The last two decades have seen a proliferation of curatorial studies programmes. How has this affected methodology and display, and what is the future of these courses?
It’s Monday morning and the frieze mailbag runneth over, so let’s see what it has in store for us today.
One of our trusted contributors emailed me this link to a YouTube video that will at last fulfil the wishes of all of you who ever wondered how Hitler would react to the announcement that Jeffrey Deitch had been named Director of Los Angeles MOCA:
Update: I admit: I thought this was a humorous satire of art institutions in LA, until someone just pointed out to me that Jeffrey Deitch is Jewish, a fact that I have to admit I didn’t know and didn’t even contemplate (nor have been able to confirm as of yet) when I first saw it, as that would immediately sap any traces of humour from the parody. I trust that whoever made the video didn’t intend it as anti-Semitic, but now it’s impossible for me to see it any other way. I obviously didn’t mean for this to be offensive, so I’ve just left the link for you to click or not click depending on whether you can see this as innocently poking fun or something else.
Here is something that is not funny: many of you may know about the Impossible Project, a team of engineers, scientists and former Polaroid employees who have made it their mission to rejuvenate the production of analogue integral film for Polaroid cameras, in part by saving the last remaining Polaroid production plant in the Netherlands. According to a recent press release, the project, which was going well, has come upon an ‘unexpected problem’ and might, in fact, prove to be impossible. Let’s hope not. For more information about this ambitious project, visit The Impossible Project
And finally, from the extremely urgent frame-related news department, from a Palm Beach-based PR company, a press release boldly headed: “PALM BEACH PHILANTHROPIST & INTERNATIONALLY RENOWNED ‘FRAME GURU’ CALLS PALM BEACH HOME.” For those of you currently residing in Palm Beach, you will be relieved to know that the ‘frame guru’ is “spending much of the winter in Palm Beach, donating hundreds of thousands of gift certificates for his works and services to philanthropic efforts.” According to the release, the frame guru “never wanted to mix business with his home away from home paradise until he realized the value he could offer art collectors in the Palm Beach community.” Thanks to his efforts, the residents of this paradisical community will never have to go without frames.
I spend a fair percentage of my time here at frieze opening post, press releases and emails – anything from unsolicited artists’ monographs to generic e-flux reminders. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think the job is below me. In fact, I find it a secretly enjoyable task. And I’m not trying to brag, but I’ve devised what I think is a pretty organized filing system by which I sort the thousands of emails and invitations by region, creating a special stack on my desk for the most interesting and putting a little orange ‘flag’ next to emails about important exhibitions in geographically-divided email folders. Nevertheless, there are some emails and letters that stubbornly evade my ingenious filing system, yet I don’t have the heart to delete them or toss them in the bin. These are the updates from toothpick sculptors, artists hawking their portraits of Putin, e-blasts about female pirates, and the like. Until now, I’ve been putting them in a folder that I simply call ‘mailbag’. And now, dear readers, because I don’t know what to do with them, I hereby open my frieze Berlin office mailbag for you – extracting the good, the bad, the tasteless, the intriguing, the bizarre, the absurd, the cringe-worthy, the inspired. Enjoy!
Our first entry comes from the gender-insensitivity department. Here’s a press release I received announcing: “Global Art Show Inspires New Perspective on Gender-Based Violence”. The show features 32 artists whose work deals with violence against women. The title of the show? “Off the Beaten Path”. You can’t make this stuff up, people. The exhibition comes to Tijuana, February 5, 2010.
Equally curious was this email, announcing an exhibition by a Paris- and Shanghai-based artist:
Dear friends,
please note my upcoming exhibition “vomiting world” at Gallery Teapot.
In his 1819 satirical poem, Don Juan, Lord Byron wrote, ‘I hate all mystery, and that air / Of claptrap, which your recent poets prize.’ Coincidentally, after nearly 60 minutes of sitting through Keren Cytter’s theatre performance, The True Story of John Webber and his Endless Struggle with the Table of Content, I had written only one word in my notes: ‘claptrap’. I don’t even use that word, ever, but something about the nature of this particular performance, or it taking place on an exceptionally chilly Sunday night, made me feel like just the kind of curmudgeon who would roundly declare a piece of theatre ‘claptrap’. However, claptrap – defined as insincere or pretentious language, or, ironically, in its obsolete form as ‘something contrived to elicit applause’ – sums it up pretty well.
For her first feature-length play, Cytter, who was recently nominated for the National Gallery Prize for Young Art here in Berlin, has collaborated with the dance troupe she founded, D.I.E. Now. The work, originally commissioned for ‘If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution’ has been shown in other incarnations at PERFORMA 09 in New York and at Tate Modern, and ran for four nights at the HAU 3 in Berlin. John Webber is ostensibly about a man who wakes up to find that he’s been transformed into a woman, which, according to the programme text, ‘has a domino-effect on society, sexual policy and identity, finally leading to a revolution’ – though these events are, at best, vaguely suggested by what transpires on stage. The five members of D.I.E. Now engaged in a mixture of both acting and dance to convey the story, though it was often hard to tell which was which. More disappointing, though, was the sense that they appear to be neither trained dancers nor actors. I was hoping to see performers who had honed at least one out of the two crafts; instead I got a painfully thin man in saggy jogging shorts and multiple glimpses at the meshy control-top of the lead dancer’s pantyhose.
For John Webber, Cytter mines not just every contemporary cliché of theatre and dance, but also video and installation art: at times, a projection on the stage featured what looked like archival footage of psychological experiments or academics discussing sociological research – the kind of stuff that abounds in current video art. This was, however, the only concrete reference to anything outside the insular and confusing world of the play itself; the rest of the action was concentrated on the mostly bare stage, and the ambiguous love story among several characters of shifting gender. Jammed into that framework, the play also included: shadow play, a smoke machine, minimal props, confessions, voice over, dubbed voice over, fake YouTube clips, barefooted dancers, good posture, bad posture, pointed toes, legwarmers, fractures in the fourth wall, repetition, repetition, self-referentiality, multiple voices, false starts, the death of the author, new age music, pantomime, stage fighting, slow motion, references to Revolution, love triangles. Despite containing all this in its 60 minutes, it had not one of the essential elements that can make a live performance compelling. It had neither comedy, nor drama. It had no spectacle, no depth, nor any traces of authentic emotion. This might be Cytter’s statement on the condition of society today, but in that case, I wish she hadn’t recreated it – again – as artifice.
