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
Sarah Lucas at The Last Newspaper, New Museum
This text was published on the 1st of December 2010 in the issue #9 of THE LAST TIMES, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
SEX SPORT-TRAIT SARAH
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso on ‘The Last Newspaper’ work ‘Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous’ by British artist Sarah Lucas.
A seriously overweight woman pouts and poses across a newspaper’s double-page spread. She frolics, almost naked, apparently feeling sexy. “My borin’ hubby bleats about my weight … Now I want someone who loves feeling’ folds of flesh in the sack”, she is quoted as saying. The story of this woman being offered for sale by her husband was originally published on November 25, 1990 in The Sunday Sport, an infamous English tabloid that specialises in the bizarre, amusing readers with outrageous stories including alien abductions and freakish sexual revelations.
Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous (1990) is a simple photocopy enlargement of these pages, which also include an article ridiculing ‘Arty-Farty Students’ being offered degree courses in Madonna studies, as well as advertising for sex phone lines. Made by Sarah Lucas when she was a 28 year-old emerging artist in London – just two years after the seminal group exhibition Freeze, yet before her 1993 venture with Tracy Emin (The Shop) and perhaps her most renowned work, Au Naturel (1994) – it belongs to a series of works in which she uses British tabloids as her raw material. The act of photocopying the pages of a tabloid and placing the results in the gallery highlighted for the artist, the “hypocritical morality being served up daily to most people in this country”. It was also an indication of what was possible for a young woman artist with limited resources, making work with whatever she had at hand and striving to articulate society’s class and gender anxieties. Already then, Lucas had directed her gaze at Britain’s working class everyday life via her assemblages of found objects (newspapers, kebabs, oranges, mattresses, etc.) – works with a seemingly obnoxious sense of humour. Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous (1990) continues to speak, some twenty years later, about the ‘formless’ outlets of perversion and excess that swarm about in our social and cultural landscape, simultaneously suppressed and served up as mass entertainment.
Visitor taking a picture of Sarah Lucas’ Fat, Forty and Flabulous (1990). Photocopy on paper. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Latitudes
What was most interesting about Lucas’ work when she first started to exhibit in London, at the artist-run space City Racing and the Saatchi Gallery, was that its irreverence and morality relentlessly challenged the established notions about the kind of art that was expected from a female artist. It wasn’t the explicit and obsessive use of genital symbols or the sexual innuendo that flooded her pieces what made her work risqué. It was its merciless gaze – and the absence of any clichéd feminist message – that made it exciting, funny and, most importantly, truly empowering. She was appropriating the brashness, sarcasm and macho attitudes of her masculine peers, yet without betraying her gender for a second.
Admittedly, Lucas’s apparently anti-intellectual approach doesn’t seem to lend itself too well to theory. Yet as with many of the artist’s subsequent works, Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous brings to mind the ideas explored by the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva a decade earlier in The Powers of Horror (1980). Heavily influenced by the writings on subversion by Bataille and Lacan, this seminal essay uncovers what lies behind our fascination with the grotesque, the dirty and the obscure: things we are systematically meant to abhor. Lucas unravels such mechanisms and presses all their buttons.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST TIMES is edited by Latitudes
Independent Gazette: Damián Ortega and Can Altay
This review was published on the 24h of November 2010 in the issue #8 of THE LAST JOURNAL, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
INDEPENDENT GAZETTE
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso reports from London on two newspaper-inspired exhibitions: ‘The Independent’ (Damián Ortega at The Curve, Barbican) and ‘Can Altay: The Church Street Partners’ Gazette’, The Showroom.
The walls of the gallery are dotted with twenty-two newspaper clippings pinned in plastic pockets, those cheap ones we all use when we feel the urge of being organized. Twenty-two sculptures, made just in the span of a month in response to those selected news, are scattered on the floor, leaning against the walls and hanging from the ceiling of the Barbican’s Curve gallery. This is Mexican artist Damián Ortega’s current project, titled The Independent after the center-left British newspaper that has been his main focus of attention. For this very particular commission, he set himself the challenge of creating a sculpture a day during a month, mimicking the daily working pattern of a newspaper.
Even though the brief and the timeline that he imposed on himself were strict, they haven’t taken over the art itself. The resulting pieces are still very ‘Ortega-esque’, each of them inhabiting his particular universe, always fascinated with the readymade, and the potential of the everyday life of objects. There are also a few pieces which evidence his ongoing interest in layering and deconstructing such objects. Architecture Without Architects is a fantastical living room suspended from the ceiling like a Magritte painting come to life. The accompanying publication of the show is, fittingly, a newspaper called The Independent.
Damián Ortega’s Architecture Without Architects at The Independent exhibition. Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery. Photo: Eliot Wyman (2010)
On the other side of London at The Showroom a completely different artistic practice related to the newspaper is being staged. One whose goal is the production of a single edition newspaper: The Church Street Partners’ Gazette, which will see the light on the very last day of the show at the end of November. I open the gallery doors to step into a space that resembles a local community meeting space, which is, in fact, the aim of the Turkish artist Can Altay. Yet on the morning of my visit it feels quite empty and a bit desolate. A table and sixteen plastic chairs await to be activated by one of the meetings that take place every one or two weeks. The walls are covered with print-outs of the newspaper in process and twenty-six photographs that depict picturesque scenes of The Showroom’s local area, especially the nearby Church Street, the main focus of the artist due to its lively market and mixed community. In keeping with Altay’s practice a wooden structure – an ephemeral, improvised architectural element – serves both as a space organizer and as a display device, where a local sign maker by the name of Joan of Art has painted messages taken from previous discussions and meetings.
The Church Street Partners’ Gazette is certainly an experimental and socially engaged work. But so local it its focus – and so dependent on those meetings with local spokespersons and communities to ‘come alive’ – that the regular non-local visitor may well feel that they can’t really participate. There is a sense of opacity, of not belonging to that community, and there is not much else in that space to distract the viewer from that fact. Damián Ortega’s show, on the other hand, doesn’t rely on any kind of participation in the making of the works, but the currency of the subjects plus the everydayness of the materials give the show a very accessible and universal feel. Shouldn’t that be the true aim of communication?
Installation view of Can Altay’s exhibition ‘Church Street Partners’ Gazette’. Courtesy: the artist and The Showroom, London. Photograph: (c) Daniel Brooke (2010)
However, a key aspect to approaching these shows is realizing how they point towards a current phenomena than can’t be overlooked: the gallery or museum as (mass) media producer. The weekly newspaper in which you are reading these words is an obvious good example, but far from an isolated one. The London art scene has witnessed in these autumn months an explosion of media-related projects within art spaces. Alongside the Barbican and The Showroom exhibitions one could also mention the Charlie Woolley’s Radio Show project at SPACE. Woolley turned the gallery of SPACE into a fully-operating radio studio where he broadcast a show five days a week for seven weeks. With a plethora of artists, writers, musicians, djs and comedians joining Woolley live, the Radio Show became a platform for collaboration and expanded dialogue. And Auto Italia, an artist run space in Southeast London, has just finished a five week run of one-hour transmissions, broadcast live on the internet, courtesy of the multifaceted artistic collective LuckyPDF. What does this (recurrent) fascination of the gallery and museum with media forms really mean? What does it saying about the current art scene and how it is consumed? More information coming soon to your local newsstand.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST JOURNAL is edited by Latitudes
Damián Ortega’s The Independent is on view at the Barbican’s Curve Gallery, London, until the 16th oj January 2011.
Truth Study? Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans
This interview was published on the 10th of November 2010 in the issue # 6 of THE LAST OBSERVER, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
IS THIS TRUE OR NOT?
‘The Last Observer’ London correspondent Lorena Muñoz-Alonso meets Wolfgang Tillmans, whose table top installation ‘Truth Study center’ is featured in ‘The Last Newspaper’.
A door buzzer is activated on a busy street of East London on a rainy Saturday evening; I push and find myself in Between Bridges, the non-profit gallery space Wolfgang Tillmans opened in 2006 to show artists that “are overlooked in the London scene”. (The current exhibition is by Gerd Arntz, a fairly unknown German artist and activist of the Weimar era.) I climb the spiral staircase to the studio and Tillmans welcomes me upstairs and offers me tea. He is tired but talkative, having just returned from Nottingham, where he has been installing his works for the British Art Show 7. His studio is a huge open space, full of desks and wooden tables, where newspapers and magazines pile under the neon lights. “Last year at the Venice Biennale I had four table works. And I had a whole room table installation (Space, Food, Religion, 2010) at the Serpentine Gallery show. But having The Last Newspaper and the Nottingham show opening in the space of three weeks has reactivated the Truth Study center project in a very significant way”, he says while pointing to the build up of world-wide printed media that towers on every surface of the studio.
What is or are the origins of your Truth Study Center works?
The project started in 2005 with a show in London at Maureen Paley which coincided with the publication of my third book for Taschen, also titled Truth Study center. It was a contradiction, somehow, because the contents of the book had nothing to do with the tables. That first show included sixteen tables. Then, in 2006, I had a big mid–career survey in the U.S., a show that toured between Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico City which included a twenty-four-table installation. In 2007 I had a show at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover where I showed thirty tables, which then become part of the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. So there have been two very big installations so far. The U.S. installation was altered from city to city; I was adding and adapting the contents depending on the context.
So the way you can work on the tables is quite quick and reactive?
Yes, pretty much. The tour was a year and a half long, and they were heady times in the American political arena, so it was interesting being able to incorporate all that to the work. There was a particular piece that was then published in The Guardian called ‘Ten easy steps for a fascist America’ by Naomi Wolf – a very heavy statement indeed. It was very striking and beautifully illustrated, so I made a table incorporating that on the spot. That table piece is again in The Last Newspaper exhibition. Americans don’t really like foreigners to criticise them. They are good at self-criticism, but the moment it’s a foreigner who does it, they can get defensive. But Wolf is American, so that couldn’t be accused of coming from European prejudices.
Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans’, Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Benoit Pailley. Courtesy New Museum.
How did you begin the process of incorporating the table as a new element in the vocabulary of your practice?
It actually started in 1995 with a show at Portikus in Frankfurt where I used five flat cabinets to show images I had published in magazines. Also in the Turner Prize show in 2000 I used the same idea of laying out elements on a flat horizontal surface, so it was already settling within my practice then. While I was editing the Truth Study center book I came to this really obvious realisation that all my work happens on a table. A table provides a space for a loose arrangement, where things are laid out in a certain way, but can be easily rearranged. On a wall you have to pin or tape the stuff, but a table is more fluid. There is clarity and complete contingency at the same time.
And why did you start using newspapers as raw material in your work?
I had worked with found newspapers before, in the ‘Soldiers’ series (1999). I have to confess I am a bit of a newspaper junkie and have collected them since childhood. I often think that a day’s newspaper contains the essence of the whole world. But I guess that around 2002–2004, the years post 9/11, a clearer picture of the world we live in emerged – all the insanity that surrounded us – after what had seemed like the less politically charged 1990s. I was enraged and concerned and spending a lot of time reading media and thinking about all these different claims to the truth, ‘the big truth’ which was the ultimate justification behind all that violence and those wars. I realised that all the problems that the world faces right now arise from men claiming to possess absolute truths.
So hence the name…
Of course it would be very desirable to have a completely neutral ‘Truth Study center’, but that will never be possible. So even though it has this big title, it is not claiming to be delivering truth, but rather looking at all these different, opposed truths. But it is not at all saying that everything is relative or subjective. I do think there are certain truths that are not negotiable, that some events and attitudes are wrong, and I am straightforward about in the work, which I think is precisely what makes it interesting. It takes a moral stand on the one hand, but on the other is always aware of its absurdity and of its extreme limitations. So it presents all these issues, like the impact of AIDS denial in Africa or the question of the existence or not of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the whole war came about from a single question: is this true or not?
Are the tables fixed in their arrangements and subjects?
The tables are, or can be, pieces in their own right. They do not always have to come in the same installations. But it’s the same as with a wall installation, when I think a grouping really works, I try to maintain it. But the working process is quite flexible and not set in stone.
Detail of Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Latitudes.
So you color–photocopy all the newspaper that are on the tables, which is already a process of translation in itself…
Very much so. That is the essential part of the visual composition, because we have been talking a lot about content but of course if the table works were not interesting to look at, they wouldn’t have an artistic justification. I use the color photocopy because of aesthetic reasons, but also because the color copy is amazingly permanent, as opposed to newspaper. I couldn’t use the original newspaper cause it wouldn’t look good after a year. But media-wise there are also real things, like a lottery ticket, a bus ticket, a vegetable wrapper…
You have a very strong relationship to printed matter. You have even said: “Everything I do happens on paper”, which I think is a simple but very meaningful realisation, with a lot of implications…
I have a double interest in The Last Newspaper show. Not only do I use newspapers and magazines as material, but also my work is heavily featured in printed media and I use media as both generator and distributor of my work.
What are the main subjects of your tables in The Last Newspaper?
There is one table about soldiers and war, one about religion, another about the depiction of war, games and violence on the internet. I also have some images of airlines and the experience of flying and there is one about Americans’ attitudes to food. There are a lot of critical messages there, but you could find all of them in very mainstream publications. Information and criticality is there for everyone, which is also one of issues I want to highlight in this work.
Detail of Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Latitudes.
Is this series your outlet for political expression?
There is definitely a bit of that. I use these works to make statements on subjects that I feel very strongly about but that I can’t or don’t want to tackle in my photographs. At the same time, though, the reason why I started to work with images from the very beginning was because I wanted to be involved with what was going on the world. Questions of taste or of beauty have always been politically charged for me. Do you find two men kissing disgusting or beautiful? That is a question of aesthetics but also of politics. I’ve always had this very strong awareness that every freedom that I enjoy as a gay person has been hard fought for by many people before me, and that gave me a great sense of public responsibility. I think every person counts. I might be very traditional in that sense, but I really think it does matter.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST OBSERVER is edited by Latitudes
Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is currently part of The British Art Show 7, touring throughout 2011 across the UK:
Nottingham Contemporary 23 October 2010 – 9 January 2011
Hayward Gallery 16 February – 17 April
Glasgow 28 May – 21 August
Plymouth Arts Centre 17 September – 4 December
Time Capsules: The Poetic and Politics of Memory in Art
This is the essay I wrote for my first curated exhibition ‘Time Capsules’ (November 2010, London). All the images are part of the exhibition catalogue, designed by David G. Uzquiza, a.k.a Maison Texas
“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality and that the past only exists as a present souvenir.”
Jorge Luis Borges ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ 1
‘Time Capsules’ is a meditation on the work of art as representation of time and the pervasive personal memories that haunt the artist when he/she faces a new project. It seems to me that, for a good number of years now, the category of space has been the main focus for many artists, curators and critics. Transnationalism, globalization, liminality, the architectural sublime and the production of space have all been hallmarks in recent artistic practice and theoretical discussion. But space feels, somehow, like a fixed, closed category. You are either here or there, maybe moving between these two points.
But how can one be sure of what time is he actually wading in? When a human being can be considered nothing but an accumulation of memories from the past –sometimes a burden, sometimes a blessing— and a formless set of desires and anxieties for the future, who is to decide what belongs to the present and what does not? The flexibility, intangibility and unattainability of time delicately address everything that is mysterious and unpredictable about life. We are always fighting time and losing the battle. Trying to stop it as to preserve a moment of elation, or trying to retrieve that past experience of bliss. Or maybe we spend our days trying to predict the future, oscillating between optimism and despair, but nevertheless always failing to work out what could happen. Anticipating what will never materialize.
Bearing all this in mind, I started getting increasingly infatuated by the idea of the ‘artist’s memory’. Works fuelled by personal nostalgia, constructed from the recycling and transformation of images, traumas and souvenirs from the past, became rare findings, almost obsessions for me. The conflicts between the individual memory and the collective unconscious, and between the autobiographical with the fictitious appeared essential to me; those interstitial realms fertile grounds for many interesting artistic phenomena. In that sense, the works of practitioners such as Lindsay Seers, David Noonan, Alice Anderson, Simon Fujiwara or Sarah Turner became beacons for me. Often from an extremely subjective perspective, the more personal these works become the more universal they feel. Moreover, when one is sure to be witnessing a piece of reality-cum-art the shadow of doubt takes over: are these works put together with shredded memories or are they fictional altogether?
Attuned, thus, to the weight of time and how it related to the subjectivity of the artist as a path to universalism, I decided to specifically explore in this exhibition the work of art as ‘time container’, instead of an ‘idea container’ (which could be considered the classic artistic approach). The time capsule came immediately to mind as an essentially problematic tool to encapsulate and preserve time. The reasons for it being problematic are manifold. Even though it is still being used nowadays in serious institutions like NASA, it is mostly a device which appears in non-serious contexts, related to the esoteric or naïve, childlike worlds. Another problem is that it seems an object destined to fail. How can a compilation of little objects, paper cuttings and material stuff even attempt to convey an era or unique moment, given the complexity of life’s experiences and their representation?
Three peripheral subjects –the ruins, cinema and ghosts– were quickly incorporated to my research on the representation of time. Ruins embody the exact point where space and time collide and become one, a testimony of how one affects the other. A ruin belongs to the past, we can almost see the ghosts of the former tenants that inhabited that space and the dramas that were staged between those crumbling, decaying walls. On the other hand, cinema and the moving image also expanded my research. Especially the figure of Andrei Tarkovsky, who came up with (and wrote profusely about) the metaphor of film-making as ‘sculpting with time’. Film has traditionally been understood as the perfect vehicle for conveying time. But what happens with other forms of visual or aural arts? Are they qualified to portray the subtleties of passing time? Can they successfully extract and transmit the slippery characteristics of personal memories?
Tarkovsky is, no doubt, an author haunted by the desire of retrieving the past. Most of his films, like ‘Mirror’, ‘Solaris’ and ‘Nostalghia’, explore directly the ideas of recurring memories and how they materialize in our present. “Time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either”2. Another key reading for this show was Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’3, which was to become the seminal text for a new cultural critical trend called ‘hauntology’. In said book Derrida talks at length about the spectre, or ghost, as a non-object, a non-present presence. Where Derrida speaks of ghosts and the politics of memory, Tarkovsky speaks of nostalgia and poetics of memory. It all amounts, as far as ‘Time Capsules’ is concerned, to the question of re-accessing the past, its remembrances and souvenirs, some more welcome than others, but all of them haunting the artist and, thus, his/her audience.
The time capsule invokes, evokes or convokes the ‘Other’. For the audience, the invoked ‘Other’ (a person, a thing, a place, a feeling) of the artist may remain unknown. Thanks to that, the artist’s ‘Other’ morphs into the spectator’s ‘Other’. If that happened, we would be opening a successful time capsule. What is the fate of the time capsules that fail?
The aforementioned conceptual problems associated with time capsules (lack of consideration in intellectual circles, childlike connotations and the difficulty of the task they face) are the starting point of the exhibition and taken as exciting artistic departures rather than conceptual dead ends. Thus, I decided to work by commissioning, inviting artists to freely respond to said proposal of the artwork as a time capsule by creating a new piece. The tensions generated by these problems are meant to feed into the works, to make both the artists and the viewers reflect on the success or failure in fulfilling the commissioning brief and, most importantly, if that has any relevance in terms of the artistic experience at all.
The one piece that existed prior to the exhibition is David Ferrando Giraut’s ‘Ruin Builder’ (2008), but it tackles the issues at stake in such a strong way that I felt it was inevitable for it to be part of the exhibition. ‘Ruin Builder’ explores the notion of technology as a time-warping device, offering in the present time an event, experience or person that belongs to the past. The idea of the ghost (something or sometime present in absence) haunts Ferrando Giraut’s practice, and obsolete (or ‘retro’) technology is his favoured way to represent that rupture within the contemporary realm. The installation is formed by twelve found objects, twelve vinyl records, plus a female voice recorded also on vinyl by the artist himself. The twelve LP records hanging on the walls become both an anthropological display of ruins and a glimpse of somebody’s personal memorabilia. The recording, an attractive ghostly voice that addresses the listener with strange familiarity and places herself at some point before 1982, tells us about different moments in time colliding through technology, a metadiscourse on the actual experience taking place.
anak&monoperro are deeply invested in the healing qualities of art. Art becomes a tool to explore and improve the life of both the artist and the audience, via catharsis, play or meditation. Almost atavistic in its symbolic attitude, the work of this duo inserts an ancient use of art, that of the magic and the ritual, within a very contemporary and conceptual practice. ‘The Treasure of Fears’ (2010) is the work that makes most literal use of the idea of the ‘time capsule’, juxtaposing it to the figure of the ‘hidden treasure’, also buried and made of physical objects heavily charged with symbolic meaning. ‘Treasure of Fears’, as much of anak&monoperro’s work, sits in a space between the performance or action, its documentation and the subsequent display of a resulting object. They always place higher value in the action itself, in the powers and sensations that were unleashed there. In that sense, they are highly idealist, almost playing alchemists, rather than artists. In ‘Treasure of Fears’ the remainder, a framed map where the treasure can be found, places the whole responsibility upon the viewer’s shoulder. It is up to him/her to buy the map, travel to a mysterious landscape and unearth and defeat his/her primal fears. It is up to the viewer to believe, to purchase this ticket to freedom as a piece of art.
For this show Julia Mariscal has created ‘The Mirror Says’ (2010), a complex installation comprising several parts (sculptures, kaleidoscopes and drawings), in which she plays with the archetype of the time capsule itself. This is a work that draws heavily in psychoanalysis figures, such as the ‘I’, the ‘Other’ and the world of ‘Dreams’ and how they converse with the Rorschach test as an almost theatrical backdrop. While the artist’s (I) main concern is to prevail in time, driven by the needs of her ego, the ‘Other’ (the viewer) is a presence and a force within the production and reception of the work that has to be acknowledged and incorporated into the process. If the work of art is a time capsule made by the artist in order to triumph over time, it will be down to the viewer to open it and make sense out of it, in a future time frame that Mariscal places within a dream, which she identifies with the ‘mirror’. Instead of loading the work with concrete time, she engages in a self-reflective game: what are her intrinsic aspirations as an artist while making the work, and her own projection of the situation in which it will be opened. Mariscal’s practice, always profoundly engaged in the process and physicality of the materials she painstakingly selects, attempts here yet another ‘fold’, one of her signature strategies.
Pablo A. Padilla Jargstorf’s ‘Resonance of Things to Come’ (2010) is a space built within the gallery. A sound installation where real-time and recorded sound, children’s tales and quantum physics co-exist, creating different time frames of different people that coincide as remembrances of something that never really happened. Inspired by the mathematical concepts of the ‘Hilbert space’ and the ‘multiverse theory’, architect-cum-artist Padilla Jargstorf explores the idea of the relativity/subjectivity of time experience through sound. And if there is an acoustic phenomenon with the potential to confuse and expand the perception of both space and time it is, surely, the echo: the reflection of sound. Keenly interested in the phenomenological experience of art, Padilla Jargstorf has created a room for us to enter and explore, in what he compares to entering a hotel room for the first time and envisioning all the events that took place there, before one’s arrival. To facilitate (or to complicate, maybe) these ‘unknown visions’, he has covered the walls and floors of the shed with shattered mirrors (again, the idea of reflection), pictures, letters, flowers and other types of debris and memorabilia, producing an uncanny sense of trespassing coupled with a growing curiosity.
The idea of the reflection, of the mirror, is recurrent in all the pieces of the exhibition, especially in the works of Mariscal and Padilla Jargstorf. The mirror as a reflection of the artist within the piece, but also as a distorting device, warping the given time-frame and the perception of reality, providing multiple viewpoints. In keeping with the influence of Tarkovsky upon the preparation of this exhibition as well as its relation with the shown pieces, ‘Mirror’, his masterpiece from 1974 will be screened, as a conceptual backdrop. As the film critic Ryland Walker Knight says: “Instead of simply reflecting, Tarkovksy’s ‘Mirror’ refracts light through the prism of memory, itself a condensation of time. Its editing performs an odd alchemy of memory that proliferates identities as much as converges them. Like in a prism, or kaleidoscope, mirrors are everywhere in the film (adorning walls or registering in windows) forever multiplying realities and planes, forever furthering the refractive inward reflection, or meditation.”
‘Time Capsules’ attempts to unfold this plethora of situations, identities and memories too, but it does so without turning to the moving image. The five artists have channelled time through very different paths: sound, installation, drawing and sculpture. Let’s see where they will take us. Or shall we say, when?
London, October 2010
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1 Jorge Luis Borges: ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’
From ‘Ficciones’ Emecé Editores Buenos Aires, 1956
2 Andrei Tarkovsky: ‘Sculpting with Time. Reflections on the Cinema’ University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986
3 Jacques Derrida: ‘Specters of Marx’ Routledge London, 1994
4 Rayland Walker Knight: ‘Making the Mortal Immortal’. ‘Reverse Shot Journal’. Issue 20, 2007
Time Capsules private view: 4th of November 2010 6-9pm, London
I am delighted to present my first curated exhibition, titled ‘Time Capsules: The Poetics and Politics of Memory in Art’.
It will be on from the 4th to the 14th of November 2010 at The Gallery Soho (125 Charing Cross Street, WC2H 0EW).
The private view is the 4th of November, 6-9pm, and I would be thrilled if you could join me for such a special occasion!
A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition and I will upload some of its contents here soon. You can find some more information in the e-flyer below.
Thanks!
Lorena
‘Time Capsules’ is supported and part of the festival ‘Spain Now! A season of Arts & Culture from Spain’
Thanks to David G. Uzquiza for the art direction of the catalogue and e-flyer.
Double Trouble. Interview with Pierre Bismuth
This interview was published on the 5th of October 2010 in the issue # 1 of THE LAST POST, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT LORENA MUNOZ-ALONSO CAUGHT UP WITH “THE LAST NEWSPAPER” ARTIST (AND OSCAR WINNER) PIERRE BISMUTH ON A CAFE TERRACE IN BELLEVILLE, PARIS
You are taking part in ‘The Last Newspaper’ at the New Museum in New York with several of your pieces from the ‘Newspaper’ series that you made between 1999 and 2001. Is the series still ongoing?
The ‘Newspaper’ series is definitely an ongoing project. I actually never finish a series; I never close a period, which is kind of complicated because it is somehow like having lots of children and having to be a good father to all of them. I still have a newspaper piece that I need to do, and I very often buy two newspapers because I feel there is always the potential for a piece there.
So tell me a bit about the principle of the series
The ‘Newspaper’ series is all about the duplication of the image. Duplication is an important method because I think it completely warps the moment of understanding. The images do not refer anymore to reality but they refer to each other, as if one image was copying the other. As a viewer you tend to forget they are addressing some real matter, you just wonder, why are there two of these? So it is a short circuit in your head.
Pierre Bismuth, First human embryo is cloned, say scientists (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Does this isolation of the image from reality account for why you always focus on really iconic social or political news, like the Sarah Payne murder or the first clone of a human embryo, for example? Is it to make even more blatant this rupture with understanding?
The reason why I started to do this series was that I was at a moment of my life when I had been doing lots of film and I really wanted to stop using video or film for a while, even though I still wanted to explore the idea of duration, of time-based work. So I thought, okay, if I put two images together, I am addressing the idea of duration as well. Two images are frames, anyway. I like this idea of suspending a moment.
At the same time, I think that this series very openly tackles recurrent concerns of your practice, like issues of perception, how we perceive and process information and how to complicate those paths.
Agreed. At the same time I realized, in a more formal kind of way, that one image on top of other refers to a sequence in a film, and one image next to the other refers to stereoscopy. The sequence is the idea of the same moment with a fraction of second of difference. Stereoscopy is the same moment with a slight difference in angle.
Also what excited me a lot about this work was having to look at reality, having to have contact with it, because when you are an artist you tend to live very much in your own world. So to me this series is also the perfect excuse to keep in touch with what is going on in the world. And when you look at the work, it also gives you information about the context in which the piece was made, and I find that very interesting.
‘Newspaper’ series ready for hanging at the New Museum. Photo: Latitudes
It becomes a sort of time capsule, which is something that interests me a lot, the idea of preserving and retrieving time. But speaking of time, you started this series in the late 1990s, when the internet was not used on the same scale as nowadays. We can definitely say that the way we access and consume information has changed due to the internet, and because the New Museum show is called ‘The Last Newspaper’, I am wondering if you think the newspaper as such is in decline?
Do you think the curators have titled the show like this, implying it is in decline?
I am not sure about that, I am just wondering…
I don’t believe it is the end of an era for newspapers, I don’t think they will be that quickly replaced. It seems that the internet it is killing television at a faster rate, because I think somehow that newspapers will always do a different job at informing people than a website. Did television kill the newspaper? I don’t think so.
You might have a point there. But going back to your practice, why is the idea of repetition so important in your work?
I see repetition as a disappointment device that forces you to deal with what was already there. I’m fighting against this idea that artists have to present something new every time.
And why are you so interested in disappointment?
Because I think it has a real potential for emancipation. When you stop believing that something is going to save you from something, you have to start dealing with what you have and making something out of it, rather than thinking that something is going to come and change everything for you.
That is quite interesting because as an artist this anti-idealist attitude pretty much puts you in the position of questioning everything. The agency of art, to begin with.
True, but is that a bad thing?
Pierre Bismuth, New ground in battle (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
No, I don’t think so.
I just don’t like art that tries to take you somewhere else. I have a problem with art that aims at providing entertainment and dreams. People don’t need art to dream. Everyone is dreaming already. Everyone is already creative. The artist doesn’t have the exclusivity of being creative in society.
So what is the privilege of the artist then?
The artist has a special way of addressing questions with a special ability with form. Even if contemporary art has moved on from appraising technique like it was in the Classical period, I still think that an artist is someone who knows how to deal with things formally. An artist is someone who knows how to do things. An artist has to make questions about reality within a particular historical and artistic context. And an artist also has probably a particular logic and irrationality in the way he or she addresses his or her own questions about reality.
So which would be your own set of questions?
How to extract freedom from systems that seem to be closed and regulated? How to find room for manoeuvre in situations that seem already determined?
Your newest work, presented at Bugada & Cargnel gallery, in which you copy the gallery desk and put it on a stage, is that some form of institutional critique?
Yes, in a certain way it is.
Are you interested in Institutional Critique?
Well, I was interested the some of the artists that were doing it back in the days, yes.
How successful do you think it was, and I am thinking of Hans Haacke or Michael Asher for instance, in terms of gradually being co-opted by the institution itself?
Well, I recently read an interview with Pete Townsend where he was being asked about political music and songs, and if they’d had any practical effect, and I really liked his answer. He said, “I am not sure how successful it was in terms of actually changing things, but the music was definitely reflecting the fact that people had those issues”, and I think it is exactly the same with art. It’s already good enough if art can simply show that some people have some problems with some issues. It records the fact that a problem was addressed at a certain time, which is quite something already.
Repetition and questions of perception are concepts very often employed in music theory. Is music a discipline you are interested in?
Music was my first love. I should have been a proper musician. I think I didn’t study music early enough in life. But when I am not doing art most of my time is devoted to listening to music and reading about music. And I think that popular music has not been historicized to the same degree as contemporary art, so there is lots of room there for research and discussion. It is not an overcrowded territory.
Pierre Bismuth, 500 Marines (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Yes, definitely, and there is also lots of links between the two fields, like all that happened in New York in the 1960s, with Fluxus, John Cage, Tony Conrad…
Yes, fantastic! I love that entire scene.
Are you working again with film? [Pierre Bismuth won an Oscar with Charlie Kauffman for the script of ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’]
Yes, I am working on a film right now, but it is difficult to find the right people to work with. Are you sure your machine is working? [Pointing at the digital recorder]
Well, I hope it is. I love this recorder. It’s new and works great.
I have one as well. I use it to record my wife’s dreams. She has amazing dreams and, moreover, an amazing and funny way of remembering them and telling them. I myself have two strange recurring dreams. One happens when I am sleeping in hotels but I think-dream I am at home. I wake up and, because I don’t recognize the room, I think someone has changed all the furniture while I was asleep.
That sounds like one of your works!
Yes! And the other dream is exactly the other way around: I sleep at home and I wake up being sure I am somewhere else and that someone has recreated my very own room while I was asleep. There is always this moment in which I wake up and I marvel about the whole repetition. Again, it’s all about repetition, the repetition of my own space. And it is also funny how the brain works. If it looks like home, why do you have to think it is somewhere else? But you do. It is extremely complicated.
It’s like when you travel a lot and for a minute you don’t know where you are when you wake up the morning. It is quite disturbing. Let’s wrap up by talking about patterns. Your practice seems to be very focused on patterns, somehow imposing on yourself a set of instructions, restraining the options, if you like.
Yes, I don’t like having to make choices. I prefer when there are limitations. It’s probably because I don’t know what I want. What I surely know is that, on an ethical level, I don’t want to be part of the culture industry. It seems that nowadays art is more and more considered as a form of leisure industry, which is not at all why I started making art. If I can avoid that, even ending by doing an extremely boring exhibition, I will be happy to do that. It is not my job to amuse you.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST POST is edited by Latitudes
Pierre Bismuth’s exhibition at Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, continues until the 6th November 2010.
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