Highlights 2014 – Erik Morse
Art Check-in time was set for 2014. Were I compelled to choose from the various interesting trends in arts criticism and curation this year, it was perhaps the use of the hotel as both subject and installation site that offered the most excitement. It began with 'Room Service: On The Hotel In The Arts and Artists in the Hotel' at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, which assembled an impressive survey of (mostly) 20th century art's relationship to the hotel, as subject, artist's workspace, site-specific installation and performance space. Thankfully, the exhibition was not wholly indebted to the modern’s characterization of these interiors as Marc Augé’s non-places; rather, the inclusion of British landscapers such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable and Berlin flaneur/caricaturist George Grosz married painterly figuration to the evocative, surveillance aesthetics of Sophie Calle, and the therapeutic performance art of Ann Liv Young.
Art Check-in time was set for 2014. Were I compelled to choose from the various interesting trends in arts criticism and curation this year, it was perhaps the use of the hotel as both subject and installation site that offered the most excitement. It began with 'Room Service: On The Hotel In The Arts and Artists in the Hotel' at Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden, which assembled an impressive survey of (mostly) 20th century art's relationship to the hotel, as subject, artist's workspace, site-specific installation and performance space. Thankfully, the exhibition was not wholly indebted to the modern’s characterization of these interiors as Marc Augé’s non-places; rather, the inclusion of British landscapers such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable and Berlin flaneur/caricaturist George Grosz married painterly figuration to the evocative, surveillance aesthetics of Sophie Calle, and the therapeutic performance art of Ann Liv Young.
As a generous gratuity to patrons, Staatliche invited Hans Ulrich Obrist to restage one of his earliest successes, ‘Hotel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763’ (1993) as part of the off-site exhibition. Much of Obrist’s literary mythology for Hotel Carlton resided in the pre-War, miniaturist’s aesthetic of hotel artist-dwellers; Robert Walser, Raymond Roussel, Alfred Jarry and Stefan Zweig, who inspired Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic blockbuster this year, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Not to be outdone by its European counterpart, the Los Angeles-based Public Fiction transformed Allen Ruppersberg’s legendary installation piece, Al’s Grand Hotel (1971), from its unlikely Sunset Boulevard origins to a set piece on Roosevelt Island, New York for Frieze Projects.
As centerpieces for Stan Douglas at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Ediburgh, the artist’s The Second Hotel Vancouver (2014) and Hogan’s Alley, 1948 (2013) similarly use the image of the hotel and apartment block as set pieces for both kitchen-sink melodrama and what the OuLiPo referred to as l’infraordinaire. Douglas’ fusion of Hollywood noir and psychogeography in the massive, digital prints, originally used as a stage backdrop, hybridizes Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) and Georges Perec’s Le Vie: Mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual, 1978).
Literature
With the translation of Globes, Spheres II: Macrospherology (Semiotext(e)), the second of a three-part installment of Peter Sloterdijk’s epic Sphären trilogy, English language readers have gained further proof of the German phenomenologist’s status as one of the most insightful theorists of the new millennium. Anticipating the miniaturist turn of the upcoming volume, Foams, which dedicates itself to the apartment dwelling of the modern era, Spheres II chronicles an epic, 2000-year history of globalism, beginning with the pre-Socratic paradigm of the orb and continuing to the trans-oceanic voyages of the colonial regimes. Verbose, rapturous and, at times, recondite beyond comprehension, Sloterdijk’s second volume continues his extraordinary, Heideggerian project into the architectonics of modern space.
Other exciting texts, both new and newly translated/repurposed include Henri Lefebvre’s ‘lost’ listology The Missing Pieces and Julio Cortazar’s Fantomas Versus the Multinational Vampires: An Attainable Utopia, both from Semiotext(e)’s Whitney Biennial collection; debut novelist Elizabeth Mikesch’s stories of girlhood and witchcraft, Niceties: Aural Ardor, Pardon Me (Calamari Press); Georges Perec’s forgotten first novel, Portrait of a Man (Maclehose Press); and Edouard Levé’s Works (Dalkey Archive).
A predecessor of Sloterdijk’s design philosophy, Paul Scheerbart is enjoying a recent renaissance in the English language thanks to the dutiful efforts of publishers such as Wakefield Press and University of Chicago. The latter’s Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader introduced belated translations of the author’s seminal Glass Architecture (1921) and a selection of some of his earliest, fantasy feuilletons. Also included in the collection are valuable essays by Glass Pavilion architect, Bruno Taut, playwright/novelist, Gary Indiana, and artist, Josiah McElheny, who is co-editor of the text. The translation of Hugo Ball’s Dadaist quasi-memoir, _Flametti, or The Dandyism of the Poor _(Wakefield Press), published in 1918 but written contemporaneously to his ‘Dada Manifesto’ and the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire, portrays the theatrical bohemianism of Zurich and underscores Ball’s importance as a creative voice behind the more persistent, historical personalities of Tristan Tzara and Richard Hülsenbeck.
A surprising bookend of sorts to these chronicles of the Wilhelmine era was the belated publication of Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years (Artists Space), a monograph of the 2012 gallery retrospective and an historical artifact in its own right. The quintessential fin-de-siecle artist collective, Bernadette’s critical flirtations with fashion, video, installation and literature in on the verge of 9/11 New York betray an intriguing similarity with the Belle Epoque decadents at the precipice of world war – and the monograph is a gripping, historical text of the last breath of the old century.
Music
Among new musical offerings of the year, certain perennial mainstays released albums worthy of honorable mention. In anticipation of their first album in over 35 years in 2015, The Pop Group’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Freaks R Us) compilation reveals unreleased material from across the band’s brief, but fecund, post-punk career. Scott Walker joined with drone outfit Sunn O))) for Soused (4AD), his heavy metal sequel to the masterful Bish Bosch (2013). in which noisy arias about Marlon Brando hover next to Walker’s lachrymose meditations on sexual bondage and infanticide. Like Soused, Leonard Cohen’s Popular Problems (Columbia) had the slight feeling of footnote to the singer’s previous masterpiece, Old Ideas, but the octogenarian’s 13th album still exudes a poetic prowess and gallows wit denied to most at a quarter of his age. (‘I have to die a little/ Between each murderous thought/ And when I’m finished thinking/ I have to die a lot,’ he sings on the archetypal Cohen lament, ‘Almost Like the Blues.’) See Lana del Rey’s Ultraviolence (Polydor/Interscope) for a deliciously morbid exception to the rule. Finally, Christian Fennesz’s thematic return to his aquatic masterwork Endless Summer with Bécs (Editions Mego) proved how the multiplicity of an artist’s genius can turn on a singular theme with perpetually affecting results.
