The Gallery of Modern Art and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia

Suspension, isolation, anticipation; frozen moments, ghostly flowers and floodlit nights

Turning to Vilnius for inspiration, ‘Urban Stories’ built complex narratives from fraught histories

Serendipity, politics and the timely return of Bertolt Brecht

I went to Rome for a flying visit last week, for the opening of Doug Aitken’s new film installation and performance Frontier (curated by Francesco Bonami, it’s the third commission for Enel Contemporanea). I hadn’t been to the city in years, though, when I was about 20, I lived there for a while and loved it. Even so, I had forgotten precisely how weary and magnificent it is – the very air seems varnished. I went for a walk and kept getting lost; I thought I knew my way around, but was constantly disoriented. Birds (swifts? swallows? bats?) were flinging themselves across the twilight blue of the sky in the kind of intricate choreographed formations Busby Berkley might have liked; infinite Baroque churches were lit up by the fading gold-tipped rays of the sun, every side street promised a journey towards a piazza of absurd, melancholic beauty and the sound of the gridlocked traffic was deafening (why do people toot their horns when no-one can move?). How can a city look this good, be this fascinating, and still, despite its chaos, function with such boundless charm? Hackney it ain’t. (But at least we don’t have that dangerous clown Silvio Berlusconi running the show; Italians seem to both deplore and reward his ludicrous shenanigans in equal measure.)

Doug’s piece was the perfect complement to my struggling memory. Staged on the tip of an island in the middle of the Tiber after the sun went down, the immersive experience that is Frontier takes place in a roofless, minimalist structure, interrupted by small, glowing windows, within which a frieze of filmed scenes shot in Rome, Los Angeles, Israel and South Africa (although you’d be hard-pressed to know which was which) drift across multiple screens. The film follows (if that’s the word for such a meandering, enigmatic journey) a Hollywood-handsome Ed Rusha wandering through urban wastelands and modern-day ruins, sitting in a cinema, looking up at buildings, gazing out on a prairie or being absorbed in the shadows formed by a tree. He appears both wholly absorbed in his own thoughts, and aware of everything going on around him which he observes with the inscrutable gaze of a modern day, west coast Buddha; it’s hard to imagine he was directed. Various characters wander in and out of shot: a couple sleeping, a man reading a book, people strolling across a soulless square; at one point a cowboy emerges from an inky, misty gloom to crack his whip and the image dissolves suddenly to focus on a house of cards tumbling into darkness which, in turn, dissolves into an ominous scene of young men running wildly, as if scattering after a crime, through mist. Despite these occasional intimations of violence or unrest, the overall mood is one of intense, often languid, concentration; no one talks – how could they, absorbed as they are in such an environment?

Gorgeous swathes of intense colour wash across the screen: deep red material appears to billow; the mid-west sky is stained a perfect, faded denim-blue; the inky patterns of book type explode in close-up after an image of a man reading. The soundtrack adds to the sense of vague, disjunctive hallucination; it’s an impressionistic sound collage, comprising repeated snatches of the piano, drums and horns from a Billie Holiday track; water dripping and wind blowing; machines; the whirring of film running through a projector; footsteps and tap-dancing; the strains of music from the Middle East; and ominous repeated chords and tones that increase and decrease in urgency. When I saw it, the film was accompanied by live performances that included young men whip-cracking, tap dancing and playing instruments, and a woman, as imperious as a statue, standing in the middle of the ‘Coliseum’ calling what sounded like a sort of operatic cattle auction. To say any of this seemed incongruous in Rome is beside the point; this is a city familiar with the vagaries of invasion. The film ends where it began; with Ruscha sitting in a cinema, observing images flickering on a screen.

If Frontier is about one thing – although reducing this complex work to a simple idea is a little like trying to hum Wagner – I’d say it’s about the panoramic vagaries of memory and the minutiae of the details that created the way we think of the past; after all, for a memory to be made, and before the inevitable distortions that time heaps upon it, it first has to be lived and living is a visceral, as well as a mental activity (we sometimes have to be reminded of this). An undercurrent of Frontier tugs at some deceptively simple questions: at what point do fiction and documentary merge? At what moment do we begin to create fictions of our own lives? When do frontiers become absorbed into the very areas they’re demarcating?

We live through time and all we’re left with is impressions and objects. Neither are flimsy or – weirdly despite the absence of the moments, the people, the emotions that created them in the first place – ever fleeting. Doug once said in an interview he did with Ed Ruscha that we ran in frieze that ‘not being concerned with time is the most difficult thing that were confronted with.’ I second that emotion.

A couple of weekends ago, I visited Vilnius at the invitation of the CAC, for the opening of the Baltic triennial (which I’ll be reviewing for the January issue of the magazine so won’t go into here but I must say it was one of the the busiest openings I have ever seen). I had never been to the city before – the capital of Lithuania, the southernmost of the three Baltic states and, in the 14th century, the largest country in Europe – and found it both fascinating and depressing. Simon Rees, the Australian curator of CAC was a great guide. Vilnius is an amazingly pretty town – cobbled streets, painted shutters, gables and Baroque churches – but it’s a scarred and haunted place. In the 20th century alone it was taken over by Poland in 1920, then Germany in 1939, then the Soviet Union in 1940, then, once again by Nazi Germany in 1941. After the final retreat of the Germans, in 1944, the Soviets once again took it over, establishing the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, which lasted until 11 March 1990, when Lithuania declared its independence – the first Soviet Republic to do so.

The country suffered horrifically during the war – around 780,000 Lithuanians died. Before World War II, Jews made up roughly half of the population in Vilnius – the town was known as ‘Little Jerusalem’ and had 105 active synagogues. During the war, the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered around 94% of the Jewish population. There is no memorial in the city to this atrocity and, bizarrely, the town’s ‘Museum of Genocide Victims’, which is located in the former KGB headquarters – which was, during the earlier part of the war the Gestapo headquarters – makes no mention of the genocide of the Jewish population. Apparently the museum’s ‘logic’ is that it’s devoted to the genocide carried out by the Soviets upon the local population – and by the time they came to power, there were very few Jews left. I tried to question the woman behind the desk about the museum’s sinister policy, but she suddenly and rather mysteriously lost the power to speak English.

Simon took me to the small, local Holocaust museum but the door was locked. We could see a man asleep on a desk inside, a bottle of Vodka beside him, so we left. After taking me for a walk through the streets of the old Jewish Ghetto, where some old signs in Hebrew had been discovered beneath more recent paint-job

Simon then directed me to the Jewish museum, which was open. On the way, I passed dusty, graffitied, windows. The Jewish Museum, located in a non-descript building on a quiet street, was full of the almost unbearable history of Lithuanian Jews but very few artifacts. The first Jewish museum had opened in Vilnius in 1913. On the eve of World War II, the museum had accumulated more than 6000 books, thousands of historical and ethnographic works and documents, publications, periodicals in 11 languages, a rich folklore collection and 3000 art works. It was nearly all destroyed in the war.

On a more cheerful note, Simon organized a visit to the extraordinary, recently opened National Gallery of Art. We walked there, through the autumnal streets, and across a bridge guarded by Soviet sculptures.

The bridge also had some locks attached to it – it’s a tradition in the city for lovers to paint their names onto them and attach them to the railings for eternity.

At the NGA, the dynamic head of the museum, Lolita Jablonskiene, gave us a tour of the beautiful spaces housing the collection of Lithuanian art and of the installation-in-progress of Cold War Modern, which has traveled to the NGA from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. It looked incredible – seeing this work in a former Soviet-controlled country certainly added a frisson to the viewing experience. Simon Rees wrote a report on the controversial opening of the gallery for the frieze website in May.
Wandering around this amazing gallery, I fell totally in love with these sculptures, made by an artist I had never heard of before, Matas Mencinskas – just another extraordinary artist who died in the war.

Quiet afternoons and meditations on the malleability of time

John Baldessari will be answering frieze readers’ questions as part of Frieze Talks 2009

The highs and lows of the 53rd Venice Biennale, ‘Fare Mondi Making Worlds’

Lismore Castle Arts, Lismore, Ireland

Jessica Lott wins first prize

Jennifer Higgie on the women who turned their backs

The predictable, outraged reactions – how strange, bizarre, crazy it all is etc etc – to the annual Turner Prize short list never cease to amaze me, if only because they make me wonder: where do these so-called critics live? On some planet, where people’s lives and imaginations are marked only by their similarity of thinking, appearance and mood? A place where difference exists only as an aberration and where creativity functions purely as a tool for the dissemination of sameness? ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion’ wrote Francis Bacon. I tend to agree; but strangeness, I hasten to add, is obviously not the preserve of art and beauty is often besides the point. To illustrate my point, here are a couple of totally unrelated links sent to me today for no particular reason – one of a religious LA-based public access TV show that has been running for 20 years and is hosted by Christian puppets, and the other a recording of Marie Osmond reading a poem by Dadaist Hugo Ball – that thrilled me for reasons that reiterate, better than I ever could, the fact that you can criticize the Turner Prize for the quality and intelligence or not of its engagement with the language of art, and the ingenuity or not with which the artists use their materials – but please, don’t tell me it’s weird. That’s like telling me you had a weird dream. What dreams aren’t?

Geoff Dyer (Canongate, Edinburgh, 2009)

The elegant aesthetic of Matthew Brannon’s pictures and sculptures belies a witty, acerbic take on the human condition

In the last week I have witnessed two totally different discussions about the economic crisis drift wistfully into the inability of so many contemporary perfumes to mirror the turbulent times we live in. Wander the aisles of perfume counters and most of them are either irritatingly literal and cheerful – Happy, Weekend Woman, Passion, Energy, Pink, etc etc – or celebrity-driven (I do wonder how many people have bought ‘Jade Goody’, the perfume.) Whatever happened to perfumes being designed for women pilots possibly getting on a plane for their final flight, like ‘En Avion’, created by Caron in 1932 in homage to female aviators (notes of cedarwood, leather, goggles and gloves mixed with Carnation, orange flower, rose, lilac and violet) or Guerlain’s ‘Vol de Nuit’ from 1933 inspired by the book of the same name by Antoine de Saint Exupéry (notes of wood, iris, vanilla and narcissus, polished gear sticks etc)?

I know I’m moaning, but in the 1920s, the most popular bohemian cafe in London was ‘The Cave of the Golden Calf’. Now everyone eats lunch in ‘Eat’. I really hope the girl band currently in the top ten on X Factor, called ‘Girl Band’ don’t win.

It’s like the artist Paul Day who was commissioned to make a work of art to celebrate the opening of the wonderful newly furbished St Pancras train station, who came up with a design ‘that portrays a commuter falling in front of a train driven by the Grim Reaper’. The frieze was to be part of Day’s execrable 20 ton, 30ft-high bronze sculpture of a couple embracing, which is meant to function as a meeting place for travellers. It’s titled ‘Meeting Place’.

There is, however, a light on the horizon. A piece in today’s Guardian reports that ‘A spokesman for the company has said: ‘The frieze as originally suggested will not go ahead and work on it has stopped.’

Oh happy day.

Quotation: ‘The act of repeating erroneously the words of another’

Paul Schütze (free download)

Huerta de San Vincente, Granada, Spain

Who, now, is writing poetry that knows about visual art in the way that Frank O’Hara did?