, the occupants of both caught short or wise enough to build high above land. But there is another element at play. Kjærgaard parasitically intervenes to create sculptural structures, employing short term and cheap constructions that go up and come down fast, resting in the space between architecture and object. Like a Scandinavian take on the favelas they are human in their materials yet aspire to gestalt greatness. Forever falling in on themselves yet simultaneously holding off the moment of final ruination, these architectural interventions develop temporally sensitive apocalyptic fantasies. Oscillating between utopian dreams and end of the world nightmares, the structure threatens to both thrust upwards of its own accord and collapse without warning.

The three minute long film, Into the Pyramid, is an edited series of still images of the abandoned Russian city on the edge of the arctic circle, Pyramiden. Becoming much more than a research trip, Kjærgaard’s exploration of this desolate ex-mining town on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway is a dispassionate yet engaged retrieval of visual language that feeds into her continued project. Boasting the most northerly bust of Lenin, Pyramiden was evacuated in 1998 by its Russian owners Arctikugol Trust because it was too expensive to maintain. Despite Pyramiden’s sad history, the film engages less in nostalgia than an aesthetic endeavour. Indeed one of Kjærgaard’s self-imposed rules is ‘no people’, suggesting an abandoned mining facility as the ideal location for the film. In fact, ruin as by product of lack of human involvement doesn’t seem to be Kjærgaard’s project at all, instead, she re-imagines the ruin as a productive or creative act. There is a play here between her intervention into ruin and her intervention as ruin. Take the title of the exhibition, Ruins of the Future. Ostensibly this suggests dismay at the failed utopian modernist dream. However, I would argue that this title names two distinct possibilities. Both the possibility of the ruination of existing buildings in future time and the ruins of the idea of the future. Or, the ruining of the future. But, to be clear, this work isn’t the representation of ruin as such, but what we could call adapted-ruin. Figured as personal dwellings amassing like favelas at the edges of state control, the structures are both utopian and at the same time antagonistic, a constant reminder of human endeavour in the face of government abandonment. Could one then read Kjærgaard’s work critically? As a strongly democratic or anarchist critique of statist visions of utopia? One could situate this work within the structure of an anti-regeneration argument. The adapted-ruin as an individually productive site of egalitarian resistance to dominant forces. Yet I am uneasy doing this. The strength of Kjærgaard’s work is that it rests only lightly and temporarily, constantly moving on, being constructed and destroyed at regular intervals, to be reduced again to its constituent parts. This throws the work into sharp focus. As architecture it is only temporary, and not nearly large enough or sturdy enough to house a family, yet as object it is too imposing and active in a way. It rests, then, between the two, like the conjunction of sea and land, Kjærgaard’s work acts doubly, at the edge of abandoned civilisation and at the height of utopian dreams.

23rd November 2008

Anthony McCall - Serpentine Gallery 2008

2009-02-03T09:18:00.000-08:00

written by Tom Trevatt

On the moment of death, when, as Blanchot might say, one is hung between existence and non-existence by the merest of threads, will the crossing be perceptible? Will the transcendental moment, the cut between two forms of discourse, between that that is sayable and that that is absolutely un-sayable, one cannot speak of death, be marked by a sublime experience? The ‘white light at the end of the tunnel’ as the imperceptibly thin plane that is passed through, just a few protons thick, reduced to a point by our position within it. As a metaphor for avant-garde art practices that surpass the discursive limits of their own particularities, that cross the boundaries between, say, art and the rest of society, art and non-art, this is rather blunt, but let’s run with it. In his seminar at the Whitechapel last year Robert Linsley picked out G. Spencer Brown’s idea that “when the frame is noticed it is crossed”, and suggested that “with reference to art we can probably also observe the opposite, namely that to cross the frame is to render it visible”. His suggestion, that the very process of the crossing makes visible the boundary, and the imperative in Spencer Brown that one must cross the boundary once it is noticed come to act doubly on the discursive limits of art. Modernism is supposed to operate as such. A working through of its own presuppositions necessarily involves an investigation of its boundaries, as it is the boundary of the system that is the precise definition of it. This double movement, to notice the frame is to cross it, and to cross it is to render it visible, has the figure of the cleave. That to cleave is to both to cut apart and to bring together. In the crossing of the boundary one is both marking it and passing beyond it. The path breaking, then, that renders what is broken through perceptible also joins the inside to the outside. At the moment of my death then, I am not only crossing the Styx, I am a bridge across it.
With Anthony McCall’s recent retrospective at the Serpentine it is difficult not think of moments of death when traversing not just the space occupied by his solid light drawings, but the very planes of existence created by the solidity of the beams of light themselves. Refracted off smoke, the light comes to operate as solid form.

9th January 2008, London

Roman Signer - 7th February 2008

2009-02-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

written by Tom Trevatt

A man fires six rounds from a revolver towards a metal can whilst strapped into a weight loss vibration belt. The gunman’s hand vibrates too violently for his shots to be accurate. None hit their target. This neat vignette is mildly humorous and absurd. One wonders if Signer would have shown the film had any hit their target. If the can had been pierced would this film have worked? If the gunman had been successful then the film would not have been.

Old Shatterhand is a fictional character in sixteen western novels by German writer Karl May and is reportedly the alter ego of the author. His name refers to his ability with a rifle and the character in the books and 1964 film of the same name certainly exhibits an outstanding accuracy. Old Shatterhand was also the inspiration for a character played by Stewart Granger called Old Surehand, supposedly the meaning of sure hand being easier to grasp for its American audience.

Indeed shatterhand invokes stutter, shake, or scatter. Not the image of a western crack shot you expect. Glass shatters, as do plates or crockery. To be shattered is to be tired, exhausted. The gunman’s hand is shattered by exertion on the slimming machine. He stutters at the decisive moment, trembling before the decision to shoot, the decision to kill. The German gunman in Karl May’s novels wouldn’t stutter before taking the shot, Old Shatterhand here implies his hand fires a shattering shot. He shatters his victim. In Signer’s film the shots are scattered about his target, shaken off course by his stuttering, trembling caused by the (non-)exercise machine, the machine that exercises you without you having to work. Is this not exactly Zizek’s Interpassivity? Interpassivity, where something is experienced for you, where, following Marx, “things believe instead of us”. Zizek gives this example:

Is the Western liberal academic's obsession with the suffering in Bosnia not the outstanding recent example of interpassive suffering? One can authentically suffer through reports on rapes and mass killings in Bosnia, while calmly pursuing one's academic career (The Interpassive Subject, Slavoj Zizek)

One can calmly have the exercise experienced for you. Old Shatterhand as the ideal interpassive subject. Impotence lost by interpassivity, the subject supposed to believe has belief believed for them and can’t hit the can. All old heroes have to die.

7th February 2008, London

Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring - curated by Steven Claydon

2009-02-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

written by Tom Trevatt

In ‘Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring’ Steve Claydon has permitted himself the luxury of the unapologetically grandiose task of cultural restitution. In his file notes Claydon asserts that ‘Strange Events…’ concerns itself with certain exceptions, flaws, aberrations, yawning apertures and flowering discrepancies inherent in taxonomic, historical, and aesthetic groupings. We shall begin by accepting Claydon’s claims to a redistribution of typologies and allow ourselves the luxury, indeed, to follow his curatorial argument.

Curation as happenstance; with a selection of objects and things that, through a process of becoming art (what he equates with the Heideggerian ‘Work-Being’), are selected purely for their ‘thingly’ character, Claydon comes to move away from two distinct curatorial models. On the one hand the more conservative method of selecting work to illustrate a theme or idea of the curator, to develop a narrative, on the other, the recent rash of curators that curate as artistic practice. This move, the curator suggests, is due to a pure love of the work. He has no thesis as such. His assertion that the show explores the problematic and elusive penumbra where the art object somehow distinguishes itself from the utilitarian or craft object through means of discretion or bombast seems to touch on what it means to exist on the discursive limits of art. However, the political move that Claydon makes here, whereby his questioning of modernism’s enunciation of the regime of art comes to bear on the specific objects he has selected for this show, is restricted to only objects he loves. This is the rub. Indeed, to say ‘I love you’ is immediately to cause violence, it is to say to all other things ‘I don’t love you’. What Claydon does then, put simply, is to form necessary limits of exclusion. By doing so he performs the very symbolic discrepancies within modernism that he flags at the beginning of his notes. The limits are necessary because any form of entering into an enunciation regime (as Latour calls it) unavoidably describes a closure of knowledge. Which is to say that to speak is to delimit. It is also, however, to speak for, to make oneself heard, to split the regime. And this split is the important moment here in representation. As we are aware, Bruno Latour, in his ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, points to democracy’s etymology:

The word "demos" that makes half of the much vaunted word "demo-cracy" is haunted by the demon, yes the devil, because they share the same Indo-European root da- to divide. If the demon is such a terrible threat, it's because it divides in two. If the demos is such a welcome solution, it's because it also divides in two. A paradox? No, it's because we ourselves are so divided by so many contradictory attachments that we have to assemble.

For the social field is absolutely split, ruptured, fragmented and to enter into discourse is to act within this field to produce this split. But re-presentation (for this is surely what Claydon is involved in above all else) inescapably relies on the distance between that that is being represented and that that is doing the representing, and at the same time relies on an absolute transparency that can never be achieved. In Emancipation(s) Ernesto Laclau proposes that 'transparency requires full representability, and there is no possibility of achieving it if the opaqueness inherent in radical otherness is constitutive of social relations' (p.5) and i would propose the inverse, that full representation requires full transparency. Which is to say that the structure of democracy and representation operate in the same way; namely they both rely on a movement of radical difference and universality concurrently. There must be a commonality for difference to be constituted operationally within social discourse.

Steve Claydon’s exhibition, then, comes to bear on what we might know as a British modernist history by re-presenting artworks that have a thingly quality in common offering an entry into the regime. Our question would be, does Claydon’s selection have enough of a relation to modernity for his claims regarding the rehabilitation of them into the regime? Or more specifically, how does he read the exceptions, flaws, aberrations, yawning apertures and flowering discrepancies he sees in history? If on the one hand his selection is a means to set right an imbalance, to offer an alternative, then he is in danger of over simplifying the political in this problematic. However, if he suggests the show enacts a certain failing democracy, if he understands what we might call the dialectical nature of modernity (following Adorno and Horkheimer’s formulation of the Enlightenment as a dialectical process, haunted by the violence inherent in rationalism, rather than as the Kantian model of a linear process of perfection), then we may just allow him this one.

29th January 2008, London

A review on a curators practice; Lisa Le Feuvre - Sophie Risner

2009-01-29T13:17:00.000-08:00

Curating; the balance between practice and distance.

By focusing on the strategies and career manifestations of this curator it is possible to begin to understand the role of curating as being as much dissemination as a method of constant questioning. It is the experimental nature of a cross-curatorial design which, at first brought me to bear on the actions of this curator. A non-declared action to a specific premise of practice alongside a multi-interpretive, interdisciplinary approach navigated all by the understanding that, for a subject such as curating knowledge is core. Moving in and out of moments which look towards what is at stake as much as trying to navigate a constant critical aspect to a career hinging on the narrative of visibility.

Having begun their education in the arts at the University of Westminster studying Architecture it would seem the natural process to align with the creative urges of The Architecture Foundation or the Architectural Association, but the idiom of a curator begs the difference. To side-step the plans of the reality of their vocational suggestion and ask for a more generalized visibility, this curator decided to practice outside of their remit, maintaining distance whilst always reverting back to product. Saying this, the word general does not compute within the language used by a curator, who, for over three years has looked towards systematizing a coherent relationship with one of the most traditional and oldest institutions of our age. Currently, but for not much longer the path of practice has lead this curator to maintaining an adaptive but strictly not substitutive mark on the National Maritime Museum, unlike those already come before it is not in the nature of this curator to staple themselves to the day-to-day slog of their institution of choice, remaining ever distant yet surprisingly present, curating is as much part-time as it is full-time. Saying this, making do is not the mentality of a curator who has asked of Lawrence Weiner the space held by ships and sails.

Here, subversion comes into play as another technicity of the contemporary curator. It is by working as the curator of the National Maritime Museum which oddly echos the gains of a BA in Architecture, for both beg of this curator for the imaginative potential of space. Working not necessarily within the bureaucracy of an institution but suggesting to be more objective is not just a motivation at play at the National Maritime Museum but surrenders itself a game plan for a curator who simultaneously lecturers and teaches at an international art college. Helping implant or maybe impart with knowledge is something a school of curators need to quickly learn the ropes of. Teaching is not the requirement of curating but ought to be, something this curator manages to successfully symbolize. Crossing both the museum threshold and the threshold of the art college helps a curator to maintain a good generative objectivity as neither / or is correct protocol for a curator whilst both manage to be exact examples of what a curator may or may not wish to embark upon. Distance here becomes keys as each occupation helps subvert the other, leaving the path always fresh, practice for curating doesn’t just become a 9 to 5 mentality but one with parallel universises, skies and galaxies.

Without getting too washed up in the romance of what a curator does, it is time to romanticise the curator, to continuously find joy in expressionistic encouragement for student-explorations from Photo 50 to Contested Ground marks a curator who isn’t afraid to actually remain faithful to art and all it may detail. It is the detail of curating which can be viewed through intense contextualizations; ranging from the depths of Foucault to the bowels of Axisweb Journal, Art Monthly as well as web based activity for Nought to Sixty at the ICA and the latter known Unrealised Projects, all help to maintain a distance from the aspect of curating by using textualization as a tool with which to reformat the aesthetic of curating with each and every manifestation. The ability to remain a curator for my own understanding is not the case of merely understanding the topic or gain at hand but making this understandable. Forcing and encouraging is a burden but also a freedom, looking at a momentum which continuously subverts the boredom of an office curatorial design is a privileged position and one well received by a tireless worker, the depth of distance is encouraging, juxtaposing Avalanche at the Chelsea Space in 2005 alongside the recent offering of Renee Greens Endless Dreams and Water Between, light years of difference in approach and conception arrive. The remains not becoming a ridiculous accolade of congratulations but actually begging to begin to see through the ‘role’ of a curator as being irrepressible, you’ll have to run to keep up but a sprint might just leave you behind when forced to examine the dynamic of a curator who admires the small depths found in No.w.here alongside Cell Project Space. Through all of these many manifestations, layers and complexities one aspect reinforces itself, that, in order to have a strong curatorial practice one must attempt a curatorial distance.

Supercream_magazine, issue no. 00: Event

2008-11-28T18:20:00.000-08:00

...now online!

http://www.supercream.org.uk/magazine/issue_00/index.html

Supercream_magazine is an online publication. It investigates the cluster of meeting points between disciplines and fosters writers, curators and artists to experiment in an expanded field with production and its reception. For Supercream_magazine, publishing means to render visible discussions and creative processes that evolve in its surrounding field. U-turns and roundabouts reveal the publishing stratagem, while reflecting an independent-minded readership belonging to a creative and critical environment.

In this issue:

Is the new really contempoary?
Wiebke Gronemeyer on Nought to Sixty at the ICA

Seven Days in the Art World
Sarah Thornton interviewed by Soledad Garcia.

When Things Cast no Shadow, or the Exhibition as Nothing in Particular
Valentina Ravaglia on the 5th Berlin Biennale.

The art fair revisited: Art fair as event
Daniella Saul on the last Frieze Art Fair

A short visual History of what curating should be
By Konstantinos Dagritzikos.

Nest, Flat 3, 481 New Cross Road, London.
Excerpts of a diary
Artwork by Christl Mudrak.Text by Sven Schuch.Translation by Elea Himmelsbach.

Future Re-enactment to the Unwittingly Involved
A reconstruction by Matthew Stone and Catherine Borra.

Tetris re-construction
An artwork by Nathalie Bikoro.

Watch Chris Crocker blink
An artwork by Yorgos Tsalamanis recounted by Elea Himmelsbach.

A Case Study
An article by Kostas Maronitis

Untitled
A youtube extravaganza by Joao Florencio.

One song, one take, one cab
Black cab Sessions reviewed by Nina Trivedi.

Enjoy!

562 words of intellectual claustrophobia

2008-11-28T17:49:00.000-08:00

Valentina Ravaglia

When in high school, I was never able to finish my essays before the bell rang. I would spend a long time feeling the stream of ideas flow from my brain through my nervous system and enjoying the satisfaction of seeing them take shape in mazes of ballpen ink. Grinding my teeth in concentration, recounting the assignment in my head over and over again, I would compulsively draw forests of conceptual maps as if swept away in a sort of adrenalin rush and follow them in a linguistic treasure hunt that I could carry on ad infinitum. Sometimes words, phrases, paragraphs would just pour on the ruled page, smooth and pleasantly shaped without an effort; at times finding a fluid structure and painstakingly selecting the most appropriate wording to articulate my ideas would require disproportioned amounts of distress and frustration, when a temporary lack of synonims would make me feel like a complete illiterate idiot, and I ended up trapped between a couple of unnecessary parenthesis I didn’t know how to get rid of. In any case, I would inevitably spend the last minutes of the test time sweating over a barely legible draft, my right hand stained with ink on one side and sore out of the vehement engraving gesture of my childlike handwriting, desperately attempting to transcribe the scribbled manuscript in an orderly copy I wouldn’t feel ashamed of submitting to the teacher.

I never wanted that moment to come. I found the imposition to produce a definitive version with so little time to reflect and elaborate cruel and unfair: they give you a stimulus and a purpose, only to then cripple your creativity with a time limit. But I soon found out that I had a real problem with containing myself when writing, so much that I would never write without a purpose and a time limit, scared by the physical and mental endeavour that the act of self-expression would require, not to mention the time expenditure. I was never able to keep a diary, as every time I tried I ended up spending almost the whole night ranting and mentally masturbating in written form about anything that crossed my mind.

So, when it comes to recounting and/or critically analysing an esthetical and intellectual experience, in order to transmit an idea of it to the reader and to provoke curiosity or at least a slight synaptic movement, I cringe at the idea of having to manage that in five hundred words. I sure consider it a very useful exercise in self-discipline, but I doubt I would ever come up with something really worth reading in this format. I can maybe barely begin to express a concept in said amount of words, but due to the review form, I am also supposed to add some factual information and descriptive parts that take away precious space. I could allow myself an experimental, autobiographical moment, but I’d feel like I’m missing the point. Does this count as a review of my dysfunctional mental activity?

But words must be running out by now. Let me check... tools, word count: five hundred and twenty two. Or nine? Well, thirty three now. Time to stop.
For those who don’t have the gift of synthesis, the shorter the text, the bigger the effort. And I’m too lazy to keep it short.

[Written in March 2008]

Loose Associations Lecture, Ryan Gander, Brighton University, 2004

2008-11-25T11:34:00.000-08:00

Written by Robert Dingle

Loose Associations is the title given to a lecture series performed by the artist Ryan Gander. Accompanied by a series of slides the talk draws an intriguing line between seemingly disparate points on the cultural map. Reminiscent of a conversation among friends congregated around a table, the subject roams aimlessly, linked only by seemingly trivial facts. Gander weaves a subtle constellation between facts, semi-fictions and fictions.

The term loose associations principally refers to a derailment in schizophrenia where the phrase designates the manifestation of a thought disorder whereby the patients responses do not correspond directly to the interviewer's questions or where one paragraph, sentence, or phrase is not logically connected to those that occur before or after.

In September 2004 Gander delivered a version of his Loose Associations Lecture at Brighton University. Being typically digressive and in true anti-Sherlockian fashion, he guided the audience on a meandering journey. Beginning from point A - a discussion of desire paths in urban planning, to point B - trauma lines meant to direct traffic flow in hospitals, to point Z - a scene from Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later in which Cillian Murphy ambles a deserted London, while just off-screen, Gander points out, thousands of real-life drivers are irately honking their car horns. Along the way connections are made to everything from invented languages (Elvish and Klingon), the British TV show Inspector Morse, a historical fragment concerning British longbows, and a lawsuit the artist Gillian Wearing brought against Volkswagen.

Gander’s dialogic and conversational work offers us an alternative model through which to view the course of history. Allowing us the possibility to rethink a notion of the past under a new set of coordinates, his associative methodology maps divergent constellations that show us the fragility of our own dominant historical ideology. It permits for a consideration of an alternative possibility for viewing the course of history from a predominantly linear trajectory accompanied by a singular narrative towards a more associative form underpinned by the possibility of a process of cause and effect.

His development of narrative systems, often underlined by a dry sense of humor, are reliant on the gap in meaning produced within language. Gander treats this space as an opening of latent possibility, a site where storytelling writes and revises the course of history over and again. As the telling of a divergent and associative path of events unfolds accompanied by the slippage between fact and fiction, an oscillatory movement occurs, as temporarily we are able suspend our disbelief and imagine an alternative course to history.

If art has the possibility to reform dominant narratives, are we then able to forge new relations and retell an alternative history of art? It makes little difference in knowing Churchill’s famous quote that ‘history is always written by the victory’s’, as history is always rewritten by Ryan Gander.

Carlos Basualdo: An Anthropology of Art (Why your past was present in our future)

2008-11-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

Pt 2

Written by Robert Dingle

In his paper delivered at the Tate Modern conference entitled Landmark Exhibitions: Contemporary Art Shows Since 1968, Carlos Basualdo proposed the passage from the 1960’s conceptualism to feminism and collaborative practices as a potential shift in our awareness from an historical understanding of the autonomous art object to an anthropological experience of art.

Basualdo begins with the tentative proposition of viewing art as an ecology, rather than examining it from the perspective of a collection of discrete objects or the relations between objects. Ecology, for Basualdo is formed in relation to systems, in which the event comes to signify large scale international exhibitions, a term which he determines (separately to Ralf Rugoff whom he references) as including the commercial activities of art fairs along side biennales and international museum exhibitions.

So why would the migration of autonomy be connected with large-scale international exhibitions? Basualdo begins with the 1960’s as the decade in which the Greenbergian notion of the autonomous art object was brought into question. He associates with it the emergence of the figure of the curator, a blurring of the boundaries between the artist, curator and critic and the dissolution of artistic medium. As the notion of autonomy became increasingly cross-examined so too were the places of its sanction. Museums became scrutinized, as exhibitions became the main vehicle by which these new forms of practice (these new forms of enquiry) came to manifest themselves.

Basualdo implies that the crisis of the autonomous art object (the crisis of the modern art object) could be described or folded into the increasing importance of the event. Stating that looking from the event permits us to describe more anthropologically this transitional period as ‘the unravelling of the increasing hegemony of the event that has not ceased to develop from that time onwards’.

What Basualdo situates to be at stake is the potential for us to pass from a restricted understanding of art based on the relationship of objects or the relationship of objects to certain subjects, towards a fully anthropological experience of art. One in which large-scale international exhibitions may have the ability to become a theatre for such anthropological deployments. Revisiting the first Venice Biennale Basualdo attempts to examine the conditions that brought it into being. Subsequent to determining four central motives (politics, publicity, market and tourism) he leaves us with little more than positing that a clear analysis would prove a useful tool in understanding the limitations of the event now. The purpose of which would hopefully act as a way to disentangle the event from the limitations that don’t allow us to explore what it may be in the future.

Basualdo’s shrewd and enlivening polemic inspires a rethinking of art history, redirecting the focus from the relationships between objects and towards examining the conditions of the event itself as a way of understanding the production of culture more clearly. However, what Basualdo neglects to declare is how this methodology would come to operate. What would an anthropology of art look like? And in what ways could it help us to disentangle the event from the limitations currently holding its potential back?

2008-11-24T02:55:00.001-08:00

2008-11-20T15:38:00.000-08:00

Cyprien Gaillard: Glasgow 2014
Hayward Project Space
7 October – 16 November 2008.

By Jenine McGaughran

Herbert Rappoport’s 1962 film ‘Cheremushki’ is a musical comedy portraying Russia’s youth gleefully embracing the hope their new world offers them. This satirical, light hearted film see’s its protagonists singing and dancing joyfully in celebration of a new form of architecture. A scene pictures a young couple rushing through their prospective home remarking on its modern construction, from its walls, floors, doors and windows to its contemporary furnishings and appliances, all the while proclaiming it to be ‘a beautiful dream come true’.
This wonderfully kitsch, Hollywood-esque moment sums up the anticipation felt throughout the Cold War period, the notion that ideas transformed into tangible reality could come true: that Utopian ideals in the form of social housing projects could actually help solve the problems societies faced.

It is within Cyprien Gaillard’s Glasgow 2014 that the failures of such ideals are documented. Three large-scale photographs depict former high-rise blocks reduced to heaps of rubble. Cairns, the titles of these works, reflect the significance Gaillard bestows upon these mounds, venerating them from masonry fragments to monumental status. The piled debris alludes to much more than mere rubble; each title contains the name and dates of the former buildings, acting as an obituary. However, these images not only lament the loss of former dwellings, they mourn the passing of the hope social and structural regeneration invested in the housing projects of the 1960’s. In Cairns (12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaw, Glasgow, 1967-2008) the dead look upon an urban space not akin to the one they once inhabited. Pollokshaw, formerly a town with independent status nestling on the periphery of the city, was annexed into Glasgow in 1912 to meet the demands of urban sprawl. The familiar terrain of its former inhabitants was cleared to make way for high-rise blocks purpose built to impose a notion of community and ease the slum poverty of the post war period. Having witnessed the creation, degradation and demolition of the ‘streets in the sky’ these ruinous headstones bare witness to the failure of such government expectations.

Gaillard pays further homage to these buildings with Cenotaph to 12 Riverford Road, Pollokshaw Glasgow 2008. This monument, composed of recycled concrete from the demolished housing estate, has been placed within a secret garden only visible from inside the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Here Gaillard’s obelisk stands as a memorial for more than Pollokshaw, placed at the centre of Hubert Bennet’s iconic Brutalist building Cenotaph commemorates both the passing of 12 Riverford Road and the faith society invested in urban regeneration.

The scene depicted in Cairns (131 Allan Street, Dalmarnock, Glasgow, 1965-2007) is no longer surrounded by looming tower blocks; demolition was completed in 2007 to make way for the Athletes Village for the forth-coming Commonwealth Games in 2014. The mission of the Commonwealth Games Federation is to improve society and the general well-being of those inside the Commonwealth, with every decision measured against their core values of Humanity, Equality and Destiny. Indeed such notions are not so alien to those put forward in the development of key campaigns such as Homes for Heroes in the years following World War Two. Here Gaillard makes clear man’s traces in nature, exposing modern architecture as contemporary ruin and nature constantly on the cusp a man’s domination and vice versa. A space that not so long ago was populated with derelict tenement blocks has become the proposed site for East One, a 39 storey residential tower block. Another city regeneration project uncannily like the ones presented half a century ago, attempting to achieve different goals but ultimately risking a similar fate.

The Lake Arches shows two men enjoying their carefree leisure time amongst Ricardo Bofill’s Saint-Quentin-en- Yvelines. This still thriving post modern housing projects was built on outskirts of Paris as one of the original ville nouvelles in the early 1960’s. As both men dive into the manmade lake, placed in the heart of the community, one emerges from the lake bloodied as a result of coming into conflict with its shallow bed. Here Gaillard simultaneously communicates the unforgiving nature of the landscape and man’s continuous attempts to manipulate and master it. Like man has rejected the imposed ideas of a Utopian way of life, the grey green waters of the lake have rejected this man’s attempt to commandeer it.

Brian Dillion articulates what lies at the centre of Gaillard’s work in his discussion of ruins stating: ‘The modern ruin – the industrial ruin, the defunct image of future leisure, or the spectre of Cold War dread is in fact always, inevitably, a ruin of the future’.

On the surface Glasgow 2014 takes an almost romantic stance on the failure of idealised aspirations for the future through the picturesque rendering of urban decay. However what is at stake is exposing man’s traces on the world and the world’s ultimate rejection of them.

Steve McQueen: Hunger

2008-11-17T08:20:00.000-08:00

Towards and Economy of Means: On Violence

By Wiebke Gronemeyer

On October 31 the critically acclaimed film Hunger by British artist Steve McQueen was released in the UK. McQueen, who will represent Britain at the 53^rd Venice Biennial in 2009, portrays in his debut film, a production commissioned by Channel 4, the last days of Bobby Sands, the hunger striker who was the first to fast to death in a range of enduring protests against British governmentality in Northern Ireland. Hunger shows fragments of a traumatic chapter of recent British history as an odyssey of epic gestures of violence, resistance, and power.

The film is set in the H-blocks of the Maze prison in Belfast in 1981. Bobby Sands is the leader of a group of convicted IRA members who were fighting against the withdrawal of Special Category Status, which the English government had abolished in 1976 and therefore no longer recognised them as political prisoners. The convicted republicans articulated their resistance to the non-political status through visceral actions such as the ‘dirty protests’: as they were prevented from using the hygienic facilities because they refused to wear prison uniforms and went naked except for blankets, they smeared their excrements on their cell’s walls and flooded the prison hallways with their urine. The prisoners’ resistance to state power is answered with cruelty and brutality. The prison officers exercise their power in sessions where they forcibly shore and scrub the prisoners accompanied by the penetrating rhythmical noise of policemen thwacking plastic shields. Recognized as a psycho-mental technique for torture, the sound should scare other prisoners and drown the cries of protest and resistance they roared.

The aesthetic of this film is very much determined by the stillness with which McQueen captures these sequences. The camera almost never moves, rather, different angles represent different perspectives and translate the observations of the camera into the atmosphere of the cinema. One of the situations the camera reveals is a young policeman who is supposed to not only bang his plastic shield, but also battering naked prisoners that are trailed through the hallway. He can’t take the situation with its horrifying and disturbing noise and bursts in tears. In another shot nothing is heard or seen apart from the urine laving below the cells’ doors flooding the cold and narrow hallway. What the cameras portray is not a narrative representation of what happened inside and outside of the Maze at the heart of the Northern Irish conflict. The visual compelling images not only translate the situations’ atmosphere into the cinema but much more the claims that are at the heart of this conflict – on both sides.

McQueen’s film spreads its sympathies around, devoting time to the wardens when beating the prisoners, but who also had to clean up their mess in the cells and lived on the outside of the prison with the constant threat of reprisals by the IRA. The distinction between culprit and victim, good and bad, becomes blurred. Their underlying forces of power become apparent, visualized through the highly atmospheric images. This culminates in the 22-minute long conversation shot between Bobby Sands and Father Moran, a priest who he has summoned to announce his planned hunger strike to the world. Shot almost in a single take, the camera remains static showing the two men facing each other across the table. This dialogue in which soon the priest tries to talk Sands out of the strike and accusing him of a misconceived pride and selfishness, reveals the forces of all political belief and bondage, which regardless of the reasons for it and effects of it share a stubbornness that McQueen intensely translates to the audience with the stoic use of the camera and its perspective.

The film portrays the body as the last resource for protest with an almost unbearable intensity. The last part of the film is entirely devoted to Bobby Sands hunger strike, of which he died after 66 days. The more his body strength ceases, the more those sunken eyes and haggard face become a powerful tool for resistance against the withdrawal of Special Category Status. The captured violence and power to which Bobby Sands subjects himself in his hunger strike commands an intense commitment by the viewer that is exposed towards a disconcerting resonance within in an extreme economy of means. The body resists its natural desires and therefore the hunger strike embodies a resistance against the current situation as a moment of endurance. A hunger strike is in fact a reverted form of violence, because the violation is solely turned against oneself, or at least one is deeply invested in the act of violence, (i.e. Kamikaze suicide attacks). As Hannah Arendt pointed out, “violence is distinguished by its instrumental character[1]”. In the case of Bobby Sands it is a means not only to destroy the power of the English governmentality but also a form of resistance that, in turn, led the attention onto the violence with which they were treated. Although Hunger may not clearly articulate a political and moral positioning or focus on ideology or public policy, the film maps out a relationship between power, violence and resistance in which the audience as the observer becomes an extension of the camera. What the film shows in its carefully composed consecutiveness of scenes are the relationships between the prison officers and the imprisoned, the inside and outside of the Maze with its internal and external circuits of communication and information. These relationships follow a structure that is one of dependency, of not only physical but also political and social affiliation that can be instrumentalised. Through the imagery of the film we observe not only the violence with which the prison officers treated the convicted but also how outside of the Maze the IRA resorted to violence against the British. What both have in common was the aim to destroy the power of the other. "Violence," Arendt writes, "can always destroy power. (…) What never can grow out of it is power.” The ambiguity of the film of not clearly articulating a political or moral positioning not at all diminishes its relevance, as some reviews of the film pointed towards it as not being political enough. What the film captures in moments when the voice of Margaret Thatcher emphatically denies the validity of the republican’s cause or status, are the forces of political system that still today try to claim their issues as present and pressing. McQueen counteracts those scenes with silent single shots of Bobby Sands fragile body awaiting its death at the time when he was elected as a representative of the republicans for the British Parliament in 1981. The relationship between power, violence and resistance is one of strategic actions and counteractions.

Through the evoked highly emotional atmosphere of the film by means of the meticulous construction of consecutive scenes, McQueen not only exposes the viewer to an economy of means but actually makes a strong political claim. The composition of the film not only reveals systems of power and violence as a means of resistance but goes further and hands over the judgement to the viewer, as the audience becomes the target of McQueens atmospheric observations, not Bobby Sands or the prison. This is in itself a highly political claim as McQueen pointed out in a recent interview: “It’s not about left and right, or right and wrong. It’s more about you and me.” Hunger is an urgent reminder of the function and dysfunctions of this period in British and Irish history, questioning weather the relationships between power, violence and resistance that succumbed this situation wouldn’t still be in place on other levels, with other players in the game, but following the same hidden agendas.

[1] Hannah Arendt (1970): On Violence. New York: Harvest. p. 46

Decasia - Sophie Risner

2008-10-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

Death Through a Lens,

A review of the film Decasia

by Sophie Risner

Screened as part of The Time Machine series at the British Film Institute, Southbank, Decasia is a contemporary noir masterpiece spinning on the axis of history through film. Celebrated director, Bill Morrison and musician Michael Gordon worked together to forge a visual testimony to the death of the image and the trial of artistic expression. Running for just over an hour, Morrison, who’s production company Hypnotic Pictures entangles our mind within the landscape of sublime decay - throwing out the rule book obsessed with tinsel town colour, here Morrison like Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allan before him finds black and white cinema the resting place for Decasia. It is the sublime that comes to the foreground when beginning to describe the narrative of a film that survives purely on the lack of a conventional narrative.

Interested in the dying nature of Nitrate film, Morrison took decomposing archive footage found at the George Eastman House and the Museum of Modern art, New York and choreographs an insight into how this medium struggles to survive the test of time. In one scene a couple dance happily together, a feather twists and turns from the woman’s head, whilst the tails of the mans coat swings merrily, all the while their faces; black holes of decomposition, the edges of the image rotting the reality that this moment is no more. In another, a camel walks from the left to right hand side of the screen, across hot sand dunes, faltering and repeating their tracks abnormally, looping in a sardonic dance implying that the camel actually enjoys the trek in the mid day sun. Kids accompanied by nuns in death shrouds loam, coaxing children into a building, the image distorting and correcting itself beginning to burn and ooze its own morbid decomposition.

All the while Gordon’s symphony plays court to the name of Morrison’s production company, hypnotically trancing each moment with spot-on cohesion. The introduction of an electric guitar into the sound of the orchestra momentarily brings this decay up to speed. Gordon who was born in Florida and after a brief time in Nicaragua moved permanently to Miami takes inspiration from the irksome heat blazed beaches of America’s east coast. Thriving a composition through late 60’s, early 70s stoner expressionism, the sometimes almost deafening ballad that accompanies Decasia remembers the seething reality of a Nixon presidency, the burn of Vietnam and the unpacking of Cambodia, an instrumental dedication to moments best tried to forget set to imagery totalizing the reality of decay. Hard felt feelings that are all too prevalent within today’s current political climate. The fact that this comes from the bowels of the post American Hollywood nightmare, with both Morrison and Gordon rendering a clear message home, that beauty and perfection, CGI and impressive effects, are mere superficiality, the same can be accused of an art world hinging on the importance of restoration. Large scale concepts that not only survive, but build gradually with every scene. Decasia uses the method of a conventional film, with a slow and tense beginning building to a crescendo end, radically subverting it’s original conceptions, but unlike a conventional film, Decasia makes no excuses for nostalgia. Moreover, with Gordon’s impressive musical attack, this film classifies death as entertainment, objectively rendering the passing of time as an increasingly important aspect of cinematographic progression, leaving in its wake the realization that decay is all too inevitable.

An ecology of art, ecosystems, Landmark Exhibitions and Frieze Art Fair.

2008-10-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

Pt one
Written by Robert Dingle

At the conference Landmark Exhibitions: Contemporary Art Shows Since 1968 held at the Tate Modern Carlos Basnaldo opened by making the statement ‘the history of exhibitions can be seen as an ecology of art itself’. Such a statement stands to reason to be followed by the question(s), what would an ecology of art look like and how would it function?

In 1866 the German biologist Ernst Haeckel provided the etymological basis for what we now come to understand by the term ecology. Combining the Greek word oikos, for ‘homestead’ with logos, for ‘wisdom’ he yielded oekology, now rendered ecology, to mean the study of the household of nature. It was in relation to this underpinning that in 1927 Charles Elton defined the modern subject of ecology as ‘the study of animals (and plants) in relation to habit and habitat’ (Elton, 1927)1.

The first imperative of ecology is to understand the cause and maintenance of variety, diversity and the complex relationships that underlie the seemingly simple system of fuelling the biosphere from the sun and radiating back its energy as heat. The second imperative is to understand both the laws of communal living and the individual relationships among the vast array of species and population densities living today.

The biosphere becomes in such a case the totality of all separate ecosystems, this includes all living plants, all animals, all processes of decomposition together with the air, soil, and waters in which life is persevered.

An understanding of the ecology of art, following Elton would thus be the study of art in relation to habit and habitat, exploding the relationships, intricacies and interactions between artists, artworks, dealers, museums, institutions, curators, exhibitions, galleries, private and public sectors, art fairs, biennales and the art market. A much more complex and intricate process or procedure of study than simply viewing exhibitions as the sole historical markers or traces of arts ecological progression, although to some extent that is exactly what they are.

We could simply put it: the ecology of art could be considered as the study of the art world. Comparable to the biosphere, the art world is itself constituted by a series of ecosystems, which are the inextricable links in the spectrum of relations, actions, transactions and exchanges in regards to the habit and habitat of art.

Thought of as the basic ecological unit the term ecosystem was refined by the British ecologist Arthur Tansley in 1935. Tansley’s stipulates that an ecosystem could vary from being as large as the entire biosphere or as small as the cup of a pitcher plant.

How can we come to view the ecosystem as an ecological unit in comparison to the art world or biosphere? And how would the inspection of the individual, overlapping and multilayering relationships and interactions exhibited within the ecology of art fall in line with the tendencies exhibited in all manner of other varying ecological systems? How could we begin to describe an ecosystem within the ecology of art?

Tatiana Trouve, Centre Pompidou, 15th June – 29th Sept

2008-10-21T08:07:00.000-07:00

Written by Robert Dingle

Born in Italy, but now based in Paris, Tatiana Trouve has become recognized for her project Bureau d’Activites Implicites (Office of Implicit Activities), which she initiated in 1997. The BAI immerses viewers within remote environments in which the organisation and classification of objects and activities are particularised according to the artist’s own personal specification.

4 between 3 and 2 is Trouve’s most recent exhibition, held at the Centre Pompidou and is produced in recognition of her reception of the 2007 Prix Marcel Duchamp. On display is a series of Touve’s polders (a term used by the artist to indicate a series of sculptural installations reduced in scale and generated as a point of departure from her BAI series).

Trouve’s exploration of differing registers of duration takes the viewer through a series of dimensional shifts, as implied by the exhibition’s title.

At either end of the main space piles of black sand tirelessly accumulate, pouring out of two small incisions made in the wall. The inexorable flow of sand compels a sense of time as it persistently accumulates. A space of simultaneity opens up effecting the present/future relation. The sand registers the immediate progression of time while indicates a more disconcerting prospect. As every footstep around the sand acts as a potential cause, triggering minor landslides, the viewer implicitly helps perpetuate the slow and inadvertent lose of territory. The piles of sand disperse outwards from their centers as they gradually swallow up everything constituted within the space.

Recessed in the walls of the gallery are a number of waist-high glass doors, which open off into a series of mirrored miniature corridors. Situated behind the walls of black sand they describe an alternative mode of duration. The passages replicate an endless mirroring of space, a constant deferral perpetually evading the viewer as though acting out a Borgian fiction – The library of Babel and its infinite structure of hexagonal libraries containing books on the true narrative of every living person and additionally every misprint and variation of each narrative. In his compendium of selected writing, Two-Way Mirror Power, Dan Graham comments on the mirror:

The mirror’s image connects subjectivity with the perceiver’s time-space axis. The symmetry of mirrors tends to conceal or cancel the passage of time, so that the overall architectural form appears to transcend time.

Occupying the central space, Untitled (rope) 2008 is positioned equidistantly between the piles of sand and the glass corridors. The rope with each end loosely curled on the floor, appears frozen in time. Tossed in the air and fixed at a point of apex it forms a walkway or transitional point within the show. Its smooth linear composition produces a formal association between itself and the series of wall mounted dark monochrome drawings. It appears as a three-dimensional extension of the two-dimensional environments that surround it.

4 between 3 and 2 allows not only the fluidity of movement across multiple dimensions (from four to three to two), but additionally inspects various registers of duration. Generated from the interplay between dimensions (second and third) different relationships are forged between elements: sculptures, drawings, curved perspectives and the continuous fall of sand. As the quest and fascination of the forth dimension led Duchamp to formulate his concept of the infra-thin, Trouve’s search for a sculpture between 3 and 2 leads her to concretely render time in space.

Gordon Matta-Clark

2008-10-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

The Sienna contemporary Art Center
6th June - 19th October 2008
written by Robert Dingle

The Sienna Contemporary Art Center having moved venue is marking its new exhibition space with a retrospective of works by Gordon Matta-Clark curated by Lorenzo Fusi and Marco Pierini. The curators intention is made clear from the press release: ‘The aim of the show is to propose a reconstruction of the artist's varied and prolific career, ranging between the most diverse languages and forms of expression from the end of the Sixties until his premature demise in 1978’.

The space couldn’t be more appropriate. Keeping to schedule has meant the few remaining snagging issues of the build continue to be visible. The section of partly painted stairwell, trailing wires throughout the corridors and the abrasive surface of the interior render (scratching anything coming into contact with it), all appear perfectly coordinated with the work to the extent where on occasion, they appear staged.

The exhibition is ordered chronologically and accompanied by an almost entire filmography. The numerous drawings, diagrams and plans from the artists ‘building cuts’ project, make up a large proportion of the exhibition raising questions about the role of documentation and the presentation of work within the context of the gallery.

Opening with Garbage Wall (1970), a wall constructed from found objects and refuse, the work establishes a set of recurrent themes that are carried throughout the exhibition. Whether its the environmental awareness and evolution of materials demonstrated in Glass Brick (1971), (where a transformative process turns disused glass bottles into an environmental construction material) or the assembled archival material of Fake Estates (1973-4), (a collection of auctioned off ‘gutter-spaces’ in New York) Matta-Clark’s interventions have retained their poignancy as they confront issues that remain pertinent.

Glass Brick was designed to become a low cost construction and building material of easy production. At the time Matta-Clark offered it as a resolution to the predicament of high numbers of homeless people and the failure of affordable housing policies in New York City, though under the conditions of the current economic context and particularly in light of a potential global recession the work acquires new significance.

From the transformation of materials including architecture and urban environments, Days End (1975) poses the question of how an unoccupied city pier can be converted into a city park. Matta-Clark wrote in one of his notebooks that he was less interested in designing buildings (having initially trained as an architect at Cornell University), than he was in converting a building into a state of mind. A process he described in a letter to the New York Department of Real Estate as ‘making sculpture using the by-products of the land and the people’.

Navigating the exhibition it becomes apparent the extent to which entropic processes underpin Matta-Clark’s work. What results is a palpable experience that underlies the topical importance to show these works three decades after they were produced. We need only to look towards a handful of recent exhibitions and talks, such as Ecotopia the 2007 Second ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, Artful Ecologies: Art, Nature and Environment the 2006 conference held in Falmouth and Ecovention, to witness the inclined debate surrounding the role art and artists within society and in relation to the environment and ecology.

The exhibition offers us a laconic and detailed insight into the production and ideas of Matta-Clarke’s work, presenting us with an image of a highly skilled individual proficiently attuned to the social ecology 1970’s America.

2008-03-25T18:57:00.000-07:00

Bernd Behr - Alexia Goethe Gallery, London.
29th February – 7th April 2008
Daniella Saul

German artist Bernd Behr films and photographs his subjects much like an archaeologist might exhume his subjects for closer exploration and investigation. Part documenting and researching, part poetic meditations, his camera finds architectural sites steeped in history and recently abandoned, models for an investigation of failed structures. His method also acts on another plane, gradually unfurling the potential of such structures to be released from their architectural functions, testing their performative possibilities in front of the camera.
Behr’s 35 mm photographic slide installation “Amoy Gardens” (2007) was filmed in the eponymous residential and shopping complex in Hong Kong, found to be at the centre of the deadly SARS outbreak in 2002 when the faulty ventilation system was found to have freely spread the virus throughout the extensive complex. Behr films quick snapshots, the salient feature being the lack of human presence due to the mass evacuation that ensued following the disaster. The car park ramps, a ground floor doorway, a harbour shot from a balcony, a crumbling exterior staircase, broken plumbing, interminably long escalators and numerous ventilation shafts. A voice over accompanies the piece, of a Chinese woman stuttering through an English reading of Le Corbusier’s treaty on “Exact Air,” for the development of an efficient ventilation system for his housing projects in the 1930s. The camera simply records the empty aftermath of the evacuation, the building now a hollow shell. While the moving image element of the work retains a degree of independence from the audio, the voice over creates a proposition for the building, a possibility to rehabilitate it through twentieth century modernist architectural building practices. The incongruity at this point is emphasised subtly, yet unmistakably– despite, or as a result of massive Chinese economic expansion, lessons might still be learnt from older, European experimental practices that deal with such essential practicalities as an efficient plumbing system.
Also exhibited is a large photograph, “Topographic Obscenities” (2007) in which a vertical landscape of rocks, debris and plumbing are fused together with sprayed on grey metallic concrete. Not only does this work magnify and condense the effects of the disaster at the housing complex, it “fossilises” them, amplifying the pull of history and mystery to Behr’s chosen sites.
The interest in the idea of fossilising, or a kind of architectural sedimentation is an aspect of Behr’s work that reveals itself through a focus on structures that have entered the transitional stage between use and subsequent abandonment. Robert Smithson’s idea of the “de-architecturalised” structure feeds visibly into the “Amoy Gardens” work and into Behr’s other works where the structure in question becomes an entropic entity. It embodies a notorious history, but with no apparent future use it further encourages fascination and mystery. Similarly, another of Behr’s works “Hotel Palindrome 2006, before Robert Smithson” not on show here, directly references and borrows notions of cultivating mystery or allure to entropic, transitional sites, as originally explored in Smithson’s work “Hotel Palenque” (1969-1972) an old, stylistically aberrant Mexican hotel built on the site of Mayan ruins undergoing several cycles of renovation and subsequent decay.
Behr explores the idea for the Hong Kong housing complex to revive its actual potential and therefore its filmic characterisation as being not strictly documentary, through the introduction of the audio voice over enacting a developmental proposal.
Borrowing from historical examples, successful or failed is one method Behr uses to offer up the potential to resurrect architectural sites of abandonment, if not in reality then for their filmic presence and resonance.

2008-03-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

Dubossarsky & Vinogradov - Vilma Gold, London

26.1.08 - 2.3.08
Daniella Saul

Having recourse to the past for a style of painting now decades removed from the ideological aims of its politics, Russian artists Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov’s paintings of the decadent life of the Russian elite are a jarring juxtaposition of Russian contemporaneity seen through Socialist Realist formal conventions. Very large in scale and brash and vibrant with use of colour, the clash of form and subject- matter is an apt method the artists take up by which to produce and comment on a set of dichotomies. A fantastically ostentatious object of wealth is painted with the same rigour and on the same monumental scale as a typical Soviet School painting of a political scene might have been. A Russian supermodel typifies the rags to riches story of a generation of young women returning to Russia as members of a new affluent, cosmopolitan and sexy social class. The hedonistic, party lifestyles of the elites with their taste for the gimmicky and the vulgar emphasises the idea of individual wealth and glamour and the independence and freedom it brings. This section of society is presented in stark contrast to how one might imagine the majority of the population who are not afforded the privilege and benefits of post – Soviet Russia’s relationships with the western world. This idea is addressed by the artists precisely through their use of a formal style associated with (a failed) Communist ideology. What is more, Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s paintings do not narrate neutrally. Not only do they juxtapose aspects of contemporaneity with a formal framework that denotes a historically incompatible vision for it, the artists often punctuate their scenes with a self- consciousness that seems in some instances to point to the unfamiliarity and strangeness of western fads and gimmicks. This manifests itself through the outward gaze of a character in a party scene or with a less subtle, but amusing approach depicting an alien following the faddish trend of owning a Chihuahua dog. The artists’ measured brushstrokes paint busy scenes and aspects of pop culture with a vibrant colour palette of acidic tones combined with more muted ones, to create works that do not appear to just represent revelry and wealth. They also seem to suggest that this manifestation of Russian contemporaneity is one that is not quite sure what it thinks of itself yet.

Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat - Sophie Risner

2008-03-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

Tim Etchells & Vlatka Horvat
‘Insults & Praises’ & ‘Promises & Threats’
Art Sheffield 08 (Sheffield Biennial)
‘Yes No Other Option*’

16.02.08 – 30.03.08

Millennium Galleries
Sheffield

Four white smallish seats sit neatly in a square formation around 4 TV sets. Each TV set has a pair of headphones attached as is gallery protocol when showing ‘video art’ within the context of the gallery space. A-mid the various video pieces within the show the work of Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat stands alone as an intriguingly honest re-presentation of the core theme at play throughout this years Sheffield Biennial. The two artists sit next to each other staring at the screen engaged in the moment of what could only be described as a dialogue of ideas, thoughts, rouses and contemplations. Not once do Etchells or Horvat look at each other throughout this torrid exchange - a wonderfully choreographed love affair enriched through a strong linguistic dynamic.

This years title of Yes, No Other Option sheds light on constructs of expectation, performance and failure. The readiness needed to live within a world dominated by a 24 hour work ethic alongside expectations to succeed and do better slip side by side with moments of abject failure, isolation and professional redundancy as tropes within contemporary Fine Art production. Occupational success and failure current idioms that dominate cultural production, resurfacing every now and then as we are expected to work harder, get up earlier and work later. The arrival of the digital age is also significant moment on the passage of this framework; as the Internet adapts the home into an office and visa versa.

To surface this through the work of Etchells and Horvat we can only but see how such images of expectation can mirror and reflect back onto the discourse of a contemporary relationship. Etchells and Horvat spend this digital journey abusing each other in vast extremes then adoring each other all through sharp one liners considerately and exquisitely performed. Often with the recourse of a sly smile or giggle planted between the lips of the two protagonists - these moments are the only insight into the mounting tension in the room. A portrait of the constant pressure unseen within the maintenance of a relationship. The trick of this pieces intriguing introvert qualities lies in the notion of the unseen - the comments normally ushered behind closed doors to each other in moments of rage, lust and exhaustion. The statements within this piece said so convincingly to one and another have the knock on effect of a representation of closeness but in truth this complex play lacks a coherent plot.

Etchells, a director for experimental Theatre company 'Forced Entertainment' is acutely aware of irony and the importance of a well conceived dialogue, or in this case a well placed monologue. As this play unwraps Etchells wit forms a clever moment from mere individual statements to a charged linguistic collaboration, that unites over dividing Etchells and Horvat. It's a love affair of the most peculiar kind - but yet stands as an impressive feight of direction and even more impressively a formidable observation of society.

Here, the theme of the Biennial must be re-evaluated, Etchells manages to look deeper into this concept of failure, it necessarily being the moment of success engrained within a work ethic nor is it our ability to function in a world which commands and demands more, far away from this stands Etchell and Horvats comprehension of this years Sheffield Biennial as a moment of success through communication at a very basic level. The two video pieces sat innocently in the middle of the gallery space do more than just look into the Biennials core them it attempts to strike a blow at our ability to actually talk to each other another and this, it does, with extreme success.

For more information please visit.

http://www.artsheffield.org.uk/as08/index.html

Laughing in a Foreign Language - Sophie Risner

2008-02-19T08:08:00.000-08:00

30 Artists exploring humour around the world

The Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre

25.01.08 - 13.04.08

Laughter is a tricky idea to represent - what makes us laugh and why we do it are two very different questions, thus under these conditions it can then be said that this is a bold move for the Hayward to attempt such an investigation into the theme. 'Laughing in a Foreign Language' sees a move towards the commodification of laughter in a 'time of increasing globalisation.' One of the first realities of this show is that it is incredibly weighed down with numerous video pieces. In an ever-digital age this is not particularly shocking but in curatorial terms it goes against the concentration of thought and time placed on this investigation. The shear historical importance of laughter per se means that any exhibition that tries to deal with it has to demand a certain attribute towards the past. Here, Brechtian 'alienation' is explored alongside themes of purposelessness and displacement. Generally speaking this exhibition seems to be overreaching its key themes and at many points seems to find the crafting of a pure assemblage of the funny more of a struggle than a joy. Samuel Beckett’s ‘Worstward Ho,’ 1983 has not only become the key text for recent explorations within art currently but integrates itself as a key paradigm within this exploration ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,’ becomes a get out clause within this exhibition’s exploration, marking not only the justification of failure within the remit of this show but the misunderstanding of failure within comedy. It is one concept to create a dialectic on the quite popular theme of failure within art but surely to bind that to failure within art and laughter is an over prescription of optimism. Mami Kataoka attempts to address this over-prescribed condition of predicating failure to the possibilities of such a global investigation into art and laughter. Is it possible for a show to address such global differences and such different artistic approaches in a bid to unify under the complexities of the funny?

Olaf Breuning’s video 'Home2' explores through a westernised irony the concept of tourism and subsequent breakdown in communication; based in Japan, Papa New Guinea and the Swiss Alps the film finds Olafs protagonist donning masks, playing with locals and screaming ‘I’m gonna meet the natives!’ it’s an uneasy film that seeks substinance in English / American irony yet suffers from an over prescribed length that wilts the humour more than lets it flourish. The polar extreme to this can be found in Janne Lehtinens beautifully subtle comments on the age-old tale of Icarus, here Lehtinen dares to mastermind comedy through the photographic, not easy – especially as most of the show is tragically shown through a video lens, rendering the idea that comedy is something experienced as a moving quantity over the still. Lehtinens ponderous moments of failed Icarus experimentations sum up wonderfully the key element of failure, as through these mini-tales we unpack Lehtinens own inner frustrations and not just sympathise but can see the ridicularity embedded within them. If Lehtinen could be described as subtle then Kalup Linzy’s 'Conversations wit de Churen' is anything but. Linzy embarks on a soap-opera pastiche based on an African-American ghetto family. Most of the footage is badly shot and the over dubbing embaressingly mis-placed - making the work uncomfortable viewing yet essential when transcending the show. Explicit sexual scenes and jargon are interspersed with mundane moments exploring the central characters relationship all performed to one another by the means of mobile phones. Other video work include Kutlug Ataman's 'Turkish Delight,2006' which finds the artist performing for the audience a highly improvised belly dance, wearing traditional turkish attire the artist mocks what he perceives as the conventional global stereotype of Turkey through an almost 3D motion self-portrait. Meanwhile Guy Ben-Ner also finds comedy through self-portraiture, one of the most striking video pieces Ben-Ner's 'Wild Boy' filmed in the artist’s own house and featuring his son looks to the role of father and son within art theory. Here Ben-Ner's son plays a feral child adopted by Ben-Ner. As the tale unwraps we view Ben-Ner teaching his adopted son how to read and write, eat and become human. The end product is awkwardly haunting yet intriquing, there aren't any major moments for clarity of the funny, but it does push towards crafting a relationship that trivializes humanity rather than glorifying it.

On a pictorial note the English contribution to the show manages to bark the obvious, Jake and Dinos Chapman de-face William Hogarth prints with the same mis-placed irony that saw them de-facing Goya in their entry to the 2003 Turner Prize shortlist. Though nothing particularly new, these painfully illustrative moments reflect perfectly back onto the Samuel Beckett concepts of 'Try again. Fail again. Fail better.' The Brothers Chapman manage to mastermind dark European illustrative mischief whilst working so incisevely within the Beckett remit. Shrigley equally finds it hard to step outside of his comfort zone, plastering the walls of the last Hayward space with slogans, wordy commentary and images that staple some kind of injustice and failure to the artists life experiences. Sadly through his more-than-notorious style there is more of a sense of repetition than a crafting through the shows key idea of Laughter.

The problem when forming this debate comes from the innards of what comedy and laughter actually ‘do.’ The response to a claim that a show exploring general themes of laughter is far to obvious, less was the contract of genuine hilarity and more was a construct built on exploring how the weird and wonderful world we live in responds to the notion of unification through the funny. We may not have laughed, giggled and erupted our way around the Hayward but at least Mami Kataoka dared to formulate a dilectic between comedy and the contemporary issue of globalization. Some of the works integrate themselves into this discourse and truly become moments of global observation whilst others lean too heavily on the Samuel Beckett illusion plastering their purposelessness at their core. It is this juxtaposition of failure and intrigued success that finds the show at the Hayward not finding its discourse in the materials of comedy production but in the essence of comedy effect.

Janne Lehtinen, Scared Bird, 1998 – 2004

2008-02-12T06:57:00.001-08:00

Does Janne Lehtinen really believe he can fly?
Janne Lehtinen, Scared Bird, 1998 – 2004
Laughing in a Foreign Language
Written by Robert Dingle

The Icarian Sea, near Icaria (an island southwest of Samos), takes its name from the story in Greek Mythology of Icarus and his farther Daedalus. Having been imprisoned by King Minos within the labyrinth (the home of the Minotaur), Daedalus fashioned a pair of wings for himself and his son made of feathers and wax. Ahead of leaving his farther advised Icarus not to fly, either, too close to the sun, as its heat would melt the wax, or too close to the sea, as the wax would dampen. Icarus being overwhelmed by the sublime feeling of freedom that flying gave him forgot his farther advice and sawed into the sky. The wax melted, his feathers disappeared and Icarus fell into the sea.

Scared Bird, a sequence composed of eight large photographic Lamda prints, sees the artist try to surpass Icarus in a series of unsuccessful attempts. In each image the artist is frozen, either poised at the moment just prior to an attempt being made or contemplating the unforeseen errors in the aftermath of an effort gone amiss.

In the former, the image captures a moment of indeterminacy. The expectation and intention is clear. The artist, surrounded by wings, fins and sails and adorned with a ‘do-it-yourself’ aesthetic, is seen preparing to undertake a leap of faith. Through an act of bravery and in the face of seemingly stacked odds, the artist is held to a point of potential; a moment of generative possibility where any number of latent outcomes still remain open.

In contrast, the other images depict the lone figure, no longer surrounded by his avaitory trappings or the expectations they formerly embodied, rather, he remains central to the image, but surrounded by wreckage. The risk has been taken and the outcome determined.

Our initial reading of this work leads us to believe that it makes clear the divide between expectation and reality. The ‘before and after’ images seem to explicate how the process of failure can operate i.e. when the distance between expectation and reality no longer meet but become misaligned.

But what happens when realization no longer equates reality? When reality becomes fiction? We cannot ignore the fact that the work harbors a conceit. Does Janne Lehtinen really believe he can fly? The answer, although I have never met him, I am certain would be ‘no’. This leads us to understand the work as a series of attempts that rely upon the staging of events. Lehtinen does not expect to fly, he does not enter a realm of doubt or not knowing, he expects to fail and his expectation corresponds to reality.

Scared Bird becomes a successful illustration or interpretation of the idea of failure and leads us to acknowledge the well-established paradox intrinsic to failure i.e. failure can never be an objective, as when achieved, reverts to becoming a form of success; one successfully fails.

Icarus can be read as a fictional metaphor for failure. He shows us that an unorthodox act entering into a realm of doubt can produce a space of opportunity. However as Icarus pushes the limits of this prospect the conjectural possibility of failure eventually becomes an actuality.

Fire under Snow: Darren Almond

2008-02-10T01:03:00.000-08:00

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, 14 Wharf Road, London N17RW
18 January – 30 March 2008

By Wiebke Gronemeyer

Upon entering the gallery’s premises 600 identical clocks forcefully carry out their task: keeping time. Nonetheless, the clocks in this sculpturally overloaded installation, Tide (2008), act out more than this, questioning the objectivity of the passage of time. Indeed, these 600 clocks are unstoppable: each time a digital number on the computer-controlled synchronised clocks flips over to mark the passing of another minute or another hour, the gallery space physically reverberates. However, this overload of homogeneity lets us question time and its duration: should we think more often of the difference between an apparently objective chronometry and our subjective tools of measurement, based on experience and constituted in our memory?
Ideas about memory in relation to the subjectivity of time permeate all of Almond’s works in Fire under Snow: Darren Almond, his new exhibition at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art in London. In his film In the Between (2006), the artist deals with evocative meditations on time and duration, geography and displacement. The fourteen-minute long, three-screen high-definition film was shot in Tibet and China on the Quinghai-Tibet railway, the world’s highest train route. What Almond pictures is an ongoing itinerary, harnessing the symbolic and both the personal and historical potential of objects, places and situations. The visual juxtaposition of the outside landscape and the interior of a Buddhist temple turns out to be countermanded by the interference of the corresponding sounds: the clattering train and the monks’ monotone chanting. Thus, the linearity of this itinerary becomes undermined, affecting its narrative character. The work is on a very literal level still to be understood as depicting aspects of duration, both on screen and by means of sound. In addition, on a more abstract level, it is much more about a contemporary attitude that can be read through the train as a metaphor, making its way across a whole continent: a characteristic of an aesthetic of globalisation. Almond surpasses and subverts the notion of an itinerary as a means to an end that is not recurrent to itself. As he interlaces the different narratives – the train and the monks, the dominating and the controlled – the artist goes one step further of portraying the evident contrast between the industrial and the spiritual and reveals how even such a clash of culture can, in its narrative structures, have something in common – time, duration and the effects it has on the individual, on both sides of the story.
This nostalgic longing seems to filter through the other works in the show. Bearing (2007) is a single-screen projection depicting the daily routine of an Indonesian sulphur miner, monitoring him on his way in and out of the mine, carrying the toxic material. The more than evident beauty of the landscape strikes the moral disguise that is evoked by the harmful characteristics of the sulphur, confronting the viewer to position himself out of his comfort zone in front of a high-resolution screen in London towards the social reality in Indonesia. Aren’t our reactions, whether they be compassion of fascination, be understood as unethical and thus wrong?
Night + Fog (2007) consists of six large-scale black-and-white photographs of dead forests surrounding the nickel-mining towns of Siberia. Again, Almond highlights pollution and its damaging consequences, relating to our historical situation, recalling similarities to the symbolic potential of pictures taken in the woods surrounding Auschwitz and Birkenau. Is a longing for the past as a means to an end for a contention with contemporary culture to be understood as how Almond lately, more poignantly, introduces nostalgia into his work? Whether this is a path worthy to explore could be a question to address in the future. As for now, it seems not to detract from the political claims he makes with his work but to strengthen them through carrying the symbolic antipodes, beauty and barbarity, image and sound, to their extremes.

Sober Realism

2008-02-10T00:55:00.000-08:00

Images of Society. Contemporary Painting at Kunstverein Hamburg, 27.09. – 31.12.2007.

By Wiebke Gronemeyer

The concern of the exhibition Images of Society. Contemporary Painting is expressed as “to explore the relation of painting to society”. More precisely, the question Yilmaz Dziewior posed in this recent show at the Kunstverein in Hamburg/Germany is one concerned with the political dimensions of recent paintings. The exhibition features several works by Minerva Cuevas, Eberhard Havekost, Victor Man, Corinne Wasmuth and Wawrzyiec Tokarski, among others, including easel paintings, murals and installations, that suggest relations between art, society and its politics, ranging from representational to repudiative characteristics. Thus, according to Dziewior, the works in respect to society advocate – referencing Jacques Rancière’s “aesthetical regime of the arts” – that in political matters there is no outside, since art and politics are but two different modes of articulating and dividing the sensory world; any hierarchisation of methods of productions becomes irrelevant.
Johannes Wohnseifer’s Spam Paintings present an attempt at a critical engagement with low-culture consumerism. For this exhibition he subscribed texts from Spam E-mails, offering Viagra, penis enlargement procedures and university degrees onto previously patterned aluminium plates. These patterns appear as cracks on the surface that disrupt any reading of the superficial words and sentences. Hence, Wohnseifer visually transports the de-coding system of the e-mails onto the surfaces intending to emphasize on their exemplary characters for the relationship of today’s society with those dangerous accidental by-products of digital communication.
Gunter Reski’s paintings of images and words introduce proverbial peculiarities: images could be read as literal and words strike through their visual figurativeness. Both elements complement each other in these works, where Reski ambivalently relates images and words without asserting any correct interpretation of that relationship, thus enhancing an oscillation between the painting and the viewer, ascertainment and doubt, identification and critical reflection.
Caroline von Grone’s way of countering the social is literally one of underpinning. The artist chose to work for several days in the subway of the underground station “Steinstrasse” in Hamburg; a highly frequented place, not so much as a tunnel for commuting passengers, as a home to drug- or alcohol-addicted women and men. The site-specific portraits, executed as “plein-air” paintings, picture the characteristics of the passage offering a correlating reality between the site as it is and the moment when one goes through it; usually this is one where the aesthetics of the site seem to be the reduced to their functionality. As the artist translates the three-dimensionality into the plane surface of the canvasses, she suggests an encountering with the site and the social circumstances it provides and/or evokes. Forasmuch, is the artist’s work for the exhibition to be understood as calling into attention an underpinning of social behaviour and attitudes or is it, far more, blaming us, as we seem to need a portrait of it on a canvas to actually encounter with real aspects of social life, whose issues we usually try to avoid?

The choice of working within the topic of contemporary painting seems to be not very obvious, as contemporary painting is deemed to feed art-market driven commodifying processes or conceived as attesting intellectual tediousness in the absence of any criticality whatsoever. However, in this case, the choice of painting was one that very well corresponds with the suggested Rancièrian set of ideas. Most of the works in Images of Society. Contemporary Painting follow the line of thinking of a conflict between politics related to and concerned with the social sphere, as thematised in the works, but at the same time encountering the politics of the social cultural context in which they were produced. Hence, in Rancièrian terms the lines between spectator and stakeholder, the sensible and the intelligible, art and politics, fade, enabling a discourse in which hierarchies within communication become irrelevant. According to Rancière’s definition of the Sensible communication is no longer pertinent to a system of truth and lies but offers possibilities of examining and observing that operate across the grain from usual narrations. So do the exhibited paintings, as they question an an encounter with the social sphere in a medium, to which the comeback of Realism was heavily attributed in recent art history. However, the relationship between image and its application on the canvas is one that – exposed inside the gallery walls – no longer awaits reality to position against it, or attack it; more so, the works depict tendencies of reality, in some cases proposing changes, but in no cases executing them through their own medium. They remain tendentious, as Walter Benjamin would have called it.
In a similar way does the curatorial approach, as some critics have emphasized, arguing that political matters remain in the realm of re-presenting social motives, rather than presenting an encounter with them. However, this could have been the intention, one that is a subtle, but no less provocative, if contemporary painting is understood as re-investigating its relationship with realism, which implies a comment on the existing characteristics of social reality and their politics, which are themselves tendentious. In this sense, the exploration of the relationship between painting to society was a fruitful one, communicating against the established narration, insofar as remaining within the boundaries of contextualising political issues, not raising new ones.

Cy Twombly, Three Notes From Salalah. The grand opening of Gagosian Gallery Rome (or La Dolce Vita gets diabetes) - by Valentina Ravaglia

2008-02-07T17:05:00.000-08:00

15 December 2007

For months, the specialized press had been wondering what exactly had led Larry Gagosian to open his seventh gallery in Rome. Why spend a huge sum to restore an entire palace, only a few steps from piazza Barberini, to open a massive showcase in a city that has very little interest in contemporary art and a totally marginal space in the international market? The answer is irritatingly simple: as Gagosian himself has declared, he’s just always loved Rome and thought, why not? I’ll do it just because I can. Just for the sake of it. And, of course, for the sake of publicity.

An aura of secrecy and glamourous lure had surrounded the whole operation, in a well calculated market strategy that worked particularly well in the spleen of the Capital of ruins. Until three weeks before the actual opening of the space, no one even knew what the inaugural show would have been. The local gallerists were terrified, as if Tony Hawks had just nonchalantly entered an amateur skateboarding contest. And in fact, the city shook at his arrival as it had seldom done before. The Mayor and the Minister of Cutural (In)Activities showed up in the afternoon to bow in front of King Larry, offering him Gold, Incense and any archeological site he may want to use to run his projects, which will undoubtedly enrich the cultural life of the City and of the Nation (has anyone even told them he’s an art dealer? Do your asslicking with a little more discretion, for chrissake). The entire street was closed to the traffic, a micro-army of policemen and security staff was drawn up on the site to enforce a zero tolerance policy on gatecrashers. The last time something like this has happened, it was when Mussolini borrowed a bunch of backdrops from Cinecittà to cover the slums from the sight of his friend Adolf, driving through Rome for an official visit.

The crowd of randomly gathered starlets, botox-faced mistresses, presentialist celebrities and other socialites seemed to have no idea what exactly they were there for. Everyone raved about the instant-classic oval room, and at times someone even tried to say something about the new Twombly series that was hanging in there almost as an excuse for conversation - small talk that local journalists managed to publish as malicious “rumours on the X million dollar Twomblys”. Truth is that Three Notes from Salalah is an intense cycle, as lyrical and compelling as ever; maybe a little mannered, true, but still in the manner of a great master that manages to reinvent himself after nearly 60 years of pure visual poetry.

In the meantime, a minority of collectors and art savvy people were trying to make sense of the logistics of that sort of tragicomic carnival, in order to finally get to the official networking area, also known as “the bar”. With a rather subtle coup de théatre, the refreshments were served in the garage-like basement of the palace (I am still unsure whether that wanted to look like some form of radical chic warehouse style interior design or if the construction workers were simply behind schedule with the renewal), where the aforementioned herd of socialites found itself totally stuck, as the invigilators, for some misterious reason, wouldn’t allow anyone to go back into the gallery space. “I am afraid you will have to go out and re-enter through the main door, miss”. Fine. Let’s hope at least the dinner will be less painful.

If I ended up actually enjoying the dinner quite a lot, it is only because it was so bizarre that I frankly couldn’t help finding it quite amusing. As a friend commented, the space where the gala dinner was served inside Palazzo Barberini looked “very Eyes Wide Shut”, with black velvet on the walls and an eclectic combination of candelabra, opulent tables covered in culinary decadence and Philip Stark chairs. The evening simply couldn’t get any more Fellinian that that.

After all, such exploits ought to be recognized as an integral part of what having Gagosian animate the roman art scene means. I am not sure whether he himself expected such a display of provincialism from the local bourgeoisie, press, politicians and art professionals - at least the ones who perceived him as a threat rather than as a positive chance to finally shake things around a bit -, but he undoubtedly received all the attention he had planned on getting.

Dear frustrated gallerists, dear so-called art writers and journalists, let poor Larry fulfill his little dream of having his own white palace in the eternal city. What’s wrong with that? If you have nothing better to do than talk about his grand opening as the event of the decade, it’s definitely not his fault. And whatever hidden strategical reason he may have, it really shouldn't shock anyone, considering the current state of the art system. Things seem to be finally changing for Rome's contemporary art scene, with new museum wings, young galleries, Gagosian, and the first “real” season of art fairs seeing the light at the end of February. The direction this change will take, though, is still quite hard for me to forecast.

Rousseau, Rancière and Hugh Fernley Whittingstall

2008-01-30T10:16:00.000-08:00

7th, 8th, 9th January, 2008, Channel 4, 9pm
Written by Robert Dingle

The horse, the cat, the bull and even the donkey are generally larger in size and have a more robust constitution, more energy, strength and spiritedness than they do under our roofs.
Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality

Hugh Fernley Whittingstall’s Chicken Out campaign is a call to adopt a more ethical approach towards poultry farming with regards to meeting increasing consumer demands within the market. In light of recent success, over the past several years, getting people to switch eggs from battery hens to free range (27% of egg production now coming from free range farms), Whittingstall’s experiment addresses the pressure poultry farmers are under to produce domestic fowl as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

Based in a shed in Axeminster, Whittingstall’s Chicken Out experiment recreates the conditions of battery farmed chickens in one end, and free-range at the other (both following regulations and guidelines set by the British agriculture ministry). Everyday the experiment was filmed and recorded, from the weeks of preparation involved in installing equipment up to the moment when the chickens would be ready to go to the slaughter house. What the experiment showed was that intensively reared chickens often meant birds with shorter lives, living in cramped conditions without ever seeing natural daylight. On top of this they would commonly develop sever injuries and disabilities, associated with unnaturally fast weight gain and restricted movement.1 In contrast, the free-range chickens experienced none of these illnesses, playing with brightly colored toys and spending between 8 – 10 hours outside everyday.

Throughout the experiment Whittingstall invited local residents from Axeminster, supermarket executives, members of the press, poultry farmers and a BBC television crew to come and experience the conditions within his experiment.

This type of inequality, relating to the conditions in which poultry is farmed (intensive and free-range), can be related directly to the economic and informative inequality among consumers. This dialectic offers Whittingstall the basis for his inquiry and relates to a general understanding of the term ‘inequality’, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau provides us with.

The human species has, I think, two sorts of inequality: the one I call natural or physical because it is established by nature, and consists of differences in age, health, physical strength, and traits of the mind or soul; the other kind we can call moral or political inequality. This inequality consists of the various privileges that some persons enjoy at the expense of others – such as being wealthier, more honored, and more powerful than others.
Rousseau, Discourses on Inequality

Supermarkets currently offer poultry farmers 3pence per chicken and if a healthy chicken does not make the correct weight it is automatically slaughtered. Responding to consumer demands, supermarkets are forcing poultry farmers to raise more birds, in worse conditions, for less money. Whittingstall believes that, not only are the production methods unethical and the quality of meat much lower, but the only way for change is to alter consumer demands, thus forcing supermarkets to adopt a policy in line with consumer attitudes.

Whittingstall acts to identify a current issue that is out of the public consciousness. He creates numerous campaigns to bring it into the public eye: working with locals in Axeminister to provide them with chickens for their allotments. Demonstrating how to be more economic with poultry (making two separate meals from one bird). Implementing changes to convert the suffering cafeteria of Axeminister’s largest employer into a green canteen. Demonstrating the stark contrast in current poultry farming methods. Inviting all Axeminister residents to a public talk about the experiment and current poultry production methods in the UK. Initiating a campaign to convert Axeminister into the first free-range town.

Whittingstall, in Ranciere’s term, acts in a sense, to re-distribute the sensible by indentifying an issue, creating a public and giving it a voice within the public sphere. His campaign has acted to change the public sphere, not alone but through a joint effort with Jamie Oliver, they have managed to influence specific supermarkets into making agreements regarding better labeling and setting dates to stop endorsing intensively farmed poultry.

This is chef acting activist. As Walter Benjamin identifies the author as producer to be an ‘operating writer’, whose mission ‘is not to report but to struggle, not to play spectator but to intervene actively.’ We see Whittingstall discarding his apron, Grande Toque and Judge Sabatier to become an animal rights activist, protesting, educating and demonstrating for a cause with a need to change.

www.chickenout.tv

Keith Tyson - Sophie Risner

2008-01-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

Keith Tyson

Studio Wall Drawings 1997 - 2007

21.11.07 - 05.01.08

Haunch of Venison

6 Haunch of Venison Yard
London
W1K 5ES

'The Studio Wall Drawing exists in a space somewhere between a map, a poem, a diary and a painting'

Keith Tyson

The very nature of Tyson's most recent exhibition at the Haunch of Venison Gallery is something of a visual totem pole to the treasure trove of ideas and mechanisms that explode within Tyson's constantly irritated mind. In total we bare witness to 55 large framed pieces exhibited in a tirelessly over worked format onto freshly painted brown walls. Whilst the ground and first floor take a very specific position as predictably curated illustrative moments, the second floor is more intelligently worked. Placed directly next to each other the result is the creation of something tangibly close to representing Tyson's thought process and fear of specificity. Unlike the ground and first floor here, we have wall-to-wall Tyson. The Haunch of Venison's largest and most powerful space is dominated by the illustrator and turned into a shrine symbolizing thought made process. Tyson is certainly not an artist terrorized by procrastination as more than anything this show serves to isolate and belittled the spectator by the shear strength of Tyson’s illustrative command.

'The thing that keeps me awake the most at night, I have no doubt, is a very general terror of the specificity of things'

Keith Tyson
http://www.haunchofvenison.com/en/#page=home.artists.keith_tyson

Here we find the main mechanism in understanding Tyson's feverish work ethic. His mode of representation is not one that finds harmony in the possibilities of subtly nor is he agreeable with an end product formulated by days or months of sifting and specifying. Tyson is an artist who wants you to bare witness to it all. The layering of ideas and irritations make up a complex poetry that demands hours to unpick. Mysticism is redundant in exploring Tyson’s path, almost walked over by years of negotiating the same artistic medium, it is evident that it is not the expanding of process that is key to Tysons work but moreover the expanding of the mind.

To expand on this intricate moment there has to become a moment of indulgence. Tyson is master of indulgence, most artists slave away forming a creation that at least heads in the direction of a conclusion, but with Tyson there is no fear of that, moreover the terror that Tyson brings us is the fear of conclusion itself. Shattering mere observation Tyson pulls at his thoughts to leave complexity in his wake. Problem in this expansion is not that it happens but that it serves to only create a hectic representation of an artist who seems unsure of his abilities, to counter what you think and produce is to criticize your approach whereas here Tyson merely embellishes his. The resistance to head towards conclusion makes this work often un-penetrable and predictable. So as I head towards my own conclusion I can’t help but question Tyson’s fear of specificity, does the fear of leaving out only mean that there becomes more room to put in?

The Heart is a Dark Forest

2008-01-25T04:35:00.000-08:00

Nicolette Krebitz’s new film at its premiere in Hamburg, December 2007.

reviewed by Wiebke Gronemeyer

I didn’t really know what to expect, apart from assuming that Nicolette Krebitz’s second movie as a director would communicate across the grain from the usual event-movies of the young Berlin-school, as she already proved with her debut feature Jeans. My overall expectations for The Heart is a Dark Forest oscillated between anticipating a heavy romantic story and at the same time doubting that Jonathan Meese, only covered with a loincloth descending from the Cross as Jesus (or at least Jesus-like), could appear somehow romantic. It doesn’t, due to a beneficial lack of an overarching harmonious scheme; every scene in this film acts like a piece of a jigsaw-puzzle: at first it seems to fit everywhere but in fact fits nowhere; however, in the end, there is only one position; then, the moment, in which it is fitted, its particularity disappears and it is yet only one piece out of many.

This sense is reflected in the story of Marie (Nina Hoss), a mother of two, living in a typical middle-class bungalow with her husband, Thomas (Devid Striesow), who is a musician in the local symphonic orchestra. One morning she prepares breakfast for her husband and two children. An egg breaks on the floor. My attention has to adjust to the speed of the action, there is little to witness, little of what you would rather expect to happen on a stage than in your living room. The camera angle is as slow and without focus as Marie’s face is without any expression other then disorientation, boredom and lassitude. Short split screens show Marie and Thomas talking to each other, staged as a rehearsal for a theatre play. Marie is researching her relationship with her husband by imagining those clarifying communications, which seem to never have happened. If they had, maybe she wouldn’t have needed to cross the city of Hamburg by bike following her husband in order to give him his violin, as he had taken the case, in which his daughter had exchanged the violin for her puppet. Marie stops, where his car stops, but this is not in front of the music hall, but in front of another, very similar middle-class bungalow. Another, very similar young mother of a child opens the door. And on another, very similar breakfast table her husband sits and enjoys his second family breakfast that same morning.

These first ten minutes full of abstract scenes tell everything about this partnership and its complicity and let me think of this as a critical engagement with the perfidity of relationships in German bourgeois society. But this inherent criticism is not imposed on the story, rather, the at first assumed notion of a romantic relationship is deconstructed and at the same time the again romantic notion of Marie fighting for her relationship or evolving from this experience to emancipation could be established by the viewer. This change in style oscillating between romanticism, tragedy and the reference to a society’s reality continues and demonstrates Krebitz’s sensibility and set of filmic possibilities.

Marie is the centrepiece in this drama, which as she tries to orientate herself evolves into a surreal version of a contemporary Medea. In the evening of that same day she attends a masked ball. She roams around the inside and outside of a solitary castle, in which twenty masquerades celebrate, her husband included. By referencing Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut Krebitz fables a revery-like situation, Marie’s mental breakdown, which only leads to one possible end.

Throughout the whole film Marie’s eyes are strangely wide open, but only slowly throughout the film they seem to discover the function of seeing, the sense of perceiving. Krebitz’s work is about opening eyes, portraying a private, individual story behind which general assumptions emanate. In this sense it functions as a piece of sociological research about gender. To whom is Krebitz proposing this inventory?

By letting Marie decide over her life and the ones of her children, her position in the puzzle of scenes and situations is defined. The reading of this end and the film as a whole contains the possibility of either preserving a surreal romantic notion, or destroying it. Hence, as always it is a question of interpretation. But, as Marie observes and questions: “Have you ever asked yourself in a dream: have I just dreamed this or is it true?”

Klara Liden at the Hayward Project Space

2008-01-21T16:06:00.000-08:00

Klara Liden at the Hayward Project Space
22 November 2007 – 17 January 2008

Valentina Ravaglia

Swedish artist Klara Liden is a space hacker. Her formal training in architecture must have proved her that the spaces we inhabit have an enormous potential that is repressed by their customary, socially regulated use. They are supposed to be spaces for living, but end up being reduced to physical constrictions, marketable boundaries, boxes or containers from which our deepest insticts are rigidly kept out or neutralized as “inappropriate” or “futile”. In the four videos shown at the Hayward Project Space, Liden gets rid of all cultural constructions on how our habitat is supposed to be used and unleashes her creative energies into the spaces of our everyday life. Her performances are politically charged gestures of reappropriation that could easily be labelled by local authorities as antisocial, while it is precisely a well-regulated social sterility that they address.

Paralysed (2003) was conceived as an experimental project in rethinking urban planning, consisting in a frenetic dance performed inside the trains of Stockholm’s underground. Halfway between classical ballet and punkrock slamdancing (the soundtrack is in fact a track by the seminal “rock’n’roll performer”, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy), her choreography is as inarticulated as it harmonizes with the space it explores through its ab-solutus, unconstrained movements. All this in front of the perplexed eyes of other passengers, who are so blocked in their status of surveilled social bodies that do not even attempt to express their reactions, being them of amusement, annoyance or disapproval, both hidden behind and confined by the self-constructed barriers of privacy.

550 Jamaica Avenue (2004) is quite different in its intimate atmosphere, but no less libertarian in its content and proposition. In the short video we see the artist in an old apartment she used to illegally occupy in New York, mysteriously abandoned by its inhabitant with all their personal belongings. It is a mess of everyday objects, pieces of furniture, books, pictures, cloths, handwritten notes, a dusty collection of lost memories that the lens of the camera explores as in an archeological inspection. The lo-fi aspect of the footage gives it a spy-cam quality that subtly amplifies the tension. Showing her naked back, as in a negation of her own (sexual?) identity, we see Liden perform a series of acts that result quite incongruous in this melancholic mess, like working out on a training bike or playing a dissonant melody on a piano, while singing in an indiscernible mix of languages about memory and materialism. She seems to be squatting someone else’s life, embodied in a mass of things once necessary and meaningful, and now transformed into mere rubbish waiting for clearance and the consequent oblivion.

Her latest work on display, Bodies of Society (2006), depicts another way to misuse an enclosed indoor space, this time an empty room in a common-looking apartment, with familiar, reassuring features as a wooden floor and a white curtain. What is not familiar in this setting is the raw, destructive action the artist performs on a bike the artist had made out of found pieces, now torn into pieces as she beats it with a crow bar. With the excuse of giving vent to her anger and frustration after her own bike was stolen, this violent impulse is actually directed towards the general social and cultural situation in her native Sweden, in particular towards homophobia and religious bigotry. This last piece, the first the visitor encounters in the Project Space, seems to be the less convincing in the show, with its quite didascalic, naive symbolism, and even as a direct expression of anger its tension seems to be weakened by the calculated dance-like quality of Liden movements.

On a final negative note, experiencing these videos in a total acoustic chaos really doesn’t do them justice. Each of them has a calculatedly noisy, cacophonic soundtrack, but the role of sound in the individual pieces gets lost as the three projection rooms are not insulated and let the sounds leak in the adjacent spaces. Especially 550 Jamaica Avenue would have benefited from a quieter atmosphere. By dismissing Linden’s well calibrated choices as just indistinct noise, the installation numbs at least half of the strength of her videos, reduced to little more than the amateurish clips of an arty anarchist’s weird adventures.

MRNG25141090 - A

2008-01-11T08:39:00.000-08:00

I can remember the night of my first visit to Vienna, when I walked down the streets of this city that I did not know yet, barefoot.
This absurdity arose from the fact that my new shoes, which I had bought for the invitation I had received and attended, hurt my feet terribly and the only possible relief was to take them off.
It was in July 2003. It was hot.
The pavement reflected the heat it had accumulated throughout the day and managed to burn the soles of my feet on top of everything else.
On this important night I was accompanied by a man for whom the passion that I felt and was to feel for the next three years makes me feel this same burning sensation even today.
That night in July 2003, I fell in love with the city at the same time as I fell in love with this man.
This consuming passion slowly made me dependent on this city which contained this man in its bosom.
Every street, every façade made me think of him.
His eyes, had they looked at this building? His feet, had they treaded down this path, this sidewalk, this entry?
I wanted to dissolve into this city so that he would look at me, touch me.
This desire to be an integral part of the city was most intense whenever I was in his street, which was frequently the case.

Mariannengasse

At night the soft electric motor of the blue and yellow neon lights of a store, at the beginning of the street, became a remarkable benchmark, like the door to a city that is reduced to itself and that is sufficient in and for itself.
A city reduced to its essentials, my essentials. Its intense humming sound seemed hostile, whereas the swirl of water when arriving at the mouth of the sewage system, seemed to calm me. Light startled me here, shit attracted me.
Anxiously I arrived at number 52.
The door to the apartment building that opened for me so graciously when I was invited has suddenly and too often become hostile. All the same the door had its favourites, those that possessed these keys that I did not have. The door jeered at me this time, once again and closed itself in front of me.
Click.
If I didn’t get to know the neighbours themselves, than I at least got to know their habits. Second floor, third window, there was always light burning even very late at night. First floor, first window, an old curtain sometimes let me have a glimpse of a light turned yellow with time. An old woman lived there.
She closed her window very early in the evening after having quickly glanced down at the street, and having recognized me. Then she pulled her curtains shut and the light slowly died out.
What must she think of me? Maybe she had also been madly in love with a man once. Maybe she understood. Maybe she did not.

By studying and examining the building in all of its details, I wound up integrating it into my life and into myself.
It became a part of me, like the street that received it. Like the city that calms me when I am satisfied with my observations, but exhausted, the city strengthens and cheers me up on my way back with its calmness, its lights and its wide streets that seem to belong to me.
My observations, which I made daily, had reached the peak of my delirium, forced me to change myself into a hunter and the neighbours started having their justified doubts about my presence in their street….
A street has to flow. No urban furniture, no bench, no bus stop came to my rescue.
I did not have an alibi.
Not even the benefit of the doubt.
I had become a suspect, hence bothersome and a disturbance.
This street had become my street, a kind of extension of my personal space within a public space. The edge of the shop-window, of a shopkeeper for dentists’ utensils, had become my office and quite often I took out my computer and started working. But the neighbourhood had not integrated such concepts. I would therefore have to use stratagems, one more ridiculous than the other, so that I would once again be permitted to be in this part of the city.

kt

Archizoom Associati 1966-1974

2008-01-11T05:45:00.000-08:00

Archizoom Associati 1966-1974
From the pop wave to the neutral surface
20 september-30 november 2007
Polytechnic School of Lausanne –- CH
Karine Teyssier

It is a succession of unfortunate political coincidences that gave rise to the exhibition Archizoom Associati 1966-1974. From the pop wave to the neutral surface, at the Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL).

Archizoom Associati was a group of architects and designers founded in 1966 in Florence and disbanded in 1974.
Archizoom Associati 1966-1974 is also a book written by the head of the theory and history of architecture laboratory, at the EPFL, Roberto Gargiani.
And Archizoom is now the new name of the exhibitions and lectures space at the EPFL.

First: The book.
This publication of 336 pages is an important historical research and critic about the theories and productions from the utopian Italian group containing a lot of remarkable archives such as plans and photos.

Second: The restructuring of the teaching group in charge of the exhibitions and lecture, due to the retirement of its curator.
The program of exhibitions and conferences in the architectural department has always been pertinent, successfully combining a didactic approach for the students as well as contemporary reflections about architecture that concerned professionals too.
Although the exhibitions could have seemed modest in their presentation, this discretion matched quite well to the teaching of a rationalist less is more architecture.

Third: The international influence
The direction of the EPFL has been over the years punctuated by a fashion and cronyism politic; An architecture competition for the future “EPFL Rolex (!) Learning Centre” has been organised in 2004, inviting all the top people in architecture - Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Kazuyo Sejima - to name only them.
This competition (won by Sanaa architects) has been an ideal opportunity to pump up the teaching body; In 2005, the department of architecture was proud to name Harry Gugger – a partner of Herzog & de Meuron- head of the Laboratory of the Architectural Production.
He teaches as well the project of architecture to the 4th year graduate students.

Whereas a good architect is not necessarily a good teacher, he could also be a bad curator.
From May 2007 Harry Gugger is also in charge of the program of the architecture exhibitions in the EPFL.; He says that the group set up a new global politic for the manifestation.
So, this new global politic begins with a new identity – a new name:

And what about Archizoom?

The justification of this appropriation is argued by Harry Gugger in this way:
(talking about Archizoom – the Italian group - )
“ The effort of ceaseless metamorphosis, the meaning facets, the notion of spectacle” are representative of the character that the team of co-workers intends in his turn to develop. It is not by coincidence that the new group (!) appropriated the name of the architects for its space of activities….

The engine starts up.
The concrete walls of the exhibition space are painted pink. A fake green grass covers the floor.
The original plans of the Archizoom projects are framed and hung on the pink walls while the textile production lie in showcases that are rationally arranged all over the grass.
Here and there some furniture of the group; the spectator is kindly asked to participate…by sitting on the sofas.
And because the relation between art and architecture is necessary, one of the lectures related to the exhibition will be given in the IKEA room (the official name of the lecture’s room) of the University of Art and Design of Lausanne.

Although the exhibition claims to promise a critical view of Archizoom Associati, this “show” is a poor literal translation of a book and the spectacle was not even entertaining. It is just the reflection of a “glitter and champagne” politic of a school that seems to forget its responsibilities toward the future architects it is producing.

Book:

Archizoom Associati 1966-1974
Roberto Gargiani
336 pages
Mondadori Electa
ISBN-10: 8837053320
ISBN-13: 978-8837053321

Exhibition:

http://archizoom.epfl.ch/

Sources:
http://actualites.epfl.ch/newspaper-article?np_id=1103&np_eid=80&catid=10

2008-01-10T01:31:00.000-08:00

Dominic Rich-‘Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring’- Camden Art Centre, Curator; Steven Claydon.

‘Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring’ presents over forty artworks splayed throughout four gallery spaces. At first Steven Claydon’s exhibition, seems steeped in curatorial concerns. He investigates how an artefact's presentation and material demarcates its status within art history. He also examines what is at stake when an artifact is re-contextualised. Indeed, Claydon’s art practice includes issues shared amongst curators. He prolifically appropriates and wittily alters intervenes with the many branches and twigs of art history with a penchant for late British Modernism. This is evident in Aspirin Nathandria, (2005), in which he incorporated an image of Lyn Chadwick’s, Pair of Sitting Figures III (1973). By absorbing them into his work he questions the artwork’s connotations, he deviates the artwork’s history, destablising its status as a work of art.

Camden Art Centres invitation to curate an exhibition must have been well received. The opportunity to incorporate original artefact's into his practice; to work with Chadwick’s original sculpture and to de-plinth it! Pair of Sitting Figures III was literally sat on the floor under Keith Coventry’s, Endangered Species, (2005). The sculpture stares at a wood-chip table, which holds a cluttering of artefact's. This table would feel more familiar in a Flowers East storage room. Amongst these objects Eduardo Paolozzi’s Untitled Maquette; a cast of the Incredible Hulk, small and dismembered, stands in the gaze of Elizabeth Frink’s Goggle Head (1969). Is he simply creating a chaos out of the connotations, categorisations and hierarchies, the history of art has given different movements and materials or is he making an egalitarian stance. Either way, Busts, Maquettes, props, relics, photo and video documentation of sculptures and happenings, objects that evade specific labels, bronze, copper, plaster, gelatin silver prints, ceramics; taxonomies are flattened like a pyramid of cards.

It sounds like a mess. Contrarily, the presentation is dry and austere almost to the point of boredom. Boring until the juxtaposition of archetypal museum and commercial displays comes to light. The gallery space, displaying Frink and Paolozzis' works is furnished like an archetypal parochial gallery. Carol Bove’s A Setting for A. Pomodoro, (2005), is knowingly reminiscent of many galleries on Cork Street. Bonnie Camplin’s Cancer, (2004) plays on a primordial television set, a model ubiquitous throughout British primary schools of the 90’s. Twelve or so empty school chairs watch the screen vigilantly, this could reference to educational programs.(1)

The chance to curate has added a new dimension to Claydon’s art practice, allowing him to play with the taxonomies and connotations of curatorial styles. For a student of Art History, Fine Art or Curating, this exhibition will resonate long after visiting hours. However to a member of the general public, the chaos made of connotations, taxonomies, materials and movements of Art History may have been lost anyway.

(1) This is perhaps a remark on Camden Art Centre’s transparent reliance, as an educational charity on such ‘educational programs’ for funding

2008-01-10T01:27:00.000-08:00

Dominic Rich, Did the Republican National Convention protests achieve Jacques Rancière’s interpretation of equality through ‘political struggle’?

In ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’ Jacques Rancière shares his notion of equality, which is better described as egality. It suggests an extreme levelling of social hierarchies through political struggle. For Rancière a political struggle manifests between these established social hierarchies as the excluded ‘part which has no part’; the unrepresented who attempt to establish their opinion as legitimate in the name of egality. Can Rancière’s notion of political struggle be compared to the events that unfolded during The Republic National Convention (RNC) in Madison Gardens New York, 2004?

The purpose of the RNC is to nominate a Presidential candidate; in 2004 George W Bush was standing for re-nomination. The announcement of the RNC’s venue caused a legal protest to be organised. The protester’s main gripes were the conceived inequalities in the present electoral system, Republican suppression of voters, not to mention the Bush administrations aggressive foreign policy.

Protesting can be a good and legal attempt to get objections heard and understood by an established power. But were their objections heard? Did the protest show the world that America’s indirect voting system misrepresented the electorate? Probably not, floors in the American electoral system have been globally understood for a long time. Did the Bush administration take heed to the significant opposition to the Iraq War? Definitely not! So what effect did the protest have, did it help create egality?

To answer this question the events of the protest must be explained further. On the night of the protest New York’s over zealous police force arrested 1806 people at the protest. One of whom, Mr Dunlop was not active in the protest; he was trying to pick up an order of Sushi from a takeaway. Mr Dunlop was charged with being physically aggressive and resisting arrest. The prosecution gave video evidence of Mr Dunlop that coincided with the charge. However Mr Dunlop’s defence submitted the same ‘unedited’ video evidence showing Mr Dunlop accepting arrest in a passive manner. This video footage proved that the police had given false evidence and that the prosecution had tampered with the original video footage. The case was dismissed along with 90% of the charges brought against the protesters. This scandal was scrutinised by the media, the term ‘Testilying’ became the buzz word to denote the corrupt behaviour of the NYC police force. The questions were asked, if it were not for the presence of independent ‘videographers’, would so many of the charges have been dismissed? Would the corruption have been exposed?

Since the inclusion of cameras to mobile phones almost everybody is an independent ‘videographer’, such events can be recorded almost by chance. Established Western governments’ use of surveillance can be seen as a psychologically and spatially intrusive form of control; it does not simply monitor spaces and events, it instills the fear of being watched into its people; causing self policing. In this case video technology monitored the activity of New York’s’ law enforcement, exposing corruption within it. This growth of a technologically equipped public may force the New York Police force to self police.

The RNC protest did not destroy the social order or create egality. It did not cause a revision of the electoral system or affect Bush’s foreign policy. However, Rancière’s notion of equality does not state that the destruction of a social order is necessary for an act to be considered a political struggle; the attempt to create change is enough. The video technology did enforce an individual’s right to act within the law, and the enforcer’s obligation to abide by the law. Although the RNC protesters’ real effect was coincidental and fortuitous the consequences were dependant on the initial malcontent and action of the protesters. This effect can be seen as a disruption if not a minor reconfiguration of hierarchies. Rancière’s interpretation of equality has not been met, but a change has been made.

Santiago Sierra - Sophie Risner

2008-01-09T16:28:00.000-08:00

Antagonism and the Divide.

Santiago Sierra

30.11.07 - 19.01.08.

Lisson Gallery

29 / 52 - 54 Bell Street
London
NW1 5BY

Santiago Sierra is not the easiest artist to deconstruct. Born in 1966 the Spanish artist lives and works in Mexico City. Previous work have included paying drug-addicted prostitutes the price of a shot of heroin to have a line tattooed across their backs as well as hiring Albanian refugees to move concrete blocks by hand across a gallery space in Switzerland. In New York in 2002 Sierras '9 Forms of 100 X 100 X 600 cm each, constructed to be supported perpendicular to a wall' had groups of three to four workers holding on their shoulders forms constructed from different elements - such as wood and concrete. The workers were paid $12 an hour and were sourced from local job centres. This is but a brief insight into the work of Sierra. His work which in itself rest on the shoulders of concepts that are politically motivated and complex beyond belief.

In 2002 Sierra's first show at the Lisson saw the closing of the gallery entrance with corrugated iron and the last time he was at the Lisson in 2004 Sierra was to be found spraying a number of Iraqi volunteers with quick setting Polyurethane. It is almost as if the tune of a Sierra piece is monumentally repeated, using the same idea just a different social minority or a different aesthetic form. The rhetoric of Sierra's show are painfully similar, with only his methods shifting in representational politics or representational aesthetic from show to show, gallery to gallery, country to country.

Here in 2007 Sierra commands both of the Lissons sites on Bell Street. 29 Bell Street pulls together the culmination of works recently realised in Venezuela and Mexico. On entering the space the first aesthetic shift choreographed by Sierra is the complete blacking out of the gallery windows with black paper and tape. This creates an uncomfortable environment as with any small gallery space that has a doorbell entrance you feel on-entering that you have been let into the show unintentionally early and that the Lisson is mid-set up. This concept is exemplified by the rubbish and packaging detritus that litters the floor. To the left is a projection of 'Four Black Vehicles with the Engine Running inside an Art Gallery' which was first shown in Sala Mendoza and typically was a comment on the cities and other large cities pollution crisis, using the fumes as an unquantifiable mass being pumped back into our atmosphere. Opposite in the right hand room Sierras 'Concert for a Diesel Electric Plant,' set in Chicago uses a blacked-out room to disperse the turbulent sounds of a diesel electric plant. Played loud enough in a small blacked out gallery just off Edgware Road and the experience is Sierra antagonism at its best. Downstairs details one of Sierra's largest works to date; 'Sumision' is a project that saw the word Sumision (Submission in English) almost tattooed onto the landscape of Anapra (the Mexican side of the Mexico / America boarder). This word not only navigates the social housing and geo-political crisis of a country forced to abandon a whole community due to lack of state funds, but highlights the tragedy of poverty that cuts Mexico and America apart.

'Santiago Sierra's most challenging sculptural projects to date,' is based at the Lissons second site on Bell Street. '21 Anthropometric Modules made of Human Faeces by the people of Sulabh International, India' is a 2005 - 06 project that decides to focus Sierras political subjectivity on the 'scavenging' crisis in Sulabh, India. Here, mainly woman are employed to clean public latrines and open sewers, being forced to walk sometimes up to four kilometers with the content balanced on their head. This, coupled with the poor living conditions and the rainy season - which often finds the contents oozing from the baskets and into the scavengers hair and face means that disease is rife, with TB being the most common. For us though, we get 21 very precisely moulded rectangles of brown earth-like substance, treated with Fevicol and left to degrade to become completely harmless. There is always an element of safety needed to display within a gallery space, especially a European or American one. This leaves Sierras message isolated from the product and devalues its content creating an uncomfortable void between subject and object. Santiago Sierra obviously has an accomplished understanding of world problematics, but the question is how does this transcend into the gallery?

Claire Bishop in her critique of Nicholas Bourriads 'Relational Aesthetics' looks at the claim that Sierra's systematic exposure of social division creates a base for less confrontational work to exist harmoniously. To compare the work of Sierra to Nicholas Bourriads 'Relational Aesthetics' is an interesting one; as we certainly do not have any kind of relationship with the objects crafted by Sierra. In fact it can almost be said that Sierra intentionally wants to impose a distance on us; between what he creates and how we experience it. This creation of antagonism between the 'us' and the 'them' so beautifully and expensively moulded by Sierra lacks a justifications of education that would be tantamount in underpinning any politically motivated work. Unfortunately it merely leans on the repetitive nature of a formation well rehearsed and tirelessly activated and paid for by galleries who enjoy a stunt as much as they enjoy a good piece of work. Saying this the system of reading Sierras work is bursting with arguments waiting to happen. He begs for the separation of the 'us' and the 'them' yet he charges his concepts with the discursive fire that could only help to educate this very separation, here he tricks us and unintentionally the work becomes just as much us trying to pick our way to the 'them' as it highlights the division so articulately. Like pawns we fall into Sierras conditioning too easily. Essentially there's almost no way out of a Sierra, try with all your might through discussion to pick your way out of his manipulation of guilt and divide, you will still end up right where he wants you. This manipulation does well to justify his method of critique and finds not so much a controversial note within the gallery space moreover an appropriate note. In an age flooded with 'Live Aid' and the justification of charity it's a challenge to react to crisis through object, a challenge it seems Sierra work tirelessly to maintain.

2007-12-11T05:56:00.000-08:00

Dominic Rich- Questioning Martin Kemps Notion of Consent in relation to Sex and Sadomasochism

In preparation for his recent exhibition; Seduced; Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now’, Martin Kemp assuredly stated that ‘consent is an important watchword for the show’.(1) He defines consent in relation to the act of sex as mutual action and reaction between two people.(*1) This statement is too general, it does not account for the possible contradiction between sex and consent. The idea of truly consensual sex is always negated by the act itself. It relies on a balance of power between a dominant person and a submissive person. The balance can be very complex; power can shift between the people involved. The balance of power can vary greatly, it can be very cordial, or can become one sided, even violent. The dominant person can assume all the power, turning the submissive person into a victim,(*2) at this point the notion of consent collapses; the act of sex becomes rape or sexual assault. Kemp chose a broad definition of consent to avoid this ugly and traumatising side of sex. Conversely, in displaying Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio; a depiction of sadomasochism through a collection of black and white photographs, Kemp has tested if not contradicted his definition of consent.(2)

To explain how, the legal definition of ‘Sadomasochism’ needs to be summarised. It is a relationship between a ‘Sadist’; one who gains pleasure from inflicting pain and violence on others and a ‘Masochist’; one who personally enjoys receiving pain and the infliction of violence. Sadomasochism that results in hurt and injury and interferes with the health and comfort of another is illegal.(3) One cannot consent to a sexual act which results in ‘actual bodily harm’. Documentation of such acts is also illegal. Although, Sadomasochism fits with the idea of mutual action and reaction between two people, the imbalance of power and violent nature of the act means one can not legally consent to it.(4)(*3) This causes one to question whether Kemp’s definition of consent accounts for the legal definition. Can X Portfolio be seen as documentation of ‘actual bodily harm’ through Sadomasochism?

Even though images that document ‘actual bodily harm’ through Sadomasochism are illegal it can be referenced or implied. X Portfolio definitely references homosexual sadomasochism, it is questionable whether it documents it. Most of the photographs show one person having pain inflicted on them in some way. The inflicter is not shown, only masochism is documented. However, there is one photograph that could be seen as documenting an illegal Sadomasochistic act. It shows two men, all that can be seen are the spread buttocks of the first man and the elbow and upper arm of the other man, his hand and forearm have been inserted into the first mans anus; the photograph depicts what is commonly known as ‘fisting’.

The question is; does ‘fisting’ constitute ‘actual bodily harm’?(*4) There is no doubt that it has potential to create long term disabling effects, or if performed vigorously will cause ‘actual bodily harm’. In the Case of Mapplethorpe’s ‘fisting’ photograph there is no concrete evidence of ‘actual bodily harm’ but it references an imbalance of power, submission and the potential of injury.(5) In displaying the act of ‘fisting’ Kemp has strained his notion of consent. He has generalised the term ignoring its complexity; undermining the legal definition of consent in relation to Sadomasochism.

1 ‘Seduced; Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now’, (2007-08) Barbican Art Gallery, Curated by Prof Kemp and Prof Wallace.

2Here, I use sadomasochism as a verb, in the case of Legal definition I use it as a noun, hence the change, ‘Sadomasochism’.

3 ‘…such an injury need not be permanent, but must, no doubt, be more than transient or trifling’. Lord Templeman, See R Vs Brown, 1993.

4 It is also because the masochist can only consent to the ‘nature’ and not the ‘quality’ of the act. He or she can agree to the idea of the act but can not predict the consequences of such an action. Since a masochist is often physically restrained; in the position of total submission, he or she may suffer pain and humiliation they did not expect. Code words are often used by the masochist to inform the sadist to stop the act, this can be argued to solve the problem, however if ‘actual bodily harm’ is created the act is still illegal.

5 The exhibition was police checked to make sure the exhibition did not include any illegal material

Comments by my Lawyer/Mother; L A Rich

*1 This very general definition is out of line with the legal definitions. It does not take into account a scenario where one party goes beyond the scope of the consent give,(the nature of the act) or misrepresents the purpose of the act (quality of the act) what would the position be for example, if the dominant party had an infectious disease that he knew about but concealed from the passive party? Would contraction of that disease have been consented to even if the act of intercourse or fisting was?

*2 It might well be, but consider the case that the passive party wants to be totally passive and allow the dominant party full reign. However, if the acts go beyond that consent that the passive party has given, then your assessment of the situation is correct. There was a case in which the passive (girl) consented to a mild spanking, but the dominant (male) gave her a severe beating.thus going beyond the ambit of the consent. See also http://www.rjerrard.co.uk/law/cases/tabassum.htm

*3 If done for the purpose of sexual gratification (R Vs Brown; A group of men performed sadomasochistic acts on each other resulting in actual bodily harm, It was agreed that an individual could not consent to actual bodily harm) but not if it was for body art, in this case consent maybe given (R Vs Wilson; with his wife's consent a man branded his initials in his wife's buttocks the act was compared to tattooing thus consent could be given)

*4 I think you need a legal definition for this which you will find in the case of Brown and also in Wilson. It is Section 20 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1892. if it does fit within the definition then it cannot be consented to ,according to the ruling in brown. However, if it has been done for the purpose of Art (does the photo turn the act into art?) then it could be that Wilson is the better case to follow. I think it is a dubious distinction and am a bit surprised that the police did not consider this porn.

2007-11-29T08:33:00.000-08:00

“Is All Modern Art Left – Wing?”
Debate at the South Bank Centre, London 14/11/2007
Daniella Saul

An hour and a half of heated debate about the current state of contemporary art practice, was the promise on The Art Fund website. As part of a series of talks organised by the Art Fund and chaired by Tim Marlow, head of exhibitions at White Cube, this one attracted four high profile speakers to address the question. A controversial artist, Grayson Perry, a Tory politician, Ed Vaizey (also the Shadow Minister for Culture), an arts consultant for a research institute into multiculturalism, Munira Mirza, and Jonathan Yeo, the British celebrity’s portrait artist of choice who recently painted a porno- portrait of George W. Bush. After three tentative introductions by the panellists about themselves, Ed Vaizey proclaimed rather predictably that he would make his sound like a party political broadcast. In his opinion, all modern art is actually right – wing. Which art? Does this mean all Modern Art and Contemporary Art?

Surely in order to conduct a legitimate debate about art practice one must first define their borders. Assuming that the audience all know that he means Contemporary Art, he argues that since this art is highly individualistic, made by entrepreneurial artists and “is concerned with freedom of expression” this makes it art of the right, and not of the left. This sounds more like a Conservative defence of neo-liberal economics and its conditions for art-making rather than defining any political leaning in the content of the work. Any weighty counterpoint to this was unsurprisingly absent from Jonathan Yeo’s remarks, who’s only claim to fame is his rebellious schoolboy attempt at “leftist art” with his portrait of George W. Bush collaged from pornographic images. So far, all of Vaizey’s examples of contemporary art used to illustrate his points seem to have been plucked straight from typical sensationalist media coverage of the work of the old YBA canon.

If this art is the justification for his point that British Contemporary art is not engaged in current political debate, perhaps he should look more closely at what other artists besides Damien Hirst are doing. Grayson Perry’s glazed ceramic pots have long been surfaces on which to satirize the politics of the art world, and paint delicately worded messages from “Heteros Murder Children” to “Muslims Are Softies.” Surely this counts as an engagement with current political issues on some level. However, to suggest, as Munira Mirza does, that British artists should make work that explicitly addresses sensitive issues such as Islamophobia and immigration quickly turned the debate away from art and more into a Question Time style political discussion that Tim Marlow had to try hard to contain. Somewhat lost in the turn in the debate was one of Grayson Perry’s remarks which made more than enough sense as to what he thinks Contemporary Art should be doing with regards to politics: “Well it’s no good asking me. I put forward the question in the work. I don’t answer it.” Exactly that, asking the questions about the world we live in, not solving its problems.

2007-11-29T08:28:00.000-08:00

Jaki Irvine - "In A World Like This" Chisenhale Gallery, 31st October - 9th December 2007 - Daniella Saul

The viewer entering the Chisenhale Gallery’s expansive space would be forgiven for thinking he has just walked into the fresh open-air again, not into the East –end chill outside, but into a rehabilitation centre for birds of prey. Irish artist Jaki Irvine’s new show comprises a nine screen video projection shot at the Irish Raptor Research Centre in County Sligo, Ireland. At The Eagles Flying Centre, Irvine recorded the rehabilitation processes of neglected, injured birds. The nurturing relationships fostered with their handlers are set to a cacophonous soundtrack of squawks, bells on the birds’ necks clanging intermittently and encouraged calls from their handlers.

The birds’ promising progress, captured by Irvine as a snapshot of typical day’s activity fosters a budding emotive type of spectating on the part of the viewer. This is achieved entirely through the arrangement and size of the projections onto the gallery’s walls and the timing of certain images onto the walls. This arrangement re-creates the probable spatial arrangement of the centre’s open terrain, with a focus on three poles of activity : the birds’ at rest, their trusting relationships with their handlers, and their flying exercises. The viewer enters the space into another almost square space in the centre of the gallery, built from two walls forming an L- shape, leaving the top left and bottom right hand corners of the space open. This is the flying arena, where the birds swoop from their handlers arms, in sometimes tentative and hesitant flight, to a target further away. The viewer is a privileged audience to a rare and triumphant spectacle. In this double L-shaped space, depending on the direction of the bird’s flight, the viewer must shift both their gaze and body in order to follow its direction. To the right hand side of the gallery space, a continuous projection shows resting birds perching majestically on various posts scattered in an expanse of greenery. To the left hand side, on four smaller screens, the nurturing relationships between the birds and their three handlers can be seen as the handlers seem to pose with their vulnerable charges perching on their elbows, as if for their portraits. The viewer’s sense of curiosity to repeatedly return to each of the screens is created by the sonority of bird calls across the gallery, impossible though it may be to be sure of any connection between them.

Linear narrative is eschewed here, in favour of creating a poignancy individual to each of the areas of activity one sees captured in the images. Irvine’s work is a looped projection and within it the activities depicted in each of the three areas all occur in real time. However, their duration seems interminable as this work captures a moment of progress in an ongoing enterprise, suspending it for the viewer to revel in its success.

I Make Up - Tom Trevatt

2007-11-28T14:24:00.000-08:00

12th January 1765, 20th May 1990 and 2nd December 2005

…this actuality that calls forth I, preserved, persevered, sublimated. That holds back in ineluctable prominence. That maintains division, disillusion, distinction. This actuality dramatising the symbolic of inconsequential I-ness…

…as one ascends the escalator at Southwark station, the sky is presented as geometric patterns, blue glass on walls and roof of the intermediate concourse, a vaulted wonder, the dome…

… for the last time mascara is applied, small drops of tears carry black blobs of this stuff down cheeks staining the fucking sofa…

…Les Deux Plateaux, a non-monument, erupts as imagined planes across the Palais-Royal in Paris. Buren prefers the term “polygons” for these fluted columns due to their cross section, the trademark 8.7cm stripes offering the various sides to these shapes…

… IKB #002FA7…

…the subject is said to exceed itself in communication. This excess of the subject, whereby it overflows in communication, allows community as such to occur since it means we are not isolated as discrete identities…

…the architects Future Systems used International Klein Blue behind the aluminium disks on the outside of the Bullring in Birmingham…

…we play this game. You stand in a street, maybe a shopping centre is best. There are just two of you, it doesn’t work otherwise. And one person discretely starts following someone. The other person then has to follow behind and try and guess who it is the first person is following. The trick is to do it so casually that you fool them into thinking you’re not following anyone at all…

…I am indirectly responsible for, among other things, the death of adequate resistance, architectural incompetencies that caused the structural decay of a cottage in South Devon, the switch in swallow’s migration patterns, the Cold War, the death and mutilation of thousands of innocent children in Vietnam and Cambodia due to landmine accidents every year, Global Warming, the certain demise of a number of highly suspicious donkeys, lack of humanitarian aid, the spread of HIV, Syphilis and Chlamydia, Timothy McVey, the heartbreak of someone I love, the mounting trepidation one feels when watching a horror film, sunrise but not sunset, the abrupt reconciliation of subject into object, not putting out self-immolators (you wouldn’t piss on me if I was on fire - for fucks sake I can’t go in a urinal if I think someone else is on the room), the decline of the Welfare State, increase in taxes, decrease in taxis and numerous counts of liver damage…

…on the outskirts of London there is no-one…

…so there’s this girl called Idriel or something, maybe Sara, and she is a empty vessel, so fucking representative of nothing that the only way she can express herself is by becoming a fan of something. A fanatic. So she starts up this website and on it lists all the things she is a fan of. Like Kill Bill, Douglas Adams, Dresden Dolls, Luna Lovegood (whoever that is), IKB, American Gods and so on. But she’s not just a fan of these things, she has joined a fan listing online to claim her fanship of this or whatever.Its crazy, like she defines herself by who or what she likes…

…even bare walls look barer now, its not as though they got less full of matter just in one day…

RCA Secret Exhibition - Sophie Risner

2007-11-28T11:56:00.000-08:00

16 - 23 November 2007

Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore
London
SW7 2EU

‘Have we time, in this world of ours, to love things and see them in close range, in the plenitude of their smallness'

Gaston Bachelard
(http://dams.rca.ac.uk/res/sites/RCA_Secret/info5.html)

Postcards through-out history have been moments or 'extraordinary assemblages.' The recount of long forgotten places and lands discovered relayed back to loved ones. Whether they are hand-made or purchased by the side of the road they espouse meaning and discovery, whilst simultaneously managing to be a personally constructed account geared to a certain audience or set of eyes. Postcards are whimsically kept and ordered, filled into place by their receivers, only to be pulled out again through moments of nostalgia. Postcards it seems have become and still are, a perfectly viable form of communication through art and beyond tourism. As technology becomes the communication de rigueur in a world permeated by the world wide web it is still enamoring to see that postcards are still used and even better still embellished upon for the sake of art.

The RCA Secret exhibition is held annually at the Gulbenkian Gallery, the main space on entering the building which is situated next to the Royal Albert Hall. The show itself has been running for 14 years and has secured quite a substantial sum for young artists during their studies, with this years show raising over £90, 000. The shows main pull is the amount of celebrity artists that still submit work and this year was no exception, with the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Yoko Ono and Greyson Perry.

With a show such as this there is a difficulty in critiquing aesthetic as every detail of originality through curatorship is regimented through an age-old display model. I've been attending the show for 3 years and not once has the layout or the running system ever changed. This may be why the show neatly fits into the structured remit of a typically unadventurous RCA project. Steeped in tradition it's a show or rather showcase of work that doesn't beg you to unnaturally 'think.' It begs no questions and demands no authority. In fact the RCA Secret exhibition seems to barely make a blip on the London Arts Calendar at all. This is not to discredit its role, what it lacks in adventure and doesn't command in ambition, it makes up for in representation. I'm not talking about the obvious possibility of owning an original Hirst or walking away with a sketch by Quentin Blake, I'm talking about the role of representing art practice from outside of the London art network. Smaller practices up and down the country get the opportunity to become involved in a international show in a well known arts institution. This could be seen as charity in itself.

'The artist, freed from the burden of subjectivity, present their gifts from the other side of themselves, swaying as they do the timbre of the multitude.'

Richard Falls, November 2007

In this sense there is a structural coming-together of artists and their work, the unifying of latter known and famous artists under one roof with one rule and completely anonymous. This is the glory of the RCA Secret show. The fact that a smaller artist practice can rest on the same ledge and next to a well known artist is a dynamic that is rarely seen within the constructs of a central London art space. This isn't just a subtle comment for the shows success but the reason why year-in-year-out people find time in their busy schedule to visit it, and more importantly artists find time to create for it. What it lacks in theme and curatorial direction it makes up for in an autonomous appreciation of image as image not on merit of name as image. Another point of justification for the success of this show doesn't have to come from the amount of money it generates for RCA students, but as a bench mark moment of appreciation for works outside of London that wouldn't and doesn't get a voice within London. Saying this the very anonymous nature of the show could counter balance that. To reflect on the Richard Fall quote above is to justify that the small offerings by each individual artist are symbolic elements of the multi-faceted paralleling of practices throughout the UK and beyond. A major force in the art world this is not, but as a tributing factor that maintains and keeps alive many unspoken moments of artistic production and progression RCA Secret it is.

Capital Letters for Duplicity

2007-11-28T09:11:00.000-08:00

(In a room with Robert Morris and Carl Andre)
Written by Catherine Borra

I looked away from the window for the light was too strong.
I turned back to the room and wondered if there would be any difference, yet no: all the steel square plates were there, arranged to form some bigger square: not great, nor grand; just bigger.
The squares reflected the blank, white shades of the room in the same, non-obvious, opaque way, just as they were doing before, and they themselves were reflected by the mirrored sides of four cubes engaged in an infinite mute dialogue, between each other.
Objects. Objects! You cannot have any great relationship with a motionless form that engages so little with its contingencies: the squares will stare up at the cubes like a bed-ridden old man that has lost his glasses, and the cubes will toss a glance back to them, still absorbed in their everlasting picture frame of uncontaminated perfectness. This could go on forever. I was clearly uninvited.
I was pushed back, put on a hold – numbed by the rigueur of this private act. I was to disturb if it interrupted the scene with some new reflection. What was left was me, with no particular need for prevalence, no expectation or special need, no need to step out from my own privateness, but willing to wait for a while.
And finally it happened: a horde of school-children rushed into the room, a horde of little prevailing Is, each with its own particular smell and voice-tone, so strong that they disrupted the silence of the cube and square dialogue.
Cubes and squares just had to look around, no matter how hard they concentrated. They were stepped on and they were contaminated with all kinds of fragmented reflections.
There were dashes of colour flying around the air.
This was enough to shake I out of its seclusion and join in the tension. I is a social individual after all.

Compagnie Beau Geste – Transports Exceptionnels – Southbank Centre’s Jubilee Gardens, London.

2007-11-28T09:09:00.000-08:00

Sunday 7 October 2007

Reviewed by Catherine Borra

On Sunday 7/10, the experimental artistic group Compagnie Beau Geste presented a ballet called Transports Exceptionels at the Southbank Centre’s Jubilee Gardens.
This fascinating choreography is a duet accompanied by the music of Samson and Dalila by Camille Saint Saens, featuring the voice of everlasting opera star Maria Callas. The opera from which the music comes from is fundamental, because the protagonists of this piece are none but French dancer and choreographer Philippe Priasso, accompanied by a mechanical digger. Yes, a digger.
Maybe one wouldn’t think of such a machine performing contemporary dance - however experimental the ballet might be – but this challenge towards traditional and more harmonic forms of representation results into a surprisingly graceful and sometimes witty performance.
The man is creating a relationship with the machine, constantly moving between friendship and love: concepts such as protection (on the diggers side) and childish playfulness (on the Priasso’s side) emerge from this 360° sensual double act. Yet at times, something like rebelliousness and domination accompany the actors’ feelings, although we cannot be sure of who starts off. Of course, the digger is not just a machine as it appears to have a human origin/derivation: its spade is more like a huge hand than a bulk of iron whose intent is to dig wholes. The rise of humanity and of consciousness inside this contraption is similar to that of a robot: there is some struggle for the man to maintain his power despite of his physical weakness, but in the end the positions are decided and the digger bows its head / hand.
In a short story by sci-fi novelist Isaac Asimov called “Robby”, a family robot decides it wants to become human at any cost. Other than being an issue regarding so-called “robot psychology”, this is just a desire of belonging that we can often encounter between humans as well: surprisingly, despite its oversized metal clumsiness, this robot-like machine turns out to be more similar to a spoilt child in need of attention.

The Affirmation - Sophie Risner

2007-11-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

The Affirmation

Chelsea Space (Chelsea College of Art and Design)
16 John Islip Street
London
SW1P 4JU

07.11.07 - 15.12.07
Curated by Andrew Hunt

Artists Involved:
Paul and Steven Claydon
Kajsa Dahlberg
Chris Evans
Robert Garnett
Babak Ghazi
Mark McGowen
Goshka Macuga
Elizabeth Price
Mandla Reuter
Jamie Shovlin
Matthew Thompson
Tris Vonna-Michell

Don't be fooled into thinking that this exhibition is in any way as obvious as its title - 'The Affirmation,' a show based on the same-titled 1981 novel by Christopher Priest is an incredibly enterprising collective exhibition. As you may witness from the large list of artists above 'The Affirmation' symbolizes an exuberance hard to comprehend within the realms of such a small gallery space such as the one offered at Chelsea.

The Christopher Priests novel looks into the mind set of Peter Sinclair a man 'tormented by bereavement and failure.' Sinclair, a man on the edge, decides to move into the countryside and a life of isolation after a failed marriage and losing his job in the city. Whilst hidden away Sinclair embarks on an autobiography. Sinclair soon finds himself writing the autobiography of another man 'affirming' a parallel identity in an imagined world, a persona whose sinister attractions draws him further in.' A tale it seems of tragedy that ends in ultimate madness.

Andrew Hunt, Co-Editor of 'Untitled' magazine and curator of this show requested that each of the thirteen artists invited respond through their work to themes of identity - in a push to mirror the personal exploration taken by Sinclair in Priests original novel. In doing this Hunt begs the artist to distort their approach to art history in 'a way that goes beyond mere ironic appropriation, and extends out towards a new and unfamiliar view of the world.' It is at this point that you can't fail but notice how ambitious this show actually is. Not only is the theme already quite complicated but to fit this negotiation into the small box of Chelsea Space is a very brave move indeed.

Like the book it details, Hunts complex curatorial concept is thoroughly multi-layered, not just with meaning, but with demands on the artists. Each work in 'The Affirmation' is a brand new piece created especially for the show. For this Hunt invited the artists to work directly with the Special Collection at Chelsea College of Art and Design Library boasting that every artist has managed 'to find their own connections within the library's archive.' I don't doubt this but what I do doubt is the general thematic indulgence in this show which unfortunately gets lost as one wanders around the space. It is highly plausible that this show could merely be a collective piece that asked the artists to work directly with the Special Collection at Chelsea Library, to then add the extra layer of the text by Priest doesn't just overly confuse the show but could also damage its credo.

Maybe the Priest novel was a starting point for the show? An inverted moment into the psychosis, referencing the role of madness and how as a society we 'affirm' concepts of identity - moreover how and what we do to sustain our own identity. This would tally with the highly charged historical element of the show and the use of the Special Collection. The contextual element seems to be a powerful curatorial theme in a lot of Hunts prior shows. Hunt seems to be exploring the role of a literary thematic to expand upon new possibilities for an aesthetic experience. The entire construct of the show is so brilliantly multi-layered and complicated that it somehow manages to actually 'work.' Hunt proves to be a genius in his physical multi-layering of the work, directing a mix-hang that forces us to come upon an artist several times as the majority of artists involved contributed more than one piece - again an adventurous insight into Hunts ambitious filling of the gallery space. The mix-media element helps to make the show increasingly visual as well as aesthetically beautiful. Each piece is worth its salt, as the artists have obviously taken time to produce something powerful and interesting (according to the publication provided, the show 'The Affirmation' has been a thought in Hunts mind ever since 2006).

This consideration and careful manipulation keeps the show very tightly curated and annoyingly hitch-less. I can't help but remember that as I appreciated each and every piece on their own merit I did observe how they all looked so 'right' together, this is a good systematic of a well conceived 'group' show. Saying this though as I did traverse the space and spend time getting to know each and every individual piece I couldn't help but only find slight tangible connections between piece and idea (theme). The broad nature of the theme means that it is ever easy to produce work that has a multitude of readings. This idea doesn't necessarily contribute to the first intention of the show and may in fact hinder its interpretation.

It's hard to look in detail at ever piece within such a large show (in such a small space). Goshka Macugas audio selection in the centre of the main space stands out as being some interesting extracts from the Special Collection but thought provoking moments of sound experimentation. Similarly Chris Evans 'The Affirmation, Letter and books, Dimensions variable 2004 / 2007' is a great introduction into the general 'gist' of the show. Other pieces such as Mark McGowens video 'Artist to set himself on fire' is slightly amusing but essentially lost thematically, especially when McGowen espouses the work as a protest on the war in Iraq.

Holistically this exhibition works beyond it's overly complex remit. Each of the work manages to do or say something and as an exhibition it is worth visiting twice or spending a long afternoon there. The surprise of this is based mainly on the size of the show in ratio with the quantity and quality of the work, though not the main reason this is definitely a contributing fact behind the loss of Hunts core theme here. An over indulgence of artists in a tightly curated small space doesn't help Hunts main idea. Aesthetically the show looks great and works well, but this could easily happen outside of the clutter of the theme. Equally the intentions embedded within that theme only hinder the clutter of the show to make this a very individualistic reading far away from Hunts uniting intention.

2007-11-27T08:54:00.000-08:00

Unplugged (Remix), David Batchelor, Wilkinson Gallery
11 October-18 November 2007
Soledad Garcia
In Unplugged (Remix), the London based artist David Batchelor gives track for his new exhibition on his well-known exploration of the use and understanding of colour. This time, the usual illuminations through neon lights or ‘billboard effects’ have been replaced by the natural gloss and saturate colours of plastic objects. Ordinary commodities, such as strainers, dusters, combs, brushes, balls and small children’s toys, among others things, are elements that Batchelor gathered from different but common Pound Shops. Once again, he attempts to work with the urban environment, a scattered and transformable place where some unvalued and insignificant objects could be potentially changed to a high status.
Parapillars, the installation placed on the ground floor of the gallery, suggests the first transcendence for these accumulative utensils that are attached to a vertical matt metal structure. All the relevance resides in the common thread of colour; some of these objects are selected under a precise distinction of range and values, while others through chromatic improvisation or by types, creating an environment of decorative trees with attractive shapes. The aim is achieved. Everyday kitsch becomes objects of fascinating contemplation. Thus Batchelor's strategic assemblages could proceed to a new state in the viewer, one that, annulling their original use, promotes the desire to consume these industrial objects as art products. And finally, the inevitable impossibility, where this state takes place is a fictional illusion, only possible in the context of an exhibition venue.
In comparison to Batchelor's previous artworks like Brick Lane Remix (2003), where installations of second hand light-boxes and shelving units celebrate the electric coloring of a technological era, Unplugged (Remix) rescues modest elements whose technological value has disappeared. On the first floor of the gallery, electric cables were wound into a ball, while plastic and souvenir sunglasses were tied together building the skeleton structure of balls forms. The opportunity for the spectator to play with these objects is forbidden, drawing attention to what has been placed on the walls of the gallery: Batchelor's drawings of his Parapillars and illuminated installations, a practical metaphor which further distances these untouchable objects.
The seduction of the gaze is recognized by Batchelor through the use of the language of capitalist industry, employing layout methods that allow a formal distribution of space and make objects visually attractive and enlightening unnoticed objects. This type of manipulation considers the effort for the artist “to make these materials look better than they do in their raw state” , while the spectator consuming this ephemeral theatre and assuming their disillusion, returns to their consumable state (home). Nevertheless collectors enjoying this artificial scenario, accessing to these objects, break completely the barrier of consumption. Inevitability, art from the masses to the few.

2007-11-27T08:41:00.000-08:00

Review on
Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo
Tate Modern, 9 October- 6 April 2008 by Soledad Garcia

Placed in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, Doris Salcedo’s exhibition is one of several shows that are included in the current Latin-American art programme. One of the distinguishing features of this exhibition is the intervention of a Colombian artist inside the venue, which overturns and replaces the classical and well-known retrospective of the Latin-American artist. This shift of perspective, from the legitimization of Latin-American artists through their historical artwork in the museum context to the opportunity of an artist to work with the legitimization of a modern museum, apparently opens a democratic interaction between centre and periphery; postcolonial concepts that are involved in Shibboleth, Salcedo’s large and sinuous crack that fractures the floor of the Turbine Hall.
Starting from the entrance of the Hall, a tiny and insignificant crack begins to separate the concrete floor. With a non-rigid and jagged shape, this broken path contrasts with the orthogonal order of the Hall, intensified by being on the middle of the building where the crack becomes a wide gap following a zigzag course. This allows us to see the inside reliefs: the traces of the museum foundations. At the end, the crack doesn't finish in the opposite wall, on the contrary, it continues along the other side of the wall. Indeed, the crack acts as a weak antagonist of this strong and impressive modern building. The Tate Modern becomes a symbol of hierarchies and classifications, due to the understanding of history. Reinforcing this idea through the title Shibboleth, the crack disrupts the criterion of identifying groups, which confronts this discomforting “Modern Shibboleth”.
Spectators crossing the unlineal crack, implicitly subvert what has been defined and fixed in eurocentric and colonial discourses, from differences based on race and territory to the fantasy expressions of otherness. Using only a simple gesture of form in the floor, Salcedo attempts to reveal imposing narrations that remains marginalized from the heritage of the Modern project. The confrontation of her artwork in this illustrious institution, commits the predictable risk of staying in the absolute silence of history, due to the recognized process of the Tate, i.e. their root foundation in the main Enlightenment heritage: this suggests a lineal reconstruction of the nation (art, history, identity) as well as the current assessment of the museum under the recognition of this still singular dominion. The Museum attempts to open its doors to pluralism and welcomes equality, while its nature on the contrary, attracts organizing contexts, knowledge and power relationships. At least this aspect is corroborative since Salcedo is curated by Achim Borchardt-Hume, curator of the Tate Modern.
The answer to these issues, as Salcedo knows, hasn’t been found, but at least her initiative explores and raises questions that confront our self-deception.

2007-11-22T01:49:00.000-08:00

Dominic Rich-
Seduction; Sex and Art from Antiquity to Now. Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2007-08

In the proposal for his new exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery Martin Kemp asks ‘Where does art stop and pornography begin?’.(1) In an exhibition that purports to explore ‘the representation of sex in art through the ages” exploring the dichotomy of cultural codes of ethics, it would be expected that there was an even presentation of pornography through the ages. Questioning the morality and purpose of representing sex, the exhibition provides a chronological overview of over 300 works. Included are ‘Roman sculptures, Indian manuscripts, Japanese prints, Chinese watercolours, Renaissance and Baroque paintings and 19th century photography with modern and contemporary art’. Here the word ‘with’ suggests a divide between post nineteenth century art and that prior. The divide relates to Kemp’s question of the dual function of erotic art; as art and as pornography, titillation or arousal. It indirectly implies that arts function as an arouser is no longer pertinent.

It is not so much through what is exhibited but through what is left out that we can begin to answer Kemp’s introductory question. To elaborate, it is no secret that Greek and Roman culture’s use of sex was a lot more diverse and freely celebrated; depictions of sexual acts had religious reverence but were also used as decoration. As Catholicism created a millennium of prudes in Europe it is not surprising that there was a suppression of sex in life and art from the Renaissance to beyond the advent of photography.(2) During this long period explicit representations of sex were confined to the secret rooms of the British Museum, or such places as J M W Turners private sketch book. Photography and print expanded the circulation and quantity of representations of sex exponentially. Photography separated titillation from artistic thought allowing it to exist independently. Print created mass production of these images. Sex was turned into a global and highly lucrative industry: the ‘porn industry’. So why in this exhibition are contemporary representations of sex only represented by contemporary art and not also with the ‘porn industry’?

Sex and titillation are still prevalent in contemporary art, but are used to convey an ideology or often a critique of the ‘porn industry’. Contemporary art is never simply about pornography.(3) For instance, being heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, the Surrealists saw sex as a method of improving one’s psyche. Robert Mapplethorpe’s ‘sado-masochistic’ photographs have a political charge questioning the notion of consent.(4) Nan Golding photographs intimate accounts of lovers with their children, reinvigorating the romantic ideals of love and sex. This seems reactionary to the way pornography has de-humanised perceptions of sex. Unlike the ‘porn industry’, contemporary art’s explicit imagery always has a cause or excuse.

As Kate Bush assured, ‘it’s an exhibition not a sex museum… the show is not about pornography’. This attitude adds to a censorship of the history of sex, undermining the role pornography played in classic civilisations. Photographic images produced purely for arousal are ignored by this exhibition after the start of the 20th century. With regards to Kemp’s question ‘Where does art stop and pornography begin?’ this photography or early pornography is the most important element of the exhibition. It shows explicit sexual images existing independently of artistic ideologies and mediums. Kemp highlights where pornography begins to separate from art. Unfortunately, in excluding the current ‘porn industry’ the ‘Now’ part of the title has been undermined

1 Martin Kemp is Co-Curator of ,‘Seduction; Sex and Art from Antiquity to Now’.
2 I mean the suppression of the representation of coitus rather than the use of nudity in painting.
3 Apart from when it is bought; this is another debate.
4 If his photography was really to be Sado-Masachstic then it would be illegal.

Projection of Otolith II, The Otolith Group - LISSON GALLERY

2007-11-21T15:16:00.000-08:00

Reviewed by Catherine Borra

As a continuation of their first video Otolith I, Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun aka the Otolith Group, present their second work (Otolith II) at Lisson Gallery, as the UK premiere.
Like for Otolith I, this work follows three main lines at the same time: the narrator’s voice, belonging to a women that speaks to us from the future; the images, that are mainly shots of poor Indian suburbs; and finally the point of view of the public, that summarizes all of this information.
The narrator is questioning herself about our era, on how the almighty divinities of Capital and of Spectacle were introduced, and if they are still influent in her own age, talking of them as if they were an obscure force that may appear in her own time as well. As she debates on these issues, we see struggling scenes of everyday life in India’s biggest shanty towns alternated with images of shootings in studios for the local TVs (the frivolity of the divinity of spectacle, that tempts many but satisfies few).
During this screening, a multitude of reconnections might go on in the western viewer’s mind: in the first place, there is a bewilderment caused by the words spoken by the narrator and the images that are presented: it takes a while to contextualize sound and vision. Then, one has to position its expectations about scenes of a third world / less developed country: the viewer may feel on the same level of the narrator, as if those images of degrade belonged to his own past too.
But suddenly there is a time overlap: the viewer is given the images of a building by Le Corbusier at Chennay to elaborate inside of this context. This powerful building, with a futuristic design that could overtake most of the scenarios a European is used to see, is now decadent and abandoned. It’s a dead building that time, vegetation and other various abuses have set into the past. But this is not the past that was identified before, this can be seen as the Western world’s personal past: its future.
The artists talk about using science-fiction in their video, and indeed we can trace all the elements that we could find, say, in a social science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick – The Simulacra. Things are not as they seem, the science-fiction narrative is used in order to permit a side vision of reality: the fiction of the video is turned into a reflection on contemporary society, and the superimposition of different points of view lead us to reconsider our original statements about what belongs to the present and what belongs to the past.

24h Experiment Marathon – 14th and 15th October, Serpentine Pavillion - Reviewed by Catherine Borra

2007-11-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

During Frieze Art Fair, Hans Ulrich Obrist invites the art public to another epic, called “24h Experiment Marathon”, as a prosecution of his last year’s “”24h Interview Marathon”.
This year’s project is curated together with artist Olafur Eliasson and takes place in the pavilion designed by the latter and architect Kjetil Thorsen. As the artist himself has stated, the structure is completed by a series of talks that have taken place since the pavillion’s opening in late September, of which the Marathon is part.
Finely structured in its program, the event started off with its lengthy mission of “creating reality” / educating the mass through a load-full of experiments, spanning between science, literature, art. Illustrious scholars from a variety of different fields were united under the directions of the curators, who imposed on them the chore of talking about the ambiguous subject of the “self” using the form of an experiment: this obliged the artists to rationalize their practice and focused the scientists on an unreasonable subject.
This experience, according to Eliasson, would help the public to produce its own reality. Indeed, at the beginning of the Marathon the artist invited the pubic to participate and to read this series of experiments as a sole happening that would give life to the architecture that hosted them.
The first voices to be herd were those of the scientists, coordinated by Dott. Israel Rosenfeld, who demonstrated a number of physical phenomena that are caused by subjectivity and by neurological / psychic adaptations.
After this solemn introduction to the matters of the self given by such a legitimate authority as science – which always makes a certain effect on such a desperately positivist society, there came a more “experimental” approach to the argument from a long list of artists including Marina Abramovic, Spartacus Chetwynd, Pedro Reyes, Tomas Saraceno, John Baldessari. Although the approaches were very different from one another, they all fitted perfectly in the context of the Marathon, producing a linear discourse that fulfilled the overall aim of presenting the subject.
The event is orchestrated in order to produce relationship with the building, and to build a view of its own regardless of the individualities of the lectures /artists. Thus, the Marathon is an active part of Eliasson’s art although maintaining its independence and relevance as a curatorial project.

Renata Lucas, 'Resident' - Sophie Risner

2007-11-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

Renata Lucas - Resident
15 November 2007 - 13 January 2008

Gasworks
155 Vauxhall Street
London
SE11 5RH

On approaching Gasworks I took the opportunity to ring the bell situated to the left hand side of the door to the Gasworks complex. I was greeted by a rather tall and slim individual who asked what I wanted. My colleagues had assured me that there was a show on and so I enquired thus 'Hi, is there a show on?' To which the tall and slim man answered yes and that this was it stepping outside of the gallery and pointing to the left hand wall. Here we observed a rhythmic reconstruction of the fascia wall to the left of the gallery door. What seemed to be previously the loading bay for the gallery space (two large wall length opening doors) had been bricked up and reconfigured. Not only was the wall rebuilt to create a small enclave outside but even better this enclave championed a small radiator. Of course! Why would there be a radiator outside? We touched the radiator (as it was quite a cold night) and it was indeed on and working, pumping heat out into the night.

According to the press release that we obtained, Lucas a Brazilian born artist is interested in 'an analysis of the commissioned site, often observing the social information embedded within buildings and particularly their boundaries.' This could not have been more subtly dominant within the workings of this piece. In order to understand 'Resident' you have to articulate the surrounding area as becoming part of the work. Gasworks a large Victorian Warehouse is situated on a road dominated by large blocks of flats, and for geographical reference a mere stone throw from Oval cricket ground. The juxtaposition of industrialization and residential habitation is not uncommon on the streets of London, in fact it is often the norm'. Here, Lucas highlights this architectural moment by subverting the use of the average house-hold radiator. How can a radiator outside be useful to anyone other than those living rough? Is this Lucas commenting on the global issue of homelessness, or alternatively is Lucas simply turning the interior, exterior? Faced with these questions it is easy to stand there and admire the work as a clever defacement of a established art space. Equally this could be a subtle comment from Lucas that art should help in the production of solutions to our social problems.

By suggesting this role reversal of interior / exterior object hood we encounter a perplexed shift in our understanding of the gallery space and the use of it to discuss the constructs of contemporary art. We also have to start observing a piece of work such as this within the conditions of street furniture and public art - as the remit alters from the typical gallery institutionalization. This is why 'Resident' can be seen to be so successful in what it does. It maneuvers our presupposed ideas into a realm or even surroundings unconventionally disjointed from what we are experiencing. We wouldn't bat an eye at the placement of a traffic light or street sign inside the gallery space, in fact we'd except it and with already acquired knowledge understand it to be quite acceptable and tangible to place such items within the gallery space. Yet, why when inside objects are placed outside, such as this, do we find it difficult to validate? I could state the Lucas is harking back to early surrealist sculptural work here or even better 'Resident' could well be a inside-out comment on Duchamps urinal. To certify its existence within the hierarchy of art production, 'Resident' can be viewed as not just a radiator in the open but a complex interior/exterior ready-made. As Duchamp wanted us to re-evaluate the role of the every day within the gallery space Lucas is almost begging us to re-evaluate the role of the everyday within the everyday.

Cornelia Parker Brontean Abstracts as part of Never Endings at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Jenine McGaughran

2007-11-21T06:58:00.000-08:00

This collection of works, amassed from Parker’s residency at the Brontë family home in 2006 seeks to uncover the underlying truths through close historical research and analysis of their personal living space and belongings.

Objects integral to their daily lives are magnified in order to discover something that remains unknown. Close-ups of pin-cushions, Charlotte’s quill, Emily’s comb all seek to imply an greater degree of intimacy and thus a greater ‘knowing’ of their owners. As much as it may seem that we are getting closer to understanding the lives of the sisters through intimate investigations of their personal belongings the paradoxical twist is that these prying’s serve in bringing the viewer no closer to a truth, but instead draws them into a narrative of the artists construction.

This notion of investigation is played out further, firstly with a video and later in a sound recording. The video shows an interview with 90 year old Phyllis who claims to be a direct descendant of Branwell Brontë. Phyllis, accompanied by another man similar of age discuss family stories that give rise to the belief that she is related to the Brontë’s. Further to this is evidence of their genealogic investigations, including a photograph of the believed illegitimate child of Branwell Brontë, which is held up in parallel with Phyllis’s face in profile to reveal slight resemblances. However, this is all extremely tenuous. Next is a sound recording accompanied by a map detailing the layout of the Brontë’s home. Two psychics can he heard discussing the movements made by its inhabitants, played out as a narrative from room to room both tell of events that are actually recorded in history, including references to a howling dog. Later it is revealed, by a third voice, perhaps that of Parker, that on the eve of Emily’s death her dog howled continuously until her passing. These facts seem to suggest a level of authenticity in their claims, which later plays an important role when they discuss the possibility of Branwell having fathered a child, substantiating the assertions made by Phyllis.

Brontëan Abstract functions under the guise of a forensic investigation of the Brontë’s in an attempt to know or understand them more. However, it could equally be claimed that this is not its real function. Parker is instead constructing narratives and possible fictions in the creation of a story that is potentially never-ending.

Eva Rothschild at South London Gallery. Jenine McGaughran

2007-11-21T03:56:00.000-08:00

Spindle-like structures punctuate the air of the South London Gallery. Left to meander a path through the labyrinth of sculptures, drawn to neither one nor another, but instead encouraged to drift.

The sculptures or drawings in space, serve to offer a stark contrast with their environment, alluding to a chaos that seems far away. Perpetually juxtaposing, they are at once inviting and prohibiting, hard yet soft, smooth but textured.

The compulsion to touch engendered by the tactile quality of these works is at once intriguing and conflicting. While the hand desires to reach out and touch the architectural forms the menacing serpents warn of the dangers involved in such an intimate encounter.

Notions of entanglement occur throughout; fabric wrapped around sculptures, papers interlocking in the creation of patterns and images, snakes weaved around spindles.
Their size too offers a strange contradiction, while they are large; they are by no means imposing, not quite flimsy but fragile and delicate enough to be knocked over.
There is a comfort in the coherence of the works but a suggestion of entrapment and suffocation caused by the asphyxiating serpents bound tightly around the fragile structures.

The constant figuring of serpents seems to reference temptation, while the use of leather composed to look like whips alludes to something erotic or even sinister.

While most of the works physicality is evident others confuse and disorientate. A large black irregular lump offers fragmented reflections from its mirrored surface, producing a ruptured reflection of the self. This is alluded to elsewhere in the exhibition with a corner sculpture composed of a smooth black reflective surface, interrupted by a matrix of lines that jut out into the viewers’ space. While the mirror seeks to tempt and entrap the spectator, drawing them closer into a simultaneous inspection of the work and self, they are kept firmly at length by the protruding architectural lines that penetrate the surrounding space.

On reflection Eva Rothschild’s subtle puns created with her use of imagery and medium is complex and considered. While her sculptures can allude to the work of artists such as Eva Hesse and thus draw comparisons with Minimalism, it is perhaps more important to uncover what Rothschild is implying through such considered appropriations of imagery and medium.

Mother and Child, Divided. Turner Prize Retrospective. Jenine McGaughran

2007-11-21T03:53:00.001-08:00

Of all the works to arouse controversy in the history of the Turner Prize and indeed British art of the 1990’s Damian Hirst’s Mother and Child, Divided wins hands down. The work, which inspired controversy when included as part of Saatchi’s Sensation and in 95 as part of Hirst’s Turner Prize exhibition is back at Tate Britain once again to remind us what all the fuss was about.

Having never physically encountered this work before I felt it my duty to go in search of what lies behind the furore that encapsulates a generation and has come to constitutes something of an art-world urban myth. Indeed the majority of press that surrounds this recent retrospective all talk of Mother and Child, Divided as something of a long lost treasure restored in to its rightful position or as the jewel in the crown of the Turner Prize so far. However, the reviews also seem to be tainted with the sensation that enwrapped the critics and new art savvy audiences of the mid-1990’s.

On entering the exhibition, I was of course conscious that I would soon have my first encounter with this work. Although interested by the others works on display (10-years worth), I was anxious to get to this piece and hopefully closer to understanding the notoriety that surrounds it.

When finally I reached the room I was surprised by the lack of shock that took place. Of course I had to wait my turn to see the piece, as it was being inspected by another group of people. I patiently waited my turn for an encounter I had long awaited. Finally it was my chance to be alone with the work; I got close and examined it. Rather than the disappointment I had half expected owing to the fact I didn’t believe the work could quite live up to the expectation that preceded it, I was more fascinated by the work than I had anticipated.

As I walked along the passage created by the cow encasing vitrines I was amazed by the animals’ tactile quality. Despite being preserved in formaldehyde for over a decade there remained a sense that it would still be soft to touch. Not just the animals’ fur but also its innards, I looked on like a fascinated student, longing to know each organs function and trying to locate the different cuts of meat. I was also struck by the sense of fragility the large animal exuded; visible amongst the vast internal organs were delicate bones, a vertebra so delicate it looked impossible of supporting such a beast. Also prevalent was the craftsmanship involved in presenting this creature in such a way, Hirst stated in his acceptance speech ‘It’s amazing what you can do with an E in A-level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw’, however the animal bears no marks of chainsaws, instead it portrays careful work undertaken in a respectful manner. Not many people can understand the sense in sacrificing an animals’ life in the name of art, however when it is done with this level of compassion it is perhaps worth questioning what governs our understanding of aesthetics and morals.

A Dramaturgical Turn: Samuel Beckett’s Company at the Bayerische Staatsschauspiel - Wiebke Gronemeyer

2007-11-21T03:29:00.000-08:00

Munich, November 2007
Reviewed by Wiebke Gronemeyer

In 1981 Samuel Beckett composed an enigmatic prose text, Company, in which a man lying on his back alone in the dark is spoken to by an unrelenting voice he can neither verify nor name. At times speaking in the third person, the voice describes the figure's tormented constraint in the present; at other moments, using the second person, he narrates scenes from the man's childhood and adolescence – a past very much like Beckett’s own.

A theatrical adaptation of this in parts autobiographic yet universalised discussion about the absurdity of existence seems difficult. Yet this autumn Stefan Hunstein accepts this challenge at the Bavarian State Theatre in Munich. He is acting both as the main character and as director of the production, understanding himself as an artist installing a piece, rather then a director staging a play. The spoken text is accompanied by a multimedia installation including four TV screens around a black podium on which the character’s body (Hunstein’s double) is situated, several screenings on the walls surrounding the stage, as well as a sound installation.

Similar to Joyce, Beckett processes a stream of consciousness and exposes the loneliness of a character situated between sleeping and awakening, questioning wherefrom and whereto on the edge of an infinite nothingness. The third person voice is refined and subtle, almost fanatical in his delineations of the man's constricted physical situation and ongoing mental processes – what he calls "unformulable gropings of the mind. Unstillable."

"Confusion too is company," he says, "up to a point." Unlike the astringent perceptions of the third person voice, the narrated instants from the past offered in the second person are with powers of observation. As this perplexing yet intensely gripping narrative proceeds, Hunstein crawls out underneath the podium and carries on the monologue that now admits to a dialogue between mind and body. He takes over the role of the reader who could have devised the voice for company: "the fable of one fabling of one with you in the dark." As the story evolves into a drama that is clearly taking place inside the man's head, the struggle about the reader’s need and obligation to imagine is at once taken away by staged action yet replaced by the challenge to pay attention to the different layers of the exposed loneliness: the seemingly dead body on the podium, the living body wondering around the stage, their identical faces screened on the back wall and his voice coming from different angles in the room. The mind (Hunstein) talks to his body (Hunstein’s double), reassuring that the one he is speak-ing to is the one that is spoken to and yet the same person.

Hunstein performs a dramaturgical turn from the text delivering an insight into a person’s world by means of selfreflection to an installation, which stages these intimate, lonely issues to a viewer that thus assumes an outside perspective. As questionable as this turn generally is, witnessing the staged self-disruption and at the same time self-reassurement is confusing yet exciting and holds through. It drives the viewer into listening to the spoken word and results in an enthusiastic fascination for Beckett’s decomposition of thoughts. Hence, Hunstein facilitates realisation through his multilayered installation and poses the question what else then the individual thinking makes an individual person, hence the lonely act of thinking is one without company.

Zhang Huan: Ash - Wiebke Gronemeyer

2007-11-21T03:17:00.000-08:00

on view at Haunch of Venison, London, 10. Oct. 2007 – 10. Nov. 2007.
Reviewed by Wiebke Gronemeyer

Zhang Huan is one of the most visible and well-known Chinese artists and has just received his first retrospective at the Asia Society in New York. This autumn, Haunch of Venison hosts his first solo exhibition in London, for which he presents his “ash works”, a series of haunting paintings and sculptures. Concurrently, the Royal Academy of Arts is displaying a colossal sculpture that the artist has conceived for their courtyard space, while Haunch of Venison shows the major installation Berlin Buddha (2007) at its venue in Berlin.

His days of Maoist indoctrination and his direct assumptions on this education by means of his early performances may be distant, but his memories of those times provide many of the themes – family, loss, propaganda and alienation – for his new body of work and are very relevant for a retrospective approach. As new material he uses incense ash, which he collects from a Shanghai temple. Here, his interest in Buddhism, which always figured indirectly in his earlier work, becomes more defined.
On entering the gallery space the direct notion of this spiritualism is induced by the strong smell of incense. However, the cultural connotation of a spiritual realm, which comes with this strong smell, calls for a further sensuous ratification, which the first series of ash busts, Ash Head Nr. 12 (2007), modelled on the artist’s own head, immediately denies. The dusty materiality of the crumbly fabric and greyscale colour of the piece excites another connotation relating to ash: deterioration and effacement. This irritating oscillation between these different cultural associations is implied in Zhang Xiao Mei (2007), a large-scale painting of ash on linen. It conveys neither mourning, nor does it incinerated surface embed the prayers and hopes of Chinese ritual incense burning.
In an act of extravagating cultural boundaries it is the entity of remembrance that Huan’s paintings, based on remediation of historical images, whether private or public, claim. Seeds (2007) depicts a group of rural Chinese in the course of their ‘re-education’, ploughing a field. This once heroic image of the Cultural Revolution is overshadowed by a dense materiality that, recalling the work of Anselm Kiefer, brings to bear an uncomfortable confrontation with both collective and individual subconscious.
The series of ash continues on the gallery’s third floor. The Smoking Buddha (2007) is almost 5 metres high; a giant that imposes with its material fragility yet transmits a transcendent stability. The smoke exuding from its features warns that at any moment it could collapse back upon itself and thus perform a last animated motion in a realm in which death is not an end but rather a mid-point in one’s path.

In any sense, ash carries one’s soul away, regardless of the cultural realm in which it is embodied and what kind of remembrance arouses. In a less aggressive but subtler form of provocation, Huan embraces different stages of his oeuvre in these new works.

Robert Dingle - Thea Djordjadze and Rosemary Trockel

2007-11-20T05:21:00.000-08:00

Spruth Magers

08^th Oct – 10^th Nov 2007

Written by Robert Dingle

Entering into the darkness alone / A small light around a corner illuminates the surrounding architecture / There is warmth in the air / The hard surface of the floor silently turns into something much softer / No longer are my shoes able to make a sound / Across the space is a figure surrounded by an orb of luminous orange light / A conversation is being held in the distance / Its content, indecipherable / Sometimes it fades away entirely / At other points it comes close to intelligibility, but yet always remains unattainable / Someone was repeatedly asking me questions / A strong sense of disorientation prevails / The floor appears to shift / Other surfaces such as the walls and ceiling swap functions and properties / A single piece of burnt paper remains fixed directly ahead / My eyes were not working correctly, my movements slow / Turning to my right someone hands me a small kitten / Wrapped in a soft tortilla for protection (salad being used as a bed), the kitten needs to be transported / Its made clear this is not to be eaten / Its my responsibility alone. / The conversation became comprehensible at last / It was short / Still without an idea of who the person was at the other end of the telephone, the recipient was clear enough / She slammed the telephone down in front of me / Sobs, sniffs and high pitch whimpers punched their way through a chorus of uncontrollable weeps / My heart sank as my mind opened a thousand questions / A sense of expectation is felt on my behalf / What is it? / There is a book in my hand / It felt incredibly hot / We only have one copy / Nothing is to be answered or to be fixed / Someone accompanied me, a good friend / Looking down at my shoes they had totally vanished / Planets from the solar system had replaced each of my toes / This is completely inappropriate / My head began to thump / Something had begun to pester me / There was no activity just total silence / My eyes blinked / I was awake.

The image that was there had now been erased. Replaced by a white wall and a flat screen monitor showing the work of Thea Djordjadze and Rosemary Trockel. The work played continuously on a loop. I recognised certain sounds and words from the work. The wooden frames that the artists constructed outdoors crackled and hissed as they were ignited. High pitch whines emanated from the screens as Djordjadze and Trockel’s high frequency microphone captures every sound. Each work follows a similar acoustic pattern. Lasting around five minutes (ignition – collapse – extinguish), a chorus of sound builds slowly as it reaches an intense climax. Each work is followed with a period of silence.

The radiator on the wall opposite me was on full. There was the sound of movement, people walking on wooden floorboards. The conversations between the two invigilators in the reception/hallway echoed through the space, penetrating the back rooms. I heard the telephone ring.

My unconscious state seemed to unify the work and the working mechanisms of the gallery (its social interactions and functions), aspects usually at odds with one another. Through an apparent disengagement with the work i.e. falling asleep, the outcome was a unique synthesis based on an unknowledgeable participation with the work and gallery. If falling asleep in the space is an act of engagement in itself then is it possible to ever extricate ourselves from a work? Or are we always inherently active because we can see, think, respond and dream?

Micol Assaël: Chizhevsky Lessons - Valentina Ravaglia

2007-11-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

Micol Assaël, Chizhevsky Lessons

Kunsthalle Basel, 14 April– 16 June 2007

I had an electrifying encounter last summer (excuse the pun). I had heard about Micol Assaël, a young Italian artist who appeared out of nowhere to participate in two editions of the Venice’s Biennale (2003 and 2005), but never had a chance to experience any of her disquieting installations, using obsolete science lab equipments to apply even more obsolete scientific theories in works that take the form of resilience experiments conducted directly on the visiting public.

Taking the idea of aesthetic experience quite literally, her enveloping environments have a tactile quality that hits the beholder in an unexpected, almost violent way. Even if you are aware of the nature of Assaël’s work, even if a sign posted outside the installation room warns you about its real potential danger, you still don’t expect to feel so very uneasy, once you enter the seemingly empty space of the Basel Kunstalle’s largest room. For the Chizhevsky Lessons, Assaël has suspended a series of copper panels to the room’s vaulted ceiling, high enough for the visitors not to be able to touch them, but still close enough to feel them. Feel, as their function is to give air particles a negative charge, thanks to a customised power generator hanging nearby, turning the whole room into an electrostatic chamber. This physical phenomenon is well known to all of us: it happens when we rub our skin against certain kinds of fabric, when we brush our hair or when we get those small, annoying electric shocks when getting out of a car: in general, whenever we touch someone or something that carries an opposite charge. Only here this magnetism is inescapable, surrounds everything and everyone, and is clearly perceivable as something unnatural. “By no means touch the face of another visitor (especially the eyes)”, the sign outside the door said, but if my first reaction was a puzzled smile, here the tension is real – and it seriously made me feel nervous and uncomfortable. I had to walk out quickly and take a deep breath.

Alexander Chizhevsky was a Russian physicist who studied the interactions between electrostatic fields and the human psyche, testing ionised air on people as a way to find correlations “between solar activity and significant historical events such as wars and revolutions” (I have to quote the press release on this, as I am not very familiar with Chizhevsky’s theories, as probably the vast majority of the exhibition visitors). But the fascination of Micol Assaël with obscure scientific speculations is little more than an excuse to recreate a state of mind – that of danger, of fear, of anxiety, which an increasingly technological warfare industry has perfected as its major byproduct. It doesn’t matter if the technology comes from centuries, decades or minutes ago – fear is universal, and industry has especially progressed in response to military needs and consequent research funds, in the West as well as in the East.

Micol Assaël’s art is about willingly taking a risk, inviting us to explore the darker sides of our psyche, and of science and technology (and its history) as part of our everyday life. Her works are strong and haunting, complex but extremely simple in their emotional outcome. It is the poetics of sublime directly applied to the beholder’s nervous system. All this, with a minimal-oriented, rusty industrial retrò appeal, whereas the formal aspects are absolutely secondary in the weight of the work. The result might not be particularly original in its visual dimension, but it is remarkably thought-provoking in its physical and psychological implications. It is the type of work that can cause a kind of subtler shock-effect, going from your skin to your mind, and not vice versa.

Valentina Ravaglia

2007-11-14T14:33:00.000-08:00

Saskia Olde Wolbers - "Deadline" Maureen Paley, 6th October- 11th November 2007

Daniella Saul

A rotund glass rabbit, with ears longer than its body and bulging eyes appears upright on the screen. Its interior filled with a glutinous, yellow liquid moves thickly around its insides. Slowly, little white syrupy globules of liquid start to drop off the mutant creature’s ears. But they fall off upside down, towards the top of the screen.

The rabbit appears twice during Wolbers’ eighteen minute new video called “Deadline”. The work is a narrated piece, spoken by a young Gambian woman who recalls an assembly of overheard stories about local legends in a local fishing community in the Gambia. Interwoven with the various local legends are recollections of experiences she and her family have as they attempt to leave the Gambia and cross West Africa on a sixteen month long journey for the airport in Nigeria in their bush-taxi with the word “Deadline” on its side. As the narrative progresses, to the sound of African drums playing softly in the background, several visual motifs appear on the screen, each forming its own scene. We follow the bodies of two silver snakes coiling upwards towards the top of the screen in abstract space, then slabs of a convex oval stone commonly used in African Modernist architecture appear, rotating in space, shards of glass appearing to grow from inside the stones. This video displays all of the hallmarks of some of Wolber’s previous video works. Her sets are meticulously handmade and the visual motifs all situated in a weightless, futuristic space.

What is at work here is the subtle creation of a disjunction in time between the aural and the visual in order to make fantasy a part of our experience. The camera movements are slow while the narrative progresses at a searing pace, starting from the birth of the narrator’s father to the family’s journey across West Africa. Truth and legend merge fluidly together as the visual motifs exude an apt snake-charming like effect on the viewer.

The journey is a function of the cyclical structure of the piece. The word “deadline” carries symbolic and paradoxical meaning. It is the beginning and the end at the same time. It is present at the starting point of the journey on the side of the travelling vehicle and at the end of the narrator’s journey as she recounts seeing a stranger carrying a book at the airport in Nigeria with a picture of her father’s bush-taxi on the cover. “ Do we all have journeys mapped out in our central nervous systems like migrating birds?” It seems that Wolbers’ piece isn’t our cue to try and untangle truth from untruth in the narrative, or beginning from end, but just to follow this journey and cling to the comforting idea that in our experience none of our journeys to an airport will ever seem that long again.

Robert Dingle - The implications of non-recoverable tax on importing art

2007-11-12T05:21:00.000-08:00

The implications of non-recoverable tax when importing art
The Fine Art Society
10th Oct – 10th Nov 2007
Curated by Toby Clarke
Written by Robert Dingle

On entering the busy ground floor gallery at the Fine Art Society I was immediately greeted with a congenial smile and an offer of assuage from my thick onerous coat. This unexpected magnanimous proposition from an elegant lady dressed entirely in black was instantaneously followed with another. Would you like a drink sir? I felt I had been caught slightly off guard. This swift cordial introduction was something I was not accustomed to. I declined the offer, but instead decided to indulge myself in selecting a handful of miniaturise buffet snacks. I was not particularly hungry but through adhering to the assumed codes and conventions of such occasions, taking something from her seemed to make the situation easier.

It was the moment she asked me for my identification number and association card that I realised I should have listened to my intuition. The uneasy feeling I was experiencing in the pit of my stomach shouldn’t have been so quickly attributed to the small decrepit sausage roll that I had just consumed. Are you not a member of the London Art Dealers Association? she asked.

The penny dropped. What I thought to be the private view was, in fact, a seminar held at the Fine Art Society for the London Art Dealers Association. Jessica Dean was about to kick off the proceedings with a short, punchy, half an hour, PowerPoint presentation introducing the implications of non-recoverable tax when importing art; I felt I had to make a swift decision. My window of opportunity was closing fast.

I apologised for the misunderstanding and asked as amicably as possible whether it would be a problem to quietly go down to the lower gallery and view the show.

Creeping down the squeaky nineteenth century staircase, I emerged into what was reminiscent of the bow of a boat. A low ceiling carries the viewer through the space and drops as it mirrors several small steps, maintaining the same distance from the floor. At either end of the space is a set of stairs. Above me the seminar had begun.

Unremittingly the sound of business jargon, tax return figures and vat refunds filtered down via the staircases at either end. The architecture acted as a conduit for the activity above. The sounds began to merge and intertwine with the work. The sound of Shawcross’s video and the rumblings of Heywood’s vibrating tower block became indistinguishable from the symphony of rustles, coughs, sighs, bumps, whispers and movements above.

Having been there barely ten minutes a gallery invigilator walked around and systematically began switching off the work. Anything that made a sound was deactivated. The work became subordinate to the mechanisms of finance that were in operation above. I am still awaiting a bill through the post for the one small sausage roll and half a dozen salted peanuts.

Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now - Sophie Risner

2007-11-08T10:10:00.000-08:00

Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now

Barbican Gallery

12 Oct , 07 - 27 Jan, 08

Sophie Risner

As with most Barbican shows there's a sense that this has too much to look at. 'Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now' is an exhibition in the vein typisch of any grandious show. Cut into several sub-sections the viewer is guided through a detailed historical narrative reflecting on the role of sex within art.

The sub-sections are
(Lower Level)
Sex and Cold Marble
Under Lock and Key
Divine Love and Carnal Pleasures
Between the Covers
Exposures
The Voice of Sex

(Upper Level)
Artistic and Muse
Playing with Edge.

This is a curatorial decision that is very previlant in the world of Barbican exhibition making. The show hinges on all that was forbidden, lusted and representational of a divine intrigue in sexual desire, or at least this is what the show is claiming. The exhibition flyer claims that the show will 'broaden your mind and stimulate your senses.' I beg to differ. 'Seduced' as I will be referring to it manages to clarify that even a 21st century audience can still find even the most age old of sexual moments still as weird and wonderful as they were deemed back in the day of their creation. Here the show manages to not be some kind of inter layering of sensual experiences and stimulating moments but moreover a point and gawk moment of witnessing the finer points of what has turned us on in the past. This isn't a bad thing by a long shot. Seduced manages to compensate for lack of curatorial 'umph' by digging out a real treasure trove of remarkable fascinations and obscurities that help enlighten even the most radical sexually active punter.

True, in the V & A you wouldn't get a Andy Warhol playing above your head as you pick apart the sexual references in 'Secretum' (a early Renaissance work previously on exhibit at the British Museum with restricted access as to not 'offend the Victorian morality.') Saying this the very fact that 'Secretum' was once on exhibit at the British Museum begs the relevance of such works in this show. A re-hang is a re-hang at the end of the day and just because there is an influx of work within one showcase does not qualify the experience as particularly interesting. Here I have to mention the work of Robert Mapplethorpe who commands his own room on the upper level of the show. Mapplethorpe, a 1970s photographer finds his wonderful photographic skill in the exploration of male bondage, domination and submission. The black and white shots not only help us step into a world intersected with moments of pain and pleasure, but the very showing of this work at the Barbican is the crux of the controversy that this show may want to create. Banned in America, Mapplethorpes photos are bound in a coffee table box and exposed as separate entities decyphering the fairly new age ideal of male S & M practice. It's refreshing and enlighting to see these photos which greatly juxtapose the gilt paintings and watercolours downstairs.

To let the lower level of the Barbican become such an observatory for antiquited art explorations not only manages to dull down this apparent lively and explosive show but almost numbs the sensory experience that we were first promised. Apart from Mapplethorpes imposing photographs and K R Buxleys pastiche on Warhols 'Blow Job' it's hard to truely find anything that hints at the contemporary or any kind of contemporary investigation of sex in the art. This is only made worse by leaving us with a beautifully comforting slide film by Nan Golding. The final piece on the upper level of the show, it is the last piece we come across. Played against the backdrop of a Bjork soundtrack we witness Goldings standardised photo-reality imprint as she explores the relationship between 5 couples. Images of tender moments of reflection between the lovers are interspersed with love making and playful shots of just existing within each others moment, it manages to single handily make us breath a sigh of relief as we can all nod and say that through all this it's all just a matter of finding the 'right' partner. A message that frays the enter construct of an exploration that begs us to confuse the very privledge of sex and how we go about obtaining it.

Left navigating my way out of the Barbican I don't necessarily feel enlightened or impressed upon, moreover I feel like I've had a casual morning at the Natural History Museum or the Portrait Gallery. It's an odd juxtaposition to be in, almost like I'm completely unsatisfied, my thirst not quenched and my desire not full-filled. A feeling I accredit to the obvious facilitation of this show by a company who boast their 'purpose is to cross the boundaries of art and science, subtly, imaginatively, and distinctively.' Marina Wallace one of the main guest curators for the show who runs and works for Artakt not only completely compels all compelling narrative away from this show but manages to make the very construction of it as enterprisingly unenterprising. 'Seduced' I am not, the latest offering from the Barbican would be great as a perminant exhibition but as a explosion onto the art world of London...well you have to dig a little deeper.

Stairwell - The Hayward Gallery by Tom Trevatt

2007-11-08T08:16:00.000-08:00

Hayward Stairwell

Tom Trevatt

Clusters of concomitant stairs dissect the upper and lower planes, rising and falling in folds. Twists of browngrey concrete. Cleaving floors; holding them apart and bringing them together in a diremptive and connective orientation. Navigation between spheres made possible by these brutalist coils scarred by years of hurried heels. The exhibition continues upstairs, the unceasing tramp of increasing audience figures. Figures of ‘appreciation’. Expansive yet simple modernist forms that scythe through white walled space, reminders of the external architecture. Brutalism in abundance on the South Bank, walled out by the requirements of the aesthetic project. What would it mean to strip back these walls? No longer would we find old render. Concrete, cold and unforgiving lingers in beautiful exigency. Concrete nothing but pure building, no adornment. But mendacious concrete. From distance this stairwell is wooden planks. Slats, greyed with the years, here a grain, a knot, there the mark of a saw. What mendacity, what lies this material plays. Concrete formed as blocks in wooden trenches take on the appearance of the wood. The modernist project, the stripping back to pure forms, the continuation of a certain enlightenment. How these constellations of buildings bear their late-modernist credentials with ease, yet the conceit runs deep. Examine the stairwell. At one point, halfway to the upper floor on the north side, between two flights of stairs there lies a knot in the wood/concrete, yet it is not grey like the rest of the stairwell. It is a rich cherry-wood golden brown. No more than an inch diameter this strange abhorrence offers nothing more than itself and its difference. How to understand this anomaly? It neither feels soft like wood or hard like stone, it is smooth but rippled. As though a knick has been had out of the wall and under lies the thing we though it was all along. As though the appearance was a double lie. A further inspection confirms the fact that the whole of the Hayward is not wood that looks like concrete that looks like wood. It is obviously real concrete. But were we to believe that we were standing on wooden slats, held together by hidden nails, then, surely our history not just the building would collapse.

Robert Dingle - Unfinished Symphony

2007-11-07T08:20:00.001-08:00

Unfinished Symphony…
The Fine Art Society
10th Oct – 10th Nov 2007
Curated by Toby Clarke
Written by Robert Dingle

Is it ever possible to declare an artwork finished? In the physical sense this may be easier to assert than in the metaphysical. If the work continuously produces new meanings and associations in different contexts over time, can it ever be said that the work of the work draws a totality?

Unfinished Symphony takes its name from a composition written by Schubert and the title gives a reasonable indication into the premise of the exhibition. Held at the Fine Art Society, off New Bond street, the exhibition includes seven contemporary artists each contributing models, plans, drawings, marquette’s, recordings and fragments.

The exhibition is composed within a single room in the basement of the building. A large sculptural fragment by Conrad Shawcross, Proposal for the superphysical, 2007, £16.000, dominates the floor space. Around the periphery hang copious drawings, proposals and photographs by Jake & Dinos Chapman, Keith Coventry, Tony Heywood, Gavin Turk, Oliver Marsden and Keith Tyson.

Tony Heywood’s 3…2…1, 2007, £36.999 Inc vat, quivers and shakes intermittently awaiting a certified time when the model will explode and destroy itself, revealing a new sculpture inside. The marquette was initially designed as a model for a life size 50s tower block although here it is presented as the work.

What does this exhibition tells us about the nature of contemporary art practice? This trope of artistic practice comes as nothing new. Last years Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery featured several pictures that the painter had not completed. Concurrently the Da Vinci exhibition held at the V&A saw a great deal of attention directed towards his preparatory sketches.

There is a historical precedent set within the arts for incomplete or fragmentary work. In some cases these works are regarded as complete in their own terms and their incompleteness draws little away from the enjoyment of the viewer. Schubert’s unfinished symphony written in 1822 is one of the most notable examples of this. Intending to produce a traditional four-movement symphony (following the discovery of two movements found in the archive of the orchestra Schubert had sent them to) Schubert’s two movement composition remains one of his most cherished and highly acclaimed works.

If only the same could be said for the work in this exhibition. On paper the show seems promising. In practice the exhibition is regrettably dissatisfying. The exhibition displays relatively insignificant work (in terms of what these artists are capable of producing) and markets itself off the back of recognized and reputable artists. For example, the singular A2 drawing by Jake & Dinos Chapman seems non-representative of either their artistic practice or their addition within the exhibition (the same can be said for admissions by Keith Coventry and Gavin Turk).

The idea underpinning the exhibition impresses itself upon the choice of work. There is no indication that the work selected for the exhibition is particular for any other reason than its collective incompleteness. The subject matter of the work becomes subjugated for this reason and in this respect the exhibition seems to only function on one level.

The gallery’s interest seems apparent; work that had in some cases literally not made it off the drawing board (for various political, economic, pragmatic and personal reasons) becomes marketed as its unique selling point. The work declared by the artists seems to incongruously complete itself through the exhibition process. The exhibition, usually regarded as the end point in artistic production, forces the work to be viewed as wholly incomplete. This exhibition appears to demonstrate the gallery’s (and by extension, the artworlds) un-relinquishing propensity to incorporate and commodify any and all disparate elements of art production.

It seems that the cause attributed to the strike of each work would appear more accurate and enlightening if attempting to construct an image of the social, political and economic traits of contemporary society. In short, the cause appears more interesting than the effect.

Park Nights at Serpentine Gallery – Public Experiment: Sound - Valentina Ravaglia

2007-11-06T07:38:00.000-08:00

Park Nights at Serpentine Gallery – Public Experiment: Sound,
7 September 2007

This year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by Olafur Eliasson in cooperation with Norwegian architect Kjetil Thorsen, was not intended to be used as an auditorium. Even though the Serpentine Pavilions host a variety of events every summer, which regularly include film screenings and live music concerts, the acoustics of this year’s creation is all but imperfect, with its uneven polyedric timber surfaces reflecting soundwaves in a disperse, chaotic fashion and creating all sorts of disturbing reverberations and sound distortions. That is precisely the reason why it is, conversely, a very apt setting for sound experiments, the unpredictability of its acoustics making it all the more exciting for sound artists to play with - in all senses.

For the Pavilion’s Opening Night, Eliasson has gathered a few artists specifically interested in the relationship between sound and the space in which this is produced/reproduced, as well as perceived; once again, a demonstration of his ongoing interest in the physical qualities of a spatial environment and of the psychological reactions on the people who experience it. The atmosphere of the pavilion, in fact, stands halfway between the quiet contemplation and the unexpected dizziness given by the somehow daring exploration of its whirling structure. While the interior of the pavilion glimmers in warm brown-red colour tones, highlighted/contrasted by especially designed lamps, its spiral ramp invites the visitors to explore its external surface, ending on a surprising balcony that overlooks the interior space with a vertiginous bird’s eye view. Moreover, the perimeter of the pavilion is higlighted by a harmonious motif of ropes that encircles the ramp in its entire length, almost resembling the strings of a harp. Standing like a sort of gigantic musical instrument, the sinuous constuction seems to resonate with its light, modulated from subtle and warm to loud and bright white.

With such material, the artists invited to experiment with the potential of this resonating chamber on the opening night were presented with the fascinating challenge of making the audience feel inside a musical instrument rather than in a concert hall, and in this respect the potential of the pavilion has been explored in quite diverse ways by the artists, turning it from the extension of a violin’s boards to an electric intonarumori of monumental proportions.

The first sound artist to experiment with this space was “live convertor” Kaffe Matthews, one of the first electro-acoustic composers to make live improvisations with self-designed instruments using microphones and sensors to capture environmental sounds and movements, allowing her to manipulate this found material and reproduce it within the very space that generated it. Her rather long preformance was a truly collaborative event, as the audience was not just a passive receiver but the very creator of the aural event. Matthews made this clear by inviting her public to help her by moving around and “playing” with the space of the pavilion. And the public gradually responded, activating a chain of reactions that made her set an enthralling sinaesthetic epiphany, capable of revealing the spatial qualities of sound while enriching the aesthetic experience of the architectural space.

Violin designer Hans Johannsson and architect Andreas Eggertsen then presented their ongoing creation, a high-tech violin that applies the most advanced technologies in digital design and sound engineering to reproduce the unique sound qualities of glorious Stradivaris. With a minimal body, complemented by separate resonating chambers, this creation was indeed a fascinating surprise, even though the performance ended up taking the form of a sort of product demonstration, with the creators trying to convince the public about the amazing qualities of their prototype.

Much more engaging was the final set by the duo Haswell/Hecker, who have been working together in a number of live and studio collaborations that push the boundaries of electronic composition and the experience of live performances to their extremes. Their approach to music-making has lately become increasingly conceptual, each set thought out as an experiment in the use of specific devices. For this performance they chose to use the material of the pavilion as an instrument for a concrete noise tour de force, as in Haswell’s trademark style. Two fans were attached to what appeared to be spare timber boards from the pavilion’s covering, generating a loud vibration that the duo recorded and reprocessed in real time with laptops and synths. It was of course delightfully mean and potentially dangerous for the listeners’ hearing, but the result seemed to have little to do with the specific acoustic qualities of the pavilion, as the timber panels were used in a limited way, only to generate a single, well calculated type of sound. Haswell and Hecker thus imposed their purpose on the pavilion and made their own show, missing the chance to fully explore what its particular acoustic and structural features had to offer. The pavilion closes on the 5th of November – so there is still some time, in case they change their mind.

Valentina Ravaglia

New Work UK: Trust Yourself, video screening, Whitechapel Art Gallery Daniella Saul

2007-10-31T11:07:00.000-07:00

Entering the Whitechapel auditorium, a cramped space on the temporary gallery site, there seemed to be an excited anticipation in the air. The scheduled evening screening was to be a curated programme of a cross- section of new video works by artists based in the UK emphatically titled “Trust Yourself.” With the emphasis resting on “newness” it came as quite a surprise to see that of the eight “new” works, half had already been widely seen in the UK over the past three years, in exhibitions and at well attended art fairs such as Zoo Art Fair. Instead, “Newness” seemed here to have become more of an individual curatorial approach to seeing and evaluating recent work. Lina Dzuverovic, the curator, also director of the contemporary art agency Electra pointed out honestly at the end of the programme that she had not previously seen the works she had been asked to select for the programme. While this already stands as a mild criticism (since Electra works on many projects with artists working in various media, not just video) are we to assume then, in an unexpected, ironic twist on the title “Trust Yourself” that as well as being a conceptual approach to exploring the works, we should also trust ourselves to trust Dzuverovic, the curator as an authority to mediate our reception to “new” video work?
The selection of work explores through the notion of trust ideas of address, such as who is speaking and to whom, language as a block to understanding and constituting meaning and the construction of narrative, what we believe and how we relate to constructed stories.Yaron Lapid’s “You Have Not Found His Riddle” (2003) takes a documentary approach to discovering how an elderly Israeli couple copes with the husband’s depression. He is unnervingly at his most animated as he recounts several of his failed suicide attempts due to various technical oversights. What led to this reality is lost in favour of the immediacy and intensity these experiences produce. Translation, understanding and meaning are explored in more direct fashion in Chia- En Jao’s “Father’s Tongue” (2007) and Flávia Müller Medeiros’ “Fight The Enemy Abroad So We Don’t Have To Fight Them At Home” (2005) Jao stages a humorous literal version of Chinese Whispers, whispering words in Mandarin that recall one of his recent encounters in Paris to a non-Chinese speaker. The speaker’s concerted effort results in the correctly pronounced words appearing in English intermittently on the screen, the rest as ellipses. Michelle Deignan’s two works “Il Cittadino” (2007) and “Red Cheeks” (2006) explore the disjunction between conventional modes of address in the media from “trustworthy” sources such as television journalism and the information they relay to us through humorous anecdotal stories.
These works explore and expose the processes we go through as viewers on seeing them in diverse and often humorous guises. Dzuverovic, on the other hand, unwittingly adds a new dimension to what it means to “trust yourself” as she might do well in future to remember the names of the artists that feature in shows she curates.

Luminous Territories - Nathaniel Rackowe

2007-10-30T14:40:00.000-07:00

Nathaniel Rackowe
Luminous Territories – Sept 13th – October 27th
Bischoff/Weiss Gallery
Karine Teyssier, October 2007

"Please knock on the door, the bell is broken"

Lift out of order - pedestrians are kindly asked to use the other street.
The sheet of paper used on the door of the gallery doesn’t seem to be an exception to all the other daily dysfunctions of the city.

The city beats.

The door was knocked upon and then opened by itself.
The visitor has to penetrate into a dark territory before being flashed... Again. One more time.
Gradually the visitor starts to clearly recognize the rectangular structure of this monster: "Luminous Territories", made by scaffolding and hoarding, enwrapped in transparent industrial construction material, usually used to protect construction sites from the rain.
Flickering light cast on the structure are lighting the inside of the work irregularly, revealing small sections at a time, never the entire work.

In the lower gallery, "Black Cube" is made out of corrugated bitumen roofing sheets, sliced, stacked and bolted together. The longer you walk around it, the more it turns into a disturbing object. In contrast to "Luminous Territory", its spatial set up is easily understood.

"Black Cube" does not only create the sensation that it absorbs the light surrounding it, but also looks as if it contained within itself a secret world, another dimension, which seems close, yet actually remains inaccessible.
Related to Pirandello’s jails paintings, the reference to the labyrinth is clearly identifiable in this work.
"Black Cube" takes us through an urban labyrinth, similar to a city in which a multitude of parallel, different dimensions are neighbouring each other, dependent on its actors, the time and the weather.

The visit ends with a sculpture entitled: WLP4
The city becomes emptier and emptier and seems to suddenly be silent.
All of her inhabitants have gone home. Although she seems to be quiet, she is exploding inside of herself due to her increasing excitement.
The nervous shadows are flying about behind the windows, the cathode’s neon tube rhythming the colours of the street.
But then the lamps of the street are suddenly lighting…the red light coming from them transforms itself into a calm orange light.

The city has woken up.

The works by Nathaniel Rackowe, exhibited there, are definitely talking about the city, but the artist doesn’t show you a city; He tells it. He not only manages to feel the city, its poetry, its unattainable transformations which were described by Pierre Sansot in his book Poétique de la ville, but he also translates them, syntheses them, to extract a concentration of different dimensions in which we could briefly meet the phantoms of the “flaneurs” rich in spleen and ideal.

2007-10-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, Barbican Art Gallery, 12 October- 27 January.
Sinead McCarthy, October 2007.

There is a promise of ‘sex in art through the ages.’ The exhibition features over 300 works spanning 2000 years. The Barbican have taken on an ambitious and controversial task. I intend to see whether they succeed.

Upon entering the space, one is immediately aware of the cries of synthesised sexual interplay. The curators are certainly setting the scene for a sensory imposition. As the exhibition space is navigated there is a definite impression that justification is key. The walls are heavily annotated with explanations prior to entering a new space and then on the wall within the new space. This didactic approach seems understandable in regard to how they have installed the pieces. The work, predominantly showing the phallus and various modes of sexual acts has been cautiously juxtaposed with explanation after historical contextualized explanation.

The subject of sex and the idea that this is an uncensored look at sex, combined with how it has been depicted, and how that has changed throughout history is not an interesting idea. It is rather obvious and at times repetitive. The exhibition holds far too varied work. The template and mission of the curators has been overly ambitious. . The work and the accompanying explanations are far too dense. The eras are shown in order to illustrate the history of eastern and western arts and their contrasting depictions of sex acts. The works lose resonance by being installed in such a way. The Barbican have chosen to attempt ‘shock’ in a historical navigation over 2000 years worth of work. The curators have decided to produce an exhibition that is doing the work for the viewer and making it appropriate to gaze upon the inappropriate. This is a mistake.

The only way that this situation could have been rectified and for this exhibition to vaguely work would have been for the curators not to have installed it chronologically. They are not giving the viewer enough credit. The entrance to the exhibition had the right idea; a video from Chris Cunningham juxtaposed with the work of the Greeks and Romans; the parallels within each of the works and great contrasts make the pieces more instinctual and sensory. The introductory text conveys an interest in the sensual side of the depiction of sex in art. The chronological, historically organized layout fails to deliver on this and loses the beauty and interest that could have been gained from the exhibition. In order for this exhibition to offer the viewer a valuable experience, the work needed to be positioned in such an instinctual and punctuated way. Placing Louise Bourgois’ ‘Couples’ amongst the Greek statues at the beginning of the show could have looked amazing. If only the curators could have seized this opportunity then there may have been scope for seduction.

2007-10-30T09:43:00.001-07:00

‘Therapy for the Masses.’
Davina and Daniel’s 8 Weeks of Change, Space Station Sixty-Five, London.
Sinead McCarthy, October 2007.

Davina and Daniel’s Eight Weeks of Change proposes a tried and tested mode of self help that can make that all important change for you. The gallery space is transformed into a sterile, white walled waiting room and treatment zone, labelled and minimally decorated for an authentic take on the medical environment. The parallels between this and the obligatory white space of a gallery are comparable from the outset. Davina and Daniel are embracing ideas around participatory art practice, combining this with self help, to create their own brand of art therapy.

As a visitor to the clinic you are invited to take part in some pre-planned tasks that evaluate the treatment required. The artists’ have employed equally enthusiastic assistants poised to interact with you (to even sing to you) to make your therapy a success. This combination of artists and agents on a face-to-face basis is actually rather successful. It is easy to feel suspicious and unsure of the merits in participatory art of this nature. Indeed, the recent influx of relational work in order to symbolise a more overt interaction with the artist, combined with the public being instrumental in the success; is something that can not always be negotiated successfully and believably.

Davina and Daniel, however, do manage to succeed in this installation/performance for two major reasons; they are satirising self help, a genre which has already become something like public property. You are all collectively aware that their brand of therapy is not to be believed. Indeed, the disclosure of the artists’ self-created credentials in the press release emphasise this. Paradoxically, there is something genuine in this show and the intention they have to interact with their audience on this level. When they speak with you, you feel they empathise wholeheartedly with you. Perhaps this is all part of the plan, but the energy that they have devoted to this composition; from producing a Therapy of the Day to the One to One consultations you can experience, is a major investment on their part.

Upon leaving the clinic I felt invigorated and happy. And surely this was their intention. They offered me some therapy; an offer of a collective experience, which I accepted and ultimately I felt in retrospect, that this made me feel better. Perhaps this ‘therapy’ was purely a metaphor and the immediate interaction was its success, but I don’t think that this matters. Davina and Daniel are on a mission of life affirmation. Job done.

Space Station 65, is situated in East Dulwich. Davina and Daniel’s Eight Weeks of Change is on Saturday and Sundays until 11th November.

2007-10-30T03:20:00.000-07:00

Paul Pfeiffer, The Saints, Wembley Retail Park, London, 2007, Dominic Rich Oct,2007

Paul Pfeiffer recent work investigates crowd behaviour in relation to a spectacle. In his work, The Long Count he manipulates footage from the “Thrilla in Manila” Boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Pfeiffer erased both boxers from the spectacle, placing the attention on the crowd. Similarly in his piece Caryatid he removes the champions of a basketball tournament from the celebration of victory. A trophy hovers in the air; the focus of the crowds emotional energy. Pfeiffer is influenced by Elias Canetti’s, and experiments with Canetti’s investigation into crowd behaviour[1]; how the crowds desire to unify under a leader or cause, is routed in the human instinct to survive.

Pfeiffer’s recent exhibition The Saints, examines this theme further. The exhibition takes place in a warehouse situated in the corner of Wembley Retail Park. An imposing roar of a football crowd fills the space; cheers, anthems and chants ricochet from wall to wall filling the empty space. Towards the rooms rear is a small white booth, placed on its outside is the manipulated footage of the 1966 World Cup Final. Similar to Carytid Pfeiffer erases all apart from the crowd and the spectacle. He removes the ball and all but the English Striker, Bobby Charlton from the football game. Charlton is made into a solitary hero, left to run aimlessly in solipsistic circles, lost and insignificant in the barrage of sound bellowing from the crowd. Pfeiffer implies that the hero and context are irrelevant, acting as vehicles for a form of instinctual behaviour.

This is in similar vein to his past works; however, entering into the rear of the white booth a further provocation is created. There are two juxtaposed screens in the booth, on the right plays the footage of the 1966, World Cup Final between England and Germany. On the left screen runs the footage of at least a thousand young Filipino men watching the same Cup Final, affecting the behaviour of the World Cup Crowd.

The use of the World Cup footage in an exhibition, metres away from the Wembley football ground appears to denote, English national identity and heritage[2]. The cultural gap between English national identity and the Filipino crowd is where Pfeiffer conducts his experiment. By playing The World Cup to a crowd of Filipino’s he decapitates English football from its history. At first the Filipino crowd were quiet, prompted by Pfeiffer to voice boo’s and cheers at suitable moments[3]. Despite the alien context and the staging of the experiment, a genuine energy proliferated amongst the crowd, the Filipino men bond under a foreign cause without understanding its tradition. Pfeiffer reveals how crowd behaviour[4] is an instinctual rather than cultural phenomenon; it does not rely on collective memory so much as social interaction.

[1] See Crowds in Power, 1960

[2] The English national identity has been built in a realm of collective fantasy, glorifying and mystifying past achievements. Whether it is a victory in football or war or reflecting on long-ago colonial conquests, the English continue to share this fantasy.

[3] …they sang “God save our gracious Queen…” and chanted “..ingla..” (England).

[4] or group mentality.

THE WORLD AS A STAGE - Tom Trevatt

2007-10-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

The World as a Stage

Tate Modern

Arriving late on Tuesday night to accompany a friend to the opening of the Tate’s new show The World as a Stage I didn’t expect to be so rushed around the exhibition. From what my companion had told me it was open until 10pm and thus we had time to quaff free red wine, talk at length about our respective partner’s reception of art in comparison to our own (we realised our non-art specifically educated others gave themselves much more generously to the pleasures of viewing art than we did) and still have ample time to digest the show. However, the otherwise delightful door staff informed us as we left the bar area and entered the show proper that we had but fifteen minutes to see this work. With not a moment to lose we headed off into the exhibition, intent on getting as much as we could from the time allotted.

Forced into a not altogether unpleasant speed viewing (as anyone who has been to an exhibition with me will realise the haste at which I tend to negotiate these things) my companion and I got the briefest of overviews of the work. Whilst I would certainly return as paying member of the public to re-visit the exhibition, in particular the Jeremy Deller piece (background work for his Orgreave re-enactment and the subsequent film), I am forced into the question as to whether the process of ‘reading’ an exhibition such as this requires an extended process of contemplation. This is not to say that the work doesn’t necessarily demand a certain lengthy interrogation, but perhaps, that what art does is not so much operate as an immediate experience, in that one is able to, if one stares for long enough at a painting ‘get’ what is ‘meant’ by it (there is no immanent meaning within the work), but as the catalyst for a further discourse. What is to be made, then, of this deferred discourse? Is this deferral a moment that operates to allow for criticality to enter? And if so, what occurs in this moment? This moment of meaning to come. In this empty moment where the meaning of the work arrives, as it were, subjectivity operates to create for itself the meaning of the world. That is it is only through a movement of the subject that meaning can be created. Perhaps my swift appraisal of both the show and this subject can never quite grasp this always ungraspable meaning, which, I hasten to add is never transcendental as such, meaning does not arrive from somewhere else. But that the logic of this chase after meaning is always incomplete. There will always be another meaning.

MATTHEW BARNEY - Tom Trevatt

2007-10-29T08:01:00.000-07:00

Mathew Barney

Drawing Restraint

Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens

20th September - 11th November 2007

Focussing on Holographic Entry Point (2005)

In the east gallery of the Serpentine Matthew Barney has installed his work from 2005 Holographic Entry Point, overlooking the pavilion the large models squeeze into the available space, buckling at one end forcing the door on to the grass open. We shall follow the fiction of this work in an attempt to unpack it. The work consists of two models of the same thing, a sloped jetty on to which boats would be hauled using a winch at the top of the slope. The model on the right as you look at it is lifelike, covered in barnacles and ruined, as though it had hauled up a boat too heavy for its strength. The model on the left is a copy, mimicking the jetty as it would have been before the ‘accident’ that caused it to fail. It is made using Barney’s trademark white self-lubricating plastic. A rope from this jetty, in the same white plastic, runs through the galleries into the western most room, where it is looped around a large unidentifiable object, named Occidental Restraint (2005).

One imagines the scenario which caused the breakage of the first jetty, the object in the far room was hauled through and collapsed the ‘real’. The copy stands resolutely as though it has no problem repeatedly hauling the object, does this mean the simulacrum can pull the occidental? The west is drawn by simulation? We have lost the Lacanian real? It is important that the two works work together, as it were. To tug against one another. The holograph in tension with the western world. The work becomes, it seems, a rather trite metaphor for some Baudrillardian analysis of westernisation, the “generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal”.

Except the conceit doesn’t work. The ‘real’ jetty is shoved so far into the corner as to render its usage impossible; nothing could have been hauled on to it as the wall prevents adequate access to the bottom of the slope (this is if we are to follow the fiction that the work exists within this setting as though it were always here, and there seems no reason not to follow that line, indeed Barney’s work relies on the suspension of disbelief and a desire to follow his newly created mythology). So, if the original jetty could never have operated as such in its position, yet the copy is able to operate perfectly well, able to pull it’s charge up the slope, as the way to it is unimpeded by the internal architecture of the gallery, we have to believe that the white simulacrum has primacy over the jetty it mimics. The implication is that, as Baudrillard states, the real has no origin, the copy is a copy of nothing, “the territory no longer precedes the map […] it is the map that precedes the territory”.

MICHAEL RAEDECKER - Tom Trevatt

2007-10-29T08:00:00.001-07:00

Hauser & Wirth London
21st Sept - Oct 27 2007

Amid changeable weather, the scarf and the sun oscillating, London’s Hauser & Wirth Gallery’s new show of paintings by Michael Raedecker calms and agitates by turn busy Piccadilly shoppers. Greys and muted purples, large rough canvases brought together in triptychs, groups of four, or two, or some standing on their own, striated by thread, holes, hair and wool.

I don’t much care for painting as such, and am, therefore, going to pin-point one specific exigency in this exhibition, one moment of difference. The working of the exhibition itself, that is the intention, the expected meaning if you will, calls for something very different to what is actually produced. This operation of differentiation occurs at the moment of the relation between the works themselves and that that we shall call extraneous to the work. In this instance the extraneousness is produced by the internal architecture of the building, the stairs, the lift, the door ways, the vault and the safe in the vault.

If one follows the stairs down to the vault, where the exhibition is continued by two more works (denial and exhibit (sic) 2007), the final space is guarded by a solid Chatwood & Milner ‘Fire and Thief Resistant’ vault door. Inside the vault another interesting encounter occurs. Ahead and on the left wall the paintings hang, but on the right wall, in similar grey tones stands a large purposefully open safe, echoing in colour, dimension and some other formal qualities (for example, the way the safe is split into two compartments, a diptych, if you like) the paintings on this level and upstairs in the main gallery. An interesting curatorial decision has been made in this exhibition; the viewer is drawn into the space downstairs ostensibly to view more banal paintings, but encounters instead the trappings of the buildings past. All galleries have their quirks, each situation, or context imbues experience with meaning, exhibitions operate syntactically, sense overflows. And it is this production of difference, of something extra or other, that is of interest here. One may wonder whether this enaction of what Robert Bruegel would call ‘migration of form’ is intentioned by the curator. Whether it is or not, the excess created operates beyond what might be called a framing device; the extraneous objects in the space, in this case the safe and the vault door, are given the same attention as the work, supplementing Raedecker’s paintings with something beyond them.

ED RUSCHA: BUSTED GLASS - Wiebke Gronemeyer, Oct. 2007

2007-10-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

ED RUSCHA: Busted Glass
at Gagosian Gallery, 17-19 Davies Street, London W1K 3DE; through 17 November, 2007.

In this new series of drawings Ed Ruscha resumes and assembles various approaches to articulate a both particular and peculiar moment of an infinite nothingness.

His drawings of popped, punctured, fractured and shattered glass are executed with such perfection on originating light and shadow that it almost creates a kind of a surreal reverie. Here, the centre of attention is not the edge of the glass as one could assume, since it is not only the most striking object to draw but furthermore the inevitable charac-teristic of shattered glass. Instead, in constantly emphasizing on the effectiveness of light and shadow with and over the background colour, the artist refuses to suggest a certain perspective of the broken material.

Ruscha likes to isolate objects, questioning their assumed connotations and thus dis-solving their meanings. He has no interest in letting the drawing emerge through an in-trospective process, rather he claims the object to be what it is – translucent, widening the visual field, which paradoxically as a reversal of this amplification loses itself in the background colour.

The artist has a talent for making the banal seem significant allowing ambiguity. His works do neither impose a certain notion, nor do they indicate an interpretation or fold in any kind of annotation.

Busted Glass evokes an interior gaze and mood, which amounts to an act of funambu-lation: the obviousness of the drawn object turns out to be resurrected by dismantling the hierarchy of both subject and medium. Hence, the created mysterious uncomfortableness turns to a self-reflective debate of art with itself on the discourse of Realism/Illusionism, exceptionally intensified by the chosen object of shattered glass.

KIKI SMITH: A GATHERING - Wiebke Gronemeyer, Sept. 2007

2007-10-27T05:54:00.000-07:00

Kiki Smith: A Gathering, 1980-2005
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
November 16, 2006 – February 11, 2007

Kiki Smith is known as one of the most original and protean American artists of our time. Her art is about the most important issues human beings use to develop their own way of life: curiosity, intuition, inspiration and experience. For Kiki Smith these issues reflect her understanding of art: “It’s a collaboration with the material, and when it’s viewed, it’s a collaboration with the world. What your work is resides in between those different spaces” .
The Whitney Museum of American Art presents a full survey of her works over the last 25 years to enable a communication between the viewer, her work and, according to her, the world. The show is divided into thematic sections such as “Entering the body”, “The Figure Reimagined”, “The Natural World”, “Wunderkammer” and “New Mythologies”, which represent both Kiki Smith’s artistic development throughout the past 25 years and a curatorial perspective, which offers the viewer a topically focussed insight into Smith’s art.

Throughout the past decades Kiki Smith has explored a broad range of subjects, including religion, folklore, mythology, natural science, art history, and feminism through her remarkable innovations in sculpture, printmaking, drawing and like this consistently reveals new metaphoric and symbolic potentials.
She is best known for her depictions of the human body, considered both provocative and aggressive towards the viewer’s perception. Smith started modelling the human body as her major focus of interest in paper and cast it in wax, plaster, bronze and resin. While her works have their visceral moments, they're strongly imbued with beauty and poetry. Her physical materials present the body entering new territory in the history of figurative sculpture. Smith's art renders the figure in frank, nonheroic terms, not contradicting but turning the figurative tradition in sculpture inside out, creating objects to tell stories not about their material existence, but about their transcendental potential.

Kiki Smith regards herself as a storyteller in the sense of reiterating over and over again themes like the figure, nature, life, beauty, joy and death, which humans have questioned for more than a hundred decades. It’s about finding aspects of life left out of art. Ways to discover some, but surely not the ultimate answers to those questions, which reside behind the continuity of stories with their features of redundancy, reimagination and relationship amongst each other.
“My work has evolved from minute particles within the body, up through the body, and landed outside the body”. The body in Smith's work becomes connected with stories, myths and fairy tales. Virgin Mary (1992) renders the Mother of God flayed skinless like an anatomical model with her muscles exposed and In Lilith (1994), a figure of a nude woman crouches upside down on the wall. The bronze sculpture seems fairly conventional until her face gathers the viewer’s attention. A pair of frightened eyes stares out from a dark, impassive visage. With these gestures she uses the body as a metaphor, drawing upon myth, spirituality, and narrative to consider the human condition, its strength and its frailties.

In her work she has been a traveller, meandering from human’s connection with the world to the cosmological realm that binds beings together. Kiki Smith uses the gallery as a space for creating narrative in the meaning of juxtaposing sculpted human figures with subjects from nature and the environment to emphasize our intimate, fragile and often questionable relationship with our outer slope, such as animals and landscape. In her Black Animal Drawing (1996-1998) the impact on the viewer’s perception might not be as strong when concerned with meaning and emotive effect if the spectator only regards the artwork as an isolated object in the gallery. In relation to the human form the drawing leads the viewer’s perception to examine various aspects of the natural world.
Smith’s work has a tang that transcends the sermonising of our time by a subtle narrative style; she sustains a persistent inquiry that results in works of extraordinary power, offering us to re-examine our history, our place and ourselves.

A Gathering, 1980-2005 represents an extraordinary invitation to Smith’s desired process of re-examination. The works are offered to the viewer so that one might gather one’s impressions and follow the most truly and strongest expression an artwork can have: “Things start telling you what you are supposed to pay attention to. It really just comes into you and tells you, ‘Pay attention to this”. The curatorial perspective itself could be described as a faithful servant to the dynamical evolution Smith’s art has on the understanding of the relationship between the human and its surroundings, nature, culture and its constant evolution and in this regard challenges the aim to conciliate her art as a request for undeniable need for a communicative relation and interaction between our intuition and experience.

Matt Calderwood: Projections - Valentina Ravaglia

2007-10-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

Matt Calderwood: Projections
David Risley Gallery, 7 September – 11 October 2007

With this second solo exhibition at David Risley Gallery, London-based artist Matt Calderwood adds a new chapter to his series of investigations on the poetics of banal objects, in which their common uses and physical laws are defied, denied or pushed to their very limits. As his recent works generally took the form of video-recorded performances (see for example Tape, 2005, Light, 2004 and Battery, 2003), the choice of the exhibition title seems to ironically dissimulate his return to sculptural research. The monumental scale of the five structures, which occupy the whole gallery space, has thus a kind of unexpected effect on the visitor, who probably expects a dark projection room and is instead presented with a light-filled, labyrinthine environment, articulated around the very tangible presence of Calderwood’s plastic constructions.

The Projections series seems to investigate a relationship of physical dependency between two elements, a precarious equilibrium that transmits an eerie sense of uneasiness, as the inner tension that governs these awkward, vaguely menacing structures seems to subtly affect the perception of their surrounding space. In fact, it would be physically impossible for the five angular plasterboard sculptures to stand erect, without the aid of plastic barrels filled with water, strategically placed to balance their centre of mass. In spite of their trivial and rather dull material aspect, these unstable objects possess a true pathetic quality; far from being cold minimal abstractions or mere visual riddles, they powerfully work as embodiments of human fragility, of the need to hold on to someone or something, in order not to collapse. They are indeed quite irritating to look at, like temporary makeshift structures waiting to be fixed, conveying a sense of anxiety and danger somehow similar to the borderline state of mind that precedes a psychological breakdown.

In a way, though, the formal purity of these sculptural works manages to counter their threatening nature, the same way as the weight of the water alone opposes the mechanic entropy of gravitational laws. Still, the choice of industrial, mass-produced materials underscores the ambiguous quality of Calderwood’s works, which deny familiar objects their use and, with it, their meaning. The final effect is a hybrid of ready-made aesthetics, minimalism and poverism, with a nineties flavour that reminds of Graham Hudson’s similarly dramatic plasterboard constructions. Yet these sculptural works manage to appear subtly original and intrinsically equivocal, at the same time unhomely objects and monuments to a sense of pointlessness and frustration that feels way too familiar. The choice of materials could also refer to a temporary state of living, to a denial or restriction of pleasure, to the suffocating anxiety of working for mere survival or of economic dependency... The shades of strain that can be projected on these objects by the viewer are potentially infinite, ranging from the personal experience to the social sphere. In this sense, they can reflect and reveal some of the grimmer sides of the human condition, but only to those who can look at them with a keen, sympathetic eye.
Valentina Ravaglia

The Saints, Paul Pfeiffer and Artangel - Sophie Risner 26.10.07

2007-10-26T15:57:00.000-07:00

The Saints,

Wembley Park.

Paul Pfeiffer.

Comissioned by Artangel.

You can navigate the narrative of this work by using several well known paradigms. The first is of art work that deals with a sociological experience as a form to ponder on deeper questions of what we as a society deem important. The second the trope of a large scale installation piece that unfolds to become many different layers of readable qualities. The Third a chance intervention of an artistic practice in an area that lacks the gentrification of artisan activity and finally the wonderful elements of a performance narrative that are the hegemonic trope that keeps this piece pumping.

I for one can see how all of these key themes come out to play in Pfeiffers most recent foray into the art world. It's a bold statement and easy to misinterpret the value of a show that demands you to travel beyond the comfort of zones 1 and 2. For those well versed in the grammar of an Artangel production this has all of the aforementioned tropes that very often find their way into the world of Artangel, but by saying this we beg the question how much is the artists vision and how much is this just another moment within the well rehearsed narrative of Artangel art production.

The work screams a silence that begs you to navigate a large wholesale container with undue precaution. It leaves you isolated and unbearably visable as you edge around the room in a romantic dance almost mimicking the wave and play of the edited footballer in the small screen film at the end of the room. By drawing your attention to the end of the room we navigate a wall that leads us to the documentation and essence of this triumphant sound scape behind. I was awestruck and yet bemused at this choice. In comparison with other London shows Artangel have chosen to lobby their weight on the economic value of Wembley arena Vs it's sociological and patriotic value. It's not an attack per se at the multi million pound over spend but it's pulling at the strings of our conscience to beg questions over its creation. By using art it also forecasts a tragic shadow over the 2012 Olympics as the art world will inevitably suffer. Is this an ironic statement or the curtain call of a already doomed future which sees the diminishing importance of art as a tool of social progression?

Robert Dingle - Paul Pfiffer The Saints

2007-10-26T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Saints
Paul Pfeiffer
26th September – 28th October 2007
Commissioned by Artangel

Whether we agree or disagree that sport in contemporary culture has, or is about to supersede art (in terms of government funding). The issue remains debatable regardless of their shared similarities. Alternatively whether or not football can become art (and it could be argued that it already has vis-à-vis Douglas Gordon’s Zidane and Sam Taylor-Wood’s David) Pfeiffer directs his attention towards England's strong sporting cultural heritage and, to what some see, its finest hour.

Paul Pfeiffer’s The Saints, situated in a former retail unit on the site of the original Empire Exhibition (the cause for which Wembley Stadium was initially constructed in 1924), turns its focus away from the iconic figures on the pitch and bears its attention towards the crowd. The constellation of speakers installed into the roof of the disused warehouse reconstruct the original crowd noises from the 1966 World Cup Final. Pfeiffer’s sound installation contravenes the busy industrial park as the noise and clamor resonates away from the building and towards the new Wembley Stadium.

At the far end of the cavernous space the audience is confronted by two dissimilar images of itself. The first being the crowd that gathered, forty-one years ago, for the final between England and West Germany (and from which the sound installation is based), and the second being the crowd of young Filipinos brought together in Manila to re-enact the experience. Pfeiffer has purposefully assembled an audience to re orchestrate the sound of the original match day crowd. Having been brought up in Philippines Pfeiffer outsourced the audience to a region that does not share a similar cultural heritage (the Philippines has little interest in football and was never part of the British Empire).

The exhibition assimilates an imprint of Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum as the young Filipinos (given nothing but Red Bull for sustenance to further more vigorous cheering and beseeching) fully immerse themselves into replicating the crowd from the World Cup final. The result is a response of simultaneous similarity and difference.

Pfeiffer’s work employs a measure of self-reflexivity, not within the physicality of the work, but within the exhibition more largely. The self-awareness that is generated acts as a precursor to a criticality that allows the viewer to view oneself in relation to the work. The Saints transcends cultural boundaries between two distinct geographical locations. What prevails is a sense of similarity and participation. The audience outsourced for the work (the specific reason being its lack of sameness) illustrates that crowd behavior is not culturally determined. Raising issues of singularity and collective behavior, similarity and difference, the work brings to attention the idolization of individuals in possession of unique talent. This can be seen as being analogous and reflective of the art worlds tendency to promote certain artists (the cannon of western artists).

As the sound of the original 1966 crowd hovers beneath the recording as though asserting its mythical status in England's collective memory (a past time of triumph as world champions). Has the time also come for an economic fall in the arts with regards to what has been predominantly seen as England's most prosperous period? In the similar way that every four years the World Cup trophy pass hands from one country to another could the same to said for the center of the art world? One certainty remains, only time will tell.

2007-10-24T02:50:00.000-07:00

A Look at David Batchelor’s Parapillars (2007), displayed at ‘Unplugged (remix)’, Wilkinson Gallery, London, 2007- Dominic Rich Oct 2007

David Batchelor is known as an artist and writer. Through both disciplines he has explored the use and reception of colour. In his book Chromophobia, Batchelor, (as the title implies) focuses on Western cultures’ fear of colour. Concentrating on visual art and literature he explains how the controllers of Western society are discriminative towards colour, associating it with that which is debased, unfamiliar or separate. He asks why this is so. Whilst deconstructing his examples he proposes that colour is a phenomenon which possesses an order outside of imposed ‘symbolic order’ . This concern is present in the current exhibition and in particular his collection of works called Parapillars.

On the ground floor of the ‘Unplugged (remix)’ exhibition stands a forest of Batchelor’s Parapillars. A collection of metal tree-like structures puncture the cavernous white gallery space providing a ubiquitous and vibrant display of colour. Ranging in height from one to three metres the sculptures pose, methodically decorated with hundreds of cheap and colourful domestic consumer products. From pegs to hair brushes, toys, power balls and baubles these bits and pieces are mainly arranged by different themes; some based on colour, others on purpose or on form, some containing or denying all three themes.

These objects were bought from “pound shops” situated close to the exhibition . The process of accumulating these objects within the galleries neighbourhood and displaying them in a gallery context causes reflection on the realities of global capitalism’s all encompassing hold; how it penetrates even the most everyday, culturally void, ephemera. It also references other contemporary artists’ obsession with everyday objects and counter-capitalist agendas; such as Tomoko Takahashi , Christoph Büchel and Tony Cragg . Perhaps Batchelor is suggesting that within the gallery context artists’ preoccupations have come to govern the meaning of everyday objects; becoming as integral to the objects as its colour or function. It is here that Batchelor shows that colour has its own order existing independently from imposed symbolics order or governing meanings.

2007-10-24T02:47:00.000-07:00

Hiraki Sawa, Hako, Chisenhale Gallery, 2007- Dominic Rich Oct 2007

Hiraki Sawa’s solo exhibition at the Chisenhale Gallery includes his recent video-animation installation, Hako. Hako, involves six 12 minute looped projections (each with its respective name ). They are cast onto their own large, propped, deliberately placed rectangular boards. They act as the only source of light in the gallery. Hako uses animation, narrow depths of field, varied visual rhythms and audio tempos to create lonely situations and a disorientation of the senses. Familiar symbols like a house, a boat, a clock, a cultivated garden suggest vague and esoteric narratives.

Hako translates as box in Japanese. Sawa is referencing his interest in a strand of psychotherapy known as “Sand Play” or box therapy. The idea is to use the unconscious mind as a form of healing. Through the somatic experience of arranging objects and figures in a box full of sand one can lose self-awareness thus engage their unconscious psyche. One can imaginatively create an inner world of symbols, finding an individual “space” related directly to their unconscious. Sawa must see a connection between this idea and his art practice, possibly attempting to reinvent it.

Sawa’s interest is evident throughout Hako, most particularly in the ‘For a Moment’ projection. In the frozen shot of a seascape sits an ambiguously silhouetted building. The notions of foreboding isolation and the relief of anonymity are felt simultaneously. I am informed that this is footage of a Japanese nuclear power station. As this information had previously been lost in visual translation, Sawa has allowed me to understand the silhouetted building using imagination. I have created a subjective symbol, perhaps placing it in my own sand box.

Using the power station as “real” footage, Sawa creates a continuum between it and his animated symbols. The projection pursues, waves lap along the shore beneath the power station. A crudely animated Ferris wheel fades in. A boat sails on the horizon; it is difficult to recognise that the boat is a superimposed animation. Sawa’s boat negates the chance of finding a divide on his continuum. This blending of appropriated footage from fabricated image presents disorientation, uncertainty and confusion. This provides a frustrating and exciting void, a lack of knowledge that can only be filled with imagination.

Although I have suggested that Hako, could be interpreted as a reinvention of “Sand Play”, any art which investigates sensory experience will always hold more than the presentation of one concept. However, Sawa’s is clearly influenced by the notion of “Sand Play”; the disorientating experience disarms, self awareness is faded by intrigue. The ambiguity of symbols and the suggestion of narratives force understanding to be created through ones own imagination (whether I am healed remains inconclusive).

2007-10-24T02:45:00.000-07:00

Christoph Buchel’s; “Simply Botiful” Hauser and Wirth, Coppermill, 2007- Dominic Rich, March, 2007

Buchel has created through his colossal installation a setting for artistic enquiry into contemporary social and political issues. The installation comprises three main spaces; a hotel space, a makeshift warehouse, and a refrigerator sales room. The hotel space’s appearance is a down at heel seedy nightmare. A warren of interwoven narratives and stereotypes are unveiled in its rooms and corridors. The effect is a genuine affront on the senses.

The confined dimensions cause anxiety and claustrophobia. The hoarding of personal effects creates a barrage of references that heighten this oppressive feeling. Buchel’s techniques hone in on contentious populist issues such as poverty, vice, crime, terrorism and capitalism. He uses his inventive play with narrative to explore the clichés and myths associated with these themes, forcing the audience to contemplate issues of social responsibility.

Narratives are created through the artist’s strategic cluttering of cheap consumer objects. Operating as evidence, the audience observes, investigates contemplates, and intrudes. An ethical crossroads between exploration and voyeurism is generated. Exploitation for the sake of encouraging artistic questioning is challenged. The abundance of references encourages the audience to let curiosity override its ethical quandaries and fears. Art through installation serves as a vehicle for creative analysis.

Music of various genres plays in different parts of the installation. It filters, echoes, merges, and supports the constructed narratives. The music connotes a mix of people occupying the space; it is a temporary dwelling for countless numbers of socially deprived people; fallen women, travellers, freedom fighters, terrorists, drug addicts and vagabonds. The narratives are stereotyped. For example, one of the smaller rooms is dirty, with used tissues strewn among discarded condoms. Tawdry garments and seedy magazines inhabit the room’s corners. The centrepiece is a soiled, unkempt bed. It is clearly the intimate setting of a prostitute.

Half made meals, open doorways, journals and general disorder suggest a sudden departure of the hotel’s occupants. This is reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Ghost Ship”, an elaboration on the “Marie Celeste” myth dating back to the late 1870’s. It is based on a small ship discovered in the straights of Gibraltar; unmanned, dry, in good condition, with clothes laid out on the floor and a meal prepared and ready to eat. The inexplicable disappearance of the ship’s inhabitants is a central element of intrigue in Conan Doyle’s story, however, the public found the author’s narrative so convincing that the British and American governments had to respond with an official investigation. Buchel’s installation is like Conan Doyle’s story in two ways. The first is the sudden inexplicable disappearance of people. The second is the artist’s and author’s command, their inventive use of mediums to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction.

To fictionalise implies motive. “Simply Botiful” acts as Buchel’s microcosm of present western culture. It seems a personal and jaded representation. Initially the audience is prompted to assume the installation exploits common tragedy; Buchel pursuing his own fanciful agenda, a selfish absorption into sensational myth making. However large segments of the warehouse and sales room have been appropriated by Buchel and installed in their original state. Whole, real life contexts are presented, not just objects. One such context appears within the warehouse space; a metal storage container decorated with lurid pornography. Amongst the pornographic images is a small photo of a proud five-a-side football team.

Buchel’s juxtaposition of fabrication and appropriation exposes the deceptive nature of myths and clichés. He demonstrates that clichés and myths are both fusions of truths and lies. Furthermore he shows that clichés are often truths masquerading as lies, and myths, lies masquerading as truths. “Simply Botiful” emphasises the difficulties that exist in deciphering myths and clichés; the (fabricated) prostitute’s narrative is as credible or incredible as the (appropriated) porn containers.

Buchel’s distortion of fact and fiction is similar to Conan Doyle’s representation of the “Marie Celeste” event. Nevertheless both had different objectives and outcomes. Conan Doyle melded facts and fancy; captivating people of the time to such an extent that they believed his story was true. Buchel contrasts his own fictional narratives against imported contexts. Masquerading as a story teller he subtly unearths truths. He exposes contradiction and unfairness in the dominant attitudes of society. Buchel’s use of objects and referencing are so directly taken from western society that it forces the audience to contemplate the environment they inhabit and apply artistic enquiry directly to their reality.

George Orwell's: Why I Write

2007-10-23T09:29:00.000-07:00

http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

Check this link out. Id post the whole text but I dont want to hog the blog with several pages of this eassy---its pretty wonderful
Have a look if'n interested...

xo, Nina