An interview with Ryan Gander
Conceptual art offers viewers a journey along an associative chain. There is always a bottom. O rather, the work attains its own life by cannibalizing the half-lives of its sources. Looping back through multiple tropes to arrive at its own existence, the conceptual art work offers itself the protagonist of an old-fashioned, well-crafted story composed through the collision of historical referents rather than characters.
Chris Kraus, ‘Where Art Belongs’ (2011)
At the end of the summer of 2011 Ryan Gander presented ‘Locked Room Scenario’ (you can read my review here), a grand scale mise-en-scène that perfectly embodied his interest in loose associations and in the creation of narratives, whose elusive rewards are often found in their very difficulty to be grasped and deciphered. It is this collision of historical referents that Chris Kraus mentions in the opening quote, as well as the characters that Gander constructs, what makes the work of this British artist a challenge to the viewer. But as he himself has quipped: “Spectators need to invest their time and their energy in my work, in order to receive something in exchange. It is my way of filtering and encountering people who aren’t just looking for a dinner party conversation”. In a long conversation conducted in his East London studio, Gander and I discussed his work, his (anti)curatorial practice and why he isn’t an elitist.
'Associative Template # 23 - And all that chatter around your career'. Credit: Dave Morgan
I’d like to start by asking you about the concept of control. I have the feeling that some artists make work in a quest for control: how the work exists and how it is experienced and interpreted. In you practice, including ’Locked Room Scenario’, your goal seems to be completely the opposite: opening up possibilities and discussions…
Bad artworks only have one reading. Really good artworks start in one place but go to multiple places; they have multiple readings, different possibilities and outcomes. For me, bad works are linear, singular and describe only one idea. But if there is only one idea to describe, you can probably articulate in speech. You don’t really need to “make something” out of it. The point of “making something” is that it can be interpreted in multiple ways. The more ways it can be interpreted and the more complicated the journey to get to that interpretation, the better the work will be.
Regarding ‘Locked Room Scenario’, I found that many people were trying to unravel a mystery by gathering as many clues and signs as possible. As if there was a complete narrative behind all those clues, a “right version” of the work. Is there a “right way” to experience it?
No, there isn’t a proper or more correct way to experience the work. Different things happen to different people by the nature of the work. It is constructed like that. So you probably miss about 60% of it if you only visit it once. You’d have to go and see it like ten times in order to see everything, and even then some of the things only happen on certain moments, so might miss them all. So every person’s experience is completely different, which is one thing I wanted, so they would end up sitting in the pub asking each other “did that taxi driver offer you a free ride home?”, “No, but I was followed by a deaf person”. That’s important.
I mean, there is a story, but it is my story and it is just an excuse to produce the work. It’s not important that the visitor understands it, what’s important is that the visitor uses his imagination. It’s a bit like a treadmill for the imagination, like being in the gym. Because the imagination is like muscle that needs exercising and we are all pretty rubbish at it. Do you remember when you were a kid, and you would look out of the window from your parents’ car and the things you could imagine? Or when you were playing in the garden making a tree house or sitting on the bed which turned into a boat… And you really believed these things! But you get older and you simply can do these things anymore. Your imagination becomes a bit stilted, lazy and flabby. ‘Locked Room Scenario’ is just an experience that can last as long as you want, and that gives you lots of catalysts to daydream and use your imagination. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people are scared of letting go and using their imagination.
'Locked Room Scenario', 2011. Credit: Julian Abrams
It seems to me that the critical discourse around your work tends to focus on its ideas and concepts, the intangible part of it, which is logical to an extent given the conceptual nature of your practice. But it sometimes feels as if we were forgetting to discuss the aesthetic part of your pieces…
It is not that it is neglected, it just doesn’t matter what it looks like. That’s not important. The only important thing about aesthetics is that they communicate the story of how the work came to be.
But I do think that you have an interest in aesthetics which shows, for example, in the way you curate. Like the Limoncello show, for instance, which was all white and black and very sleek…
But that wasn’t due to an aesthetic interest, meaning that I just liked the way it looked. There was a conceptual reason for it. It was meant to be a tongue in cheek comment on conceptual art being boring. All my aesthetic choices have reasons behind them. What I mean is that the things I do look the way they do because of the thinking behind them, not because I have made aesthetic decisions. The material thing is just the leftover from an idea. It’s a physical manifestation of an idea, like a receipt that proves the idea existed.
Installation view of 'Young British Artists', Limoncello 2011. Credit: Leon Yearwood
You’ve said that you wouldn’t want people to consider ‘Locked Room Scenario’ a critique of the art world.
Yes, some people suggested that because it centres around an exhibition it could be read as some sort of parody. But for me these are the less interesting conclusions to the work, while the ones around fictional narratives are the most interesting.
In any case, some people criticise your work on the basis that it is very self-referential and opaque. Do you agree with that?
What I’ve heard is that I make art for the art world, rather than about the art world. Which could be true, to a certain extent. You make work for the people that are going to be interested in it…
'Locked Room Scenario', 2011. Credit: Julian Abrams
On that same note, there is a feeling, when encountering your work, that if one has some previous knowledge of the history of art and even of your own practice, he/she will have more chances of navigating the piece sucessfully and understanding the wealth of quotes and references that you place all over. For example, in ‘Locked Room Scenario’ you reference several movements in the history of art, such as Situationism, Fluxus or Conceptualism. And you also quote yourself in the use of Santo Sterne, which is a fictional artist that you’ve already used in previous projects. Isn’t it a sort of a natural selection, whereby only the more knowledgeable spectators will understand the piece?
No. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a different experience. It is still an experience, no matter how much previous knowledge you have. A lot of these things are just excuses to make things. Just because there is a reference to me in it, it doesn’t mean that you need to know it to understand the work. It’s not elitist in the sense that the more you know the more you get from it. I have seen people getting much more from my work than people that know everything about art. It doesn’t have to do with how much you know and how much you research. It has to do with how much you let yourself go and how much you invest of yourself in it.
'The Medium', Lisson Gallery, 2010. Credit: Adlard/Dave Morgan
If it is not elitist then, is your strategy just a playful game of references?
It depends on what exactly you are talking about. In my works there are different levels of encryption, of closure and camouflage. And there are things that people will never get cause they are just things that happened to me. There are works that mean something, that have a lot of meaning. And there are works that are totally meaningless, like a painting of clouds. People make work that doesn’t mean anything more than “I’m artist and I like these materials”. I am not interested in that at all, because it doesn’t do anything for me if it doesn’t have a meaning.
What can you tell me of your participation in the last Venice Biennale, ILLUMInations (2011)?
In the para-pavilion, for example, I showed a vitrine with two dice of forty-two sides, each side with the initials of all the artists that were included the show. But I had more works scattered around the biennale. I showed five works in total. They were big works for me, but for biennale standards they were actually pretty small. I remember going to Venice previous years and encountering these huge bombastic, business-card projects that shouted “this is me!!” in a big room. And I decided that I wasn’t going to do that, so I thought I’d make five works and ask the curators to put them wherever they wanted, spreading them in different location. That was meant to make them function as punctuations. Some people thought it worked well, that it was refreshing to see works of smaller scale in this context. Others, on the other hand, thought, “Ryan Gander, who does he think he is? He is everywhere!!”. You can’t really win, can you?
'In Hearts?', Venice Biennale 2011. Credit: Kiki Triantafyllou
What connections do you find between your curatorial practice and your own artistic practice?
I don’t have a curatorial practice.
Well, I think you do… In 2011 you curated the Limoncello show and the opening exhibition of the Lisson Gallery in Milan. And when you did the Art Now show at Tate Britain in 2008, you chose to curate other artists’ works, rather than present your own…
No, I really don’t have a curatorial practice. What I do is not curating. I just invite people to participate in a show…
How is that different from curating?
It isn’t curating because I am not a curator. It’s like making a mixtape. And every time I “curate” something anyway, the logic behind it is sort of “anti-curating”, of a critique of curating.
How does that logic work?
For example, in the Young British Art show (Limoncello Gallery, 2011) I did a sort of experiment. You could put up an exhibition with the same thirty-eight extraordinary artist and because no one knows who they are, not many people will come. But I called the show “Young British Art”, and two thousand people turned up to the opening. I like testing that sort of thing. It exposed the ludicrousness of the art world, but it was also brilliant for the artists in the show! (laughs).
Installation view of 'Young British Artists', Limoncello 2011. Credit: Leon Yearwood
Maybe two thousand people showed up because you curated it…
No, I don’t think so. It had to do with the name, with being all black & white works and with opening on a Bank Holiday weekend…
What about the Tate Art Now show? Did they ask you to curate a small show instead of presenting some of your works or was it your idea?
They asked me if I wanted to do something, if I had any ideas. And just a few weeks before I had been invited to see their stores, and they pulled out all these amazing storing walls full of artworks, with paintings upside down, without any sort of order, chronological or thematic. They were placed just wherever they’d fit, so you’d have a Pollock next to a Steve Claydon, which I thought was brilliant. There was this really nice happenstance and that’s why that show I did was also a critique of curating. I just picked two walls by rolling a dice and hung its contents in the gallery in exactly the same locations as they had been in the store. The fact is that you can make associations and pull connection and collisions between things by just rolling a dice and it will look great. And that’s not curating, is it? It’s so easy to curate, and it seems that the harder you try to curate the worse the show ends up being.
You have always said, regarding your own artistic practice, that it is much more interesting to put a set of works together that just an isolated one. That the dialogue between works creates something much more powerful…
That’s true. So if we call that “curating”, which I’d rather not, and your question is whether there are connections with my artistic practice, there are connections indeed. The interest in the creation of new meaning by putting a set of works together is definitely present in both. The “Loose Associations” lectures or the “Associate Templates” series are mainly based around that principle.
'It’s a right Heath Robinson affair', installation view at Kadist Art Foundation. Credit: Aurelien Mole
’Loose Associations’ will be ten years old soon. Were those lectures and the subsequent book a declaration of intent, a summary of your artistic methodology?
It wasn’t mean to be like that, but the truth is that it does represents the way I work. Coming back to the idea of curating my own pieces in sets, I think I have a sort of privilege in that I make a lot of work. I make work really fast and I am not that precious about letting it go. Some artist are really afraid of their artworks leaving their studios but I just need to see how my pieces work out there. Here in the studio we make at least a 100 works a year. I would be so bored if I only did a couple of projects per year! I am not interested in doing masterpieces, I am much more interested in seeing how different works go together, so I can “curate” my own shows. That’s where I get the most enjoyment.
The typical response to your work involves a love or hate reaction. Many people seem to get annoyed by it, why do you think that happens?
Yes, it seems to irritate some people. But that is just because they let themselves. It has to do with their own characters rather than with my work. The other day I went to the kitchen department of John Lewis with my brother and he turned all the egg timer’s alarm clocks exactly in three minutes and then walked off. I though that was a brilliant creative act, but imagine how many people were irritated and annoyed. These are the people that also get irritated with my work (laughs).
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An shorter version of this interview was published on this is tomorrow in November 2011. You can read it here.
Images courtesy of Studio Gander and Artangel.
Luis Camnitzer’s “Reflejos y Reflexiones”
This review was originally published on Art-Agenda in January 2012
After several years of teaching and working in printmaking, the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer made what he considers to be his first conceptual piece. It was 1966: written in black plastic lettering over a white board, two sentences accosted the viewer, “This is a mirror. You are a written sentence.” Thus began Camnitzer’s enduring exploration of the symbolic qualities of the mirror. The piece also granted him entrance to the clique of emerging Conceptual artists—those exiled from South America in particular—that were gathering in New York, where he had moved to in 1964. Since then he has been something of an artist’s artist and a beacon for a younger generation of post-Conceptualists like Alejandro Cesarco or Stefan Brüggemann.
"This Is A Mirror, You Are A Written Sentence" (1966), Luis Camnitzer's first conceptual work
This relatively low profile seems to be changing at the not-so-tender age of 75. In 2011, Camnitzer had a survey exhibition at the Museo del Barrio in New York, which toured from the Daros Museum in Zurich. His show at Parra & Romero in Madrid marks his first solo exhibition in Spain. It is a tight retrospective of his long career through eight works, five of which are constructed around the figure of the mirror. Fittingly, the show’s title is “Reflejos y Reflexiones,” which, when translated from Spanish to English as “Reflections and Reflections,” becomes slightly ambivalent: “Reflejos” are reflections in the physical sense, while “reflexiones” are reflections in the meditative sense. This riddle has surely delighted Camnitzer, for whom word plays and linguistic puns are a key part of his practice.
View of Luis Camnitzer’s “Reflejos y Reflexiones” at Parra & Romero Gallery
El Reflejo (The Reflection, 1977) welcomes the viewer into gallery. A large text piece, which revolves around the nature of mirrors and how they affect space, has its exact reversed version on the opposite wall. The play on symmetry is repeated in the neighboring Combate (Fight, 2004), where two empty slide projectors face each other in a mechanic duel of light and sound. The projectors are separated by a dark glass reminiscent of either a tennis net (a barrier between opponents) or a two-way mirror protecting anonymous audiences during interrogations. The references to political repression, quite subtle in this work, materialize on a grander scale in the next room. Half the wall space is occupied by Memorial (2009), a reproduction of the Montevideo telephone book presented in 196 framed prints. In it, the names of Uruguay’s desaparecidos (the 300 plus political dissidents that “vanished” during the military dictatorship) have been meticulously inserted between the rows of surviving citizens. Though present in this custom-made directory, the desparecidos’ names are still invisible in that they are graphically indistinguishable from those still alive, signalling perhaps the futility of the artistic act in the face of such political and moral atrocities.
Luis Camnitzer, "Memorial" (2009)
Also consisting of a series of prints on paper, Eco (2011) slices up a copy of Five Moral Pieces (1997) by Umberto Eco to then implement the re-assembling strategy of the Czech artist Jiří Kolář, whose existentialist deconstruction of texts and images is a strong point of reference for Camnitzer. At the far end of the second room, Homenaje a Mandrake (Homage to Mandrake, 2010) features two identical white vases on white plinths, separated by the scattered pieces of a shattered mirror. The title of the piece alludes to Mandrake, the Magician, the hero of a famous comic strip created by Lee Falk in 1934, when Camnitzer was only three years old. In one particular episode, following a plot worthy of Lewis Carroll or Jean Cocteau, Mandrake steps to the other side of a mirror to find all his friends and loved ones behaving like their evil twins and talking backwards.
Mandrake is puzzled and confused with this evil replica of his world and has to fight his way back to reality. This proves to be a fitting metaphor for one’s feelings after bumping into Camnitzer’s mirror tautology time and again, whereby repetition never amounts to simplicity, or to clarity. He forces us, rather, to look for meaning in the reflections. But if we go beyond the looking glass, there’s much more to reckon with.
Luis Camnitzer, "Homenaje a Mandrake" (Homage to Mandrake), 2010
Notes for an idealistic visit to the Frieze Art Fair
This review was originally published on the online art magazine a*desk in October 2011
The voracity with which the contemporary art market chews up increasingly young artists is, at this point, just one more feature of extremely accelerated cultural consumerism. The cycles of artists appear ever shorter, their careers beginning to seem ever more worryingly like those of athletes, destined to triumph young (at best) to subsequently be forgotten or criticised for repeating the formula that legitimised them in the first place. This frenetic mechanism has been going round in my head during my strolls through what has come to be known as “Frieze Week”.
Ed Atkins, still from 'A Tumour (In English)'. HD Video, 2011
The success of the artist Ed Atkins (Great Britain 1982) is symptomatic. Relatively unknown until only a year ago, in this edition of the fair one has been able to see his work as part of the Frieze Film programme –with his excellent video “Delivery To The Following Recipient Failed Permanently”–, at the stand in the fair of his gallery (Cabinet), in the Tate Britain with a monographic exhibition as part of the prestigious programme Art Now and in the screening of his collaboration with Haroon Mirza and James Richards in the impeccable Chisenhale Gallery. As a coda, an image of one of his videos adorns the cover of the October issue of the magazine Frieze. Atkins is, without a doubt, one of the most exciting artists on the British scene at the moment. His videos in HD demonstrate an exceptional mastery of both editing and sound. Hypnotic and subversive, his work manifests an obsession with the corporal, with its precarious and transitory status, in the face of the artificial and the object. This decadent fascination, along with the pace of the montage and exquisite use of colour as a compositional element convert him into the post-modern child of Kenneth Anger and Paul Sharits, who decided to make videos having seen the rescued scenes from “L’Enfer”(Hell) by Henry-George Clouzot.
Ed Atkins, 'Death Mask II: The Scent', HD Video ( 2010)
In the site-specific section called Frieze Projects, which this year artists such as Laure Prouvost, Christian Jankowski and Pierre Huyghe, amongst others, have participated in, the project that has caused the most commotion (with the permission of the yacht of Jankowski) has been that of the group LuckyPDF. These four artists (all born in the United Kingdom in 1986) have set up a television studio in the fair, open to the public, from where they have rehearsed and broadcast live a daily one hour programme, each of the four days that the fair has been open to the public. Opening sequences with a new age aesthetic lead onto discussions about Spinoza, a performance by a Japanese krautrock band, or to give an example, an interview in which the artist Cory Arcangel is subjected to a questionnaire, concocted for the comic actor Leslie Nielsen at the hands of a London curator, dressed up as a giant tomato (the video of this interview can be seen here).
The world of LuckyPDF is a pastiche in which theory and pop, critique and parody, co-exist on a similar plane. Something like the experience of surfing the Internet with no fixed destination transposed into a television format. And, just like Ed Atkins, during the year 2011 they have gone from relative anonymity to carry out projects and exhibitions in institutions and galleries in London, unleashing on the way, a euphoria of broadcasts made by the artists on the Internet. The only shadow in such a sunny perspective for these artists is the issue of ephemerality: what is the recipe for maintaining this point of equilibrium between creativity, credibility and relevance, when you have achieved such an incredibly rapid success?
Cory Arcangel interviewed by curator Paul Pieroni on Frieze Art Fair 'This is LuckyPDF TV'
The other big question evident in the fair–in an edition overshadowed by the political-economical tensions and the threat of a crash of the markets -was that of going for the safe bet: for established names, colour and works in 2D (painting, photography and the triumphant return of collage). Also significant was the minimal presence of videos, not to mention the disappearance of 16mm projectors, so ubiquitous in previous years.
However, despite it not having been a daring or courageous edition, there was a good number of galleries and pieces for which it was worth enduring the long hours under the neon lights, amidst the human hordes. The gallerist Elizabeth Dee hit the spot showing various video pieces by the New York artist Alex Bag –something like the “big sister” of Ryan Trecartin– and the always fantastic Adrian Piper, with a series of cut-out figures and collages made during the nineties. And it was a delight to come upon the monographic and retrospective presentation of Helena Almeida in Helga de Alvear’s stand. An impeccable installation with a fair number of her photographs and drawings – midway between the exploration of the body in space, performance and conceptual art, similar at times to pieces by Vito Acconci or Bruce McLean–, that also seduced the curators of the Tate, who acquired some pieces for the permanent collection.
But probably the most fascinating piece in the whole fair, which I took home with me without needing to purchase it, was situated in the stand of the Berlin gallerist Johann König, who presented the new video by the artist Jordan Wolfson, “Animation, masks” (2011). In it, a 3D animation of a disturbing character called Shylock assumes the voices of different characters through various fragmented narratives that tackle the dichotomies and conflicts of the binomial love/sex. In one part, we hear a dialogue between the artist himself and a woman. Their voices and relaxed breathing seem to suggest that they are in bed and that their bodies are touching. Wolfson asks his companion to describe what it is like going to bed with him, to which she accedes with the tension and inconsistency typical of flirtation. The sensation that maybe we shouldn’t be listening to this intimate conversation, that sounds so real, becomes annulled by our own identification with the familiarity of this type of situation (loving-sexual). While this happens, the only thing we see is the face of Shylock, ever more distorted and erratic within his digital aesthetic. Shylock holds in his hand– and every now again glances through it with us– a recent copy of Vogue Paris with Kate Moss on the cover, reproduced to even the most minimal detail. The backgrounds of the screen change incessantly, showing at times bourgeois and sophisticated interiors like the ones in Vogue and humble homes with a working class and shambolic feel in others.
Jordan Wolfson 'Animation, masks' (2011). Video still courtesy of Johann König
It is impossible to list the quantity of triggers that these layers of meaning activate in the brain of the spectator: popular culture in which we are inevitably immersed, the aspirational consumerism of fashion and design, the sinister relationship that for a few moments we have with Shylock, with his virtual corporality and his worrying changes of humour, the sexually charged conversation of the couple…All these stimuli a priori unorganised, in reality create an epistemological system, something typical of the work of Wolfson. The ventriloquist-artist and his digital dummy conjure the voices of our emotional and post-Fordist schizophrenia, as well as our necessity to extract meanings to guide us through them.
For someone who is not a collector and with little perspective of becoming one, the encounter with an art piece of this calibre instantly revaluates the experience of the art fair. Because what is easiest and most common is to fall into the inherent cynicism of the art market, but under this roof and in this “contaminated” context, there are hundreds of real and sincere pieces that maybe we won’t see again. Is this not ultimately what it’s all about? Suddenly, while I walk towards the exit leaving behind the Wolfson piece, looking for a zone with zero stimuli, I think that it has been worth the effort. At least for a moment.
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This text was originally written in Spanish. You can read the Spanish version here.
Ryan Gander or the pleasurable frustration
This review was originally published on the online art magazine a*desk in September 2011
An abandoned industrial warehouse in the east of London is the scenario chosen by the British artist Ryan Gander to represent his latest and until now most ambitious project, commissioned by the prestigious producer, Artangel. The choice of the verb “represent” is not incidental: “Locked Room Scenario” is a hybrid, somewhere between an art exhibition, a theatrical play, a mystery novel and a paranoid mental trip.
It’s quite likely that many of those who began to read in the eighties will remember the “Choose your own adventure” collection, those children’s books where the choice of different options/pages resulted in different outcomes, offering the intrepid reader several books in one. Its motto included suggestive phrases like, “the possibilities are endless: remember that you choose the adventure, that you are the adventure”, which fits perfectly to describe this project by Ryan Gander, where the visitor has to banish the cobwebs from the limits of his imagination to be able to navigate this disturbing installation.
To visit “Locked Room Scenario” one has to sign up for an appointment, given that only eight people can be in the space at one time. The day of my visit, early in the morning, I received a text message, in which a certain Spencer A. urged me to meet him in a nearby pub, ten minutes before my appointment. Of course, I realised this afterwards because initially, having not seen the pub on the way, I put the message down to a strange mix up. The information available beforehand about the project is at best limited: one knows the address and that one has to adopt a sort of detective mentality, when studying the objects and the people present, in order to unravel the mystery.
Arriving at the door of the warehouse I see a group of people waiting to enter. Furtive glances and direct stares are exchanged unashamedly. I suspect that some of them could be actors under Gander’s orders and I believe they suspect the same of me. Suddenly, one hears screams that seem to come from some wild animals or human beings. The barrier opens and little by little, they let us go in. Having entered the building I go down an unlit passage. Everything is black and I have to slide my hand along the carpeted wall to be able to proceed. I go slowly, blindly, frightened of bumping into the other visitors who have gone in before me. All of a sudden I hear the sound of a slide projector, that materialises in a hole in the wall on my right, at floor height, projecting backwards, as if designed to be seen from a central room to which – I soon discover – there is no access. I think of the labyrinthine installations of the artist Mike Nelson and for a moment, in the darkness, I worry about not being able to find the exit.
After stumbling and bumping several times into closed doors, I arrive at what I presume to be the main entrance. I see a double door, with a poster that informs me that we are in a gallery called Kimberling, to see the group exhibition “Field of Meaning”, with a list of artists as unknown (and fictitious) as the gallery itself; amongst whom one finds Spencer Anthony, who I now recognise as the author of that morning’s text message. The entrance to the exhibition is, of course, shut.
I manage to squeeze into another dimly lit passage, where I hear lounge music that makes me think of the ghosts congregated in the hotel bar in The Shining. While I advance, increasingly frustrated, I can’t stop thinking that someone is observing us, me and all the others, live through the installed security cameras. Are we lab rats in a sociological-artistic experiment? Is Ryan Gander laughing at my lack of astuteness, at my inability to access the closed room of the title? At the end of the passage, a window with half-open blinds allows me to see the back part of the room and a few pieces of the elusive exhibition: a giant furry toy in Klein blue signed by Santo Sterne, a sort of wooden altar with a collection of images, in which photographs by Lee Miller and other works in the Modern style abound, a pair of figurative paintings on wood… Next to it, a room, also closed, where neon lights flicker incessantly, makes me think of Martin Creed and his piece “The Lights Going On and Off”.
The clues or signs come rapidly, one after another. A chronology on a wall explains details about the lives of the artists and their participation in key 20th Century movements, such as Situationism, Conceptualism and Fluxus. At the exit, two adolescents sitting on the stairs smoking cigarettes vilify another visitor, who, indignant, returns the insult. “Actors”, I think, while my eyes light upon some Klein blue fake fur thrown in a skip, just like the stuff in the work I had spotted a few moments before. Hours later, consumed by the fever of coming to terms with what I had seen, I discover that Santo Sterne is a fictitious artist created by Gander, and that he has included his phantasmagorical presence in various previous projects. On the Internet, I discover dubious references to some of the artists in the list. I even visit the website of the gallery, to find myself in front of a mirage-page, empty.
“Locked Room Scenario” is the astute culmination of many of the concerns that recur in Gander’s work. The artist, obsessed with enigmas and story telling, has here created a scenario, frustrating at times, that forces the spectator to fill in the gaps that he refuses to cover. “Locked Room Scenario” is a piece where the susceptibility of the visitor is everything, where only those who use their imagination will fully enjoy (or suffer) the experience. It is a mystery, which will be resolved or not, depending on the desire to carry on investigating having left the area. Gander, fascinated by tangential associations, has managed in this project to materialise, on a grand scale, questions that he had already raised in previous pieces, such as his performance talks titled “Loose Associations” or his exhibitions “You walk into a space, any space” (Lisson Gallery, Londres, 2010) or “It’s a right Heath Robinson affair” (Gb Agency and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, 2009), where large quantities of referents and signs insinuate themselves upon the spectator, who is charged with unravelling, not without effort, the proposed suggestive narratives.
Many could accuse Ryan Gander of being an opaque artist, difficult to read. And elitist, given that this reading can only be carried out with sufficient knowledge of the history (histories) of art and contemporary cultural production. It is not a democratic art nor is it accessible, and doesn’t for a moment aspire to be. As Gander himself explained in a recent interview: “Spectators need to invest their time and their energy in my work, in order to receive something in exchange. It is my way of filtering and encountering people who aren’t just looking for a dinner party conversation. The true value of the work of art resides in the experience that one has of the work once one has physically left it”. “Locked Room Scenario” goes way beyond achieving this aim. Ryan Gander, opaque, irritating yet brilliant, has done it again.
Locked Room Scenario runs thorough the 23rd of October 2011. More information here.
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All installation images courtesy of Artangel.
Photographer Julian Abrams
Locked Room Scenario – Ryan Gander
Commissioned and produced by Artangel with the support of Londonewcastle and the Lisson Gallery.
This text was originally written in Spanish. You can read the Spanish version here.
Time travels and the (de)construction of contemporary myths
(In September 2011, the Spanish media & video art distribution platform HAMACA invited me to curate a text-based itinerary through their extensive moving image catalogue. This is the result.)
Throughout this itinerary, I would like to navigate through the HAMACA catalogue in search of traces or residues from other times and voices. I am looking to identify the little or great homages that artists make to other “artists-legends” or to the “landmark moments” in their history (understood both on a collective and an individual level). What I will engage with here is the unravelling of nostalgic impulses in art, led by a (perhaps unhealthy?) curiosity to get to the bottom of the archetypes that have come into play in the creative process of these artists.
In his “Mythologies”, Barthes said that a myth is nothing other than a distortion of history; a new ‘discourse’, born through the appropriation of a previously existing image. This re-writing of a sign is in itself a creative act. It isn’t just a cultural appropriation, but a translation or update of meaning through time. This temporal dislocation, intrinsic to the act of incorporating elements from other socio-historical contexts, is also fundamental in this stroll through the catalogue, where the evocations of the past, explorations of the present, and fantasies of the future merge unevenly, provoking a sense of vertigo towards a continuous and never-ending present.
Love the myth. Kill the myth
Our first stop is Little Star (1994) by Clemente Calvo, a popular legend transformed into a small visual tale. Calvo, who lived in New York at the time the piece was made, incorporates a legend that amongst the Indians who lived in Manhattan before the arrival of European colonisers was a small group of shamans whose souls turned into white, seven-pointed starfish when they died. Those lucky enough to find one of the starfish would enjoy the protection of the shamans forever. The plot’s temporal dimension takes us to a particular historical moment of the 17th century, yet the piece formally looks like a homage to silent film and, in particular, to the films of Jean Cocteau. With a piano piece by Liszt as its sole soundtrack, its use of black and white and poetic images with surrealist overtones, the piece inevitably takes us back to the universe of the French genius.
'Little Star' (1994) by Clemente Calvo
Following along the surrealist trail, Espejismo (1993), by Maite Cajaraville, offers a trip “through the looking glass”, in an obvious reference to the author of Alice in Wonderland, the British writer Lewis Carroll. Yet the aesthetics of this dream, set in primary colours and geometries, are clearly those of a digital landscape. Espejismo is more a memory of the future than one of the past, and is tremendously contemporary in its hybrid mix of 3D and psychedelia with New Age overtones, all of which awaken a strong devotion in many contemporary artists who, like Cory Arcangel, are obsessed with 90s digital aesthetics.
'Espejismo' (1993) by Maite Cajaraville
SIS. E3 (Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras) (2000-2001), by the Basque artist Txomín Badiola, holds the accumulation of references and symbols as one of its fundamental ingredients. In only 4 minutes, we witness the invocation of various cultural myths, placed in that temporal grey zone that lies between modernism and post-modernism, and which includes the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard, the art of Jorge Oteiza and the industrial design of Charles & Ray Eames. The piece freely recreates the final scene from Der Amerikanische Soldat (1970), by Fassbinder. Godard said that his death had been caused by “an overdose of creative obligations”, a sentence we can read on one of the stage walls in the piece. Whilst one of the actors wears a t-shirt with a fragment of La Ley de los Cambios, by Jorge Oteiza, another dons one with S.O.S. written on it. Both messages are on view while both men roll on the ground, between the Eames’ chairs. Shot 30 years after the original film was made, and using contemporary looking actors -who are however trapped in a melange of times and ideologies between the homage and the critique-, SOS. E3 appears to represent the footprint of our most recent cultural past, like a heavy embrace from which we cannot (and perhaps should not) escape.
'SOS. E3 ( Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras)' (2000-2001) by Txomín Badiola
Seeing as Jean-Luc Godard rears his head, it seems relevant to speak about El Enemigo (2010), by WeareQQ. El Enemigo is a reworking of that Godardian myth called La Chinoise (1967). The young protagonists’ endearing and pedagogic verbal diarrhoea, the film credits, the domestic interiors, and the dry humour it oozes, are inherited from the original, which is however nothing more than a shell, or an excuse, to speak about certain subjects. A stage set within which the characters -cultural agents orchestrated by WeareQQ- offer a series of porous monologues where political, economic, cultural, and even emotional critiques are intertwined.
Speaking of the critique and deconstruction of myths, we may find no example more powerful within the history of the moving image in Spain than Rocío (1980), by Fernando Ruiz de Vergara. This is a documentary where a Catholic rite -the procession of the Virgen del Rocío-, is taken apart with precision, through the use of facts, and, by extension, so are the rest of the rites of Marian devotion. This was a touchy subject for a democracy still in its infancy, leading to several fragments of the film being censored, and to its author being condemned to two years in prison plus a fine of 10 million pesetas. Rocío is still, even today, a work that is little known, and terribly underrated. A good number of brilliant shots and a wise use of archive footage hold up a brave and controversial thesis for which its author paid an unmistakably draconian and absurd price.
'Rocío' (1980) by Fernando Ruiz Vergara
I also find Duchamp (retard en vídeo) (1986/87), by Eugeni Bonet, to be an essential work for a number of reasons. Not only is it a comprehensive documentary about Marcel Duchamp, it is also, in my opinion, a clear precursor of the “performative documentary” that has gained such visibility and followers since the 90s, both in the field of film and video in general, and in contemporary art in particular, with examples that go from media celebrities like Michael Moore to artists such as Mario García Torres or Duncan Campbell. In this case, a casual, humorous conversation between a couple is used to structure a narrative about Duchamp’s life, work, and impact, from his early stages as a painter -culminating with The Large Glass-, to his subsequent development of conceptual art through the readymade. Finally, it is worth mentioning that this documentary was broadcast on TV3 in 1987 as part of the TV show “Arsenal”. Without a doubt, the porosity between mass media, conceptual art and history is an exciting phenomenon, researched by the curator Chus Martínez in her recent exhibition at the MACBA, titled “Are you Ready for TV?”.
'Duchamp (retard en vídeo)' (1986-1987) by Eugeni Bonet
Time Distortions: Here come the ghosts
There is something exquisitely unsettling about Medio Tiempo (1964), by Manel Muntaner. Tension grows, due to an unsettling soundtrack by Schaeffer and Stockhausen, among others, as we are guided through spaces that are suspended in time. These are different rooms within a school, ‘paused’ during the summer, waiting to be reactivated by the students’ return. Medio Tiempo is a pioneer in the history of Spanish experimental film, a sophisticated metaphor of childhood within which Muntaner shows an extraordinary sensibility for composition and framing. The result is a nostalgic reminiscence of the first years of school, a time when freedom and play intermingle with fear and a castrating authority that is often only imagined, but equally sinister.
One of the qualities present in Nummulitis (2002-2004), by Isaki Lacuesta, that I find most interesting, is the fact that he renders visible the overwhelming capacity that black and white images have for creating meaning. As if sharing the same texture resulted in an alchemy that turns disparate images into analogous ones. Different scenes from a procession, a televised film, and a group of friends in a bar appear to blend into the same, strange, temporal space, in a simulacrum of continuity.
With similar ends, but completely different means, Mabel Palacín’s in Una noche sin fin (2006-2008) makes use of the two-channel installation to explore the absolute relativity of the perception of time. On one screen actions appear to be slowed down; dense, whilst on the other screen, everything seems somewhat speeded up; frantic. As a viewer, the experience is disquieting, and this is intensified by the theatricality of the installation, where the two screens are facing one another and separated by a bench where the viewer, seated, is forced to look one way or the other. The situations and speeds change from one screen to the other, so that any intention of continuity is constantly frustrated, but somehow encouraged by the repetition of characters and backdrops. The viewer’s capacity for attention, patience, and curiosity are put to the test during the 23 minutes of this work. When it ends, he may not know what he’s seen, but he can be sure he has learned to look at things differently.
'Una noche sin fin' (2006-2008) by Mabel Palacin
In El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó) (2007), Marcelo Expósito plays at undoing history. Looking through a viewfinder, we witness a chronologically inverted itinerary through archive footage that begins during Spain’s first democratic elections after Franco’s death, and end with the beginning of the Civil War in 1936. The inversion of the temporal axis generates questions about the (in) evitability of the events. Is there any escape from history’s repetitive and ruthless cycle? Couldn’t these skulls, found in the excavation of the final scene (remains from the republican soldiers, in fact) belong to the ghosts of a past civilisation, or the dead from the future? The key, in keeping with the inverted structure of the piece, lies at the beginning: the primary audience of this phantasmagoria is a group of children. The only possible salvation for the future therefore lies in knowing how to learn from past mistakes. As Heiner Müller says in the quote that opens this journey through time: memory is not mere contemplation, it is work.
'El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó)' (2007) by Marcelo Expósito
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This text was originally written and published in Spanish. You can read the original here.
English translation by Alex Reynolds, whom I would like to thank for her meticulous and considerate work.
HAMACA is a Barcelona-based distribution platform of Spanish media & video art. Explore their catalogue here.
PAST PRESENT FUTURE SPACE-TIME
Psychedelia is back. Forget about the Goth revival, all that paleness and blackness. Right now it’s all about tie-dye, crazy colours and acid (sounds, that is). Last 10th of September the Wysing Arts Centre held the ‘Past Present Future Space–Time’ music festival in collaboration with Electra, Strange Attractor, Bad Timing and Escalator Music. It was the culmination of the six-week residency of the artists Mark Essen, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Kate Owens and Damien Roach who, under the suggestive name of ‘The Department of Psychedelic Studies’, explored the links between psychedelia and art through text, film, sculpture and print.
Tye-dye workshop
On arriving to the festival I was greeted by the psych-pop set by The Doozer, a Syd Barrett-esque character from Cambridge that set an accurate tone for the things to come. I then went to the gallery to listen to a talk by the artist Liliane Lijn, the first female artist to work with kinetic text mixing light and text, and who used to hang out in the 1960’s NY with the mighty William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Declining participation on a yoga lesson held at the Wysing’s Stone Circle –a setting that made it all look more like a witchcraft ritual than some sort of sports– I returned to the gallery to catch the devilish performance of the duo 6666, which felt like a cross between a concert, a satanic meeting and a horror film.
Later that afternoon the band Diagonal played a fantastic set, one of the highlights of the day for me due to their geeky concoction of prog, acid and kraut rock. The band, hailing from Brighton and formed by six excellent musicians including a saxophonist/singer front man, sounded very tight while unfolding their long and hypnotic compositions that reminded me at some moments of both Can and Neu! At 6,30 it was time to listen to English Heretic, a music project/society which presented a series of song inspired by the writings of the London occultist Kenneth Grant, incorporating original recordings on witchcraft and Satanism. Part séance part gig, it was unlike anything I’ve seen before. By the end of it, all the spectators felt united in a sort cult. Throughout the day, as the music played all around the premises, artists Fay Nicolson and Oliver Smith performed a ‘manifesto-parade’ as well as creating poster display, part of the ongoing curatorial project ‘Constitution of the Damned’.
Alexander Tucker playing at the Boulder Stage
The night slot started with a live set by the post-dubstep lot Old Apparatus and reached its climax with the performance of Demdike Stare. Now, I might not be entirely objective here, since they are probably my favourite band these days, but the Manchester-based duo offered a truly mesmerizing performance. Accompanying their unique mix of dub and hauntological sounds with footage from European erotica and horror films from the 70’s, it was no doubt one of the best juxtapositions of music and image I have seen in quite some time. The festival, a ‘connoiseurs’ programme sadly a little wasted on a very small audience, ended with an unexpected hardcore-gabba techno DJ set by the artists Ed Atkins and Andy Holden. Psychedelia and the occult might be where is at, but it is –perhaps fortunately– still small business.
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An edited version of this review was published on this is tomorrow
Photo Credits: Ruta Balseviciute, courtesy Wysing Arts Centre
Experimental Station. Research and Artistic Phenomena
(This review was originally published on www.frieze.com in August 2011)
CA2M (Centro de Art 2 de Mayo), Madrid, Spain.
John Cage’s aphorism ‘art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living’ is the inspiration for ‘Experimental Station’, a group show of 29 international artists. However, it’s not just the idea of trial or error that the curators chose to explore here: the rationale of the exhibition attempts to shed some light on questions such as how new technologies can be applied to art, and what art can do for science.
Alberto Tadiello, EPROM (2008)
‘Experimental Station’ is divided into four thematic areas: ‘Artefacts and Mechanisms’; ‘In the Laboratory’; ‘Fieldwork’; and ‘Lost in Space’. This loose taxonomy aims at bringing together a number of works that share a cluster of interests including research, process, methodology, technology, science, sci-fi, phenomenology and mechanics. But the concepts are so broad, and at times even at odds with each other, that their cohabitation often provokes more confusion than clarity.
A good number of the work displayed on the first floor of the CA2M, in the ‘Artefacts and Mechanisms’ and ‘In the Laboratory’ sections are kinetic-inspired. Alberto Tadiello’s EPROM (2008) successfully invokes a fascination with the aesthetics of the machine, both visually (through the intricate cable and component pattern) and sonically (the baffling noise that the machine emits). Conrad Shawcross’ The Limits of Everything(2010) is a perfect fit due to the artist’s ongoing experimentation with science: it’s a kinetic sculpture that creates a spiral of light. Ariel Schelesinger’s absurdist use of everyday materials in Untitled (Gas Loop) (2011), and L’angoisse de la page blanche(The anguish of the blank sheet of paper, 2007) seems to belong more to the worlds of the domestic sublime and magic tricks than to the laboratory, but his sense of humour is engaging.
Julio Adán 'Ecografía (no tocar, por favor)' (2011)
Julio Adán and the artist duo O Grivo are represented by painstakingly assembled sets of music machines. Although charming and precise exercises in mechanics they both lack the musical expertise of Felix Thorn (aka Felix’s Machines), for whom the machine is a way of producing experimental music and not just an aesthetic end in itself. The installation The Limitations of Logic and the Absence of Absolute Certainty (2010) by Alistair McClymont recreates a mini-tornado with the aid of fans within a metallic structure, so that we can witness the formation and hypnotic appearance of this natural phenomenon without any of the usual havoc.
Upstairs, two works with clear cinematographic references are highlights. Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimarães’ video The Tenant (2010), a tribute to Roman Polanski’s 1976 film, features a soap bubble quietly bouncing about the artist’s studio. A subtle meditation on time and fragility, it’s a work I’m still trying to understand within this exhibition’s context. Karlos Gil’sTaking/Giving Information. Every lasting idea has been made from an unverifiable but verifiable story (2011) is an installation comprising several loosely related parts and a compelling film piece titled The Neverending Story (Chapter 1) (2010). Filmed in 16mm and borrowing some semantic and visual blueprints from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), the film continuously reaches a climax but never a resolution.
Karlos Gil 'Taking/Giving information. Every lasting idea has been made from an unverifiable but verifiable story' (2011)
Faivovich & Goldsberg, Ilana Halperin and Paloma Polo’s works all share a concern with research as artistic methodology. All three present documentation displays of personal research on different subjects. Faivovich & Goldsberg’s En búsqueda del Mesón Fierro (In Search of Mesón del Fierro, 2011) is the result of the artist’s obsessive search for meteorites that fell in Argentina 4000 years ago. Halperin’s Physical Geology (2009) concerns the artist’s interest in volcanic activity, while Paloma Polo’s The Path of Totality (2010) is a slide show of 70-odd images of the precarious eclipse observatories built from the mid-19th to the early 20th century in the USA, France, Germany and Italy, countries that invested in astrophysical research.
Faivovich & Goldberg 'En búsqueda del Mesón del Fierro' (2011)
There is, of course, nothing particularly contemporary about this linking of art and science. Leonardo da Vinci, obviously, is the most enduring of the Renaissance polymaths, while numerous 20th century artists incorporated the whirlwind of technological innovations in their practices, from Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Rotoreliefs’ (1935) – which the artist chose to launch at an inventors’ fair – to Jean Tinguely’s large-scale, fully automated and self-destructive machines. In the last 15 years, however, it has been the Internet as means of production and distribution that has captured the imagination of many artists – and which is strangely missing from ‘Experimental Station’.
By reducing the varied works in this show to formal commonplaces, both art and science risk presented superficially instead of engaging in what could otherwise be an extremely productive partnership, aimed at unfolding serious questions about both disciplines: how we relate, consume and learn with the advent of these external prostheses. How, in other words, we live and die in the 21st century.
Karma Chamaleon: Interview with Donelle Woolford
This interview was originally published in ‘An Art Newspaper: Special DECADE Issue, April 1, 2011′.
Donelle Woolford
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso: I was reading David Joselit’s piece on you, in which he describes you as a quasi-mythical character and as an “avatar”, which allows “for an imaginary/real mobility” that a regular artist lacks. I am wondering: How do you interpret this concept of mobility, and why does it symbolise something positive or desirable?
Donelle Woolford: The dichotomy of “real” and “imaginary” reminds me of the three kinds of beds in Plato’s Republic: the idea of a bed (“bedhood,” if you will); the object that is made by a carpenter (the bed itself); and the representation that is made by an artist (a likeness or imitation of a bed). Though Plato was quite confident about the distinctions he drew between ideas, objects, and representations, in our time we’re no longer committed to such utilitarian hierarchies. So, what are these paradigms of “real” and “imaginary?” Am I, Donelle, a “god-made” idea, and if so, are ideas real or imaginary? If I’m an object—and as such, useful—does that make me more real? Or am I an imitation of something—an artist, perhaps—that relegates me to the realm of the imaginary? If I’m enjoying some kind of mobility it’s between these levels of being (or not). This chimerical quality is key to myth. Being a character-driven myth, a kind of shared theatrical figure, allows me to be fixed and flexible simultaneously. There is the underlying, common notion of Donelle Woolford as a young artist—my character, so to speak—and then there are the particular embodiments of that character by the different actors who interpret it. Myth allows me to be in several places at once, or to be instantly fluent in German, or tall, or somber, or handsome. Every version of me is different, and yet every version is still me.
In your artist statement you define yourself as the “quintessential market artist”. Could you explain what you mean by that and how it relates to your political agenda?
I’m just trying to claim some valuable intellectual territory for the left. I’ve never understood why so-called political artists almost completely cede the power of commerce to conservatives. The belief that refusing to make saleable art objects for a market economy somehow symbolizes a critique of that market is dubious and shortsighted. Eliminating the object of exchange only turns the artist herself, or the public event, or the community involved, into commodities that get bought and sold in an institutional marketplace of museums, biennials, and state-funded public art. So what we somewhat lazily refer to as commodity critique is really only a transformation—an exploitation, really—of systems and networks of people into art objects. That doesn’t sound very liberating to me, in fact it sounds quite corporate and repressive. If one of my desires is to empower myself within a system like the art world, it seems more resistant and effective to collect free material, use my skills to organize it into meaningful images, and try to control the flow (and value) of those images as my sustenance.
Your narrative as a working-class black female is written by Joe Scanlan, a middle- class white man. Do you have any idea why Joe decided you should fit this description, what were his most intrinsic reasons and thoughts to engage in a race and gender conflict that doesn’t really affect him that much?
Actually you have it backwards. Joe is the working-class artist, I’m the privileged one. My father was a real estate lawyer who made a successful transition into entertainment law. My mom is a natural healer and author. And I graduated from Yale. If I were to say anything about Joe’s characterization of me it would be that he wrote me to be everything that he is not. That counts in the basic, white / black, male / female way, but it also counts in terms of class and education and family history. I’m everything he is not in those ways, too, and I think those are the ways that really matter. I also question your assuming that race and gender don’t really affect him. Aren’t we all equally affected by this conflict? I think a working-class white male is just as bound to a stifling categorization as a bourgie black woman is, or a queer Arabian monarch. We’re all trapped in overlapping sandboxes, and in that sense Joe and I play well together.
'Osaka'. Wood scraps, enamel paint, latex paint, wood glue, screws.
So far, you have been played by many different actresses. I am wondering, if you could choose to be embodied by a really famous actress, who would it be?
Salma Hayek is always a good answer to any question regarding celebrity embodiment. I could say Tilda Swinton but I think she’s too tall—even though I love her body language, her screen temperature. Does Patti Smith count? She would be the exact opposite of both Swinton and Hayek, so you kinda get my drift. If Johnny Depp’s turn as a drag queen in Before Night Falls qualifies, he’d be great, too. However, Viola Davis would be my top choice, even though she might be too perfect for the part.
I like very much the idea of you being a ghost, which you also say on your statement. However, a ghost is someone ‘present in absence’, in the form of a memory or a supernatural force. But you are, if you will, ‘absent in presence’. You are there but you are not you, —but the actress that plays you. What kind of ghost are you?
I think ghosts are a manifestation of our desire to see what we want to see. The Donelle with whom you’re interacting and the Donelle with whom someone else might interact are different. I don’t think I’m “absent in presence,” if I understand what you mean by that statement. But perhaps others do feel that way. I often have to contend with invisibility, even though I’m always sure I’m there.
Donelle Woolford
How necessary are you for the art world?
I think we’re all only just beginning to learn the language of perception as it relates to social space. Our vocabulary is quite narrow, actually. For a recent show at White Flags Projects in Saint Louis I created a piece based on Piaget’s theory of the conservation of volume. This theory deals with development and perception: at a young age, people associate volume (size) with shape, regardless of what they might have previously known or seen to the contrary. At the opening, I got to experience (and experiment with) reactions that I attributed to shifting perceptions of my portrayal. Throughout the opening, I would periodically change out of character whenever I climbed onto one of four risers built for the occasion that were of slightly different heights. Although my portrayal changed back and forth throughout the opening, my physical form remained unchanged. Some people had a hard time dealing with that because, like the Piaget experiment, they were not able to apply knowledge from previous perceptions of Donelle to the situation of Donelle in the present. Others just rolled with it and played along. It felt pretty important. The performance challenged notions of provenance. It challenged my audience to reckon with what they think I am and what they’d like me to be. If that’s an experience we need to have as an audience, then I guess I’m necessary for the art world.
I remember I went to see ‘Double Agent’ at the ICA almost three years ago but I completely missed the point of your work. You were not in the gallery in that particular moment and I didn’t even know you were an ‘avatar’, so my experience was reduced to the sight of an empty studio. What happens with Donelle’s agency when the viewers fail to grasp her true essence? Is it diminished or, on the contrary, multiplied?
The unknown is always more promising than the known. My agency is quite vast when you don’t know anything about me, but the more you learn the tighter and smaller my realm gets. However, just when you think what you know about me will annihilate your curiosity, the fact that I am portrayed by many actors who are empowered by their portrayals flips the whole premise on a point, like light passing through a pinhole, and my agency expands again. My existence is kind of like a solar eclipse. I’m best seen inverted, projected, indirectly.
Donelle Woolford's 'Return' exhibition, at Wallspace, New York
‘Double Agent’ was a very interesting show in that it addressed situations wherein artists use others to make their work. Have you ever felt exploited in an artistic working relationship, like for example with Joe? And, have you ever felt guilty of exploiting someone yourself?
I’d like to point out that exploitation has two meanings: to make productive use of something generally, like a skill or a natural resource; and to make productive use of something specifically, for one’s own advantage. I can’t name an artist who doesn’t want to be exploited in the first sense, and I can’t name an artist who hasn’t been exploited in the second. It’s funny that people are so fixated on my exploitation, but I think that’s more a function of their politicized perceptions of me (and of Joe) than it is of the work. It’s also disrespectful, somehow, to assume that I would wittingly allow myself to be used. After all, the show was called ‘Double Agent’, not ‘Agent and Sub-Agent’.
Donelle Woolford with Claire Bishop and Mark Sladen, curators of 'Double Agent'.
At the end of the day, what is more important to you: your work in itself or the debate around the questions of gender, race, and authorship that it generates?
The work.
I was thinking about African-American art institutions and museums and wondering if your work has ever been included in any show in that kind of context. What do you think of these institutions and in what way do you feel they open up or narrow the dialogue around an artist’s work?
Joe told me something that happened at the opening of a show he had recently in New York City, where he displayed his archival recreation of David Hammons’ Blizzard Ball Sale. That’s the performance where Hammons sold snowballs on St. Mark’s Place in 1983, alongside all the other Sunday morning flea market participants. Anyway, a curator from MoMA asked him if he was particularly interested in black artists. And Joe thought, you know, I’ve made works derived from Bruce Nauman, Robert Gober, Rachel Whiteread, Mike Kelley, and a whole museum exhibition that was an hommage to Sol LeWitt. Not once did someone ask me if I was particularly interested in white artists in response to any of those works. But with David Hammons it was different. The question wasn’t asked in a malicious way at all, it was just a normal, rote thing to say by someone working at one of the most prominent museums in the world. If we weren’t all racially affected in some way, institutions like The Studio Museum or El Museo del Barrio in New York, to name two, would not need to exist. I think the commonly held notion is these places are exclusionary and narrowing. However, they exist to achieve exactly the opposite goal: to overturn the narrow question that Joe heard at his opening. We have yet to reckon fully with our perception of “the norm,” and until we do, we have to have institutions for the rest of us.
Detail of Donelle Woolford's studio
Shadowboxing: Review of the RCA Curatorial MA final show
MA Curating shows pose an unsettling question: are we here to encounter a set of artworks or rather to assess under what conceptual make-up were they thrown together? Like a mirror held to the face of our art system, the MA Curating show makes us wonder about the increasingly dominant –and sometimes slightly terrifying– position that curators have in the current artistic status quo, competing directly with the agency and attention traditionally reserved to artists.
Mariana Castillo Deball, 'Blackboxing' (2007) installation view © Royal College of Art; photo: Dominic Tschudin
‘Shadowboxing’ is this year’s Royal College of Art MA Curating Contemporary Art final show, which, along with Bard College in New York, is the most reputed and historical curatorial course, and whose graduates have traditionally landed influential posts in the international art landscape. The exhibition’s catalyst is Giorgio Agamben’s “What is an apparatus?”, a text that chews on Michel Foucault’s elaborations on the mechanisms of institutional power and how they are incorporated almost seamlessly into individual subjectivities – hence the fighting with one’s shadow referred to in the show’s title. The group of thirteen students invited artists Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Dockerey, Marysia Lewandowska and Wendoling Van Oldenborgh to respond in a threefold strategy: by presenting works in an exhibition, by contributing to a set of five publications and by taking part in a programme of events.
The results are quite varied, which is precisely what makes the show interesting. Lewandowska’s three-room project ‘Subject to Change’, in keeping with her institutional critique-research based practice, is centred on various RCA-related controversies. The closing of its highly experimental Environmental Media department in 1986 is a particularly intriguing one, as is the screening of some of the works that were produced during its existence. In the lower galleries, the artist has relocated the furniture of the Senior Common Room, whose access is reserved to the teaching staff, and decorated it with works from the RCA art collection, equally restricted from the student corpus.
Sean Dockery, 'Public Monument' (2011) installation view © Royal College of Art; photo: Dominic Tschudin
Sean Dockery has created a full operating radio studio where meetings and talks will be recorded and preserved in a time capsule, to be opened in the FM wave-less digital future. Wendolin Van Oldenborgh presents two slideshow installations, whose topics are the relationship of women and labour in the agitated 70’s Brazil and the squatting movement in Rotterdam. Mariana Castillo Deball, also showing two previous video-works, has created ‘The Wall and the Books’, a beautiful site-specific piece that reproduces/materialises a short story by Jorge Luis Borges by ‘stealing’ words from 987 books (one book for each word of the story) from the RCA’s library, visible across the installation. While Castillo Deball is probably the one that has more loosely responded to the curators’ brief, her work possesses a poetic quality that sets her apart from the other more socially engaged works in the show.
Mariana Castillo Deball, 'The Wall and the Books' (2011) installation view © Royal College of Art; photo: Dominic Tschudin
Shadowboxing is, overall, a carefully thought out and installed exhibition with an earnest curatorial approach to Agamben’s text . So earnest, in fact, that a sense of ingenuity somehow transpires: given the ‘apparatus’ the RCA is in itself and the institutional appeal it bestows on its curatorial students, one is left in need of a little bit of irony, a little ‘shadowboxing’ with the RCA and the by now established curatorial ‘critical agenda’.
Marysia Lewandowska, 'Subject to Change' (2011) installation view © Royal College of Art; photo: Dominic Tschudin
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A slightly different version of this review was published on this is tomorrow
Rosa Barba & Hilary Lloyd: dance with projector
They say stoicism’s cradle was Greece, third century BC. A long time and a long way from contemporary London, a city where just the perils and anxieties of commuting to work in the morning (if one was lucky enough to have one of those) are enough to make anyone loose the will to live. With enough stoic disposition, however, London offers any devoted artistic sufferer enough thrills to make this kind of pedestrian miseries very much worth her while.
Last week, in the space of just one day, I had the pleasure of consecutively visiting two extraordinary exhibitions by two artists working within the expanded field of moving image, and whose specific particularities are just as fascinating as their meeting point: employing the projecting technology of their images as an active and essential part of the works, adding a heavy layer of theatrical and sculptural qualities to their installations.
Hilary Lloyd, Trousers, 2010. 2 Panasonic PT-DW5100U Projectors, 2 Pioneer DVD-V7300D Players, 4 Unicol Suspension Units. Dimensions variable. Photograph by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy of Raven Row.
The first stop was of my pilgrimage was Rosa Barba’s show at Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery. Barba’s practice has come to exemplify the current and ubiquitous come-back of the celluloid projector –clattering sound and flickering light included– to the gallery and its pervasive re-incorporation to the lexicon of artists’ films in the last few years. Her inclination for the 16mm and 35mm paraphernalia and sculptural use of modified projectors (John Cage and his ‘modified pianos’ quickly spring to mind) has won her as much international acclaim as her carefully crafted films.
Installation view of Rosa Barba’s exhibition at Tate Modern. Photo : Tate Photography © Rosa Barba
On the other side of the river Thames, in the sophisticatedly stripped-bare Victorian house that is Raven Row, the British artist Hilary Lloyd gives yet another master class on her use of projecting equipment as decisive part of the works mis-en-scéne. What makes Lloyd’s particularly striking to the eye these days is her utter embrace of the digital technology. In a moment where Barba’s nostalgic and predominant discourse could be understood as the triumph of the obsolete, a longing for the archaic and a sort of fetishism for retro textures, Lloyd’s unapologetic endorsement of state of the art gear feels like very fresh, almost optimistic, position to take.
Moreover, she not only plays with digital projectors. Huge plasma screens, dvd players, speakers and even the poles that hold them in place are all exquisitely choreographed in groups of slightly menacing art-machines. The apparatus are so important and specifically chosen that they are enumerated in the description of the works. For Lloyd even the cables –whose exhibiting fate usually involves being obliterated and hidden under wall-matching gaffer tape– are also worthy material: they are painstakingly arranged in geometrical and very visible lines crossing the ceiling and forming strict patterns that would probably overwhelm fellow cable-lover artists like Alberto Tadiello.
Hilary Lloyd, Motorway, 2010. 4 Sanyo PLC-XP100 Projectors, 4 Pioneer DVD-V7300D Players, Cambridge Integrated A5 Amplifier, 9 Unicol Suspension Units, JBL Control 23 Speakers. Photograph by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy of Raven Row.
Obviously the ‘spot the difference’ game between these two artists is only sustainable and entertaining on a formal level. Content-wise their preoccupations and the language chosen to talk about them are miles apart. Lloyd’s works at Raven Row employ video, photography and slides to create a hybrid result which could be defined somehow as ‘moving collages’. Motorway and Man, for example, play with composites of four and six moving images respectively –whose movements are more or less evident– and that force the viewer to find a suitable viewing spot between the bunch of projectors, hanging from the ceiling to the viewer’s body level. They are not only very present, they are almost intrusive. Their strict and symmetrical placement only helps to reinforce the sense of control and restrain that Lloyd seems to exert on her works. Motorway depicts a series of girders to a soundtrack of passing cars, and Man shows images from an male underwear ad, cropped to the groin area. Interestingly, both works result just as cold and asexual. Metal and human body are both treated as objects, mere raw material for visual compositions. As are the crane and the man’s legs of Crane and Trousers, two diptychs in movement with serious hypnotic appeal.
Hilary Lloyd, Man, 2010. 6 Sanyo PLC-XP100 Projector, 6 Pioneer DVD-V7300D Players, 12 Unicol Suspension Unit. Photograph by Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy of Raven Row.
This is Hilary Lloyd’s (Halifax, 1964) first large scale exhibition in London in 10 years. An artist’s artists, she remains fairly unknown for the wide public despite having had solo shows at Tramway (Glasgow, 2009), Munich Kunstverein (2006) or Chisenhale Gallery (London, 1999) and being represented by Sadie Coles HQ (London) and Galerie Neu (Berlin). She is a rara avis in the contemporary art world who, despite obvious talent, shied away early on from the temptations of a quick but short-lived recognition in favour of a slow development of her style and unique voice. Clearly a long-distance runner, the press release for the exhibition reveals she has been preparing this show for three years, since the very inception of Raven Row.
Rosa Barba (Italy, 1972), on the contrary, has been a permanent fixture in the contemporary art scene in the past few years, including shows at Birnbaum’s Venice Biennale (2009) and his Torino Triennale, 50 Moons of Saturn (2008), this year’s Liverpool Bienial, Centre International D’Art et du Paysage (2009) and Stedelijk Museum amongst many others. Her practice oscillates between narratives, where she delicately weaves fact and fiction, as seen on Outwardly, from Earth’s Centre (2007), o fluxus-inspired films where textures and languages are the protagonists, like It’s Gonna Happen (2005) or Let Me See (2009). Mapping is also one of he recurrent concerns. Her resolute use of archaic equipment is perhaps a tool of critical nostalgia, a refusal to reckon some of the aspects and implications of current film making as an artistic practice. In that case, Lloyd’s is an audacious refusal of any nostalgic reminiscing about the “good old days”. Two different strategies to help us explore the way we look at things and how we navigate our way around them. Isn’t it exactly why art is such a thrilling pursuit?
Rosa Barba Stating the Real Sublime, 2009. Installation at the Tate. Photo: Tate Photography © Rosa Barba
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