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 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.

The opening sentences of this text come from the film Arrebato (Rapture), by Iván Zulueta (1979). In this scene the character played by Will Moore conveys to the one played by Eusebio Poncela the tremendous power of fascination (or ‘rapture’) that an image charged with certain meanings and personal memories may have over its beholder. This fetishism, a celebration of the semiotic power of images and of the technology which records and plays them, is something which David Ferrando Giraut shares with the recently deceased Zulueta, an essential reference point for him for various reasons which we shall explore below.

Still from 'Loss' (2011)

The work of Ferrando Giraut (Negreira, Spain, 1978) captures the tension experienced by an artist with a Romantic spirit who must create his work in a highly technological, postmodern and post-structuralist environment. And when I say ‘Romantic spirit’ I do so with a full awareness of the clichés associated with this 19^th-century art movement. If one could synthesize the three major themes in the work of Ferrando Giraut, they would be death, desire and memory. Essential themes in the works that make up this exhibition: Journeys End in Lovers Meetings (2010), The Fantasist (2011) and Loss (2011).

The image, objet petit a  

But death here is something far more complex, with many more layers of meaning beyond the idea of “ceasing to exist.” For Ferrando Giraut death is a powerful symbol, an exquisite metaphor to speak of man’s drive – of his own drive, above all – to freeze changing realities into fixed images:

“When an object or idea seduces us, in an immediate and unconscious way we turn it into an image, which allows us to grasp and assimilate it. When what seduces us is a person, the strategy is the same: we turn it into an image, whether mental or physical (through a photo or any other type of recording). In this way we can reconstruct that person exactly as we wish. Thus can we also remember the person when they are not present. The problem is that, in this way, this live and organic person is converted into a fixed image, something inorganic. It is as if we were in some way killing the person as an autonomous and constantly-changing entity, turning a life, which is something organic, into an image, which is inorganic.”

David Ferrando Giraut²

The “death” which cinema inflicts is also portrayed by Iván Zulueta in Rapture, where the camera is, metaphorically, a vampire: an entity which absorbs and denaturalizes the protagonist, converting his life into images to the point where his life disappears, exhausted. That fatal attraction to images – symptom of a death drive³ – as well as a collision of two cinematographic genres, horror movies and arthouse cinema, also draws these two visual artists together.

The dead woman, so present in the work of Ferrando Giraut, thus takes the shape of a metaphor for the image. And the image, in turn, is revealed as a metaphor of desire, perhaps even as the very essential object of desire (Lacan’s objet petit a⁴) of an artist for whom the image, more than a mere instrument through which to work and present his anxieties, is the anxiety itself, his dark fetish. The image/death binomial, so present in the work of cinema theorists such as Laura Mulvey and Raymond Bellour, tends to be associated with psychoanalytic theories, in this case the aforementioned Freudian concept of the “death drive” being particularly pertinent: the drive towards death, self-destruction and the return to an inorganic state.

Returning to the previous idea, a cinema fetishist is, according to Christian Metz, “one who is fascinated with what cinema is capable of doing, and also by its technological tools.”⁵  And, indeed, a reflection on the use of the image and sound recording technologies is another of the cornerstones of Ferrando Giraut’s work.

Installation shot of 'Meteorite Fall' (2007)

Recording technologies: ways of seeing, ways of remembering

The idea of ghostliness or immateriality as something inherent to recording technologies is fundamental to Ferrando Giraut’s conceptual lexicon. It is an intimate and indissoluble association, with a special predilection for the record player and its inseparable vinyl record.

Already in works such as Road Movie (Perpetuum Mobile) (2008), we see how a video piece is combined with the presence of obsolete technologies, creating a tension of signifiers and offering a far more complex interpretation of the works. Road Movie presents an accident on a small roadway in the artist’s hometown (Negreira, Galicia) in a disturbing and obsessive fashion, through a dense and suspended temporal space reminiscent of the films of Tarkovsky. A vitrine contains the work Storyboard, a series of vinyl whose covers feature different scenes of cars in wild settings, creating narratives about their degradation. The vinyl seem to anticipate the future, portending what we will later see. In his seminal novel Crash J.G. Ballard created an ode to the fetishist power of the automobile over the bourgeois citizen, with the traffic accident as the maximum sexual expression of that perverse relationship. For Ferrando Giraut the choice of the accident represents a question of fetishism too, but in this case it is linked to cinematographic conventions and to the symbol of the traumatic event, of Romantic implications. This idea is reinforced by the beautiful and ominous landscape and by the presence of the vinyl, analogical (or indexical) and obsolete containers in a world that is veering towards the digital.

Installation shot of 'Storyboard II' (2008)

This obsession with vinyl as a paradigm of technological ruin repeats itself again in subsequent works such as Ruin Builder (2008), where audiences are invited to play an album on which an eerie voice makes us conscious, in a calculated meta discourse, of the temporal fragmentation experienced between the moment of the recording and the moment we listen to it. On a nearby wall another collection of vinyl, in this case referencing architectural ruins, adds to this sensation of decay.

In Journeys End in Lovers Meetings each and every one of the pieces is brimming over with technological ruin. The film work was shot in 16 mm, while the collection of Polaroids of kisses from horror movies speaks to us of a dead, and later revived, photographic format. Even the record player, where a broken Kate Bush vinyl is playing, is vintage. Journeys End… can be interpreted as an elegy to the technology which the artist grew up with, and to the audiovisual products with which he built his understanding of the world, of love, and of the image.

In Loss, his most recent work, we are shown a selection of ads for image and sound recorders and players that were widely used between the 60s and the 80s. Nearby, we find another record player, now almost a trademark item, but this time hidden in a coffin-shaped piece of furniture that Ferrando Giraut copied from a similar one he grew up with at home. The persistent appearance of obsolete technological objects reveals a nostalgic vision of bygone elements of the artist’s life which, as he himself recognizes, form an essential part of his creative process. The repetition of strategies throughout different pieces, in addition to the seriality of the elements contained (series of vinyl, ads, record players) may be understood as a subjective use of the archive: accumulations of objects and documents that speak to us of the societies which produced and consumed them.

The sociological aspect of these ‘archives’ – belonging to the mass media – offer Ferrando Giraut the possibility of taking these personal questions over to a universal level, laying down bridges for the audience, using a system of signs which is recognizable for the vast majority.

“My understanding of an artist’s work is that, although he has to be conscious of the history of Art and its traditions, he also has to be capable of creating and offering something new, related to a personal point of view on the world. My work arises from personal anxieties and emotions, but I also seek common ground with the audience. Themes such as death and desire are universal questions that affect everyone, but nobody has been able to fully explain our relation to them. I think that this tension between the unknown and the will for knowledge creates a favourable place for communication.”

David Ferrando Giraut⁶

Polaroids from 'The Friday the 13th Series' (2010)

Nostalgia: textures from the past and invented memories

We have already mentioned the important role which nostalgia plays in the work of Ferrando Giraut. For him it represents a powerful mechanism which functions on two separate but connected levels. On one hand there is intimate nostalgia, related to memory and individual remembrances. On the other there is a kind of collective nostalgia in which personal memories meld with the visual and mental tracks left by a sort of cultural memory – especially during the last century, due to mass media and the cinema. Thus, the human need to experience films and stories is linked to the process of generating and reliving memories.

In the work of Ferrando Giraut – and this is especially patent in works such as Natural Scenes (2006), Journeys End in Lovers Meetings and Loss– the involuntary memory (so vividly described by Proust in the passage on the muffin in In Search of Lost Time) may prompt us to conjure up our own memories, but may also evoke in us “learned” memories such as, for example, the landscapes and heroines of Twin Peaks, triggering in the artist memories of his adolescence in the lush forests of Galicia, where an encounter with Laura Palmer might not have been so surprising, but something desired.

The writer and film director Alain Robbe-Grillet – author, along with Alain Resnais of the script of the masterful study of memory entitled Last Year in Marienbad⁷, as well as of exquisite visual essays on eroticism and the masculine gaze – is another staunch defender of the organic and creative potential of human memory:

“Memory belongs to the sphere of the imagination. Human memory is not like a computer, which stores things. Memory is part of the imaginative process, at the same level as what we understand as invention. In other words, inventing a character or recalling something real is part of the same process. This is very clear in the work of Proust: for him there is no difference between the experience one lives – his relationship with his mother and others – and his characters. They represent exactly the same kind of truth.”

Alain Robbe-Grillet⁸

This involuntary memory is, again, the “rapture” sparked by the cards in the scene from Rapture with which this essay begins. This being “frozen in a complete pause,” in a suspended time, is inseparable from the alchemy of image and memory, produced by the human (organic) memory’s encounter with the recorded image (inorganic memory).

Horror films and mad love

In the visual and cognitive world created by Ferrando Giraut terror and love go hand in hand. His pieces at times borrow signifiers from horror films to explore questions (both aesthetic and content-related) more typical of arthouse cinema. These themes of love and desire are the bridge which the artist employs to unite the two genres, as they are fundamental questions in both. In the first part of the essay we have seen the use of the iconography of the dead woman as a sign of the act of image making. But the woman, even when dead, also represents the “beloved” in the narratives which Ferrando Giraut presents in two of the exhibition’s pieces.

Installation shot of 'Journeys End in Lovers Meetings' (2010)

Journey’s End was developed at a difficult time of personal transition full of uncertainty, and this is why the strategy of repetition is employed in the two feminine characters, and why one of them is “murdered,” thereby becoming inaccessible and rendering change impossible.  In Loss, nevertheless, the heroine is unique. Her presence, or absence, to be more precise, permeates every part of the piece, appearing in different objects and characters.

“Man […] shall discover, in all the faces of those women, a single face: the last face loved. And how many times I have noticed that, under totally disparate appearances, an exceptional trait resurged, along with an attitude which I thought had been wrenched from me forever. However alarming this hypothesis strikes me, it could be that in this territory replacing one person with another, or several with several, leads to a clear definition of the loved one’s physical aspect, through a growing subjectivization of desire. The beloved, then, is she who features a series of particular qualities, considered more attractive than others, appreciated separately, successively, in all the beings who have loved each other before.”

André Breton⁹

André Breton wrote his treatise on mad and surreal love during the period in which he fell in love and began a relationship with Jacquelin Lamba, who would become his second wife. This quote evokes the sensation of ubiquity which the beloved in question acquires: the author sees her everywhere, every woman looks like her, but only one, Jacqueline, actually is. With a less hyperbolic and certainly more melancholy tone, Loss also explores amorous obsession and the images which said obsession conjures up.

Though the loss to which the title refers is multiple in nature (including episodes involving family, friends and even colleagues) the essential loss leading up to the idea behind the film is that of unrequited love, or perhaps unrealized love. Loss does not deal with the loss of contact with the loved object, but with the acceptance or assumption of the circumstances and contexts which determine that relationship, rendering it unattainable and therefore producing and thereby producing a painful but in some way enjoyable melancholy. Lacan dubbed this pleasurable pain jouissance¹⁰. In his recent study of Freud, Lacan and Barthes, Margaret Iversen for the first time introduces the idea of “anti-mourning” to refer to this intellectual process whereby the emotional wound is consciously kept open, as a catalyst for the creative process.¹¹

One of Ferrando Giraut’s strategies, as we have seen, consists of locating this “amorous-creative” process in the context of the horror genre. This manoeuvre is clearly evident, for example, in Journeys End in Lovers Meetings, in which complicated emotional narratives are linked through the appropriation and repetition of  romantic dialogues from horror movies such as Salem’s Lot, Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.  The setting is a misty forest in which, confirming our fears as audience members, the cadaver of a murdered woman appears. But when it does, rather than sparking terror, the emotion which arises is that of tenderness, as if we were witness to a heartfelt appeal for attention, an entreaty not to be abandoned in the depths of oblivion. The dialogues, exactly the same as those spoken by the living feminine and masculine characters, take on a special pathos in the “silent” (or silenced) version of the cadaver, contributed to by Nigel Yang’s soundtrack, a progressive and highly psychological piece of music.

Ferrando Giraut confesses to feeling drawn to horror movies in a visceral and intuitive way ever since he was a boy. In his view, there is no intellectual artifice in that somewhat irrational attraction towards a genre which has always been considered to be mass entertainment. And yet, if we scratch a bit below the surface, a great number of congruous aesthetic and theoretical links can be drawn to the artist. First of all, we might say that the horror film is the contemporary manifestation of the Gothic novel, fulfilling a relatively similar cultural function. The Gothic has always maintained a close relationship with Romanticism, for example, in the way that both movements see Nature as a sublime and ominous setting. Both currents also share the idea of love with a tragic destiny, and so all the more desirable.

Installation shot of 'Encounters with the Inorganic II: Golden Voices' (2011)

In addition, for Ferrando Giraut the experience of the sublime, that “pause” or state of suspension, is visually associated with nature, above all with the landscapes of Galicia where he lived until after his adolescence, and to which he often returns in his work, as in Loss, whose outside scenes are shot in the forests and by the rivers he roamed as a boy.

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror…No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too.”

Edmund Burke¹²

This investigation by Burke was the foundation of Freud’s idea of the uncanny, a term he coined in order to express the sensations of fear and existential vertigo produced by a patient’s repressed emotions, which were freed in an encounter with something which appears to be familiar – a childhood memory or a mental association with something known – but isn’t at all. The two concepts of the sublime and the uncanny are found, without a doubt, in the work of David Ferrando Giraut, who not only plays with present emotions but also with past memories – his childhood landscapes, his family’s Super 8 movies, or the horror genre he grew up with – to create that state of pause, both in himself and in the audience.

Still from 'Loss' (2011)

Despite these points of reference, however, Ferrando Giraut is opposed to a fatalistic idea of art and life. For him, art always has a social and positive use, insofar as it is to be used to come to know and improve the lives of both artists and their public:

“I am interested in sentiment as the starting point for reflection. For example, Romanticism and the Gothic, two movements akin to my sensibility, share the idea of ‘fatalism’, that things cannot be controlled or changed. But my point of view towards that fatalism has changed. Now, perhaps due to my own psychoanalytic experience, I am interested in exploring how these states of anxiety or desire can bring about understanding, and how that understanding can change one’s emotional response, altering the course of events. In this sense my work, although it does not seem so on an aesthetic level, has become much brighter.”

David Ferrando Giraut¹³

This essay was published in the catalogue of David Ferrando Giraut‘s exhibition ‘The Fantasist’, held at MACUF from October 2011 to February 2012.

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1 Sentences said by Will More’s character to Eusebio Poncela’s character in the film Arrebato (Rapture) by Iván Zulueta (1979).

2 David Ferrando Giraut in conversation with the author. London, August of 2011.

3 The concept of the ‘death drive’ was formulated by Sigmund Freud in his essay Beyond The Pleasure Principle (1920). The death drive, also called Thanatos, finds its opposite in Eros, which symbolizes the impulse to live.

4 In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan the object petit a symbolizes the patient’s unattainable object of desire.

5 Metz, Ch.: Photography and Fetish, an essay published in the journal October. Fall of 1985.

6 David Ferrando Giraut in conversation with the author. London, August of 2011.

7 Alain Robbe Grillet was a novelist and a proponent of the nouveau roman or ‘new novel’, a depersonalized style of literary fiction characterized by the almost aseptic description of situations, places and objects. Robbe-Grillet collaborated with Alain Resnais on the film Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which marked the start of his career as a film director.

8 Alain Robbe-Grillet in an interview with Sasha Guppy, published in the spring of 1986 in the magazine Paris Review.

9 Breton, A.: Mad Love. University of Nebraska Press, 1988. First published in French (L’Amour Fou) in 1937.

10 The transgressive act is central to the Lacanian idea of jouissance. This particular type of painful or sinister pain comes from doing something prohibited, subverting some principle of symbolic order.

11 Iversen, M.: Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes. Penn State University Press, 2007.

12 Burke, E.: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford University Press, 1990. First published in 1757.

13 David Ferrando Giraut in conversation with the author. London, August of 2011.

Art criticism is in crisis. The proposition is already a clamour in the world of art, above all at an editorial and academic level, which are, as it happens, the areas where the critics reside. However, one could have the sensation that, given the intrinsic instability of the genre, manifested in its effervescence in some eras and insipid inertia in others, crisis has accompanied art criticism since its early infancy, the date of which, incidentally, nobody can agree upon. In this sense, the fact that both concepts share the same root, in ancient Greek “krísi” implying the idea of judgement as much as that of schism, shouldn’t be considered a mere coincidence. In this text, however, the idea I want to explore is that in regard to art criticism, obsessively looking backwards can be more counterproductive than anything else, plunging critics into a state of doubt and mental block not so different from being turned into a statue of salt.

Clement Greenberg speaking in New Delhi in 1967 at a presentation of the MoMA exhibition 'Two Decades of American Painting'.

So, let’s return to “today”. In the last month of 2011 two conferences took place in London about the state (cause for concern, if we pay heed to the titles) of art criticism. The first took place in the auditorium of the Tate Britain at the beginning of December, under the rubric “The Art Critic in a Cold Climate” was organised by the AICA (International Association of Art Critics). The event, though not lacking in interest, was limited to a presentation by the art historian Stephen Bann, in which he touched on the porous relations between criticism and art history. Illustrating his thesis by way of the careers of various critics–such as the historian Michel Fried (author of the still polemical essay “Art and Objecthood”, published en Artforum in 1967), the British Lawrence Alloway or, of course, the inescapable and monolithic, Clement Greenberg– the talk was, in itself, a historical discourse which didn’t actually ever explore the present cold and unpropitious climate of the title. The condition of criticism is to process the present and evaluating its state by way of a historical discourse ends up being both an oxymoron and the perfect illustration of one of its more paralysing dilemmas: criticism is not history, however much both disciplines and their professionals endlessly intermingle as if in a hippy commune. Criticism, and it’s worth keeping it in mind lacks the weight and solemnity of what is written in the annals, thereby offering infinite possibilities to try out new ideas and points of view.

The following week, “The Trouble with Criticism” brought together a reputable cast of critics under the auspices of the ICA: Tom Morton (Contributing Editor for frieze, independent writer and curator), Adrian Searle (art critic for The Guardian newspaper), Melissa Gronlund (managing editor of Afterall) and JJ Charlesworth (associated editor of the magazine ArtReview). The discussion began with impetus thanks to the moderator, curator and critic, Teresa Gleadowe, who asked the participants if the supposed crisis in art criticism could be in part due to the unstoppable ascent of the curator as the principal mediator between the artist and the public. For the one who is writing these lines, convinced that this is without a doubt one of the causes of the low moments that critics are experiencing, the conference for a moment looked very promising. However there were no conclusive or satisfactory replies.

JJ Charlesworth made a series of interesting comments though, for example that critics are currently immersed in a perennial and anguished fight to justify the value and need for their role. A tribulation to which one could add the question: in an art scene where curators decide which artists are promoted at an institutional level; where university education, as a result the hegemony of conceptual practice, has taught artists to articulate their works as if they were doctoral theses, explaining the process, concept and even on occasions the “appropriate” interpretation; and where galerists and collectors handle the economic resources to ensure the visibility and viability of the careers of certain artists, in a panorama such as this, I repeat, what is exactly the role of the critic?

Rosalind Krauss. Photo by Ann Gabbart from the book 'Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974'.

Another of the problems that plagues the genre, a result of the aforementioned hybridisation with other disciplines such as history or curating, is what Christopher Bedford identified in 2008 in his essay “Art Without Criticism”: “Art historians, even museum curators, spend more time formulating their theses than looking at the objects that anchor those arguments; works of art for most theoretically-inclined contemporary art historians are not generative, they are illustrative”. It is precisely this trap that works of art serve to “illustrate” the ideas of some curator, critic or historian that limits the experience of art and its critique. Perhaps we should give more room to the works, not placing them in mental boxes constructed a priori with the materials that afforded by the vertigo, or even panic, that can arise when facing a piece that is at first glance incomprehensible.

A possible “cure” for this ever so generalised hermeneutic strategy (of which I am guilty as well) was already proffered by Lucy Lippard in 1970, in her text “Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds”: “The recompense of art criticism resides in the act of looking at a work of art and allowing oneself the time to experiment and re-experiment, to think, consider, articulate, vacillate and rearticulate. The critique of contemporary art is not an appropriate ambit for somebody who expects to be right all the time or on the majority of occasions. Rapid and not always significant change begs an illogical criticism that creates a dialogue between historic fact, the visual and opinion in an “open manner”, instead of trying to establish a pedantic system that permits no variations and that is only perfect with regard to its own limitations. The idea of self-correction is precisely what is most interesting about art criticism. Oscar Wilde said that criticism is the highest form of autobiography. I would like it not to be autobiography or self-expression, but auto-didactic, a printed record of the process of learning and, ideally, a demonstration that the art discussed is stimulating.”

What was Lippard telling us, now 42 years ago? That criticism is an organic process, mutable and that in its name it is allowed to make mistakes. Her quotation also implies that one of the functions of criticism is to stimulate debate and discussion. And if there is something that makes this impossible it is the asphyxiating presence of generalised consensus in the international art scene. Criticism suffers a crisis that needs to be faced up to with courage and generosity, in public: in the forums where critics talk amongst themselves and with their audiences. For this alone, aside from evaluating the results of one conference or another, it is heartening that these conferences or editorial projects such as the fantastic “Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism”, are taking place in such rapid succession over the last few years. But, above all, a critic should study himself/herself. As a writer, the working process is a solitary one and on rare occasions does one know what opinions or effects one’s texts can give rise to. It is in this solitude, and in the exercise of self-imposed correction that accompanies it, where the crisis of art criticism can begin to be combated.

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This text was originally written in Spanish. You can read the Spanish version here.

Chris Kraus, ‘Where Art Belongs’ (2011)

At the end of the summer of 2011 Ryan Gander presented ‘Locked Room Scenario’ (you can read my review here), a grand scale mise-en-scène that perfectly embodied his interest in loose associations and in the creation of narratives, whose elusive rewards are often found in their very difficulty to be grasped and deciphered. It is this collision of historical referents that Chris Kraus mentions in the opening quote, as well as the characters that Gander constructs, what makes the work of this British artist a challenge to the viewer. But as he himself has quipped: “Spectators need to invest their time and their energy in my work, in order to receive something in exchange. It is my way of filtering and encountering people who aren’t just looking for a dinner party conversation”. In a long conversation conducted in his East London studio, Gander and I discussed his work, his (anti)curatorial practice and why he isn’t an elitist.

'Associative Template # 23 - And all that chatter around your career'. Credit: Dave Morgan

I’d like to start by asking you about the concept of control. I have the feeling that some artists make work in a quest for control: how the work exists and how it is experienced and interpreted. In you practice, including  ’Locked Room Scenario’, your goal seems to be completely the opposite: opening up possibilities and discussions…

Bad artworks only have one reading. Really good artworks start in one place but go to multiple places; they have multiple readings, different possibilities and outcomes. For me, bad works are linear, singular and describe only one idea. But if there is only one idea to describe, you can probably articulate in speech. You don’t really need to “make something” out of it. The point of “making something” is that it can be interpreted in multiple ways. The more ways it can be interpreted and the more complicated the journey to get to that interpretation, the better the work will be.

Regarding ‘Locked Room Scenario’, I found that many people were trying to unravel a mystery by gathering as many clues and signs as possible. As if there was a complete narrative behind all those clues, a “right version” of the work.  Is there a “right way” to experience it?

No, there isn’t a proper or more correct way to experience the work. Different things happen to different people by the nature of the work. It is constructed like that. So you probably miss about 60% of it if you only visit it once. You’d have to go and see it like ten times in order to see everything, and even then some of the things only happen on certain moments, so might miss them all. So every person’s experience is completely different, which is one thing I wanted, so they would end up sitting in the pub asking each other “did that taxi driver offer you a free ride home?”, “No, but I was followed by a deaf person”. That’s important.

I mean, there is a story, but it is my story and it is just an excuse to produce the work. It’s not important that the visitor understands it, what’s important is that the visitor uses his imagination. It’s a bit like a treadmill for the imagination, like being in the gym. Because the imagination is like muscle that needs exercising and we are all pretty rubbish at it. Do you remember when you were a kid, and you would look out of the window from your parents’ car and the things you could imagine? Or when you were playing in the garden making a tree house or sitting on the bed which turned into a boat… And you really believed these things! But you get older and  you simply can do these things anymore. Your imagination becomes a bit stilted, lazy and flabby. ‘Locked Room Scenario’ is just an experience that can last as long as you want, and that gives you lots of catalysts to daydream and use your imagination. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people are scared of letting go and using their imagination.

'Locked Room Scenario', 2011. Credit: Julian Abrams

It seems to me that the critical discourse around your work tends to focus on its ideas and concepts, the intangible part of it, which is logical to an extent given the conceptual nature of your practice. But it sometimes feels as if we were forgetting to discuss the aesthetic part of your pieces…

It is not that it is neglected, it just doesn’t matter what it looks like. That’s not important. The only important thing about aesthetics is that they communicate the story of how the work came to be.

But I do think that you have an interest in aesthetics which shows, for example, in the way you curate. Like the Limoncello show, for instance, which was all white and black and very sleek…

But that wasn’t due to an aesthetic interest, meaning that I just liked the way it looked. There was a conceptual reason for it. It was meant to be a tongue in cheek comment on conceptual art being boring. All my aesthetic choices have reasons behind them. What I mean is that the things I do look the way they do because of the thinking behind them, not because I have made aesthetic decisions. The material thing is just the leftover from an idea. It’s a physical manifestation of an idea, like a receipt that proves the idea existed.

Installation view of 'Young British Artists', Limoncello 2011. Credit: Leon Yearwood

You’ve said that you wouldn’t want people to consider ‘Locked Room Scenario’ a critique of the art world.

Yes, some people suggested that because it centres around an exhibition it could be read as some sort of parody. But for me these are the less interesting conclusions to the work, while the ones around fictional narratives are the most interesting.

In any case, some people criticise your work on the basis that it is very self-referential and opaque. Do you agree with that?

What I’ve heard is that I make art for the art world, rather than about the art world. Which could be true, to a certain extent. You make work for the people that are going to be interested in it…

'Locked Room Scenario', 2011. Credit: Julian Abrams

On that same note, there is a feeling, when encountering your work, that if one has some previous knowledge of the history of art and even of your own practice, he/she will have more chances of navigating the piece sucessfully and understanding the wealth of quotes and references that you place all over. For example, in ‘Locked Room Scenario’ you reference several movements in the history of art, such as Situationism, Fluxus or Conceptualism. And you also quote yourself in the use of Santo Sterne, which is a fictional artist that you’ve already used in previous projects. Isn’t it a sort of a natural selection, whereby only the more knowledgeable spectators will understand the piece?

No. It doesn’t matter, it’s just a different experience. It is still an experience, no matter how much previous knowledge you have. A lot of these things are just excuses to make things. Just because there is a reference to me in it, it doesn’t mean that you need to know it to understand the work. It’s not elitist in the sense that the more you know the more you get from it. I have seen people getting much more from my work than people that know everything about art. It doesn’t have to do with how much you know and how much you research. It has to do with how much you let yourself go and how much you invest of yourself in it.

'The Medium', Lisson Gallery, 2010. Credit: Adlard/Dave Morgan

If it is not elitist then, is your strategy just a playful game of references?

It depends on what exactly you are talking about. In my works there are different levels of encryption, of closure and camouflage. And there are things that people will never get cause they are just things that happened to me. There are works that mean something, that have a lot of meaning. And there are works that are totally meaningless, like a painting of clouds. People make work that doesn’t mean anything more than “I’m artist and I like these materials”. I am not interested in that at all, because it doesn’t do anything for me if it doesn’t have a meaning.

What can you tell me of your participation in the last Venice Biennale, ILLUMInations (2011)?

In the para-pavilion, for example, I showed a vitrine with two dice of forty-two sides, each side with the initials of all the artists that were included the show. But I had more works scattered around the biennale. I showed five works in total. They were big works for me, but for biennale standards they were actually pretty small. I remember going to Venice previous years and encountering these huge bombastic, business-card projects that shouted “this is me!!” in a big room. And I decided that I wasn’t going to do that, so I thought I’d make five works and ask the curators to put them wherever they wanted, spreading them in different location. That was meant to make them function as punctuations. Some people thought it worked well, that it was refreshing to see works of smaller scale in this context. Others, on the other hand, thought, “Ryan Gander, who does he think he is? He is everywhere!!”. You can’t really win, can you?

'In Hearts?', Venice Biennale 2011. Credit: Kiki Triantafyllou

What connections do you find between your curatorial practice and your own artistic practice?

I don’t have a curatorial practice.

Well, I think you do… In 2011 you curated the Limoncello show and the opening exhibition of the Lisson Gallery in Milan. And when you did the Art Now show at Tate Britain in 2008, you chose to curate other artists’ works, rather than present your own…

No, I really don’t have a curatorial practice. What I do is not curating. I just invite people to participate in a show…

How is that different from curating?

It isn’t curating because I am not a curator. It’s like making a mixtape. And every time I “curate” something anyway, the logic behind it is sort of “anti-curating”, of a critique of curating.

How does that logic work?

For example, in the Young British Art show (Limoncello Gallery, 2011) I did a sort of experiment. You could put up an exhibition with the same thirty-eight extraordinary artist and because no one knows who they are, not many people will come. But I called the show “Young British Art”, and two thousand people turned up to the opening. I like testing that sort of thing. It exposed the ludicrousness of the art world, but it was also brilliant for the artists in the show! (laughs).

Installation view of 'Young British Artists', Limoncello 2011. Credit: Leon Yearwood

Maybe two thousand people showed up because you curated it…

No, I don’t think so. It had to do with the name, with being all black & white works and with opening on a Bank Holiday weekend…

What about the Tate Art Now show? Did they ask you to curate a small show instead of presenting some of your works or was it your idea?

They asked me if I wanted to do something, if I had any ideas. And just a few weeks before I had been invited to see their stores, and they pulled out all these amazing storing walls full of artworks, with paintings upside down, without any sort of order, chronological or thematic. They were placed just wherever they’d fit, so you’d have a Pollock next to a Steve Claydon, which I thought was brilliant. There was this really nice happenstance and that’s why that show I did was also a critique of curating. I just picked two walls by rolling a dice and hung its contents in the gallery in exactly the same locations as they had been in the store. The fact is that you can make associations and pull connection and collisions between things by just rolling a dice and it will look great. And that’s not curating, is it? It’s so easy to curate, and it seems that the harder you try to curate the worse the show ends up being.

You have always said, regarding your own artistic practice, that it is much more interesting to put a set of works together that just an isolated one. That the dialogue between works creates something much more powerful…

That’s true. So if we call that “curating”, which I’d rather not, and your question is whether there are connections with my artistic practice, there are connections indeed. The interest in the creation of new meaning by putting a set of works together is definitely present in both. The “Loose Associations” lectures or the “Associate Templates” series are mainly based around that principle.

'It’s a right Heath Robinson affair', installation view at Kadist Art Foundation. Credit: Aurelien Mole

 ’Loose Associations’ will  be ten years old soon. Were those lectures and the subsequent book a declaration of intent, a summary of your artistic methodology?

It wasn’t mean to be like that, but the truth is that it does represents the way I work. Coming back to the idea of curating my own pieces in sets, I think I have a sort of privilege in that I make a lot of work. I make work really fast and I am not that precious about letting it go. Some artist are really afraid of their artworks leaving their studios but I just need to see how my pieces work out there. Here in the studio we make at least a 100 works a year. I would be so bored if I only did a couple of projects per year! I am not interested in doing masterpieces, I am much more interested in seeing how different works go together, so I can “curate” my own shows. That’s where I get the most enjoyment.

The typical response to your work involves a love or hate reaction. Many people seem to get annoyed by it, why do you think that happens?

Yes, it seems to irritate some people. But that is just because they let themselves. It has to do with their own characters rather than with my work. The other day I went to the kitchen department of John Lewis with my brother and he turned all the egg timer’s alarm clocks exactly in three minutes and then walked off. I though that was a brilliant creative act, but imagine how many people were irritated and annoyed. These are the people that also get irritated with my work (laughs).

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An shorter version of this interview was published on this is tomorrow in November 2011. You can read it here.

Images courtesy of Studio Gander and Artangel.

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

After several years of teaching and working in printmaking, the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer made what he considers to be his first conceptual piece. It was 1966: written in black plastic lettering over a white board, two sentences accosted the viewer, “This is a mirror. You are a written sentence.” Thus began Camnitzer’s enduring exploration of the symbolic qualities of the mirror. The piece also granted him entrance to the clique of emerging Conceptual artists—those exiled from South America in particular—that were gathering in New York, where he had moved to in 1964. Since then he has been something of an artist’s artist and a beacon for a younger generation of post-Conceptualists like Alejandro Cesarco or Stefan Brüggemann.

"This Is A Mirror, You Are A Written Sentence" (1966), Luis Camnitzer's first conceptual work

This relatively low profile seems to be changing at the not-so-tender age of 75. In 2011, Camnitzer had a survey exhibition at the Museo del Barrio in New York, which toured from the Daros Museum in Zurich. His show at Parra & Romero in Madrid marks his first solo exhibition in Spain. It is a tight retrospective of his long career through eight works, five of which are constructed around the figure of the mirror. Fittingly, the show’s title is “Reflejos y Reflexiones,” which, when translated from Spanish to English as “Reflections and Reflections,” becomes slightly ambivalent: “Reflejos” are reflections in the physical sense, while “reflexiones” are reflections in the meditative sense. This riddle has surely delighted Camnitzer, for whom word plays and linguistic puns are a key part of his practice.

View of Luis Camnitzer’s “Reflejos y Reflexiones” at Parra & Romero Gallery

El Reflejo (The Reflection, 1977) welcomes the viewer into gallery. A large text piece, which revolves around the nature of mirrors and how they affect space, has its exact reversed version on the opposite wall. The play on symmetry is repeated in the neighboring Combate (Fight, 2004), where two empty slide projectors face each other in a mechanic duel of light and sound. The projectors are separated by a dark glass reminiscent of either a tennis net (a barrier between opponents) or a two-way mirror protecting anonymous audiences during interrogations. The references to political repression, quite subtle in this work, materialize on a grander scale in the next room. Half the wall space is occupied by Memorial (2009), a reproduction of the Montevideo telephone book presented in 196 framed prints. In it, the names of Uruguay’s desaparecidos (the 300 plus political dissidents that “vanished” during the military dictatorship) have been meticulously inserted between the rows of surviving citizens. Though present in this custom-made directory, the desparecidos’ names are still invisible in that they are graphically indistinguishable from those still alive, signalling perhaps the futility of the artistic act in the face of such political and moral atrocities.

Luis Camnitzer, "Memorial" (2009)

Also consisting of a series of prints on paper, Eco (2011) slices up a copy of Five Moral Pieces (1997) by Umberto Eco to then implement the re-assembling strategy of the Czech artist Jiří Kolář, whose existentialist deconstruction of texts and images is a strong point of reference for Camnitzer. At the far end of the second room, Homenaje a Mandrake (Homage to Mandrake, 2010) features two identical white vases on white plinths, separated by the scattered pieces of a shattered mirror. The title of the piece alludes to Mandrake, the Magician, the hero of a famous comic strip created by Lee Falk in 1934, when Camnitzer was only three years old. In one particular episode, following a plot worthy of Lewis Carroll or Jean Cocteau, Mandrake steps to the other side of a mirror to find all his friends and loved ones behaving like their evil twins and talking backwards.

Mandrake is puzzled and confused with this evil replica of his world and has to fight his way back to reality. This proves to be a fitting metaphor for one’s feelings after bumping into Camnitzer’s mirror tautology time and again, whereby repetition never amounts to simplicity, or to clarity. He forces us, rather, to look for meaning in the reflections. But if we go beyond the looking glass, there’s much more to reckon with.

Luis Camnitzer, "Homenaje a Mandrake" (Homage to Mandrake), 2010

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.

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.

Throughout this itinerary, I would like to navigate through the HAMACA catalogue in search of traces or residues from other times and voices. I am looking to identify the little or great homages that artists make to other “artists-legends” or to the “landmark moments” in their history (understood both on a collective and an individual level). What I will engage with here is the unravelling of nostalgic impulses in art, led by a (perhaps unhealthy?) curiosity to get to the bottom of the archetypes that have come into play in the creative process of these artists.

In his “Mythologies”, Barthes said that a myth is nothing other than a distortion of history; a new ‘discourse’, born through the appropriation of a previously existing image. This re-writing of a sign is in itself a creative act. It isn’t just a cultural appropriation, but a translation or update of meaning through time. This temporal dislocation, intrinsic to the act of incorporating elements from other socio-historical contexts, is also fundamental in this stroll through the catalogue, where the evocations of the past, explorations of the present, and fantasies of the future merge unevenly, provoking a sense of vertigo towards a continuous and never-ending present.

Love the myth. Kill the myth

Our first stop is Little Star (1994) by Clemente Calvo, a popular legend transformed into a small visual tale. Calvo, who lived in New York at the time the piece was made, incorporates a legend that amongst the Indians who lived in Manhattan before the arrival of European colonisers was a small group of shamans whose souls turned into white, seven-pointed starfish when they died. Those lucky enough to find one of the starfish would enjoy the protection of the shamans forever. The plot’s temporal dimension takes us to a particular historical moment of the 17^th century, yet the piece formally looks like a homage to silent film and, in particular, to the films of Jean Cocteau. With a piano piece by Liszt as its sole soundtrack, its use of black and white and poetic images with surrealist overtones, the piece inevitably takes us back to the universe of the French genius.

'Little Star' (1994) by Clemente Calvo

Following along the surrealist trail, Espejismo (1993), by Maite Cajaraville, offers a trip “through the looking glass”, in an obvious reference to the author of Alice in Wonderland, the British writer Lewis Carroll. Yet the aesthetics of this dream, set in primary colours and geometries, are clearly those of a digital landscape. Espejismo is more a memory of the future than one of the past, and is tremendously contemporary in its hybrid mix of 3D and psychedelia with New Age overtones, all of which awaken a strong devotion in many contemporary artists who, like Cory Arcangel, are obsessed with 90s digital aesthetics.

'Espejismo' (1993) by Maite Cajaraville

SIS. E3 (Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras) (2000-2001), by the Basque artist Txomín Badiola, holds the accumulation of references and symbols as one of its fundamental ingredients. In only 4 minutes, we witness the invocation of various cultural myths, placed in that temporal grey zone that lies between modernism and post-modernism, and which includes the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard, the art of Jorge Oteiza and the industrial design of Charles & Ray Eames. The piece freely recreates the final scene from Der Amerikanische Soldat (1970), by Fassbinder. Godard said that his death had been caused by “an overdose of creative obligations”, a sentence we can read on one of the stage walls in the piece. Whilst one of the actors wears a t-shirt with a fragment of La Ley de los Cambios, by Jorge Oteiza, another dons one with S.O.S. written on it. Both messages are on view while both men roll on the ground, between the Eames’ chairs. Shot 30 years after the original film was made, and using contemporary looking actors -who are however trapped in a melange of times and ideologies between the homage and the critique-, SOS. E3 appears to represent the footprint of our most recent cultural past, like a heavy embrace from which we cannot (and perhaps should not) escape.

'SOS. E3 ( Servidumbre de la vida y el carácter de las sombras)' (2000-2001) by Txomín Badiola

Seeing as Jean-Luc Godard rears his head, it seems relevant to speak about El Enemigo (2010), by WeareQQ. El Enemigo is a reworking of that Godardian myth called La Chinoise (1967). The young protagonists’ endearing and pedagogic verbal diarrhoea, the film credits, the domestic interiors, and the dry humour it oozes, are inherited from the original, which is however nothing more than a shell, or an excuse, to speak about certain subjects. A stage set within which the characters -cultural agents orchestrated by WeareQQ- offer a series of porous monologues where political, economic, cultural, and even emotional critiques are intertwined.

Speaking of the critique and deconstruction of myths, we may find no example more powerful within the history of the moving image in Spain than Rocío (1980), by Fernando Ruiz de Vergara. This is a documentary where a Catholic rite -the procession of the Virgen del Rocío-, is taken apart with precision, through the use of facts, and, by extension, so are the rest of the rites of Marian devotion. This was a touchy subject for a democracy still in its infancy, leading to several fragments of the film being censored, and to its author being condemned to two years in prison plus a fine of 10 million pesetas. Rocío is still, even today, a work that is little known, and terribly underrated. A good number of brilliant shots and a wise use of archive footage hold up a brave and controversial thesis for which its author paid an unmistakably draconian and absurd price.

'Rocío' (1980) by Fernando Ruiz Vergara

I also find Duchamp (retard en vídeo) (1986/87), by Eugeni Bonet, to be an essential work for a number of reasons. Not only is it a comprehensive documentary about Marcel Duchamp, it is also, in my opinion, a clear precursor of the “performative documentary” that has gained such visibility and followers since the 90s, both in the field of film and video in general, and in contemporary art in particular, with examples that go from media celebrities like Michael Moore to artists such as Mario García Torres or Duncan Campbell. In this case, a casual, humorous conversation between a couple is used to structure a narrative about Duchamp’s life, work, and impact, from his early stages as a painter -culminating with The Large Glass-, to his subsequent development of conceptual art through the readymade. Finally, it is worth mentioning that this documentary was broadcast on TV3 in 1987 as part of the TV show “Arsenal”. Without a doubt, the porosity between mass media, conceptual art and history is an exciting phenomenon, researched by the curator Chus Martínez in her recent exhibition at the MACBA, titled “Are you Ready for TV?”.

'Duchamp (retard en vídeo)' (1986-1987) by Eugeni Bonet

Time Distortions: Here come the ghosts

There is something exquisitely unsettling about Medio Tiempo (1964), by Manel Muntaner. Tension grows, due to an unsettling soundtrack by Schaeffer and Stockhausen, among others, as we are guided through spaces that are suspended in time. These are different rooms within a school, ‘paused’ during the summer, waiting to be reactivated by the students’ return. Medio Tiempo is a pioneer in the history of Spanish experimental film, a sophisticated metaphor of childhood within which Muntaner shows an extraordinary sensibility for composition and framing. The result is a nostalgic reminiscence of the first years of school, a time when freedom and play intermingle with fear and a castrating authority that is often only imagined, but equally sinister.

One of the qualities present in Nummulitis (2002-2004), by Isaki Lacuesta, that I find most interesting, is the fact that he renders visible the overwhelming capacity that black and white images have for creating meaning. As if sharing the same texture resulted in an alchemy that turns disparate images into analogous ones. Different scenes from a procession, a televised film, and a group of friends in a bar appear to blend into the same, strange, temporal space, in a simulacrum of continuity.

With similar ends, but completely different means, Mabel Palacín’s in Una noche sin fin (2006-2008) makes use of the two-channel installation to explore the absolute relativity of the perception of time. On one screen actions appear to be slowed down; dense, whilst on the other screen, everything seems somewhat speeded up; frantic. As a viewer, the experience is disquieting, and this is intensified by the theatricality of the installation, where the two screens are facing one another and separated by a bench where the viewer, seated, is forced to look one way or the other. The situations and speeds change from one screen to the other, so that any intention of continuity is constantly frustrated, but somehow encouraged by the repetition of characters and backdrops. The viewer’s capacity for attention, patience, and curiosity are put to the test during the 23 minutes of this work. When it ends, he may not know what he’s seen, but he can be sure he has learned to look at things differently.

'Una noche sin fin' (2006-2008) by Mabel Palacin

In El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó) (2007), Marcelo Expósito plays at undoing history. Looking through a viewfinder, we witness a chronologically inverted itinerary through archive footage that begins during Spain’s first democratic elections after Franco’s death, and end with the beginning of the Civil War in 1936. The inversion of the temporal axis generates questions about the (in) evitability of the events. Is there any escape from history’s repetitive and ruthless cycle? Couldn’t these skulls, found in the excavation of the final scene (remains from the republican soldiers, in fact) belong to the ghosts of a past civilisation, or the dead from the future? The key, in keeping with the inverted structure of the piece, lies at the beginning: the primary audience of this phantasmagoria is a group of children. The only possible salvation for the future therefore lies in knowing how to learn from past mistakes. As Heiner Müller says in the quote that opens this journey through time: memory is not mere contemplation, it is work.

'El Año en que el Futuro Acabó (Comenzó)' (2007) by Marcelo Expósito

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This text was originally written and published in Spanish. You can read the original here.

English translation by Alex Reynolds, whom I would like to thank for her meticulous and considerate work.

HAMACA is a Barcelona-based distribution platform of Spanish media & video art. Explore their catalogue here.

Tye-dye workshop

On arriving to the festival I was greeted by the psych-pop set by The Doozer, a Syd Barrett-esque character from Cambridge that set an accurate tone for the things to come. I then went to the gallery to listen to a talk by the artist Liliane Lijn, the first female artist to work with kinetic text mixing light and text, and who used to hang out in the 1960’s NY with the mighty William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Declining participation on a yoga lesson held at the Wysing’s Stone Circle –a setting that made it all look more like a witchcraft ritual than some sort of sports– I returned to the gallery to catch the devilish performance of the duo 666⁶, which felt like a cross between a concert, a satanic meeting and a horror film.

Later that afternoon the band Diagonal played a fantastic set, one of the highlights of the day for me due to their geeky concoction of prog, acid and kraut rock. The band, hailing from Brighton and formed by six excellent musicians including a saxophonist/singer front man, sounded very tight while unfolding their long and hypnotic compositions that reminded me at some moments of both Can and Neu! At 6,30 it was time to listen to English Heretic, a music project/society which presented a series of song inspired by the writings of the London occultist Kenneth Grant, incorporating original recordings on witchcraft and Satanism. Part séance part gig, it was unlike anything I’ve seen before. By the end of it, all the spectators felt united in a sort cult. Throughout the day, as the music played all around the premises, artists Fay Nicolson and Oliver Smith performed a ‘manifesto-parade’ as well as creating poster display, part of the ongoing curatorial project ‘Constitution of the Damned’.

Alexander Tucker playing at the Boulder Stage

The night slot started with a live set by the post-dubstep lot Old Apparatus and reached its climax with the performance of Demdike Stare. Now, I might not be entirely objective here, since they are probably my favourite band these days, but the Manchester-based duo offered a truly mesmerizing performance. Accompanying their unique mix of dub and hauntological sounds with footage from European erotica and horror films from the 70’s, it was no doubt one of the best juxtapositions of music and image I have seen in quite some time. The festival, a ‘connoiseurs’ programme sadly a little wasted on a very small audience, ended with an unexpected hardcore-gabba techno DJ set by the artists Ed Atkins and Andy Holden. Psychedelia and the occult might be where is at, but it is –perhaps fortunately– still small business.

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An edited version of this review was published on this is tomorrow

Photo Credits: Ruta Balseviciute, courtesy Wysing Arts Centre