Sarah Lucas at The Last Newspaper, New Museum
This text was published on the 1st of December 2010 in the issue #9 of THE LAST TIMES, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
SEX SPORT-TRAIT SARAH
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso on ‘The Last Newspaper’ work ‘Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous’ by British artist Sarah Lucas.
A seriously overweight woman pouts and poses across a newspaper’s double-page spread. She frolics, almost naked, apparently feeling sexy. “My borin’ hubby bleats about my weight … Now I want someone who loves feeling’ folds of flesh in the sack”, she is quoted as saying. The story of this woman being offered for sale by her husband was originally published on November 25, 1990 in The Sunday Sport, an infamous English tabloid that specialises in the bizarre, amusing readers with outrageous stories including alien abductions and freakish sexual revelations.
Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous (1990) is a simple photocopy enlargement of these pages, which also include an article ridiculing ‘Arty-Farty Students’ being offered degree courses in Madonna studies, as well as advertising for sex phone lines. Made by Sarah Lucas when she was a 28 year-old emerging artist in London – just two years after the seminal group exhibition Freeze, yet before her 1993 venture with Tracy Emin (The Shop) and perhaps her most renowned work, Au Naturel (1994) – it belongs to a series of works in which she uses British tabloids as her raw material. The act of photocopying the pages of a tabloid and placing the results in the gallery highlighted for the artist, the “hypocritical morality being served up daily to most people in this country”. It was also an indication of what was possible for a young woman artist with limited resources, making work with whatever she had at hand and striving to articulate society’s class and gender anxieties. Already then, Lucas had directed her gaze at Britain’s working class everyday life via her assemblages of found objects (newspapers, kebabs, oranges, mattresses, etc.) – works with a seemingly obnoxious sense of humour. Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous (1990) continues to speak, some twenty years later, about the ‘formless’ outlets of perversion and excess that swarm about in our social and cultural landscape, simultaneously suppressed and served up as mass entertainment.
Visitor taking a picture of Sarah Lucas’ Fat, Forty and Flabulous (1990). Photocopy on paper. Copyright the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London. Photo: Latitudes
What was most interesting about Lucas’ work when she first started to exhibit in London, at the artist-run space City Racing and the Saatchi Gallery, was that its irreverence and morality relentlessly challenged the established notions about the kind of art that was expected from a female artist. It wasn’t the explicit and obsessive use of genital symbols or the sexual innuendo that flooded her pieces what made her work risqué. It was its merciless gaze – and the absence of any clichéd feminist message – that made it exciting, funny and, most importantly, truly empowering. She was appropriating the brashness, sarcasm and macho attitudes of her masculine peers, yet without betraying her gender for a second.
Admittedly, Lucas’s apparently anti-intellectual approach doesn’t seem to lend itself too well to theory. Yet as with many of the artist’s subsequent works, Fat, Forty and Flab-ulous brings to mind the ideas explored by the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva a decade earlier in The Powers of Horror (1980). Heavily influenced by the writings on subversion by Bataille and Lacan, this seminal essay uncovers what lies behind our fascination with the grotesque, the dirty and the obscure: things we are systematically meant to abhor. Lucas unravels such mechanisms and presses all their buttons.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST TIMES is edited by Latitudes
Independent Gazette: Damián Ortega and Can Altay
This review was published on the 24h of November 2010 in the issue #8 of THE LAST JOURNAL, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
INDEPENDENT GAZETTE
Lorena Muñoz-Alonso reports from London on two newspaper-inspired exhibitions: ‘The Independent’ (Damián Ortega at The Curve, Barbican) and ‘Can Altay: The Church Street Partners’ Gazette’, The Showroom.
The walls of the gallery are dotted with twenty-two newspaper clippings pinned in plastic pockets, those cheap ones we all use when we feel the urge of being organized. Twenty-two sculptures, made just in the span of a month in response to those selected news, are scattered on the floor, leaning against the walls and hanging from the ceiling of the Barbican’s Curve gallery. This is Mexican artist Damián Ortega’s current project, titled The Independent after the center-left British newspaper that has been his main focus of attention. For this very particular commission, he set himself the challenge of creating a sculpture a day during a month, mimicking the daily working pattern of a newspaper.
Even though the brief and the timeline that he imposed on himself were strict, they haven’t taken over the art itself. The resulting pieces are still very ‘Ortega-esque’, each of them inhabiting his particular universe, always fascinated with the readymade, and the potential of the everyday life of objects. There are also a few pieces which evidence his ongoing interest in layering and deconstructing such objects. Architecture Without Architects is a fantastical living room suspended from the ceiling like a Magritte painting come to life. The accompanying publication of the show is, fittingly, a newspaper called The Independent.
Damián Ortega’s Architecture Without Architects at The Independent exhibition. Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery. Photo: Eliot Wyman (2010)
On the other side of London at The Showroom a completely different artistic practice related to the newspaper is being staged. One whose goal is the production of a single edition newspaper: The Church Street Partners’ Gazette, which will see the light on the very last day of the show at the end of November. I open the gallery doors to step into a space that resembles a local community meeting space, which is, in fact, the aim of the Turkish artist Can Altay. Yet on the morning of my visit it feels quite empty and a bit desolate. A table and sixteen plastic chairs await to be activated by one of the meetings that take place every one or two weeks. The walls are covered with print-outs of the newspaper in process and twenty-six photographs that depict picturesque scenes of The Showroom’s local area, especially the nearby Church Street, the main focus of the artist due to its lively market and mixed community. In keeping with Altay’s practice a wooden structure – an ephemeral, improvised architectural element – serves both as a space organizer and as a display device, where a local sign maker by the name of Joan of Art has painted messages taken from previous discussions and meetings.
The Church Street Partners’ Gazette is certainly an experimental and socially engaged work. But so local it its focus – and so dependent on those meetings with local spokespersons and communities to ‘come alive’ – that the regular non-local visitor may well feel that they can’t really participate. There is a sense of opacity, of not belonging to that community, and there is not much else in that space to distract the viewer from that fact. Damián Ortega’s show, on the other hand, doesn’t rely on any kind of participation in the making of the works, but the currency of the subjects plus the everydayness of the materials give the show a very accessible and universal feel. Shouldn’t that be the true aim of communication?
Installation view of Can Altay’s exhibition ‘Church Street Partners’ Gazette’. Courtesy: the artist and The Showroom, London. Photograph: (c) Daniel Brooke (2010)
However, a key aspect to approaching these shows is realizing how they point towards a current phenomena than can’t be overlooked: the gallery or museum as (mass) media producer. The weekly newspaper in which you are reading these words is an obvious good example, but far from an isolated one. The London art scene has witnessed in these autumn months an explosion of media-related projects within art spaces. Alongside the Barbican and The Showroom exhibitions one could also mention the Charlie Woolley’s Radio Show project at SPACE. Woolley turned the gallery of SPACE into a fully-operating radio studio where he broadcast a show five days a week for seven weeks. With a plethora of artists, writers, musicians, djs and comedians joining Woolley live, the Radio Show became a platform for collaboration and expanded dialogue. And Auto Italia, an artist run space in Southeast London, has just finished a five week run of one-hour transmissions, broadcast live on the internet, courtesy of the multifaceted artistic collective LuckyPDF. What does this (recurrent) fascination of the gallery and museum with media forms really mean? What does it saying about the current art scene and how it is consumed? More information coming soon to your local newsstand.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST JOURNAL is edited by Latitudes
Damián Ortega’s The Independent is on view at the Barbican’s Curve Gallery, London, until the 16th oj January 2011.
Truth Study? Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans
This interview was published on the 10th of November 2010 in the issue # 6 of THE LAST OBSERVER, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
IS THIS TRUE OR NOT?
‘The Last Observer’ London correspondent Lorena Muñoz-Alonso meets Wolfgang Tillmans, whose table top installation ‘Truth Study center’ is featured in ‘The Last Newspaper’.
A door buzzer is activated on a busy street of East London on a rainy Saturday evening; I push and find myself in Between Bridges, the non-profit gallery space Wolfgang Tillmans opened in 2006 to show artists that “are overlooked in the London scene”. (The current exhibition is by Gerd Arntz, a fairly unknown German artist and activist of the Weimar era.) I climb the spiral staircase to the studio and Tillmans welcomes me upstairs and offers me tea. He is tired but talkative, having just returned from Nottingham, where he has been installing his works for the British Art Show 7. His studio is a huge open space, full of desks and wooden tables, where newspapers and magazines pile under the neon lights. “Last year at the Venice Biennale I had four table works. And I had a whole room table installation (Space, Food, Religion, 2010) at the Serpentine Gallery show. But having The Last Newspaper and the Nottingham show opening in the space of three weeks has reactivated the Truth Study center project in a very significant way”, he says while pointing to the build up of world-wide printed media that towers on every surface of the studio.
What is or are the origins of your Truth Study Center works?
The project started in 2005 with a show in London at Maureen Paley which coincided with the publication of my third book for Taschen, also titled Truth Study center. It was a contradiction, somehow, because the contents of the book had nothing to do with the tables. That first show included sixteen tables. Then, in 2006, I had a big mid–career survey in the U.S., a show that toured between Chicago, Los Angeles and Mexico City which included a twenty-four-table installation. In 2007 I had a show at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover where I showed thirty tables, which then become part of the exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. So there have been two very big installations so far. The U.S. installation was altered from city to city; I was adding and adapting the contents depending on the context.
So the way you can work on the tables is quite quick and reactive?
Yes, pretty much. The tour was a year and a half long, and they were heady times in the American political arena, so it was interesting being able to incorporate all that to the work. There was a particular piece that was then published in The Guardian called ‘Ten easy steps for a fascist America’ by Naomi Wolf – a very heavy statement indeed. It was very striking and beautifully illustrated, so I made a table incorporating that on the spot. That table piece is again in The Last Newspaper exhibition. Americans don’t really like foreigners to criticise them. They are good at self-criticism, but the moment it’s a foreigner who does it, they can get defensive. But Wolf is American, so that couldn’t be accused of coming from European prejudices.
Installation view of Wolfgang Tillmans’, Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Benoit Pailley. Courtesy New Museum.
How did you begin the process of incorporating the table as a new element in the vocabulary of your practice?
It actually started in 1995 with a show at Portikus in Frankfurt where I used five flat cabinets to show images I had published in magazines. Also in the Turner Prize show in 2000 I used the same idea of laying out elements on a flat horizontal surface, so it was already settling within my practice then. While I was editing the Truth Study center book I came to this really obvious realisation that all my work happens on a table. A table provides a space for a loose arrangement, where things are laid out in a certain way, but can be easily rearranged. On a wall you have to pin or tape the stuff, but a table is more fluid. There is clarity and complete contingency at the same time.
And why did you start using newspapers as raw material in your work?
I had worked with found newspapers before, in the ‘Soldiers’ series (1999). I have to confess I am a bit of a newspaper junkie and have collected them since childhood. I often think that a day’s newspaper contains the essence of the whole world. But I guess that around 2002–2004, the years post 9/11, a clearer picture of the world we live in emerged – all the insanity that surrounded us – after what had seemed like the less politically charged 1990s. I was enraged and concerned and spending a lot of time reading media and thinking about all these different claims to the truth, ‘the big truth’ which was the ultimate justification behind all that violence and those wars. I realised that all the problems that the world faces right now arise from men claiming to possess absolute truths.
So hence the name…
Of course it would be very desirable to have a completely neutral ‘Truth Study center’, but that will never be possible. So even though it has this big title, it is not claiming to be delivering truth, but rather looking at all these different, opposed truths. But it is not at all saying that everything is relative or subjective. I do think there are certain truths that are not negotiable, that some events and attitudes are wrong, and I am straightforward about in the work, which I think is precisely what makes it interesting. It takes a moral stand on the one hand, but on the other is always aware of its absurdity and of its extreme limitations. So it presents all these issues, like the impact of AIDS denial in Africa or the question of the existence or not of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – the whole war came about from a single question: is this true or not?
Are the tables fixed in their arrangements and subjects?
The tables are, or can be, pieces in their own right. They do not always have to come in the same installations. But it’s the same as with a wall installation, when I think a grouping really works, I try to maintain it. But the working process is quite flexible and not set in stone.
Detail of Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Latitudes.
So you color–photocopy all the newspaper that are on the tables, which is already a process of translation in itself…
Very much so. That is the essential part of the visual composition, because we have been talking a lot about content but of course if the table works were not interesting to look at, they wouldn’t have an artistic justification. I use the color photocopy because of aesthetic reasons, but also because the color copy is amazingly permanent, as opposed to newspaper. I couldn’t use the original newspaper cause it wouldn’t look good after a year. But media-wise there are also real things, like a lottery ticket, a bus ticket, a vegetable wrapper…
You have a very strong relationship to printed matter. You have even said: “Everything I do happens on paper”, which I think is a simple but very meaningful realisation, with a lot of implications…
I have a double interest in The Last Newspaper show. Not only do I use newspapers and magazines as material, but also my work is heavily featured in printed media and I use media as both generator and distributor of my work.
What are the main subjects of your tables in The Last Newspaper?
There is one table about soldiers and war, one about religion, another about the depiction of war, games and violence on the internet. I also have some images of airlines and the experience of flying and there is one about Americans’ attitudes to food. There are a lot of critical messages there, but you could find all of them in very mainstream publications. Information and criticality is there for everyone, which is also one of issues I want to highlight in this work.
Detail of Truth Study Center (NY), 2010. Wood, glass, and mixed media. Courtesy the artist and Andrea Rosen Gallery, © Wolfgang Tillmans. Photo: Latitudes.
Is this series your outlet for political expression?
There is definitely a bit of that. I use these works to make statements on subjects that I feel very strongly about but that I can’t or don’t want to tackle in my photographs. At the same time, though, the reason why I started to work with images from the very beginning was because I wanted to be involved with what was going on the world. Questions of taste or of beauty have always been politically charged for me. Do you find two men kissing disgusting or beautiful? That is a question of aesthetics but also of politics. I’ve always had this very strong awareness that every freedom that I enjoy as a gay person has been hard fought for by many people before me, and that gave me a great sense of public responsibility. I think every person counts. I might be very traditional in that sense, but I really think it does matter.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST OBSERVER is edited by Latitudes
Wolfgang Tillmans’ work is currently part of The British Art Show 7, touring throughout 2011 across the UK:
Nottingham Contemporary 23 October 2010 – 9 January 2011
Hayward Gallery 16 February – 17 April
Glasgow 28 May – 21 August
Plymouth Arts Centre 17 September – 4 December
Time Capsules: The Poetic and Politics of Memory in Art
This is the essay I wrote for my first curated exhibition ‘Time Capsules’ (November 2010, London). All the images are part of the exhibition catalogue, designed by David G. Uzquiza, a.k.a Maison Texas
“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality and that the past only exists as a present souvenir.”
Jorge Luis Borges ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ 1
‘Time Capsules’ is a meditation on the work of art as representation of time and the pervasive personal memories that haunt the artist when he/she faces a new project. It seems to me that, for a good number of years now, the category of space has been the main focus for many artists, curators and critics. Transnationalism, globalization, liminality, the architectural sublime and the production of space have all been hallmarks in recent artistic practice and theoretical discussion. But space feels, somehow, like a fixed, closed category. You are either here or there, maybe moving between these two points.
But how can one be sure of what time is he actually wading in? When a human being can be considered nothing but an accumulation of memories from the past –sometimes a burden, sometimes a blessing— and a formless set of desires and anxieties for the future, who is to decide what belongs to the present and what does not? The flexibility, intangibility and unattainability of time delicately address everything that is mysterious and unpredictable about life. We are always fighting time and losing the battle. Trying to stop it as to preserve a moment of elation, or trying to retrieve that past experience of bliss. Or maybe we spend our days trying to predict the future, oscillating between optimism and despair, but nevertheless always failing to work out what could happen. Anticipating what will never materialize.
Bearing all this in mind, I started getting increasingly infatuated by the idea of the ‘artist’s memory’. Works fuelled by personal nostalgia, constructed from the recycling and transformation of images, traumas and souvenirs from the past, became rare findings, almost obsessions for me. The conflicts between the individual memory and the collective unconscious, and between the autobiographical with the fictitious appeared essential to me; those interstitial realms fertile grounds for many interesting artistic phenomena. In that sense, the works of practitioners such as Lindsay Seers, David Noonan, Alice Anderson, Simon Fujiwara or Sarah Turner became beacons for me. Often from an extremely subjective perspective, the more personal these works become the more universal they feel. Moreover, when one is sure to be witnessing a piece of reality-cum-art the shadow of doubt takes over: are these works put together with shredded memories or are they fictional altogether?
Attuned, thus, to the weight of time and how it related to the subjectivity of the artist as a path to universalism, I decided to specifically explore in this exhibition the work of art as ‘time container’, instead of an ‘idea container’ (which could be considered the classic artistic approach). The time capsule came immediately to mind as an essentially problematic tool to encapsulate and preserve time. The reasons for it being problematic are manifold. Even though it is still being used nowadays in serious institutions like NASA, it is mostly a device which appears in non-serious contexts, related to the esoteric or naïve, childlike worlds. Another problem is that it seems an object destined to fail. How can a compilation of little objects, paper cuttings and material stuff even attempt to convey an era or unique moment, given the complexity of life’s experiences and their representation?
Three peripheral subjects –the ruins, cinema and ghosts– were quickly incorporated to my research on the representation of time. Ruins embody the exact point where space and time collide and become one, a testimony of how one affects the other. A ruin belongs to the past, we can almost see the ghosts of the former tenants that inhabited that space and the dramas that were staged between those crumbling, decaying walls. On the other hand, cinema and the moving image also expanded my research. Especially the figure of Andrei Tarkovsky, who came up with (and wrote profusely about) the metaphor of film-making as ‘sculpting with time’. Film has traditionally been understood as the perfect vehicle for conveying time. But what happens with other forms of visual or aural arts? Are they qualified to portray the subtleties of passing time? Can they successfully extract and transmit the slippery characteristics of personal memories?
Tarkovsky is, no doubt, an author haunted by the desire of retrieving the past. Most of his films, like ‘Mirror’, ‘Solaris’ and ‘Nostalghia’, explore directly the ideas of recurring memories and how they materialize in our present. “Time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either”2. Another key reading for this show was Jacques Derrida’s ‘Specters of Marx’3, which was to become the seminal text for a new cultural critical trend called ‘hauntology’. In said book Derrida talks at length about the spectre, or ghost, as a non-object, a non-present presence. Where Derrida speaks of ghosts and the politics of memory, Tarkovsky speaks of nostalgia and poetics of memory. It all amounts, as far as ‘Time Capsules’ is concerned, to the question of re-accessing the past, its remembrances and souvenirs, some more welcome than others, but all of them haunting the artist and, thus, his/her audience.
The time capsule invokes, evokes or convokes the ‘Other’. For the audience, the invoked ‘Other’ (a person, a thing, a place, a feeling) of the artist may remain unknown. Thanks to that, the artist’s ‘Other’ morphs into the spectator’s ‘Other’. If that happened, we would be opening a successful time capsule. What is the fate of the time capsules that fail?
The aforementioned conceptual problems associated with time capsules (lack of consideration in intellectual circles, childlike connotations and the difficulty of the task they face) are the starting point of the exhibition and taken as exciting artistic departures rather than conceptual dead ends. Thus, I decided to work by commissioning, inviting artists to freely respond to said proposal of the artwork as a time capsule by creating a new piece. The tensions generated by these problems are meant to feed into the works, to make both the artists and the viewers reflect on the success or failure in fulfilling the commissioning brief and, most importantly, if that has any relevance in terms of the artistic experience at all.
The one piece that existed prior to the exhibition is David Ferrando Giraut’s ‘Ruin Builder’ (2008), but it tackles the issues at stake in such a strong way that I felt it was inevitable for it to be part of the exhibition. ‘Ruin Builder’ explores the notion of technology as a time-warping device, offering in the present time an event, experience or person that belongs to the past. The idea of the ghost (something or sometime present in absence) haunts Ferrando Giraut’s practice, and obsolete (or ‘retro’) technology is his favoured way to represent that rupture within the contemporary realm. The installation is formed by twelve found objects, twelve vinyl records, plus a female voice recorded also on vinyl by the artist himself. The twelve LP records hanging on the walls become both an anthropological display of ruins and a glimpse of somebody’s personal memorabilia. The recording, an attractive ghostly voice that addresses the listener with strange familiarity and places herself at some point before 1982, tells us about different moments in time colliding through technology, a metadiscourse on the actual experience taking place.
anak&monoperro are deeply invested in the healing qualities of art. Art becomes a tool to explore and improve the life of both the artist and the audience, via catharsis, play or meditation. Almost atavistic in its symbolic attitude, the work of this duo inserts an ancient use of art, that of the magic and the ritual, within a very contemporary and conceptual practice. ‘The Treasure of Fears’ (2010) is the work that makes most literal use of the idea of the ‘time capsule’, juxtaposing it to the figure of the ‘hidden treasure’, also buried and made of physical objects heavily charged with symbolic meaning. ‘Treasure of Fears’, as much of anak&monoperro’s work, sits in a space between the performance or action, its documentation and the subsequent display of a resulting object. They always place higher value in the action itself, in the powers and sensations that were unleashed there. In that sense, they are highly idealist, almost playing alchemists, rather than artists. In ‘Treasure of Fears’ the remainder, a framed map where the treasure can be found, places the whole responsibility upon the viewer’s shoulder. It is up to him/her to buy the map, travel to a mysterious landscape and unearth and defeat his/her primal fears. It is up to the viewer to believe, to purchase this ticket to freedom as a piece of art.
For this show Julia Mariscal has created ‘The Mirror Says’ (2010), a complex installation comprising several parts (sculptures, kaleidoscopes and drawings), in which she plays with the archetype of the time capsule itself. This is a work that draws heavily in psychoanalysis figures, such as the ‘I’, the ‘Other’ and the world of ‘Dreams’ and how they converse with the Rorschach test as an almost theatrical backdrop. While the artist’s (I) main concern is to prevail in time, driven by the needs of her ego, the ‘Other’ (the viewer) is a presence and a force within the production and reception of the work that has to be acknowledged and incorporated into the process. If the work of art is a time capsule made by the artist in order to triumph over time, it will be down to the viewer to open it and make sense out of it, in a future time frame that Mariscal places within a dream, which she identifies with the ‘mirror’. Instead of loading the work with concrete time, she engages in a self-reflective game: what are her intrinsic aspirations as an artist while making the work, and her own projection of the situation in which it will be opened. Mariscal’s practice, always profoundly engaged in the process and physicality of the materials she painstakingly selects, attempts here yet another ‘fold’, one of her signature strategies.
Pablo A. Padilla Jargstorf’s ‘Resonance of Things to Come’ (2010) is a space built within the gallery. A sound installation where real-time and recorded sound, children’s tales and quantum physics co-exist, creating different time frames of different people that coincide as remembrances of something that never really happened. Inspired by the mathematical concepts of the ‘Hilbert space’ and the ‘multiverse theory’, architect-cum-artist Padilla Jargstorf explores the idea of the relativity/subjectivity of time experience through sound. And if there is an acoustic phenomenon with the potential to confuse and expand the perception of both space and time it is, surely, the echo: the reflection of sound. Keenly interested in the phenomenological experience of art, Padilla Jargstorf has created a room for us to enter and explore, in what he compares to entering a hotel room for the first time and envisioning all the events that took place there, before one’s arrival. To facilitate (or to complicate, maybe) these ‘unknown visions’, he has covered the walls and floors of the shed with shattered mirrors (again, the idea of reflection), pictures, letters, flowers and other types of debris and memorabilia, producing an uncanny sense of trespassing coupled with a growing curiosity.
The idea of the reflection, of the mirror, is recurrent in all the pieces of the exhibition, especially in the works of Mariscal and Padilla Jargstorf. The mirror as a reflection of the artist within the piece, but also as a distorting device, warping the given time-frame and the perception of reality, providing multiple viewpoints. In keeping with the influence of Tarkovsky upon the preparation of this exhibition as well as its relation with the shown pieces, ‘Mirror’, his masterpiece from 1974 will be screened, as a conceptual backdrop. As the film critic Ryland Walker Knight says: “Instead of simply reflecting, Tarkovksy’s ‘Mirror’ refracts light through the prism of memory, itself a condensation of time. Its editing performs an odd alchemy of memory that proliferates identities as much as converges them. Like in a prism, or kaleidoscope, mirrors are everywhere in the film (adorning walls or registering in windows) forever multiplying realities and planes, forever furthering the refractive inward reflection, or meditation.”
‘Time Capsules’ attempts to unfold this plethora of situations, identities and memories too, but it does so without turning to the moving image. The five artists have channelled time through very different paths: sound, installation, drawing and sculpture. Let’s see where they will take us. Or shall we say, when?
London, October 2010
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1 Jorge Luis Borges: ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’
From ‘Ficciones’ Emecé Editores Buenos Aires, 1956
2 Andrei Tarkovsky: ‘Sculpting with Time. Reflections on the Cinema’ University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986
3 Jacques Derrida: ‘Specters of Marx’ Routledge London, 1994
4 Rayland Walker Knight: ‘Making the Mortal Immortal’. ‘Reverse Shot Journal’. Issue 20, 2007
Time Capsules private view: 4th of November 2010 6-9pm, London
I am delighted to present my first curated exhibition, titled ‘Time Capsules: The Poetics and Politics of Memory in Art’.
It will be on from the 4th to the 14th of November 2010 at The Gallery Soho (125 Charing Cross Street, WC2H 0EW).
The private view is the 4th of November, 6-9pm, and I would be thrilled if you could join me for such a special occasion!
A catalogue will be published to accompany the exhibition and I will upload some of its contents here soon. You can find some more information in the e-flyer below.
Thanks!
Lorena
‘Time Capsules’ is supported and part of the festival ‘Spain Now! A season of Arts & Culture from Spain’
Thanks to David G. Uzquiza for the art direction of the catalogue and e-flyer.
Double Trouble. Interview with Pierre Bismuth
This interview was published on the 5th of October 2010 in the issue # 1 of THE LAST POST, the free weekly newspaper and incremental catalogue of The Last Newspaper exhibition at the New Museum, New York.
OUR LONDON CORRESPONDENT LORENA MUNOZ-ALONSO CAUGHT UP WITH “THE LAST NEWSPAPER” ARTIST (AND OSCAR WINNER) PIERRE BISMUTH ON A CAFE TERRACE IN BELLEVILLE, PARIS
You are taking part in ‘The Last Newspaper’ at the New Museum in New York with several of your pieces from the ‘Newspaper’ series that you made between 1999 and 2001. Is the series still ongoing?
The ‘Newspaper’ series is definitely an ongoing project. I actually never finish a series; I never close a period, which is kind of complicated because it is somehow like having lots of children and having to be a good father to all of them. I still have a newspaper piece that I need to do, and I very often buy two newspapers because I feel there is always the potential for a piece there.
So tell me a bit about the principle of the series
The ‘Newspaper’ series is all about the duplication of the image. Duplication is an important method because I think it completely warps the moment of understanding. The images do not refer anymore to reality but they refer to each other, as if one image was copying the other. As a viewer you tend to forget they are addressing some real matter, you just wonder, why are there two of these? So it is a short circuit in your head.
Pierre Bismuth, First human embryo is cloned, say scientists (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Does this isolation of the image from reality account for why you always focus on really iconic social or political news, like the Sarah Payne murder or the first clone of a human embryo, for example? Is it to make even more blatant this rupture with understanding?
The reason why I started to do this series was that I was at a moment of my life when I had been doing lots of film and I really wanted to stop using video or film for a while, even though I still wanted to explore the idea of duration, of time-based work. So I thought, okay, if I put two images together, I am addressing the idea of duration as well. Two images are frames, anyway. I like this idea of suspending a moment.
At the same time, I think that this series very openly tackles recurrent concerns of your practice, like issues of perception, how we perceive and process information and how to complicate those paths.
Agreed. At the same time I realized, in a more formal kind of way, that one image on top of other refers to a sequence in a film, and one image next to the other refers to stereoscopy. The sequence is the idea of the same moment with a fraction of second of difference. Stereoscopy is the same moment with a slight difference in angle.
Also what excited me a lot about this work was having to look at reality, having to have contact with it, because when you are an artist you tend to live very much in your own world. So to me this series is also the perfect excuse to keep in touch with what is going on in the world. And when you look at the work, it also gives you information about the context in which the piece was made, and I find that very interesting.
‘Newspaper’ series ready for hanging at the New Museum. Photo: Latitudes
It becomes a sort of time capsule, which is something that interests me a lot, the idea of preserving and retrieving time. But speaking of time, you started this series in the late 1990s, when the internet was not used on the same scale as nowadays. We can definitely say that the way we access and consume information has changed due to the internet, and because the New Museum show is called ‘The Last Newspaper’, I am wondering if you think the newspaper as such is in decline?
Do you think the curators have titled the show like this, implying it is in decline?
I am not sure about that, I am just wondering…
I don’t believe it is the end of an era for newspapers, I don’t think they will be that quickly replaced. It seems that the internet it is killing television at a faster rate, because I think somehow that newspapers will always do a different job at informing people than a website. Did television kill the newspaper? I don’t think so.
You might have a point there. But going back to your practice, why is the idea of repetition so important in your work?
I see repetition as a disappointment device that forces you to deal with what was already there. I’m fighting against this idea that artists have to present something new every time.
And why are you so interested in disappointment?
Because I think it has a real potential for emancipation. When you stop believing that something is going to save you from something, you have to start dealing with what you have and making something out of it, rather than thinking that something is going to come and change everything for you.
That is quite interesting because as an artist this anti-idealist attitude pretty much puts you in the position of questioning everything. The agency of art, to begin with.
True, but is that a bad thing?
Pierre Bismuth, New ground in battle (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
No, I don’t think so.
I just don’t like art that tries to take you somewhere else. I have a problem with art that aims at providing entertainment and dreams. People don’t need art to dream. Everyone is dreaming already. Everyone is already creative. The artist doesn’t have the exclusivity of being creative in society.
So what is the privilege of the artist then?
The artist has a special way of addressing questions with a special ability with form. Even if contemporary art has moved on from appraising technique like it was in the Classical period, I still think that an artist is someone who knows how to deal with things formally. An artist is someone who knows how to do things. An artist has to make questions about reality within a particular historical and artistic context. And an artist also has probably a particular logic and irrationality in the way he or she addresses his or her own questions about reality.
So which would be your own set of questions?
How to extract freedom from systems that seem to be closed and regulated? How to find room for manoeuvre in situations that seem already determined?
Your newest work, presented at Bugada & Cargnel gallery, in which you copy the gallery desk and put it on a stage, is that some form of institutional critique?
Yes, in a certain way it is.
Are you interested in Institutional Critique?
Well, I was interested the some of the artists that were doing it back in the days, yes.
How successful do you think it was, and I am thinking of Hans Haacke or Michael Asher for instance, in terms of gradually being co-opted by the institution itself?
Well, I recently read an interview with Pete Townsend where he was being asked about political music and songs, and if they’d had any practical effect, and I really liked his answer. He said, “I am not sure how successful it was in terms of actually changing things, but the music was definitely reflecting the fact that people had those issues”, and I think it is exactly the same with art. It’s already good enough if art can simply show that some people have some problems with some issues. It records the fact that a problem was addressed at a certain time, which is quite something already.
Repetition and questions of perception are concepts very often employed in music theory. Is music a discipline you are interested in?
Music was my first love. I should have been a proper musician. I think I didn’t study music early enough in life. But when I am not doing art most of my time is devoted to listening to music and reading about music. And I think that popular music has not been historicized to the same degree as contemporary art, so there is lots of room there for research and discussion. It is not an overcrowded territory.
Pierre Bismuth, 500 Marines (2001). Courtesy: The artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris
Yes, definitely, and there is also lots of links between the two fields, like all that happened in New York in the 1960s, with Fluxus, John Cage, Tony Conrad…
Yes, fantastic! I love that entire scene.
Are you working again with film? [Pierre Bismuth won an Oscar with Charlie Kauffman for the script of ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’]
Yes, I am working on a film right now, but it is difficult to find the right people to work with. Are you sure your machine is working? [Pointing at the digital recorder]
Well, I hope it is. I love this recorder. It’s new and works great.
I have one as well. I use it to record my wife’s dreams. She has amazing dreams and, moreover, an amazing and funny way of remembering them and telling them. I myself have two strange recurring dreams. One happens when I am sleeping in hotels but I think-dream I am at home. I wake up and, because I don’t recognize the room, I think someone has changed all the furniture while I was asleep.
That sounds like one of your works!
Yes! And the other dream is exactly the other way around: I sleep at home and I wake up being sure I am somewhere else and that someone has recreated my very own room while I was asleep. There is always this moment in which I wake up and I marvel about the whole repetition. Again, it’s all about repetition, the repetition of my own space. And it is also funny how the brain works. If it looks like home, why do you have to think it is somewhere else? But you do. It is extremely complicated.
It’s like when you travel a lot and for a minute you don’t know where you are when you wake up the morning. It is quite disturbing. Let’s wrap up by talking about patterns. Your practice seems to be very focused on patterns, somehow imposing on yourself a set of instructions, restraining the options, if you like.
Yes, I don’t like having to make choices. I prefer when there are limitations. It’s probably because I don’t know what I want. What I surely know is that, on an ethical level, I don’t want to be part of the culture industry. It seems that nowadays art is more and more considered as a form of leisure industry, which is not at all why I started making art. If I can avoid that, even ending by doing an extremely boring exhibition, I will be happy to do that. It is not my job to amuse you.
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The Last Newspaper is on view from the 6th of October 2010 till the 9th of January 2011 at at the New Museum, New York.
THE LAST POST is edited by Latitudes
Pierre Bismuth’s exhibition at Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, continues until the 6th November 2010.
Fiona Banner: Harriet and Jaguar
Many of us may have already seen images of Fiona Banner’s Harriet and Jaguar, her recently unveiled 2010 Duveens Commission. But this is a work that truly excites and overwhelms when experienced in direct confrontation. Two fighter jets scattered in the neo-classic sculpture galleries of Tate Britain could seem like a simple ready-made statement, but the complexities they arise are far for predictable. One is immediately surprised by the beauty of the objects themselves, like giant toys in a theme park, only to remember that they are real war machines, the ones that blow entire blocks and schools, the ones that kill soldiers and civilians alike. The ones that cause the deaths we see in the news on television.
Fiona Banner. Harrier and Jaguar 2010 © Fiona Banner. Photo: Tate 2010
War is one of Fiona Banner’s artistic obsessions and the fighter jet iconography is by now a permanent fixture in her body of work. But there is a second recurrent subject for her, which she often juxtaposes to the first: porn. Both issues are usually regarded as macho realms where males can engage in power games, but Banner explores these fetishist universes in order to understand why she (and, by extension, the rest of humanity) is so fascinated by the same things she is supposed to abhor. In this quest to expose how guilty pleasures operate, these magnificent fighter jets –beautiful killing machines– have the same contradictory and problematic appeal than any murky sexual practice that we might want to contemplate only in our deepest thoughts. Highlighting this fact is one of the strengths and most interesting aspects of Banner’s work.
Harrier and Jaguar are undeniably appealing and easy on the eye. When visiting the installation, I couldn’t help but noticing the free-floating enthusiasm they provoke: people smiling in awe, relentless picture-taking like tourists by the Tour Eiffel (myself included), little kids playing war games around them… Even the way they have been placed feels like a fascinating and precise choreography. The Harrier is hanging vertically from the ceiling in the South Duveens, it’s round nose/beak hovering just a few inches above the floor. The whole jet is framed by the neo-classic columns like a post-nuclear crucifix with feathers painted on it. In the North Duveens the Jaguar lies belly up, as if it had crash-landed after a failed mission. The paint has been removed so its shiny aluminium body reflects the architectural space and the audience like a mirror (“so they can’t detach themselves from it”, explains Banner). The planes obviously arise the comparison between technology and nature. Since they were baptised after animals, one can also reflect on the doomed human desire to achieve god-like abilities: to create things, to destroy others and to control all of them. Fittingly, Harriet and Jaguar look estranged and defeated here, no matter how dangerous and powerful they were not so long ago.
Fiona Banner. Harrier and Jaguar 2010 © Fiona Banner. Photo: Tate 2010
The power of this monumental piece of Fiona Banner lies not in the symbolic introduction of military imaginary inside a museum, but in the objects being two fighter jets that were actually flown by British soldiers in military campaigns, namely the Bosnia and Gulf wars. The successful strategy of Harrier and Jaguar –clearly refusing to patronise the viewer– results, unsurprisingly, in a serious questioning of the agency of political art. There are lots of well-meaning artists whose main concern is to embed political and social issues into the cultural discourse, raise awareness on the ugly truths we don’t want to be reminded of. But once inside the gallery many of these works loose effectiveness. The realities they are denouncing become removed, alienated, fictional, something you can take a souvenir picture of and then forget. And there is a currency in that, both for art world and the mass media, that it is something to be reckoned with.
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Harriet and Jaguar, Fiona Banner’s work for the Duveens Galleries Commission 2010, will be on view at Tate Britain until the 3rd of January 2011
An edited version of this review was published on this is tomorrow in August 2010
Rosa Barba. A Curated Conference
(This review was originally published on www.frieze.com in June 2010)
Manuel Borja-Villel’s latest strategy to reinvent the Museo Reina Sofía sounds just as crisis-friendly as it is promising: inviting a roster of noteworthy artists to curate a series of shows using the permanent collection –18,000 pieces and counting – in what looks like a remake of MoMA’s successful ‘Artist’s Choice’ programme, which began in 1989. Accepting the invitation of Reina Sofía’s chief curator, Lynne Cooke, the Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Rosa Barba has recently inaugurated the first instalment of this new scheme. The resulting exhibition, ‘A Curated Conference’, revolves around the metaphor of the exhibition as a conference, the gallery being the stage and the artists the ‘speakers’.
The idea of the speaker turns out to be quite relevant in this two-room display, as the works communicate in true conversational style. The first room has a big indexical diagram that Barba – who has chosen not to show any of her own work despite being part of the collection – designed as a declaration of intent. Alongside this diagram, subtle and restrained works by Lili Dujourie, Mira Schendel, Francis Alÿs and Joëlle Tuerlinckx fill the small opening room, which feels somehow silent and preparatory.
It’s in the second, main room, where the ‘chatter’ begins: the clatter of 16mm projectors interacts with the muffled soundtracks of video works shown on TV monitors and large screens. Here, the individual legibility of the works is not a priority. All the voices are meant to be experienced as a multiple, uneven clamour. Even the black-screen pauses, the silence between the pieces, have been technically programmed. Nothing is left at random: that David Lamelas’ everyday experiments in To Pour Milk into a Glass (1972) clatter exactly opposite Paul Sharits’ Word Movie (1966), or that Gordon Matta-Clark’s burlesque acrobatics in Clockshower (1973) take place to the relentless hammering soundtrack of Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll (1972) is no coincidence. Two pairs of monitors are scattered in the room, each of them dramatizing their own male-female conversation. In one pair we find Yvonne Rainer versus Guy Debord. On the other set, Valie Export’s Syntagma (1983), a meditation on female representation, cinema and subjectivity is coupled with a selection of Nam June Paik’s videos of early performances.
Out of forty pieces that made the final selection, twenty belong to the moving image format, split between three big screens with DVD projections, four TV monitors and three 16mm projectors right in the middle of the room, each of them placed beside Carl Andre’s Magnesium Copper Plain (1969), a self-reflexive token of Barba’s own use of celluloid projectors as sculptural devices in her practice, highlighted here by its pairing with such an iconic minimalist work. Highly choreographed in phenomenological terms, ‘A Curated Conference’ oozes the nuances and plastic concerns typical of an artist. Barba’s first experience as a curator shows an obvious fondness for the seminal figures of film and video practice from the 1960s and ‘70s, as well as for the ideals of the Fluxus movement. What is not so evident in its first reading is that most of the pieces on display share a humorous or ironic look at both life and art.
Barba has confessed she seized this opportunity to explore works relevant to her practice, so it’s easy to understand why so many works here are in 16mm (some of them transferred to video). But there is more to it than personal delight, as one can sense a sincere engagement in bringing together the collection and its audience, resulting in this subjective and exhilarating lesson in 20th-century art history.
Photography is present through works by Cindy Sherman, Tacita Dean and David Wojnarowicz’s poignant Arthur Rimbaud in New York (Duchamp) (1978–9/2004). And, bearing in mind the institutional context, there is also a selection of Spanish artists, from Picasso and fellow cubist María Blanchard to Antoni Muntadas and the sculptor Cristina Iglesias. We can even witness a silent drama taking place between two works: Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even (The Green Box) (1934), a compilation of the preparatory sketches and notes for his Large Glass, is displayed in a cabinet underneath Louise Bourgeois’ Spider (1994) – the menacing arachnid becoming an ingenious embodiment of Duchamp’s dominant and dangerously erotic ‘bride’.
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All images: Installation views by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso
6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art: Renzo Martens / Mark Boulos
(This review was originally published on this is tomorrow in June 2010)
What Is Waiting Out There is the title of the 6th Berlin Biennale and, if we are to produce an answer based on the works in show, the future looks pretty bleak. That gloomy feeling, which resonates coherently with the current socio-economic landscape, is moreover problematised with the overarching concept: an examination of reality, in an epoch where claims to objectivity have long been abandoned in favour of a fear/fascination with staging and performativity. If mistrust is the defining malaise of contemporary Realism, the show put together by curator Kathrin Rhomberg clearly succeeds: most of the works in the biennale –where politically engaged documentary video and photography are key– raise the right questions for the wrong reasons. Doubt and paradox take over the experience, they accompany the viewer along the exhibition like an unwanted friend.
Access to Danh Vo’s exhibition at the 6th Berlin Biennale, 2010
Out of the more than 40 artists gathered for this 6th edition, there is one player that perfectly exemplifies such controversies. Episode III (2008), by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, is an extremely layered and contradictory work that portrays him as a Fitzcarraldo figure of sorts gone to Congo to preach the assets of impoverishment to the locals, by redefining it a ‘natural resource’. Episode III adopts the form of a gonzo documentary that highlights the ways in which the First World economy profits from the impoverished African regions while launching ineffective aid programs to save face. Martens achieves this by making statements and creating situations that keenly question both the international handling of the issue and the agency of political art itself. However this leaves the viewer feeling that his cynicism has gone too far and reached obscene proportions. Is he not exploiting those poor communities he wants to help, just the same as all those westerners (photographers, aid organisations, politicians) he is pointing at, and then touring the biennale and gallery circuit like a morally superior hero himself?
Renzo Martens, Episode 3, Enjoy Poverty (2008) video still. Courtesy the artist; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Wilkinson Gallery, London, copyright the artist
For all those who Renzo Martens’ ninety minute-long opus leaves an uncomfortable taste in the mouth, there is another work in the Biennale dealing with a related set of issues, which seems to tackle the complexities of African post-colonialism in a subtler way, in what almost feels like balm of intellectual rigour and common sense. Everything That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008) by Mark Boulos borrows its title from a sentence from the Communist Manifesto, and delves into the idea of commodity fetishism applied to the production of oil in Nigeria and its subsequent speculative use in North America. Consisting of a two-channel synchronised video installation, each screen depicts one of the two factions struggling for control of the precious good. On one screen we find the Nigerian guerrillas that seek to alleviate the misery of the region by redistributing the oil resources by all means necessary. The opposing screen shows the theatricality of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the largest exchange of futures and derivatives, where corporations trade goods that don’t even exist yet. That removal of the material stuff –absent from both the land where it comes from and trade where is exchanged– is what Boulos means by ‘melting into air’, the path to metaphysical qualities. The two facing screens, which portray such polarised but inextricable realities, build a dialectic and hypnotic space for thought.
Mark Boulos, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (2008), installation view. Courtesy the artist, copyright the artist
The dialogue and comparison between the works is a productive tool to comprehend a biennale where one could feel the least important thing is the art itself, prioritising political and epistemological endeavours in detriment of sensuous and sensorial enjoyment. But there are quite a few things to be gained by engaging with these apparently aloof works. By negotiating the gap between the socio-political events and how they are represented we are already looking at them differently.
Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence
In the end, it had to be a commercial gallery the responsible for Ana Mendieta’s first solo show in the UK, despite the Cuban’s unquestionable appeal for any well intentioned art institution (being a woman, Latin, with a unique artistic voice and extraordinary doses of charisma). Alison Jacques –a Fitzrovian gallery that also represents the estates of other key 20th century artists like Hélio Oiticica, Robert Mapplethorpe or Hannah Wilke– has offered the London audience a small but very representative survey of the practice of the artist, born in Havana but raised and educated in exile in the States, first in Iowa and then in New York.
Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence at Alison Jacques Gallery, installation shots.
Ana Mendieta’s work is rooted on the most physical and primitive aspects of being: the four elements (earth, fire, water, wind), the human body (blood, sweat, skin, bones) and the rituals (often through the Cuban rites of Santería) to combine these two aspects, i.e. the body becoming nature or, rather, returning to nature. With videos, photographs, drawings and one installation, all produced between 1972 and 1982, this show serves as an introduction to the general audience while also offering the more versed followers an insight to some less-known pieces.
Entering the gallery a close-up of Mendieta’s face welcomes us. The video ‘Sweating Blood’ (1973), her face static, her eyes closed, seems like a meditative piece, where nothing happens, until drops of blood start falling from her forehead staining her face. In the next room, another video titled ‘Burial Pyramid’ (1974) shows the artist breathing in and out of a nest of stones, each breath allowing her to emerge a bit more and us to see her naked body, like both a plant blossoming and a grown up baby being born, painfully, to then die.
Ana Mendieta, Sweating Blood (1973). Super-8 colour, silent film transferred to DVD. Image courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery
The exhibition also provides extensive illustration of her on-going Silueta project through videos, photographs and the installation ‘Nañigo Burial’ (1976), where lit candles melt in the iconic form, and ‘Body Prints’ (1974), a pair of photographs of Mendieta’s bloody body covered with a plastic sheet, which resonate with her notorious piece ‘Rape’, a performance she had staged the previous year, when she invited her teachers and colleagues to her flat in the campus of the University of Iowa. When the group arrived, they found her naked, bent over and tied to a table in the dark, with blood running down her legs. A few days before a fellow girl student had been raped and murdered in the campus and that was Ana’s fearless way of protesting against it.
Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series), 1978. Image courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery
Mendieta’s creative play with death, blood, nature and the female condition –strong and fragile at the same time– seems eerily admonitory of her premature death at the age of 36, in 1985, plunging from the thirty-fourth floor apartment in Greenwich Village that she shared with her husband, the minimal uber-artist Carl Andre. Andre and Mendieta had a volatile on and off relationship that getting married did not soothe. The night of Ana’s death, Andre admitted they had been arguing, but nothing else is known as to what happened in that room. Andre was charged and went to trial, a process that took almost 3 years, when he was finally acquitted. The whole issue is a huge taboo that haunts both Mendieta’s and Andre’s artistic careers, though indeed it tends to be brought up whenever she is mentioned, while for Andre is an obscure past event than is silenced for everyone’s convenience.
The death of Ana Mendieta is a scenario that ticks too many boxes and poses to many questions to be comfortably handled: Domestic abuse; the female/male professional battle of egos; the dark immigrant vs. the White American, the struggling artist vs. the established art star… Unfortunately, such a heavy burden in her personal life risks taking away relevance to her work itself, a maverick combination of land-art, body-art, feminism and the Latin voice, executed with confidence, passion and conviction. Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), still the artist’s artist, keeps fighting the elements even after death.
Ana Mendieta, On Giving Life (1975). Image courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery
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Ana Mendieta: Silueta and Silence at Alison Jacques Gallery, London. 19 February- 20 March 20010
Image credits: Copyright © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, courtesy Galerie Lelong and Alison Jacques Gallery
A version of this review was published on March 2010 in the online magazine this is tomorrow.
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