Looking Back, Looking Forward: Part 3

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Sean O’Toole is a writer and co-editor of CityScapes, a critical journal for urban enquiry. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

2012: A Year of Mountains

Etel Adnan, Untitled (Beirut), 2010, oil on canvas, 24×30cm

Where I live, there is a large mountain: it dwarves the high-rise ghettoes and retro skyscrapers which have taken root on the windy slopes of Table Mountain. I don’t recall seeing many works in 2012 that consciously noticed this craggy natural wonder. Julia Clark’s solo exhibition ‘Booty’ at Whatiftheworld / Gallery included a vintage postcard aggregated into one of her collecting-as-drawing collages. Field Notes from Solitude Island/ No Place, her montage of differently hued blues on a coastal map, delivered what would have been the perfect title for painter Carl Becker and photographer Monique Pelser’s exhibition ‘Our Land’ at the Stellenbosch University Art Gallery. A few years ago, both these artists independently set out to investigate the contemporary sites of JH Pierneef’s constructed modernist pastorals from the late 1920s. In search of something miraculous, the artists discovered very little: sun, dust, ennui, creeping urbanity, the subterfuge of an accomplished painter whose singular vistas were the outcome of composite descriptions, and – of interest to me – unyielding stony mountains.

Last year, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with artist Jacques Coetzer. In 2012, in search of some more miraculous, I visited Japan, where, nearly two centuries ago, Hokusai described his much-quoted 36 views of Mount Fuji. Unlike Bas Jan Ader, whose name I repeatedly heard mentioned as a riposte to the ritual parade of good taste and gilded luxury in yet another bubble year, I decided to cycle – not sail – to Japan’s ‘mighty volcano’, as Lafcadio Hearn once described the nearly symmetrical mountain. In the four days it took me to slowly pedal up to the mountain’s northwestern base from Hamamatsu, where I sighted Fuji for the first time – on a billboard – I never once saw Fuji not obscured by clouds. Recounting his 1898 trip, Hearn similarly complained of a ‘uniformly grey sky’ that rendered Fuji ‘always invisible’. Perhaps the weather was different during Hokusai’s time? The lesson: artists are not cartographers.

In Kassel, which I visited after a detour up the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland – to be rewarded with a kitschy mural depicting Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary wanderer – I learnt that Etel Adnan considers Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, the most important person she has ever met. The wall text accompanying Adnan’s dOCUMENTA 13 display mumbled something about Cezanne, who repeatedly painted Sainte-Victoire Mountain in Aix-en-Provence. Recently I spotted a really bad knock-off of Pierneef’s pointillist study of the Swartberg Pass, a fabled route through the Swartberg mountains northeast of Cape Town. It made me again appreciate the difficulty recording stone with paint or pencil. Am I being un-contemporary? Perhaps. But Adnan showed me that it is okay to think about mountains, even idealise them. They are their own kind of miraculous.

I haven’t been to Koh-e Bâbâ, a mountain range in Afghanistan. Michael Rakowitz may have been. What Dust Will Rise? (2012), his elegant dOCUMENTA 13 installation, suggested he has: the display included rubble from the demolished Buddhas of Bamiyan, patiently carved into cliffs in the mountainous Ḥazārajāt region. The habit of artists to exhibit their collections rarely prompts me to say, ‘Gee whizz!’ Rakowitz’s sombre meditation on architecture, printed books, censorship, idolatry and memory (also the failure thereof) made me ditch Karlsaue Park as a bad idea. I returned to the Fridericianum for a second time, happy to silently stare at his gift of stones.

Robert Griffiths Hodgins, Clem, 1983, oil on board, 60 × 79cm. Courtesy: Strauss & Co, Cape Town

Yes, there were other highlights. They included: Chad Rossouw’s smart autopsy of white nostalgia in his solo exhibition ‘A History of Failure’ at Brundyn + Gonsalves (in which he concocted a fake historical account about a dirigible airship named De la Rey); a handful of Zander Blom’s over many experiments in abstract painting from his solo show at Stevenson; James Webb’s use of Japanese ukiyoe prints, a Henry Moore bronze and commissioned installation by Stephen Hobbs to supplement his semi-survey ‘MMXII’ at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; the appearance at auction in Cape Town of an agreeably unflattering portrait of Clement Greenberg painted in 1983 by the crypto-abstractionist Robert Hodgins; also Barend la Grange and Louis Mabokela’s joint non-verbal response (defacement) of Brett Murray’s painting The Spear (2012), a flaccid work about a flaccid subject. But, ultimately, nothing I saw really approached the rigorous poetry of Rakowitz’s commissioned installation or Adnan’s unvarnished total engagement with the world. Yes, their works whispered, the world still rewards believing in the miraculous.

A speculative postscript: I am looking forward to Burundi-born sculptor and painter Serge Alain Nitegeka’s solo show ‘Black Cargo’ at Stevenson. Although sometimes presented as a couch-friendly modernist by his gallery, Nitegeka’s jet-black installations – physical infrastructure that speak of trafficking and trade – interrupt easy passage through gallery spaces, sort of like Ryan Gander’s wind, but not. The physical barriers are key. Kendell Geers is the subject of a career retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich. His recent Goodman show suggests that his defining period has now passed. Emerging during South Africa’s unsettled transition, his 1990s work skilfully blended danger and argument and insult and plagiarism to produce something almost sui generis. More speculatively: Elvira Dyangani Ose, the Tate curator appointed to oversee the third edition of the stalled Lubumbashi Biennale, has some big promises to deliver on. Speaking at the Joburg Art Fair, she mooted plans mooted plans to stretch this event in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo over the entire year. Lastly, a sombre yet hopeful speculation: with troubles continuing in Mali, will we see a 10th edition of the much-loved, always enervating pan-African photo biennial, Bamako Encounters? Fingers crossed.

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Christy Lange is associate editor of frieze and contributing editor of frieze d/e. She is based in Berlin, Germany.

Alexandra Leykauf, Spanische Wand, 2012, installation view at Sassa Trülzsch, Berlin

Alexandra Leykauf ‘Heart of Chambers’ at Sassa Trülzsch, Berlin
http://www.sassatruelzsch.com/pages/39.html

Darren Bader at MoMA/PS1, New York

- a room full of cats, salad ingredients on pedestals….
http://momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/349

Jeremy Deller’s Beyond the White Walls (2012) at art:concept, Paris

- the artist’s articulate meta-commentary on the projects he’s done outside of galleries or museums

Harun Farocki at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

- A New Product (2012) is a hilarious indictment of corporate culture and german middle-management
http://www.galeriebarbaraweiss.de/dateien/pressetext.php

Omer Fast’s Continuity (2012) at Documenta 13, Kassel
http://www.tba21.org/program/commissions/163?category=commissions

“Set-up” at Galerie Jousse Enterprise, Paris

- a tightly-curated group show by Stephen Hepworth that provided one possible view of where photography is going: including Michele Abeles, Kate Costello, Sam Falls, Corin Hewitt, Matt Lipps and Elisa Sighicelli

TV

Breaking Bad

Lena Dunham’s Girls (more real than reality tv), Catfish the TV show (what is the authentic self in the age of digital culture?), Breaking Bad Season 5 “Dead Freight” (the train heist episode), Mad Men Season 5 “The Other Woman” (the Jaguar episode)

Radio

Shalom Auslander, ‘Death Camp Blue’s’ on The Moth Podcast
http://wehearus.com/podcasts/episode/44054

Revisiting John Updike’s Fresh Air interviews on Fresh Air with Terry Gross
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/16/148600210/revisiting-john-updikes-fresh-air-interviews

Tig Notaro’s morbidly hilarious stand-up comedy routine after being diagnosed with cancer, as presented on This American Life’s Episdoe 476, ‘What Doesn’t Kill You’
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/tig-notaro

This American Life’s Episode 454 ‘Mr Daisey and the Apple Factory’ – an expose on the manufacturing of Apple products in China, and the program’s subsequent retraction of the story in Episode 460, ‘Retraction’
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/454/mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/460/retraction

RadioLab’s ‘The Fact of the Matter’ (24 Sept 2012) featuring Errol Morris
http://www.radiolab.org/widgets/ondemand_player/#file=%2Faudio%2Fxspf%2F239470%2F;containerClass=radiolab

Print

Dexter Filkins’ ‘Atonement’ in The New Yorker, 29 October 2012

- the story of an Iraq war veteran seeking truth and forgiveness for his actions in Iraq
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/29/121029fa_fact_filkins

Theater

Rimini Protokoll, Lagos Business Angels, Hebbel Theater, Berlin

Jerome Bel’s Disabled Theater (2012) at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel

Rimini Protokoll’s Lagos Business Angels (2012) at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin

- untrained actors and entrepreneurs from Nigeria and Germany attempt to convince an audience to invest in their businesses through a series of 10-minute presentations.
http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_5410.html

Books

Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome

The Man without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin by Masha Gessen (Riverhead Books)

- a problematically-reported but compelling book that dramatically lifts the curtain on Russian politics
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Without-Face-Unlikely-Vladimir/dp/1594488428

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace by D.T. Max (Granta)

Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome (MACK)

- republished by MACK after 34 years, finally back in print. Indispensible.
http://www.mackbooks.co.uk/books/44-Kodachrome.html

Jacqueline Hassink’s The Table of Power 2, 2012 (Hatje Cantz)

http://www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00003214&lang=en

Roman Ondák’s Observations, 2012, (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König)

Film

The Queen of Versailles, directed by Lauren Greenfield

- a microcosm of almost everything that’s wrong with America

textileRef:13988950475641ea4a4e09a:linkStartMarker:“http://grist.org/politics/the-queen-of-versailles-almost-makes-you-feel-sorry-for-the-1-almost/

http://youtu.be/AdJYzgJ4CwI”:http://grist.org/politics/the-queen-of-versailles-almost-makes-you-feel-sorry-for-the-1-almost/ http://youtu.be/AdJYzgJ4Cwl

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Sally Tallant is Artistic Director of Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, 2012, performance documentation. Photograph: Roman März

• Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel

This extraordinary performance surprised and challenged me in ways that I didn’t expect – I was moved and when we left the theatre we were all stunned and speechless for a moment. This was a truly memorable moment in a brilliant programme.

• Manifesta 9, ‘The Deep of the Modern’, Genk

The layering of heritage, historic works and work by contemporary artist in the post-industrial setting of Genk was a brilliant lesson on coal and curating by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Dawn Ades and Katerina Gregos.

• Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass, Barbican, London

It was amazing to finally have the opportunity to see this iconic work performed in London after having only ever seen documentation.

• Helen Marten, ‘Plank Salad’, Chisenhale Gallery, London

Helen Marten’s first solo show in the UK assembled a complex range of work with wit and precision. Its exciting to see her use the space with such confidence and panache and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work.

• Klaus Weber, ‘If you leave me I’m not coming and Already There!’, Nottingham Contemporary

This show right at the beginning of 2012 comprised a solo exhibition of work by Klaus Weber and an exhibition of over 200 objects and artworks curated by him. It was an ambitious and encyclopeadic endeavour and provided a wild glimpse into his thinking and practice.

• Glasgow International Festival

Its always inspiring to visit Glasgow. Memorable works by Corin Sworn, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Charlotte Prodger, Rosalind Nashashibi and of course Jeremy Deller’s bouncy Stonehenge.

Things I am looking forward to next year:

• Homeworks VI, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (Spring 2013)

• Sharjah Biennial 11, United Arab Emirates curated by Yuko Hasegawa (13 – 17 March)

• Manchester International Festival (4 – 21 July)

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Mark Beasley is a writer and curator at the visual arts performance biennial Performa, New York. His first LP with the group Big legs will be released on Junior Aspirin Records in Spring 2013.

My reading in 2012 was largely from the past but the present struck me sharply with John Menick’s, portrait of Mexico City, A Report on the City, 2012, published by dOCUMENTA (13). Moving from the quest to locate a VHS snuff movie through hypochondria to tales of ‘Mad Travelling’ each of its six essays tackle, via some very fine and lightly sprung prose, the curious and compelling facts of city life.

John Menick, A Report on the City

With regard to public lectures, and its lowly cousin hi-falutin’ chat, there have been a number of presentations that have provided substantial brain food. Chiefly Sukhdev Sandhu’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University has, over time, hosted a broad range of brilliant minds from Mark Fisher to Mark Pilkington, from Asiatica to off-kilter Englishness. Simon Critchley’s On Truth (and Lies) at Brooklyn Academy of Music presented the facts and otherwise of literary relations to the truth. In quick succession I caught inspiring lectures – come victory laps –by dOCUMENTA (13) curators and organizers Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chuz Martinez.

Anthony Huberman’s Artist’s Institute gallery come schoolhouse continues to be an inspiration. The normative relations of ‘an education in the arts’ – the professor and the schooled – is ditched in favor of direct meditative learning: objects, art works and artists are present in the classroom. Summer Guthery’s sporadic Canal Series in an office suite on Canal (New York) keeps the flame of idiosyncratic and savvy programming alive.

Two documentaries recognized two great wordsmiths, BBC4s Evidently… John Cooper Clarke provided an overarching insight into the part poet, part singer, part comic, life long inspiration and very thin man Cooper Clarke. Heavenly Films’ Lawrence of Belgravia – technically released at the end of 2011 but screened in New York in 2012 – is a long overdue recognition of Lawrence, the mononamed frontman of Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart: perhaps the greatest popstar Britain never had.

Bedwyr Williams, The Hill Farmer, 2011, c-type print on DuroSpec

Four exhibitions: Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist’s Choice’ at MoMA married the inadvertently psychedelic chip-board mapping with hummingbird’s and paintings by Odilon Redon: a curious and compelling mix. Nicola Tyson’s photographs ‘Bowie Night at Billy’s Club London, 1978’ at White Column’s gallery revealed the birth and genesis of a New Romantic look and sound that continued with the Blitz Club and exploding into the popular consciousness of the eighties, sweeping hair and everything else before it aside. The Philadelphia Museum’s ‘Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp’ curated by Carlos Basualdo and Phillipe Parreno was a tour de force in curating as seductive theater. Experienced from a distance – via the publication! – Bedwyr William’s ‘My Bad’ at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, has managed to transplant his exceptional writing and ear for the satiric into – as David Robbins would have it – the concrete comedy of objects.

In the realms of theater David Levine’s Habit organized by PS122 was an engagingly nervy and durational work stuck on repeat. Meanwhile at the movies Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, his first film in thirteen years, delivered some of the most memorable images of the year from a jade-green suited, red bearded, finger and flower eating goblin apparition to latex-clad-cyber-sex-martial-arts and talking limo’s. On the small screen E4’s Misfit’s forth series continues to poke at the wtf gland. Parker Posey’s cameo in Louis CK ‘s third season of Louie should also be credited.

A personal highlight of 2012 was to perform in China with the group Big Legs. Junior Aspirin Records’ ‘Junior Aspirin Life Size Model’ gigs in Heihe, on the Black Dragon River and Beijing brought together label fixtures Socrates that Practices Music, God in Hackney, Soul Punch and newer ones in a two hour-nonstop gig before five thousand rattle-waving locals, beneath a vast lighting rig and firework display of which Jay-Z would have approved.

Mike Kelley in Venice, 1988, Photograph: Sidney Felson

In January we lost Mike Kelley, which will make viewing his Stedelijk retrospective in Amsterdam (on until April 1) bittersweet. Working with Mike on his Judson Church Day is Done show for Performa 09 and co-curating the Fantastic World music festival at Gramercy Theater with him was a privilege and an education. Over the past year I’ve been re-reading his texts, watching his films and listening to his music. He seems more present to me than ever.

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Gabriela Jauregui is a writer, critic and editor. She is the author of Controlled Decay (Akashic, 2008) and lives and works in Mexico City.

Teresa Margolles, ‘La Promesa’, installation view at MUAC, Mexico City

Perhaps it is indeed the end of an era, as the Mayans say. Looking forward to the new one! In the meantime, here’s some of what made 2012 into a good ending:

Watching Seun Kuti dance and morph along with his Egypt 80 Shukar Collective at Cine Plaza in Mexico City.

The Argentine writer César Aira’s regenerative prose – any and all of it – this year it’s *_El Mármol_ (La bestia equilátera).

Okkyung Lee’s cello explosion at el nicho aural festival in Mexico City in May.

A spring full of marches and protests, the blossoming of a youth movement of resistance in Mexico.

Eduardo Terrazas’ double whammie in Mexico City: at Casa Barragán and Proyectos Monclova (new location).

Patti Smith’s concert under a full moon at the Anahuacalli Museum, Mexico City.

Lizzy Fitch’s ‘Concrete U’ at New Galerie, Paris.

Re-re-re-reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (even though it’s not 2012, I kept coming back to them this year, as I did The Stories of John Cheever, Picador 2009 and Vintage, 2000 respectively).

Oskar Fischinger’s ‘Space Light Art’ at the Whitney Museum, New York.

Teresa Margolles’ harrowing exhibition ‘La Promesa’ (The Promise) at the Museo Unversitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City.

The theatrical release of Matias Meyer’s Los últimos cristeros (The Last Christeros, 2011).

Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Monkey self and family portraits at kurimanzutto gallery, Mexico City (‘Nuestra imagen actual, autorrretratos recientes’ ‘Our Current Imagination: Recent Self-Portraits).

The release of Mexican duo Soledad’s debut 12” Fe (on Vale Vergas Discos).

Colm Tóibin’s lecture at the Claustro de Sor Juana University in Mexico City.

Marihuana voted legal in Colorado and Washington states shining a hope for Mexico’s future and a possible end to its so-called war on drugs.

Spiritualized’s new release Sweet Heart Sweet Light (on Double Six Records).

Palestine granted UN observer state status.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, Physichromie 174, 1965, cardboard, casein, cellulose acetate inserts, mounted on plywood, 62 × 51.4 × 4.6 cm

And in the new year:

I am excited about the retrospective of the French Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, ‘Color in Space and Time’ at MUAC (until February 24)