SelfSelector

(This review was originally published in frieze magazine, issue 145 March 2012)

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.

The bilingual title of Antoni Muntadas’s retrospective, ‘Entre/Between’, is apt. The Barcelona-born, New York-based artist has spent most of his 45-year career hopping between continents, languages and media, as well as exploring the social space that emerges between the production of information and its interpretation.

The exhibition organized Muntadas’s vast oeuvre around nine thematic ‘constellations’; it kicked off with written documentation and videos of his 1971 Fluxus-esque performances, which employed the physical body as a metaphor for the body politic that could not be discussed during General Franco’s dictatorship. In the same year, Muntadas relocated to New York, where freedom of speech allowed him to express his ideas about the burgeoning ‘information age’ that Marshall McLuhan theorized in his 1964 essay ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’.

Perception remains a key concern of Muntadas’s practice and some of the best installations in the show emphasized the shift in collective subjectivity aroused by what the artist termed the new ‘media landscape’. A particularly effective piece, Mirar Ver Percibir (To Look, To See, To Perceive, 2009), comprises three small, cheap table lamps, each illuminating a verb written on the wall. Nearby was his 1980 commission for The Kitchen in New York, Public/Private, an installation that requires the visitor to sit on a chair in front of a clock and a calendar that registers their arrival time; and two monitors, one of which screens a mix of soap operas and various other TV entertainments while the other shows an image of the viewer, captured by a hidden video camera. While reminiscent of seminal early works by Dan Graham and Bruce Nauman, there is something unique about Muntadas’s take on the closed-circuit installation that stems from his relentless investigation of mass media and the distorted mirror-image it casts on society. Years before the explosion of reality TV and ‘prosumer’ culture, Muntadas heralded the breakdown between the once distinct public and private spheres.

Other themes in ‘Entre/Between’ focus on the construction of social power, and of fear as its most useful tool. The ominous installation The Board Room (1987), the video Portrait (1994) and the screenprint series ‘Portraits’ (1995) all feature images of public figures and how the media transforms them into religious-like icons. Muntadas is, however, a clever enough artist to introduce elements that signal de-mystification or banalization. For example, the triptych On Translation: El Aplauso (The Applause, 1999) illustrates the passive way in which information can come to be trivialized and consumed: two videos of clapping hands flank streamed images of violent events – drug cartels, torture, police repression – in Colombia.

Muntadas’s critique of mass media is mostly constructed from a sociological point of view. It is both an informed research on and a challenge to the established roles of the (institutional/corporate) broadcaster and the (mass) receiver. This is why the several calls for action that crop up throughout exhibition are so powerful. Towards the end of the journey is the room that hosts On Translation: La mesa de negociación (On Translation: The Negotiation Table, 2005), which was presented in the Spanish Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale. It consists of a large round table, covered with piles of books about power, telecommunications struggles and maps of the global distribution of wealth. The walls of the room were filled with panels in which red bright signs declare: ‘Warning: Perception requires involvement’. At this point, the weight of individual responsibility returned like a slap in the face. What to do about it is another question.

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All images courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain.

The exhibition ‘Entre/Between’ took place between November 2011 and March 2012

This review was originally published on Art-Agenda in February 2012

This year’s edition of ARCOmadrid Art Fair was having none of the doom and gloom that usually accompany the fair. The Spanish art scene has tended to berate its most important and oldest art fair, a feeling which intensified when it was subject to management disagreements and ensuing conflicts with the galleries a couple of years ago. But the new team has honed an edition this year that people felt optimistic about. Whether in the national press or at the parties and events that heralded the fair’s openings, the mood was cautious but bright, even after ten hours of parading on a gray carpet and enduring the neon lights.

Javier Téllez, 'Caligari und der Schlafwandler' (2008). Still from super 16mm film. Courtesy of Figgen Von Rosen Galerie, Cologne.

As I walked into the fair on a cold and sunny Wednesday morning, I was instantly reminded, with a sense of dread, of its colossal size. Inhaling deeply, map in hand, I headed directly to the Opening section on Hall 10, featuring twenty-five young galleries from all over Europe, carefully handpicked by Manuel Segade. The independent curator expressed his interest in showing underrepresented scenes, hence the inclusion of Eastern Europe’s gem Plan B and Ivan Gallery from Bucharest, or the Oslo-based gallery Imo. One pleasant surprise was the discovery of Figge von Rosen, a gallery based in Berlin. Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008), a video projection by Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez anchored me there for the entire duration of the work: 27 minutes. Nearby, Tanya Leighton shed light on the intriguing collaboration between Dan Rees and David Keating. Titled Chuzpah (all works 2011), it featured monochrome canvases on which pairs of the traditional Iberian peasant shoes known as “alpargatas” (or “espadrilles” in French) were fixed. A precarious metal shelf on the floor displayed pottery sculptures with what looked like clay balloons coming out of them, all in beautiful earthy colors. Like a post-Povera take on Mediterranean culture, it was a collaboration that showed an appealing new side of Rees’s work to me. But what’s “chutzpah” about this restrained and sensuous combination of colors and materials? Wondering, I moved on, catching a glimpse of Iris Van Dongen’s addictive pastel and charcoal drawings that blend the aesthetics of fashion and gothic imagery, of the pre-Raphaelite with metal rock, hanging at Luis Adelantado.

Iris Van Donguen, 'Night Letter' (2011). Pastel, watercolors and charcoal on paper. Courtesy of Luis Adelantado, Valencia.

On my way to Hall 8, I bumped into yet another section called Solo Projects, where twenty-three galleries from Latin America have been invited to do solo presentations. The Argentinean artist Cecilia Szalkowicz’s delicate installation has occupied the stand of Galeria Alberto Sendrós with a modernist feel, whose different elements intermingle and pose questions about representation, the original and the copy.

Every year a guest country is invited to ARCOmadrid and a gallery selection representing its national scene is made. This year fourteen top Dutch galleries curated by Xander Karskens were scattered all over the fair. Fons Welters showed Renzo Martens’s Enjoy Poverty (2009), a feature-length film that many have a strange love-hate relationship with. When I first saw it as part of the 2010 Berlin Biennale I was quick to berate Martens’s Herzogian and egomaniac self-portrait of the artist as politically and morally engaged actor. Two years later, I am no longer sure I fully understand Martens’s moral stance towards this piece, nor mine. Ellen de Bruijne Projects was also part of this Focus section, with a wonderful presentation of Falke Pisano and the Spanish-born Amsterdam-based Lara Almárcegui. But it was the work of Dina Danish at Jeanine Hofland’s stand that provided a much-needed comic relief: Type Sonata (2011) is a video where two hands play the keys of two typewriters creating a monotone tune about the absurdity or failure that can undermine (or revitalize?) the artistic gesture.

Dina Danish, 'Type Sonata' (2011). Single-channel video. Courtesy of Jeanine Hofland Contemporary Art, Amsterdam.

It seemed that this year’s ARCOmadrid was markedly more international, but two Spanish galleries stood out for me in the general section. Nogueras Blanchard showed a relevant roster of young Spanish artists, with works by Rubén Grilo, Fran Meana and Ignacio Uriarte, whose artistic practice-as-office-routine breeds delightful monochromes manically executed with biro pens and other kinds of office paraphernalia. At the stand of Elba Benítez an exciting meeting of generations was taking place. The performative exploration of the body in space undertaken by Catalan artist Francesc Torres in the 70s (Descriptive Analysis of the Three Dimensions. Three Points of View, 1973) shared space with a recent project by Joachim Koester or Fernanda Fragateiro’s astute See Part 2. I’ve had enough of this, Don Judd, “Complaints part1″ in Studio International, p.182-185(2012), which objectifies the historical magazine duel between Donald Judd and the writer of the essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michel Fried.

Rubén Grilo, 'Tige and Hélène Smith' (2011). Courtesy of NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona.

But in general, it seemed as if the Dutch had invaded the entirety of Madrid. At dusk I crossed the city towards La Casa Encendida, where a Dutch-themed group show opened recently. Curated by the art critic Javier Hontoria, “A Dutch Landscape” gathers twelve artists, drawing parallels between seminal figures like Bas Jan Ader or Jan Dibbets with members of the younger generation, including Gwenneth Boelens, Feiko Beckers, Martin in ‘t Veld and Navid Nuur. I walked around the show in sheer delight. Needless to say, there weren’t any landscapes there but an overarching and very Dutch exploration of the small gesture, slapstick, and futility that seems to resonate strongly with the current climate of culture cuts that have abounded both in The Netherlands and Spain during the past year. Or at least that’s the way I read it in my exhausted daze….

Navid Nuur is indeed having a field day this week, not only at the fair and at La Casa Encendida but also because of his first solo show in Spain at the nearby Matadero (Spanish for “slaughterhouse,” which it was until the 80s). Since it opens until 11pm, I fittingly dragged my body to the slaughterhouse to see the exhibition of the Tehran-born, Hague-based Nuur. Fourteen pieces were gathered under the title “Hocus Focus,” tackling an alchemy whereby pedestrian material is transformed into art, and in which light plays a predominant role. Favorites here include Ours (2012) a large-scale slide projection of a dried tear, whose components form the most incredible floral shapes, looking like a flowery snow flake under the microscope; or The Eyecodec of the Monochrome (2012), in which a simple reflective sheet, made with the same material as traffic signs, illuminates brightly like a low-cost Olafur Eliasson when reaching a point in the exhibition space next to a tiny spotlight pointed at it. Making a mental note to visit the new Hans Haacke retrospective at Museo Reina Sofía first thing the following morning, I set off for home, avoiding Madrid’s infamous nightlife, which I can hear thriving not too far away.

Ignacio Uriarte, 'White Rhombus' (2011). Bic pen on paper. 4 pieces. Courtesy of NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona.

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.

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.

(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.

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

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.