Art’s disputed relationship to activism

In a survey show of the artist at Tate Modern, Hirst’s trademark repetitions soon become apparent

Life is a quotation. Sort of.

The fictitious portraits of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Jennifer Higgie and Sam Thorne talk to the new director of Tate Modern about the museum’s plans for the future

Our longing to make contact with other beings in the cosmos - a mixtape

Dionysus and big cats

Yto Barrada juggles her work as an artist with running a cinémathèque in Tangier. She talked to Jennifer Higgie about her reasons for opening a cinema, the ‘strategies of resistance’ she encounters in Morocco today, and her interest in botany

It’s 20 years since the first issue of frieze. How has the art world changed in that time?

An update of Raymond Williams's 1975 dictionary of culture for today's art world

Press reaction to the 54th Venice Biennale

Various Venues

Censorship and the art world

Last week I returned from Poland where a heteronym I invented was included in Krakow Photomonth. I prefer, though, to keep mum about what exactly I came up with as to do otherwise would run counter to the spirit of the thing. Titled ‘Alias’, and curated by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, it was one of the oddest, most enigmatic and imaginative shows I’ve seen. (I wouldn’t normally trumpet something I was, however minimally, involved in, but this one is worth it.) As the curators declared: ‘None of the artists in this exhibition exist. All of the works are copies.’ (I do love an original show about copies.) Let me explain.

‘Alias’ is, according to Broomberg and Chanarin, ‘an incomplete survey of invented artists’ – incomplete as the potential and solace of assuming an alter ego is infinite; artists and writers will never, I imagine, tire of disguise and subterfuge as a liberating proposition. Reversing the usual power-structure of most exhibitions – artist is invited by curator to do their thing, they do it, writer responds etc. – Broomberg and Chanarin kick-started their project by firstly asking writers to create a heteronym, i.e., an imaginary character with a history (which is where it differs from a pseudonym which is simply a false name). It’s a concept dreamed up by the Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator Fernando Pessoa, who invented around 70 in his lifetime. But it would seem that Pessoa’s motivations were less to do with escape than the opposite: he was in thrall to the idea that a false identity can, paradoxically, be a conduit for truthful expression and a way of expressing the complexities of day-to-day existence without the burden of everyday responsibilities – after all, can anyone ever be absolutely truthful when they have jobs, lovers, friends and colleagues to negotiate? (Remember the chaos Jim Carrey’s character gets into in Liar Liar when he is forced to tell the truth for a day?) ‘To live,’ wrote Pessoa in his posthumously published The Book of Disquiet (1982), ‘is to be someone else.’ Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum is also apt here: ‘Man’, he wrote, ‘is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’

Not in Order of Appearance from Max Pinckers on Vimeo.

(In collaboration with Broomberg and Chanarin, responding to a challenge from Setareh Shahbazi)

Back to ‘Alias’. Once the invited writer accepted the brief and came up with a heteronym, it was then given to an artist/photographer who, in turn, was required to assume its character and to respond to it with a piece of photographic-based work which was then displayed in one of 23 venues around Krakow – museums, small rooms in apartment blocks, church crypts and galleries. Searching them out amongst the crumbling beauty of Krakow’s 18th-century buildings was half of the fun.

Lee Cluderay, That Afternoon (1929)

Dora Fobert, from the archive of Adela K. (c.1942)

Although the names of writers and artists who agreed to participate were cited in the catalogue, who wrote which heteronym, who paired with whom, and who created the works on show remained anonymous. Thus, as you can imagine, there was much speculation about authorship amongst viewers to each venue, which revealed one of the strengths of the show: the way it highlighted image-making and ideas over personality. I must say that on a purely personal level I did enjoy not being myself for a while, as did other participants. It was kind of soothing (as was the rather popular apple vodka).

Claude Cahun, installation view, Maia Holtermann Entwistle (2011)

In the main venue, the Bunkier Sztuki, Broomberg and Chanarin curated a show of historical and contemporary works by 55 artists and collectives who employ heteronyms, such as Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy, Walid Raad/The Atlas Group, Salvador Dalí (who was, he declared, a reincarnation of his dead brother of the same name); The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland, Lucy Shwob/Claude Cahun, and Simon Fujiwara as his father. Non-artists were also included such as French serial child-impersonator (yes, it is a category) Frédéric Bourdin, who posed as missing schoolboy Nicholas Barclay. Obviously, the reasons why each of these people chose to assume another identity varies wildly but often it was to do with survival; repressive regimes do not, obviously, encourage transparency and heteronyms allow artists and writers the freedom to explore issues of politics, sexuality, race and gender without the burden of being thrown in prison (an approach that has particular resonance in Krakow, the closest city to Auschwitz and one that has, over the last century, became all-too-familiar with varying degrees of totalitarianism).

Video still of the performance My Life as a Dove

Less life-threatening situations have also historically encouraged the assumption of an alter ego: artists have chosen anonymity or collective action as a form of resistance to the cult of the individual. Conversely, some artists have chosen to operate with heteronyms in order to explore ideas that might run counter to their usually held beliefs while others have chosen to forgo their identity as a form of protest – or of course, simply to side-step the complications of selfhood because it can be a lot of fun.

The Burial of Patrick Ireland, Wake, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2008)

The main exhibition of ‘Alias’ was unique in its approach to display: only one original work was included – a picture by Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland, which was turned to the wall to reveal an inscription: ‘To my singular wife from her plural husband’. Every other work was represented by a photograph of its installation, a method that both emphasized the role of photography in documenting art and side-stepped the liabilities and costs involved in transporting invaluable works of art from around the world to Poland. The result is a show that operates on so many levels – from detective fiction to visual pleasure to a rigorous questioning of the intertwining of individuality, aesthetics and ethics – that it was impossible not to follow Pessoa’s declaration: ‘Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.’

Anonymous, courtesy The Lascaux Folders, original images courtesy of Belfast Exposed

I’ve just returned from Australia, where I visited the new Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania, which opens to the public this weekend – entrance is free. It’s the biggest privately funded museum in Australia (which isn’t actually saying much, as there are only a couple of others in the country) and, as far as I know, is the only one in existence to include a crematorium – visitors are encouraged to buy a life-and-after-life membership, which means they will be cremated at MONA and stored there for eternity. (I’m not joking.) Around 460 pieces are on display, from a collection of more than 2,000 works. Less than half of this is contemporary art; it includes a lot of antiquities from Egypt and various parts of Africa, Mesopotamia and Mesoamerica: the oldest is a 6,000-year-old jar and the most recent is a new version of Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca (2010), which was specially commissioned for the museum (as were about 20 other works by artists including Julia deVille, Christian Boltanski, Tomoko Kashiki, Gelitin, Roman Signer, Erwin Wurm, Tessa Farmer, Masao Okabe and Dasha Shishkin.) Works are displayed in a non-linear fashion – three Sidney Nolan paintings, say, are hung next to a pile of ancient Chinese coins – and MONA is designed to be intentionally disorientating: it’s a place that privileges the journey over the destination. Similarly, connections between objects and periods are never explained and there’s not a wall label in sight. Information can be gathered from state-of-the-art individual iPods, which each visitor will be given on arrival. (At the end of your visit it can email you information about the works you’ve looked at it; it also registers exactly how long each visitor looks at each work, which would, apparently, make it possible to assess which is the most popular work in the collection – which, I was told, might swiftly effect its removal from display.) MONA is a wonderfully eccentric, philanthropic endeavour that includes a winery, brewery, restaurant, café and self-contained pavilions for guests and it’s run with as much humour and self-deprecation as scholarship.

Wim Delvoye Cloaca (2010)

The museum is funded by one man: David Walsh. A gambler and something of a mathematical genius, he started out playing blackjack before moving on to horse racing. He’s a self-confessed ‘rabid atheist’ who, when I met him, was dressed in a T-shirt emblazoned with a Richard Dawkins’ line about what a malevolent creature God must be if he exists. Walsh talks non-stop; his enthusiasm for his project is electric, but he’s not what you’d call a listener – he has Asperger’s syndrome and expresses himself without censorship. He’s passionate about his museum, which he describes as a kind of ‘secular temple’ to the ‘pursuit of sex and the avoidance of death’, themes which, he says, are the two fundamental motivating factors in life. He never seems to tire of discussing this, despite the fact that it’s all a little reductive – after all, you can wander around the National Gallery in London for hours and be inundated with images of sex and death, but that’s not, obviously, all that is being communicated. But it soon becomes clear that Walsh likes to provoke. (He recently told one journalist: ‘This is how you should start the story. David Walsh is a rich wanker.’) But for all of his bluntness Walsh is a more nuanced thinker than he likes to let on. The more time you spend with him the more apparent this becomes; he rattles off facts and figures and theories with the rapidity of a machine gun. He is never dull, often illuminating, quite frustrating, always irreverent and very funny – and his humour infiltrates every aspect of his museum. Take, for example, his description of the Keifer Pavilion on the MONA website: ‘Books, says Keifer, are a manifestation of time. He also says you must build a pavilion to house my massive sculpture. Otherwise you’re not having it.’ Or this, for the ‘Boltanski Cave’: ‘What kind of idiot would pay two-and-a-half grand a month to watch an old guy sitting around picking his nose? David Walsh has too much money, obviously.’ Similarly, Walsh’s online invitation to the public for the opening weekend, which includes an extensive programme of bands and performances – from Wire to the Cruel Sea, Grinderman to Phillip Glass and more – is nothing if not inclusive: ‘The Museum’s opening’ it declares. ‘We’re having a party. Want to come?’ Yet, he’s more tentative in his surprisingly enigmatic written introduction to MONA: he compares someone opening a museum to someone aspiring to be a writer:

‘This is good, I think: but maybe not useful, too clever, clever.
You think you’re a great writer. But you’ve got writer’s block. You’ve had it for a while, your whole life in fact. You’ve never written anything. But you’re a great writer. Finally, here, now you’re lifting the pen, putting it to paper. Will the words pour out in a delicate, delightful stream, conveying the depth and beauty of all the ideas you have ever had, lovely capsules of meaning in perfect prose? Or will they resemble the chaos of your mind, words tripping each other in a tangle of obfuscation, only misconceptions conveyed?
The writing is on the wall. I call it MONA.
I await the museum opening with interest.’

But ultimately, of course, what Walsh has created speaks for itself: despite my reservations about some of the work (I can do without the bombast of, say, Jenny Saville, Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst et al), a lot of it is wonderful – in particular some gems of Australian Modernism (such as Sidney Nolan’s largest work, the fantastic 46-metre Snake, 1971, which comprises 1,620 separate images and which forms the heartbeat of the collection), some great contemporary Australian work (by Callum Morton and David Noonan, among others) and an eclectic array of international works by artists from Egon Schiele, Wassily Kandinsky, Gerry Judah, Su-en Wong, Fernando Botero to Paul McCarthy and Erwin Wurm – and, of course, the exquisite antiquities.

Julius Popp Bit.Fall VI (2010)

The breathtaking building, designed by Melbourne firm Fender Katsalidis, is a three-level structure built into a sandstone hill overlooking the Derwent River. From land it’s almost invisible; the most visible thing about it is a tennis court. From the water though – and it’s possible to visit it by ferry from Hobart – it appears, like some kind of startling and elegant sci-fi monastery. (Walsh wrote about it in 2007: ‘Even those that ridicule the theoretical underpinnings and abhor the capriciousness of the new venture may glory in its physical manifestation just as I do the by-product beauty of the architecture of the catholic church.’) The site includes two buildings by the late Modernist architect Roy Grounds, who designed the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; they’re sensitively incorporated into the new museum as a library and accommodation. When I visited, the collection was in the process of being installed. We descended more than 30 metres down a winding staircase into a breathtaking, vertiginous space. The lighting is a dramatic chiaroscuro; the enormous sandstone wall reminded me a recent visit to Jerusalem. (Such a reference is, of course, intentional.) During the course of the next few hours we wandered around the beautiful, disorientating spaces where works were still in the process of being hung; the spaces are astonishing, yet never distract from the work on show. I’m sad I couldn’t be there for the opening to see the final hang – which, of course, will have nothing final about it. All that is locked in, as far as I know, is an exhibition curated by Jean-Hubert Martin in 2012 and a shifting landscape of other possible shows. Time will tell. Lucky Hobart.

With their narrative and perceptual slippages, the films of Emily Wardill deal in condensation and complication

Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall on a rainy Saturday night is not what you’d call inviting. Even after repeated visits in the ten years since Tate Modern opened, the sheer, breathtaking scale of the space tends to make me feel like a small, pale dot floating inside a whale. How apt, then, that Michael Clark Company – for who the body, obviously, is the prime expressive tool, and whose performances have reiterated, again and again, that a dancer can electrify, respond to, grapple with, and even seemingly expand or contract any space they find themselves in – have been doing a residency there for the past seven weeks.

I went to see I Am Love last night, the new Italian film starring Tilda Swinton, directed by Luca Guadagnino. It’s been getting great reviews; the cinematography is lush, the John Adams score even more so and Swinton is great at repressed anguish; the storyline is of the rich-alienated-wife-meets-sexy-young-baker-has-affair-and-destroys-family variety.

The ghosts of great directors like Visconti and Antonioni have been wheeled out as influences but the comparisons are lazy. What these earlier directors achieved – and repeatedly – was, at its best, brutal, brilliantly nuanced analyses of the complex intertwining of family and politics, money and tradition. I Am Love, on the other hand, and quite despite its arthouse credentials (it’s got subtitles and Tilda Swinton) reiterates every cliché about sex, class and tradition in the book. It’s a great example of the new breed of films I like to call faux-indie – films that pretend to be doing something radical but that are, in fact, as conservative as they come. (_Up in the Air_, and Juno are prime examples – hey, I never knew that Big Business could be soulless! That family is great! That being alone is sad! That teenage pregnancy is cool if you’re perky! I mean, thanks for that!! )

OK, a quick checklist of the clichés in I Am Love, a story that, despite its lovely surface, is so stale I don’t see how anyone could be surprised that it all crumbles at the end.
1) We meet a seemingly beautiful woman who has a pretty great life and nice kids. Oh, one is gay. But she’s cool about it! She is also nice to servants. Husband doesn’t say much, but then neither does she. However, as she’s really rich, beautiful, has a lovely family and lives in a truly amazing house in Italy we should assume she’s miserable. We are right.
2) Woman’s husband, being rich, is, by implication, a brute although on the whole he seems to behave perfectly decently so I couldn’t work out what he did wrong apart from call her Emma instead of her Russian name Kitiesh (spelling?), which surely she could have put her foot down about early on in their relationship – but then putting one’s foot down is never really proffered up as an option in this film. The script is very sparse – no-one really talks, but unlike the rich, pregnant silences of, say, Antonioni’s films, here the void felt like more silence of the I-have-nothing-to-say variety (once again, a reiteration of the fine line between minimalism and emptiness).
3) Note names: Husband is called Tancredi – the name of the wayward Prince in Lampedusa’s The Leopard, in a not-so-sly nod to Visconti. The name he calls his wife is Emma. Hard not to think of Bovary, that other famously adulterous wife. Not exactly clichés, granted, but not exactly original, either.
4) Emma/Kitiesh finds sexual fulfilment with her son’s best friend, who is a monosyllabic cook (ie, prefers textures and taste to speech; ergo, sensual), who lives in the hills surrounded by nature (_i.e_., sort of sexy, like an animal).
5) Compassionate capitalist/wise man is a Hindu, ergo more naturally ‘spiritual’ than your-run-of-the-mill Italian.
6) At the beginning of the film, Emma/Kitiesh is emotionally lost, so it’s winter – everything is frozen. When she and sexy cook discover each other, it’s spring (cue close-up of bugs on flowers etc). When her son dies, it rains. Get it?
7) Plot spoiler warning! Son discovers mother is sleeping with best friend, gets jealous, shouts a bit at her for whoring, falls in swimming pool, bangs head and dies. Thus, if mother hadn’t strayed, son would still be alive. It’s really only a hair-breadth-away from Iranian cleric blaming earthquakes on loose women. Is that an old story or what?
8) When Emma/Kitiesh decides to leave family – in the most hyperbolic finale to a film I have ever seen – weeping servant packs her bags in a manner not unlike a tornado organising haysheds and helps her change from her fancy dress into something more comfortable – ie, she has literally slipped into something more comfortable. Cue, lots of silences, then Emma/Kitiesh leaves family without a word, but to fill up the emptiness John Adams lets loose with some pretty major sounds (which I enjoyed). The end.

This is the film that has garnered really great reviews. I agree, it looks great, the performances are convincing and the music is wonderful. The only problem was, it needed a script. And an idea not saturated in sepia. Faux-indie. Showing now, in a cinema near you. (Oh – don’t get me started on Kick Ass.)

The role of the dead in the lives of the living