Selfselector

Many of us may have already seen images of Fiona Banner’s Harriet and Jaguar, her recently unveiled 2010 Duveens Commission. But this is a work that truly excites and overwhelms when experienced in direct confrontation. Two fighter jets scattered in the neo-classic sculpture galleries of Tate Britain could seem like a simple ready-made statement, but the complexities they arise are far for predictable. One is immediately surprised by the beauty of the objects themselves, like giant toys in a theme park, only to remember that they are real war machines, the ones that blow entire blocks and schools, the ones that kill soldiers and civilians alike. The ones that cause the deaths we see in the news on television.

Fiona Banner. Harrier and Jaguar 2010 © Fiona Banner. Photo: Tate 2010

War is one of Fiona Banner’s artistic obsessions and the fighter jet iconography is by now a permanent fixture in her body of work. But there is a second recurrent subject for her, which she often juxtaposes to the first: porn. Both issues are usually regarded as macho realms where males can engage in power games, but Banner explores these fetishist universes in order to understand why she (and, by extension, the rest of humanity) is so fascinated by the same things she is supposed to abhor. In this quest to expose how guilty pleasures operate, these magnificent fighter jets –beautiful killing machines– have the same contradictory and problematic appeal than any murky sexual practice that we might want to contemplate only in our deepest thoughts. Highlighting this fact is one of the strengths and most interesting aspects of Banner’s work.

Harrier and Jaguar are undeniably appealing and easy on the eye. When visiting the installation, I couldn’t help but noticing the free-floating enthusiasm they provoke: people smiling in awe, relentless picture-taking like tourists by the Tour Eiffel (myself included), little kids playing war games around them… Even the way they have been placed feels like a fascinating and precise choreography. The Harrier is hanging vertically from the ceiling in the South Duveens, it’s round nose/beak hovering just a few inches above the floor. The whole jet is framed by the neo-classic columns like a post-nuclear crucifix with feathers painted on it. In the North Duveens the Jaguar lies belly up, as if it had crash-landed after a failed mission. The paint has been removed so its shiny aluminium body reflects the architectural space and the audience like a mirror (“so they can’t detach themselves from it”, explains Banner). The planes obviously arise the comparison between technology and nature. Since they were baptised after animals, one can also reflect on the doomed human desire to achieve god-like abilities: to create things, to destroy others and to control all of them. Fittingly, Harriet and Jaguar look estranged and defeated here, no matter how dangerous and powerful they were not so long ago.

Fiona Banner. Harrier and Jaguar 2010 © Fiona Banner. Photo: Tate 2010

The power of this monumental piece of Fiona Banner lies not in the symbolic introduction of military imaginary inside a museum, but in the objects being two fighter jets that were actually flown by British soldiers in military campaigns, namely the Bosnia and Gulf wars. The successful strategy of Harrier and Jaguar –clearly refusing to patronise the viewer– results, unsurprisingly, in a serious questioning of the agency of political art. There are lots of well-meaning artists whose main concern is to embed political and social issues into the cultural discourse, raise awareness on the ugly truths we don’t want to be reminded of. But once inside the gallery many of these works loose effectiveness. The realities they are denouncing become removed, alienated, fictional, something you can take a souvenir picture of and then forget. And there is a currency in that, both for art world and the mass media, that it is something to be reckoned with.

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Harriet and Jaguar, Fiona Banner’s work for the Duveens Galleries Commission 2010, will be on view at Tate Britain until the 3rd of January 2011

An edited version of this review was published on this is tomorrow in August 2010

(This review was originally published on www.frieze.com in June 2010)

Manuel Borja-Villel’s latest strategy to reinvent the Museo Reina Sofía sounds just as crisis-friendly as it is promising: inviting a roster of noteworthy artists to curate a series of shows using the permanent collection –18,000 pieces and counting – in what looks like a remake of MoMA’s successful ‘Artist’s Choice’ programme, which began in 1989. Accepting the invitation of Reina Sofía’s chief curator, Lynne Cooke, the Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba has recently inaugurated the first instalment of this new scheme. The resulting exhibition, ‘A Curated Conference’, revolves around the metaphor of the exhibition as a conference, the gallery being the stage and the artists the ‘speakers’.

The idea of the speaker turns out to be quite relevant in this two-room display, as the works communicate in true conversational style. The first room has a big indexical diagram that Barba – who has chosen not to show any of her own work despite being part of the collection – designed as a declaration of intent. Alongside this diagram, subtle and restrained works by Lili Dujourie, Mira Schendel, Francis Alÿs and Joëlle Tuerlinckx fill the small opening room, which feels somehow silent and preparatory.

It’s in the second, main room, where the ‘chatter’ begins: the clatter of 16mm projectors interacts with the muffled soundtracks of video works shown on TV monitors and large screens. Here, the individual legibility of the works is not a priority. All the voices are meant to be experienced as a multiple, uneven clamour. Even the black-screen pauses, the silence between the pieces, have been technically programmed. Nothing is left at random: that David Lamelas’ everyday experiments in To Pour Milk into a Glass (1972) clatter exactly opposite Paul Sharits’ Word Movie (1966), or that Gordon Matta-Clark’s burlesque acrobatics in Clockshower (1973) take place to the relentless hammering soundtrack of Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll (1972) is no coincidence. Two pairs of monitors are scattered in the room, each of them dramatizing their own male-female conversation. In one pair we find Yvonne Rainer versus Guy Debord. On the other set, Valie Export’s Syntagma (1983), a meditation on female representation, cinema and subjectivity is coupled with a selection of Nam June Paik’s videos of early performances.

Out of forty pieces that made the final selection, twenty belong to the moving image format, split between three big screens with DVD projections, four TV monitors and three 16mm projectors right in the middle of the room, each of them placed beside Carl Andre’s Magnesium Copper Plain (1969), a self-reflexive token of Barba’s own use of celluloid projectors as sculptural devices in her practice, highlighted here by its pairing with such an iconic minimalist work. Highly choreographed in phenomenological terms, ‘A Curated Conference’ oozes the nuances and plastic concerns typical of an artist. Barba’s first experience as a curator shows an obvious fondness for the seminal figures of film and video practice from the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as for the ideals of the Fluxus movement. What is not so evident in its first reading is that most of the pieces on display share a humorous or ironic look at both life and art.

Barba has confessed she seized this opportunity to explore works relevant to her practice, so it’s easy to understand why so many works here are in 16mm (some of them transferred to video). But there is more to it than personal delight, as one can sense a sincere engagement in bringing together the collection and its audience, resulting in this subjective and exhilarating lesson in 20th-century art history.

Photography is present through works by Cindy Sherman, Tacita Dean and David Wojnarowicz’s poignant Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Duchamp) (1978–9/2004). And, bearing in mind the institutional context, there is also a selection of Spanish artists, from Picasso and fellow cubist María Blanchard to Antoni Muntadas and the sculptor Cristina Iglesias. We can even witness a silent drama taking place between two works: Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (The Green Box) (1934), a compilation of the preparatory sketches and notes for his Large Glass, is displayed in a cabinet underneath Louise Bourgeois’ Spider (1994) – the menacing arachnid becoming an ingenious embodiment of Duchamp’s dominant and dangerously erotic ‘bride’.

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All images: Installation views by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

(This review was originally published on this is tomorrow in June 2010)

What Is Waiting Out There is the title of the 6th Berlin Biennale and, if we are to produce an answer based on the works in show, the future looks pretty bleak. That gloomy feeling, which resonates coherently with the current socio-economic landscape, is moreover problematised with the overarching concept: an examination of reality, in an epoch where claims to objectivity have long been abandoned in favour of a fear/fascination with staging and performativity. If mistrust is the defining malaise of contemporary Realism, the show put together by curator Kathrin Rhomberg clearly succeeds: most of the works in the biennale –where politically engaged documentary video and photography are key– raise the right questions for the wrong reasons. Doubt and paradox take over the experience, they accompany the viewer along the exhibition like an unwanted friend.

Access to Danh Vo’s exhibition at the 6th Berlin Biennale, 2010

Out of the more than 40 artists gathered for this 6th edition, there is one player that perfectly exemplifies such controversies. Episode III (2008), by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, is an extremely layered and contradictory work that portrays him as a Fitzcarraldo figure of sorts gone to Congo to preach the assets of impoverishment to the locals, by redefining it a ‘natural resource’. Episode III adopts the form of a gonzo documentary that highlights the ways in which the First World economy profits from the impoverished African regions while launching ineffective aid programs to save face. Martens achieves this by making statements and creating situations that keenly question both the international handling of the issue and the agency of political art itself. However this leaves the viewer feeling that his cynicism has gone too far and reached obscene proportions. Is he not exploiting those poor communities he wants to help, just the same as all those westerners (photographers, aid organisations, politicians) he is pointing at, and then touring the biennale and gallery circuit like a morally superior hero himself?

Renzo Martens, Episode 3, Enjoy Poverty (2008) video still. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Wilkinson Gallery, London, copyright the artist

For all those who Renzo Martens’ ninety minute-long opus leaves an uncomfortable taste in the mouth, there is another work in the Biennale dealing with a related set of issues, which seems to tackle the complexities of African post-colonialism in a subtler way, in what almost feels like balm of intellectual rigour and common sense. Everything That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008) by Mark Boulos borrows its title from a sentence from the Communist Manifesto, and delves into the idea of commodity fetishism applied to the production of oil in Nigeria and its subsequent speculative use in North America. Consisting of a two-channel synchronised video installation, each screen depicts one of the two factions struggling for control of the precious good. On one screen we find the Nigerian guerrillas that seek to alleviate the misery of the region by redistributing the oil resources by all means necessary. The opposing screen shows the theatricality of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the largest exchange of futures and derivatives, where corporations trade goods that don’t even exist yet. That removal of the material stuff –absent from both the land where it comes from and trade where is exchanged– is what Boulos means by ‘melting into air’, the path to metaphysical qualities. The two facing screens, which portray such polarised but inextricable realities, build a dialectic and hypnotic space for thought.

Mark Boulos, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008), installation view. Courtesy the artist, copyright the artist

The dialogue and comparison between the works is a productive tool to comprehend a biennale where one could feel the least important thing is the art itself, prioritising political and epistemological endeavours in detriment of sensuous and sensorial enjoyment. But there are quite a few things to be gained by engaging with these apparently aloof works. By negotiating the gap between the socio-political events and how they are represented we are already looking at them differently.

In the end, it had to be a commercial gallery the responsible for Ana Mendieta’s first solo show in the UK, despite the Cuban’s unquestionable appeal for any well intentioned art institution (being a woman, Latin, with a unique artistic voice and extraordinary doses of charisma). Alison Jacques –a Fitzrovian gallery that also represents the estates of other key 20th century artists like Hélio Oiticica, Robert Mapplethorpe or Hannah Wilke– has offered the London audience a small but very representative survey of the practice of the artist, born in Havana but raised and educated in exile in the States, first in Iowa and then in New York.

Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence at Alison Jacques Gallery, installation shots.

Ana Mendieta’s work is rooted on the most physical and primitive aspects of being: the four elements (earth, fire, water, wind), the human body (blood, sweat, skin, bones) and the rituals (often through the Cuban rites of Santería) to combine these two aspects, i.e. the body becoming nature or, rather, returning to nature. With videos, photographs, drawings and one installation, all produced between 1972 and 1982, this show serves as an introduction to the general audience while also offering the more versed followers an insight to some less-known pieces.

Entering the gallery a close-up of Mendieta’s face welcomes us. The video ‘Sweating Blood’ (1973), her face static, her eyes closed, seems like a meditative piece, where nothing happens, until drops of blood start falling from her forehead staining her face. In the next room, another video titled ‘Burial Pyramid’ (1974) shows the artist breathing in and out of a nest of stones, each breath allowing her to emerge a bit more and us to see her naked body, like both a plant blossoming and a grown up baby being born, painfully, to then die.

Ana Mendieta, Sweating Blood (1973). Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD. Image courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery

The exhibition also provides extensive illustration of her on-going Silueta project through videos, photographs and the installation ‘Nañigo Burial’ (1976), where lit candles melt in the iconic form, and ‘Body Prints’ (1974), a pair of photographs of Mendieta’s bloody body covered with a plastic sheet, which resonate with her notorious piece ‘Rape’, a performance she had staged the previous year, when she invited her teachers and colleagues to her flat in the campus of the University of Iowa. When the group arrived, they found her naked, bent over and tied to a table in the dark, with blood running down her legs. A few days before a fellow girl student had been raped and murdered in the campus and that was Ana’s fearless way of protesting against it.

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series), 1978. Image courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery

Mendieta’s creative play with death, blood, nature and the female condition –strong and fragile at the same time– seems eerily admonitory of her premature death at the age of 36, in 1985, plunging from the thirty-fourth floor apartment in Greenwich Village that she shared with her husband, the minimal uber-artist Carl Andre. Andre and Mendieta had a volatile on and off relationship that getting married did not soothe. The night of Ana’s death, Andre admitted they had been arguing, but nothing else is known as to what happened in that room. Andre was charged and went to trial, a process that took almost 3 years, when he was finally acquitted. The whole issue is a huge taboo that haunts both Mendieta’s and Andre’s artistic careers, though indeed it tends to be brought up whenever she is mentioned, while for Andre is an obscure past event than is silenced for everyone’s convenience.

The death of Ana Mendieta is a scenario that ticks too many boxes and poses to many questions to be comfortably handled: Domestic abuse; the female/male professional battle of egos; the dark immigrant vs. the White American, the struggling artist vs. the established art star… Unfortunately, such a heavy burden in her personal life risks taking away relevance to her work itself, a maverick combination of land-art, body-art, feminism and the Latin voice, executed with confidence, passion and conviction. Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), still the artist’s artist, keeps fighting the elements even after death.

Ana Mendieta, On Giving Life (1975). Image courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery

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Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence at Alison Jacques Gallery, London. 19 February- 20 March 20010

Image credits: Copyright © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Alison Jacques Gallery

A version of this review was published on March 2010 in the online magazine this is tomorrow:

http://www.thisistomorrow.info/viewArticle.aspx?artId=266&Title=Ana%20Mendieta:%20Silueta%20and%20Silence

It is funny that, quite an atheist myself, maybe an agnostic on a bad day, I have ended up falling for some sort of surrogate form of religion: contemporary art.

Art lovers from all over the world don’t have to go to church. Our social gatherings, where we mingle and meet fellow members of our cult, are the private views. As in a Sunday mass, the sermons (the works) are probably the least important element of it all. Much more crucial is to see and be seen and gossip the latest news. Private views are where the community comes together, where individuals gather a sense of belonging, but of course, like in any group, there are impenetrable elites (those of artists, gallerists, writers and curators) that remind us of the classical religious hierarchies.

Galleries and museums are our temples, and not in a metaphorical way. The “white cube” has sacred connotations: spaces with high ceilings (spiritual) and white walls (purity) where we must remain silent and respectful, because these are domains where we can meditate, find some time to reflect on key issues and take in the new information provided to us.

Big art spaces, like the Tate Modern or the Guggenheims, are often deemed as cathedrals, as it is like true cathedrals that they function: they attract millions of long-distance travellers each year that pilgrim from all over the globe with fervent passion to visit this famous places a la Lourdes, the Vatican or Florence’s Duomo. Insiders feel like they have arrived to the long-awaited Promised Land. Outsiders can either remain untouched or feel intimidated  (commercial galleries are especially prone to provoke this) or completely out of place by these highly charged spaces, a bit like I felt when as a teenager I travelled to Italy with my school mates and had to see all the most notorious Italian cathedrals in the space of a week. Had I gone a few years later, being a bit older and more artistically oriented, I would have been able to appreciate, if still not their catholic prowess, indeed their architectural or painterly qualities. But cathedrals were not exactly my cup of tea back then, and I remember not feeling the overwhelming emotion I was told I was supposed to.

But art, and its artworks, are sustained on a matter of faith just as much as any religious belief. Art lovers bestow art works with sometimes magical and emotional, sometimes economical, powers. Let’s take –using an example everyone can relate to– Duchamp’s urinal, “Fountain” (1917). To me (and to many millions more), it stands as one of the most important masterpieces in the History of Art. It gave birth to conceptual art itself, it changed the expectations of the discipline, prioritising an idea rather than a manual skill. To many, it is just bullshit. And those probably are the same people who claim that they could do a Pollock painting on a regular Saturday morning. Those are the people that argue that the true masters were Goya, Velazquez, Rubens, Gioto, Cranach, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, even Picasso if they are feeling a bit bold. And who couldn’t agree with that? Contemporary art lovers don’t reject classical, figurative art. We just vindicate the attributes and qualities of other forms of artistic expression. We vindicate them because we believe they are art, as opposed to others who think they are bullshit. If it is a system sustained in belief, well then we could call it religion, couldn’t we?

True art lovers, like true religious people, accommodate to a lifestyle based on art events and rituals. Art organises your schedule. You have all these private views to attend, those shows to visit (leisure controlled) those museums and biennales to travel to (holidays sorted), all these books, magazines –pieces if you can afford them– to buy (consumer goods allocated). We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, religion and art have historically been always intertwined. Art, in the beginning of the days, was religious (or magical, mystical) art. But societies back then were tremendously religious themselves. In contemporary western society, characterised by an increasing and non-stopping secularity, contemporary art has become one of the replacements for religion itself. In the end, from the perspective of one of these contemporary art cult followers, I would say that art offers a freer, less regulated and constrictive, intellectual space and tools to think about life and death. Minus the salvation promises, I guess.

Written in September 2009

The video starts. A grey mass materialises before my eyes. I can’t really recognise the shapes. I squint my eyes and long for a sound to guide me, to give me a clue. Maybe if I could hear seagulls, I would imagine myself standing on a cliff, watching the rough sea getting closer and closer, almost feeling the waves calling me, inviting me to jump, like mean sirens. But there is no sound. My mind wanders. The stream of images is quite hypnotising. Maybe this is a macro shot of an insect, those images where you realize how hairy flies’ legs are. Spiky hairs like rose thorns. Under a microscope all the bugs become the perfect David Cronenberg creature.

This untitled video arrives to my life through an email one early morning; the sender, the artist, an equally unknown entity as the piece itself. I am supposed to write about something and someone I don’t know at all. They found me, and it becomes an experience as intriguing as poetic, so I accept.

A few weeks later, I have managed to meet the artist, at the private view of an installation set in the toilets of a pub in East London, of all places. She doesn’t want to give away any information, which I seek and push for cunningly. That first encounter doesn’t provide with much more, but a few days later I have discovered what the video shows. Now I know. The video is Julia’s mountain and it embodies the answer of a very important question for her and Carlos Pastor. “Now tell me Julia, which one is your mountain?”. We will hear this conversation, which was recorded in a car, in the exhibition at Oblong Gallery, as part of the installation “Horizontal Pleat”. The video will be one component of it.

Julia’s mountain is not a physical, real mountain, but a composition of 4 different pictures recorded with a Super 8 camera. The pictures are inverted shots of a Tuareg’s turban, those folded tissues being the “horizontal pleats” of the exhibition’s title. A Tuareg is a nomadic man of the North African desert, and I wonder if this choice of Julia -–another Spanish émigré like me– is entirely casual or, on the other hand, highly charged with meaning. But I am not supposed to ask. So it’s just the video, Julia’s mountain, the turban and me. All alone in a room.

Knowing the original source of these images, oddly enough, doesn’t set my mind at ease, but triggers my thoughts to run even more wildly. Julia’s work avidly encourages a sense of displacement, of dislocation, maybe even of deceit. She is playing a game of appearances and symbols with us, her public. Subjectivity is Mariscal’s main preoccupation when constructing and then showing a piece. She is not interested in imposing us a story, a narrative, a justification for her work. She offers a kind of raw material to the viewer to chew on, and she does that through processes of fragmentation and encoding of information. She folds and pleats, most accurately in this particular work.

In his essay “The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque”, Gilles Deleuze elaborates in the potentiality of the fold as a producer of subjectivity. Deleuze understands the world as a body of infinite folds and surfaces, which twist and weave through compressed time and space. In an interpretation of Leibniz’s philosophy that has become crucial for our understanding of the contemporary, the French thinker described history and the event as multifaceted combinations of signs in motion, and the modern subject as nomadic, always in the process of becoming.

It seems to me that the folding of Mariscal’s Tuareg might, consciously or not, be addressing some of these deleuzian questions, sharing a concern with the powers of the subjective and its use to better interpret and play with the information overload, making it ours, adding yet another layer that conveys our own point of view. But, then again, these are all lucubrations. In the end I just don’t know, I tell myself, as I watch the video yet another time.

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Julia Mariscal, “Horizontal Pleat”. From the 4th to the 31th of December 2009 at Oblong Gallery, London.
This text forms part of the exhibition catalogue.

http://www.juliamariscal.com/
http://www.oblonggallery.com/

Stefan Bruggemann considers himself a hypermodern artist. He defines himself like that, straightaway, using a term coined by the French philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky with whom he regularly has meetings and conversations. Lipovetsky described our times as based in “hyperconsumption”, a consumption which absorbs and integrates more and more spheres of social life and which encourages individuals to consume for their own personal gratification rather than to enhance their social status. And it seems to me that it is in true hypermodern style that I conduct this interview with this Mexican artist born in 1975 and living in London since 1998. I contacted him through an Internet social network, which I am aware might not seem an entirely professional approach, and I first met him at Soho’s Groucho Club, a famous member’s club where I am more bound to meet a famous model or actor than anyone who can discuss the practice of Pontus Hulten.

“Naked Girl” (2003). Digital print on canvas.

Bruggemann inhabits an artistic terrain that mixes conceptualism with a certain punk demeanour. His conceptualist bias surfaces in his love for short, concise text pieces and minimal installations. Statements that explore the art world, the own conceptual and minimal traditions, and the results of blending of art, fashion and music in tune with the capitalistic scenario. The neutral Arial font is key. Black, white, aluminium paint or neon lights his colours and materials of choice. The punk side, on the other hand, manifests through a confrontational attitude and a constant play with the contradictions that a commercial artist (he is represented by heavyweight dealer Yvon Lambert) faces when producing critical, self-reflexive and meta-discursive work from the core of our capitalistic society. But Bruggemann embraces that contradiction, which he prefers to call “instability”. “I can’t explain and I won’t even try” is one of Bruggemann’s most famous text pieces, but, then again, he is willing to explain quite a few things with a very articulated discourse.

I came across your work as part of a research on contemporary practitioners of Institutional Critique. Would you agree to be considered like that?
Yes, I think there is definitely a part of my work that addresses those concerns, but obviously not in the same manner as the pioneers, in the 60’s and 70’s, which had a clear anarchist feel to it. My context is completely different. I am not against neither the art commerce, nor its commodification, really. These are not my issues. There are some strategies that may be similar, though. But I think my work is another type of analysis of capitalism.

But some of your works are rather difficult to sell, and I am thinking of “Show titles”, for example.
Sure. I don’t think I am taking necessary the easy road, producing little objects, or small drawings that are easy to sell. But there is some degree of perversion to what I do, because in the end, most of it is for sale, you can buy it. I am not making anti-form or immaterial work most of the time. I like to think that I am using capitalism from its insides to wear it off. It’s like stepping on the accelerator pedal of a car to see how far it goes.

Is that reason why you use fashion and music in your work, two more mainstream disciplines?
Yes. Apart of the notion of Institutional Critique, I am also really interested in the question of what is it to be an artist today. It is such an over-used concept and word it seems nowadays we are all artists and, at the same time, none of us is. It is such an ambiguity. One decides that something is art, and that’s it. Then you face the question of how to communicate it, how is “legitimized”.

Obliteration Painting #13 (No Eyes) (2008).  Digital print on canvas, aluminum paint.

Why do you think your art, what you decided that was art, has been accepted and “legitimized”, then?
I think my art produces reactions, even if not always positive. But that doesn’t really matter, the moment you have any kind of answer, you are already having a conversation. I think that the most challenging part of making art is saying something new. I am trying to do that by using the strategies of conceptual and minimal art. I want to develop my own reflection on our society. As an artist, I am interested in creating from within. To me, it is quite useless to be isolated in my own world, in my studio. I want my work to belong to the world, to be part of it. Some artists considered political work by illustrating an idea. As if they read a book, some Freud, or some post-structuralist work, and decided to produce an illustration of that. They take a picture of the phenomenon. I am much more interested in the process of making it, in the way you operate to make the piece, which most of the time it is invisible. It is there, but the viewer cannot see it. This is why I always use Arial Black, which is completely standard and neutral. Or why I use vinyl, or aluminum paint. My messages are straightforward and quick. They speak of our society, which is based on the notion of speed.

They are like slogans…
I don’t like to call them slogans. I call them text pieces, but ok. What I like about them is that they can reach anyone, from a very knowledgeable curator to a kid.  Of course, what each of them makes of the same message will depend on their own cultural context. Interpretation will vary depending on their background. But my pieces lack the high-brow factor, they are not intimidating. When I use fashion magazines, I do it because it is also a reflection of our obsession with speed, of short-lived fads and trends.

“Life S(o)(u)cks” (2001). Magazine page, red permanent marker.

But don’t you think that art itself has become as fast-paced as fashion already, even disposable?
Oh yes, indeed. But what interests me about fashion is the idea of playing with different means of production. For example, to tear out the pages of a photo shoot or an ad, which probably have a millionaire budget, and then make a small intervention on it. I like that gesture, reversing the process.

That sounds like a ready-made…
Yes, it is a ready-made somehow, a continuation of the concept of appropriation, the act of making something yours. I tear out a page, sometimes I write on it, then I scan it and print it with domestic scanners and printers, low quality. And then I take it to a professional place where they scan it on high quality and print it on a canvas, usually on a format of 150cm x 150cm. After all that process, the result is ambivalent, it looks worn out, it could be a picture, a painting, a picture of a painting or a painting of a picture. My works are neither poems nor sculptures, nor paintings. They are unstable. It is like life in a big city such as London or Mexico. In the same day you can oscillate from heaven to hell. Or like the stock exchange, always up and down. I think that the stock exchange is a great representation of life itself.

I am quite intrigued about your project “Show Titles”, which is an ongoing list of titles for shows that you offer to be used for free by whoever might want to.
“Show Titles” is an investigation on duration and time, because it is an ongoing project that will only stop when I decide to or when I die, and not even, because people will carry on using them after I am dead, hopefully. It is a platform. Anyone is allowed to used them, my only request is to be included on the credits. When I presented it at the ICA (Beck’s Futures, 2006), I really liked that oppressive sensation of being overwhelmed by words, by information, that was completely void at the same time. All that information is empty, unreal, up to each member of the audience to make something out of it. It is really essential that this piece is shown inside an exhibition space, because if you take it outside, it becomes something else.

“Show Titles” (2000–on going). Black vinyl lettering.

That makes me think of the culture flux right now. Thanks to the Internet we can access to so much information it seems we are all much more cultivated than before, but it is just superficial data, like headlines, shallow. We don’t have any in-depth knowledge about anything, just bit and pieces…
Absolutely. That is technology. Mobile phones, emails, Twitter, Skype… We are connected all the time, but we don’t have anything relevant to say, which is a bit sad. I was talking about this recently with Gilles Lipovetsky, in a conversation that will be published soon, where we discussed this idea of the society of disappointment.

Lipovetsky, the French philosopher that published “Hypermodern Times” in 2006…
That’s right. I consider myself a hypermodern artist.

And “altermodern”?
I am not sure, because I do not quite understand the concept. I thought it was a really exciting theoretical wrapping, but couldn’t see the connection with the actual exhibition.

We will soon be able to see a new project of yours at Frieze Art Fair, from the 15th till the 18th of October. Tell me about it.
It is an ongoing project by curators Lisa Rosendahl and Daniel McClean called “Offer & Exchange”, and it will be shown at the Yvon Lambert booth (Bruggeman’s Parisian gallery). Their project explores the idea of the artist contract, which is a subject that has been used since the conceptualists. My take on it is something I have been wanting to do for a few years and that really fits their rationale, and it is basically presenting two works, one by me and other by other artist, each of them with their own certificate, where it is stipulated that every 5 years the authorship of the works change, so my work will be his and vice versa. It is interesting because it explores the idea of the death of the author and also because it breaks the linearity of the History Art. Depending on what year it is shown in a museum, the works will be by different artists. How you catalogue that? It also plays with the capitalist obsession with authorship.

Looks Conceptual (1999). Black vinyl lettering.

Who is the other artist?
Robert Barry, who belongs to the first generation of conceptual artists, which provides an exciting dialogue between generations. I really like the idea of letting go of your work, which I am aware is not an easy thing to do. We actually proposed it to some other artists, such as Lawrence Wiener or Douglas Gordon and they said no. It was also important for me to present it in a fair context, because it addresses the subjects of speculation and commerce.

It reminds me of the project “Purchase of a prize”, in which Santiago Sierra bought the Golden Lion of Venice Biennale awarded to Regina Jose Galindo in 2005, in order to sell it.
Actually, Santiago Sierra has also made a project for “Offer & Exhange” called “Death Counter”, in which a giant LED outside the Hiscox Insurance HQ documents the annual number of human deaths worldwide, from any cause. (On view until the 31st of December 2009 in London. Hiscox, 1 Great St Helens London, EC3A 6HX).

You said before that one of your main practice questions is what is an artist today. So what is it, then?
I think an artist nowadays is someone who is able to navigate a lot of world at the same time: the world of art, of music, of fashion, of nightclubs…

I see that music, as well as fashion, is something definitely important in your work. Actually, in one of your last shows in London last year, at Bloomberg SPACE, you invited the band The Fall to perform during the private view.
Yes, when Bloomberg commissioned me a site-specific piece last year in their HQ, I thought it was such a fantastic place, the climax of the communion between art and capitalism. I did a series of Obliteration paintings, and also presented some paintings by the Mexican artist Dr. Atl. He was some sort of Renaissance man, also involved in politics and very confrontational, with whom I really identify with. It was also to great to have The Fall performing, a band that I love and of whom John Peel said “always the same, always different”, which is something, I would like to think, applies to my work as well. Having a punk band playing at Bloomberg was something very symbolic to me. And also something pretty prescient of the times, as only a few weeks later the stock exchange market fell itself. Credit cruch, the fall…

The Fall playing at the private view of “The Fall”. Bloomberg Space, London (2008).

Speaking of all this… Do you consider yourself punk? Because that is the way many critics or art writers portray you. You have a certain “in you face” attitude, you are critical to society, you have collaborated with Malcom McLaren, and yet, I am not sure I would call you “punk” myself. You work seems a bit too refined and “clean” for that.
Well, yes, I might be punk somehow, but it is indeed a contemporary punk and without falling into nostalgia. It has been a long way since 1977!

You are actually finishing a 5 star hotel in Acapulco, which is not exactly a punk thing to do, I guess!
I know! But as I said I don’t have any interest in being marginal. I like this kind of works, actually. These promoters, who are big collectors of my work, proposed me to collaborate in this new hotel. I decided that I just didn’t want to sell them some works so they could scatter them there. If you are going to be involved in a 5 star hotel in Acapulco, which obviously it is not the most radical thing you can do as an artist, you might as well seize the chance and go for it. So I decided to be involved in the actual design of the hotel, embedding my work on it. And I came up with a format, a formula that can be used in any hotel. The name is “Hotel Hotel”, and the whole project is based on Edward Hooper’s interior paintings. Each room has the title of a Hooper painting carved in one of its walls, in Arial font, of course. The bas-relief is based on idea of taking out, as opposed of adding, which is what decoration usually does. The titles are very poetic and I think that can produce diverse reaction on different customers.

You have also curated some shows, like “Shallow” at I-20 Gallery, NY. Are you interested in curating as well?
Yes, but right now only sporadically. I started my own gallery space in Mexico D.F. when I was a student, a mix of studio and gallery space where we had two shows a month and showed lots of rubbish. But we also put quite a few interesting shows by artists that are now doing quite well. Then I travelled to NY and got really inspired by the Dia Foundation, and back in Mexico I started a more serious art space called Programa, with a similar ethos to Dia. I directed it and worked really hard on it for a few years, until I fell out with the Major of Mexico and closed it. But I think really interesting things happened there that helped to shape a new scene of contemporary artists in Mexico.

“Shallow” installation view (2007).

You have been living in London for quite a few years now, but the connection with Mexico is still there.
Of course, I am Mexican and now I could even say I am Mexican artist, somehow, after all we achieved during those years in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. There was a text piece that was crucial for me. I made it in 1999 and it was called “Looks Conceptual”. I wanted to highlight how conceptual art, that always stood for anti-form and anti-style, after a few years ended up being more formalist than any other school, with a very identifiable style, easy to copy and reproduce. I was fascinated by that contradiction. I sought to apply that question to the context of Mexico, that wants to belong to the international economical community, but whose culture policies are still promoting all the Latin-American clichés: the rural, the found object with magical properties. Even artists with international reputation like Gabriel Orozco are still stuck with this. I wanted to challenge that. It was time to do something about it.

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More info at: http://www.stefanbruggemann.com/

Stefan Bruggeman’s last piece, “Shift:, will be on view during Frieze Art Fair (15th-18th October, London), at the Yvon Lambert booth.  http://www.friezeartfair.com/

Keren Cytter (1977, Tel Aviv) is an artist and writer. In her short films she explores human relationships and the everyday through a playful experimentation with structures and narratives and subverting classical ways of storytelling. She also makes drawings and has published a number of poems, articles, scripts and, most notably, novels. She has just been awarded the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art and, in 2006, she won the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. In a few years, Keren has become a permanent fixture of the international art circuit. She is currently showing her work at The New Museum (New York, until the 5th of July) as part of Younger Than Jesus exhibition. She has had solo shows at Cubitt (London, 2008), Centro Huarte (Huelva, Spain, 2008) and Witte de With (Rotterdam, 2008) amongst others. Already featured in Manifesta 7 (Trentino, Italy, 2008), the Second Moscow Biennial (2007) and the Lyon Biennial (2007) to name but a few, this year Cytter will take part in Making Worlds, the International Art Exhibition of the upcoming 2009 Venice Biennale curated by Daniel Birbaum, who already selected her to take part in the 50 Rings of Saturn, the Torino Triennale (November 2008-January 2009). Keren Cytter lives and works in Berlin.

Hi Keren! How are you? Are you working on a project now?
Oh yes, I am shooting the video for the Venice Biennale 2009. We will see how it looks. There is a boy who was supposed to shot a woman, but he started crying and he couldn’t do it. Very cute.

He was too into character, I suppose!
He was totally out of character, he should have shot her!

Are you shooting in Berlin?
Yes, I shot in a theatre, with real actors. Two of them are over 40 years old.

That is interesting. You usually use friends, don’t you?
Yes… generally. People I feel comfortable with.

So why the change to professional actors?
Because that suits the film, which takes place in a theatre. There was supposed to be an audience but hardly any one came. It was Sunday morning after the first of May, so only extremely hungover people showed up.

Still from Keren’s video for the 2009 Venice Biennale

Are you excited about showing in Venice?
I don’t know, I wonder how the movie will come out. I didn’t really start editing it…

Well, you always seem to work very close to the deadline, don’t you? I remember that with your videos at your recent show at Pilar Corrias it was a bit like that as well (Domestics, March-April 2009, Pilar Corrias Gallery London).
Yes… but this time the actors really acted. And the tempo is different now.

I think the show at Venice, Making worlds, is going to be good. For example, Nathalie Djurberg is there also. Do you like her work?
I don’t know… I am not so keen on animation…

Oh, neither am I. But she is not doing like “cute” animation precisely. How is Berlin, anyway?
Today? Rainy.

All the artists seem to live there now.
Well, yeah, it’s cheap and the people are nice. It is easiest place to live outside Israel. But there is no money.

When did you leave Israel? Long time ago?
7 years ago. Is it long?

Quite long, I suppose! Do you miss it?
No. I read Israeli newspapers every morning.

It’s an awful situation there…
I don’t think about that so much, it’s very personal for me.

Do you consider yourself political?
Maybe somehow, yes. But who is somehow “not political”?

I mean in your work.
Mhhhhh, yes but not in this kind of politics.

What kind, then?
For example: all the characters in my movie are smoking. I do that to make people smoke, because I don’t want to be the only one who’s smoking on this planet…

(Laughs) That’s mean! What about the role of sex in your work? It seems to me like a very important part of it…
Only in my work. All I want is to fall in love…

(Laughs) You are sublimating… Are you not in love, then?
I am checking in the dictionary what is sublimating…

“In psychology, sublimation is a term coined by Friedrich Nietzsche which was eventually used to describe the spirit as a reflection of the libido. It has its roots in the Nietzschean & psychoanalytical approach, and is sometimes also referred to as a type of defense mechanism. According to Wade and Tavris, sublimation is when displacement “serves a higher cultural or socially useful purpose, as in the creation of art or inventions”.
Mmmmmm…

Are you sublimating, then?
It’s complicated. Would that mean that I have problem I am projecting in my work?

I am not sure, to be honest. I am bit out of my depth here… but I think that when you sublimate you tend to work a lot, and you seem to produce non stop. Videos, writing, drawings…
Yes, I do a lot. I think it’s a good idea to do a lot.

Still from Keren’s video for the 2009 Venice Biennale

You have published quite a few novels (three, since 2005)… And writing takes lots of discipline…
I like discipline. I think it’s cool. It shows power of will and, at the same time, another power which is against the will, the one that tells you to sit down and write instead of doing something else.

In what language do you write?
Mostly Hebrew.

And who translates?
Sometimes me and then an editor friend. And sometimes Hillel, my friend from Israel.

And what came first: writing, drawing or filming?
Writing. Since I was very little girl. My first story was called The pretty Group.

What made you experiment with other media?
I started to draw after I went to a psychologist and she told me I should draw. So I started drawing. And then I went to learn, drawing in the village next to my place and then, when I left the army, I went to study art. Then I was painting and drawing and, when I finished, I started to write for newspapers, then I started drawing again. Then got bored of it so I started filming. My father bought a camera, and I wanted to do something different than drawing… So I wrote a script, and used my father’s camera.

But you see! I see some sublimation there as well, or transference, maybe…
Where?!

In you starting to draw as a little girl. “Transference: the redirection of feelings and desires and especially of those unconsciously retained from childhood toward a new object.” Another definition is “a reproduction of emotions relating to repressed experiences, especially of childhood, and the substitution of another person for the original object of the repressed impulses.” Transference was first described by Sigmund Freud, who acknowledged its importance for psychoanalysis for better understanding of the patient’s feelings”.
Ah! So instead of solving my problems I started drawing!

Well, you transferred your troubles to paper maybe. And I think I am going to end my cheap therapy session here…
That is quite interesting!

How was being in the army?
Boring.

Why there are always penises in your films?
No reason. Just to make it look like hardcore, I guess. Just to be noticed… Or maybe I am sublimating!

(Laughs) Why this need to be noticed? I read your recent Art Review cover feature (April 2009), and there you explicitly said that you wanted to attract attention…
But otherwise I am wasting my time, aren’t I?

Sure, but there are many other ways to do that, and you chose a very specific way, which is by shocking
Like how? Penis is the easiest!

Maybe you can call attention by extreme beauty, or by being strongly political.
But that is either kitsch or political art, which is the 50% of contemporary art. And I am not that interested in any of these.

Do you know the work of Santiago Sierra o Regina Galindo? They are shocking too, in a very different way to your shocking.
Yes, I know their work. To me they are only shocking.

Ok, so what are you doing besides shocking?
Trying to confuse the audience, and confuse them with a set of rules. There’s supposed to be a logic in it…

To me it’s well confusing, I have to say. I think your video works are quite hard to understand, to decipher…
Really? I think they are really easy to read through. They are just a bit complicated to describe…

Still from Keren’s video for the 2009 Venice Biennale

Ok, for example, Repulsion, yes I get it, cause I like early Polanski and have seen his films, so I recognize the signs and the re-interpretation you have made. But Peacocks (2009), I don’t really understand what it’s about…
I am trying to remember… It’s about a trio. I’m trying to remember what I was thinking about when I wrote it. I thought about memories that are not real and hate that comes out of love, carelessness, images and photos…

You say you want to confuse with your films, but by following a set of rules. What set of rules is this? Some sort of “Dogma”?
No, it’s not as literal as Von Trier’s, it’s more about setting different rules to each video, and they are not about the technical way of shooting the movie, but mostly about a certain style and reality the movie is describing… Something like that…

What is similar in your writing and films? Do you recognize some things in common?
No… not really… Even the dialogs are different.

I am wondering if maybe in both media there is some sense of subverting the ways of telling stories. Playing with classical structures and narratives… Like Cortazar?
Ah, yes, maybe. But I don’t like that. It’s too confusing.

But you have just said that you want to confuse your viewers!
Yes, but I’m not the viewer.

(Laughs) Fair enough. How did you feel when you saw yourself on the cover of Art Review with the title “Art hottest young star”?
Like in a woman in a style magazine. By the way, me and my friend have a blog: http://sillycatholic.blogspot.com/. Check it out! I do the haikus.

Yes, I have seen it! But what I mean is, apart of the magazine anecdote, you seem to be everywhere now: shows in the best museums and galleries, biennales… Did you expect it?
Yes, and I expected it to happen sooner, to be honest. It’s a very small world.

Really? Think about all the students each year in art school all over the world that will never make past the graduation show…
Yes…but you are talking about something else. What you are talking about here it’s how hard it is to start or to get in, and with that I totally agree, and which is why I don’t like the art world. It’s not about quality. It’s a dictatorship of money and formulas and of buyers (collectors and curators).

And gallerists…
Yes.. ! But if there are no buyers and curators, the gallery has nothing to do…

And the press…
Yes, the press. I think in London and NY the press is relevant.

Have you experienced any change since you were in the cover of that magazine? Like more sales or offers for shows?
No, some people wrote on my Facebook wall. That is pretty much it. I think covers on magazines are not the same for older people. I’m not a rock band… or maybe I need to be on many covers!

What artists do you like?
Bruce Nauman. But I am more into film-makers.

Like who? Like Jodorowsky, for example?
Yes, I really like him.

The Sacred Mountain is genius.
I like the one when they cut off the hands of the woman. A friend of mine met him and made a tattoo on his hands because of it. Long story…

Jesus! What is your next project?
I need to write a performance for Dublin, for If I can’t dance I don’t want to be part of your revolution programme. It’s immediately after Venice. It will be a performance in a theatre. I have a dance group, we’re called D.I.E NOW (Dance International Europe Now).

Promotional poster for the D.I.E. Now tour

That’s a brilliant name. Will be it be your first performance?
No, we have already done some at De Appel Rotterdam, in a cafe in Amsterdam, and in a dance studio in Bilbao. And we will be at the Pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery at the end of July. And we will do a mega play that will tour! I am very excited. It’s not only dance, it’s acting too, combined with videos, and I direct and write the scripts. Every show is a different part of the same story, a long story.

Sounds amazing! It’s great you are doing so much stuff. I am trying to write a curatorial proposal for a show… I just don’t have much money or time… It takes lots of discipline to work at night, after work.
Yes, but I was working also in kitchens for years, in Israel and Amsterdam, and I found the time to do my stuff.

Really? I didn’t know that…
Yes! I am a really good cook, I am telling you. Amsterdam was awful though, I felt like Ann Frank. The thing is now I do more, because I have time and resources and but with less passion. And I miss the times when I felt the urgency to get out of a situation. And that’s the only way, isn’t it?

Yes, I suppose!
I am tired now.

Me too! That was long. Thank you so much!
Kein problem!

More info:

Younger Than Jesus (The New Museum, New Yorks) runs until the 5th of July 2009.

Making Worlds, the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale opens the 7th of June and runs until the 22nd of November 2009.

Keren Cytter is represented by Pilar Corrias Gallery (London, UK) and by Elizabeth Kaufmann (Zurich, Switzerland).

Keren Cytter’s blog: http://sillycatholic.blogspot.com/