‘Là où je suis n’éxiste pas’. ‘Here where I am doesn’t exist.’ It’s not a comfortable translation – I had to read it twice – but the subtitle to ‘Le Printemps de Septembre’ (Spring in September) is not intended to be a tidy, comfortable idea. It responds in part to the equally gnomic strap-line of the 2008 edition of this yearly contemporary art festival (which was also under the artistic direction of Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, director Christian Bernard): ‘Wherever I’m going, I’m already there.’ Bernard and associate curator, Jean-Max Colard, were keen to downplay the significance of these subtitles; they were designed as jumping off points for some – not necessarily all – of the artists involved, rather than as an adhesive to bind together the more than 40 discrete exhibitions, commissions, concerts and performances of the three-week festival.
Ironically, many of the festival’s best works seem to articulate this evasive concept the most clearly, by simultaneously acknowledging and thinking beyond their surroundings. Victor Burgin expressed the subtitle’s implication of temporal and geographical dislocation in Hôtel D (2009). The work was made especially for the space in which it was shown – the magnificent, wood-panelled Salle des Pérelins and its adjoining chapel in the Hôtel-Dieu, Toulouse’s first hospital. Sequestering himself within the space, Burgin has built a grey cube within which he shows a film of ponderous, creeping pans and zooms through the Salle des Pérelins as well as an anonymous hotel room, which looks out onto a cityscape. It was only when I noticed that distant cars in the street were not moving that I realized every scene was a still photograph; despite the movement between here and elsewhere, between now and then, Burgin’s eye is as chilly and dispassionate as the digital media he records with.
In Toulouse’s Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Sylvie Fleury has interspersed a selection of chrome-plated, bronze-cast fetish objects throughout the museum’s ethnographic and natural history display. Did her Dior Shoes (2008) align themselves more to the Mongolian shaman costume, the turtle shell, the stuffed bird of paradise or the Maori hunting equipment? All of it, and none of it, I guess; while appraising contemporary culture through an anthropological long-view, the juxtapositions reveal the essential strangeness of our moment, making these items at once mystical and unknowable.
On the other side of town, Cyprien Gaillard showed a new film, Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009), in the cavernous hall of the Théatre Garonne. (Many of the exhibitions of the festival employed previously derelict, but impressive, historic spaces in the town, as well as museums, independent spaces, the art school, commercial galleries and, in one instance, a bookshop.) Gaillard’s film shows the night-time demolition of a Glasgow block of flats, framed poignantly by a graveyard in the foreground. Gradually the thick smoke clears to reveal an image of the silently thundering Niagara Falls in their place. This description belies the immaculate execution of the idea; while digital trickery would divert the work’s impact, the seamless transition seems entirely natural, as if Gaillard is uncovering the eternal sublime at the core of the Modernist structure. Pruitt-Igoe was, of course, Minoru Yamasaki’s public housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri that was dynamited in 1972, signalling, according to the critic Charles Jencks, the death of modern architecture. (Incidentally, it was Yamasaki who designed New York’s World Trade Center, which fell 29 years later, marking the end of another era.) Gaillard presents the collapse of the Glasgow building as a perpetually repeating event, both a beautiful failure and a never-ending catastrophe.
While the festival’s high points were very high, equally the lows were very low indeed, though I would concede that – in some cases – this was down to personal taste. The gloss-black and silver, adolescent hard-rock aesthetic that was so painfully demonstrated by Claude Lévêque in France’s pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale was here too in force. An overblown installation by the Swiss artist Pierre Vadi titled Hell is Chrome (2009), a gloomy display of sculptures and paintings by brothers Florian and Michaël Quistrebert in one of the town’s ubiquitous arched cellars, and Jean-Luc Verna’s posturing emulations of heavy-metal imagery were all classics of the genre.
Equally teenage, but far more objectionable, was Christian Marclay’s 35 mm film Solo (2008), shown in the town’s arts cinema. The film opened with a lithe, blonde young woman entering what looks like a soundproofed room, and starts exploring the curves and knobs of a Stratocaster that happens to be plugged in to an amplifier. Given the work’s title, and Marclay’s interest in using instruments in unorthodox ways to make sound (think of 2000’s memorable Guitar Drag), you can probably guess how the film pans out. The woman is soon naked, grinding her groin ecstatically (and presumably uncomfortably) against the strings. Perhaps Marclay has a point here about subliminal attraction to the muscular, phallic emblem of the electric guitar (particularly the Strat), although I’d argue that the real erotic charge of the instrument speaks, like this film, primarily to 14-year-old boys. Perhaps, at a stretch, Marclay is deliberately quoting the language of high-grade porn. But by the 20th minute, as the camera lingers on the writhing model’s breasts, I wondered how this film ever got to be made, let alone shown. In an interview published last year in the Daily Telegraph, Marclay says of the work that previously ‘it would not have been politically correct [...] But today it doesn’t seem to be an issue.’ When he goes on to compare it to Marcel Duchamp’s once-scandalous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), the full extent of his obliviousness is revealed.
If you’re considering visiting ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’, don’t let Marclay put you off. It’s worth the trip just to see Jim Shaw’s remarkable installation Labyrinth: I dreamed I was taller than Jonathan Borofsky (2009), in the contemporary art museum, Les Abattoirs. Shaw’s carnival of figures on cut-out panels responds partly to the vast paintings by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí between which it is sited, partly to the iconic work of US artist Barofsky, and partly to the cast of characters from graphic Americana that already populate Shaw’s work. Also excellent are the series of smaller exhibitions, ‘Seven Easy Pieces’, also in the museum. To those who complained that these drew too heavily on the collection of Christian Bernard’s own institution, Mamco, he might have answered that ‘Les Printemps de Toulouse’ was in no way meant to be about the local or the site-specific; after all, ‘Là où je suis n’existe pas’.
At Wysing Arts, in rural Cambridgeshire, the Danish art collective A Kassen have been producing their new video work, Minus Roof, which will be unveiled this Saturday. They enlisted the help of a pilot at the local airfield, who supplied them with a plane from which they filmed Wysing’s gallery from the air. Meanwhile, a camera inside the space filmed the Cambridgeshire skies through a wide gap that the artists had made in the roof. The two videos will be shown side by side, the roof having been replaced.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the project will be hidden in the final work: the artists’ engagement of the group of men who seem to operate the rather dilapidated airfield almost as a hobby. Many concrete runways remain in East Anglia’s flat landscape from World War II, only a few of them are still in use. When A Kassen asked for directions to the airfield, even the village’s postman didn’t know how to reach it. If Minus Roof can be interpreted as a reflection on the various types of distance implicit between the viewer, the art work, the artist and the gallery, then it is an amusing irony that despite the artists’ attempt to include members of the local community in Wysing’s programme, they actually positioned them several hundred feet above the gallery itself.
It was with a cautious eye on these underlying themes of distance that I, as a visiting critic, accepted a ride in the tiny plane that flew over the gallery. My knuckles grew whiter when, as the plane bounced down the cracked and weedy runway for take-off, the pilot commented: ‘This runway’s completely shot full of potholes. We shouldn’t really use it, but we still have a licence for it, so here goes …’.
I was cast back to some thoughts I’d had recently on the moon landings, prompted by the BFI’s ‘One Giant Leap’ season commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Despite the magical achievement of sending human beings into the skies, even so far as to land on the moon, what’s really revealing is not the perspective looking outwards, but the view back to earth.
At the weekend I traveled up to Cumbria for the grand opening of Grizedale Arts’ new home, Lawson Park. Part artists’ residency centre, part experimental self-sufficient farm, Grizedale’s spanking new premises are the result of architects Sutherland Hussey’s redevelopment of a near-derelict hill farm overlooking Coniston Water. Now, in the interests of full transparency, I should disclose that I used to work at Grizedale Arts and that I’ve just finished editing a book about their programme over the past decade (‘Grizedale Arts: Addding Complexity to Confusion’) so I’ll stand back and let the pictures do most of the talking.
The assembled guests
The bog garden
The eclectic interior mixes Arts and Crafts furniture, mid-century Modernism, a Japanese woven-rush wall, and specially commissioned pieces by resident artists.
Artist Wapke Feenstra of the group Myvillages offered tastings of Dutch horse’s milk. (A little thin, but drinkable. Apparently, the bigger the animal, the milder the milk. Rat’s milk is presumably best avoided.)
An honesty stall, at which garden and artists’ produce is offered for sale to passers-by. The money-tin is deliberately left visible and stealable. Only once has it ever gone missing.
Pablo Bronstein’s potting-shed facade can be seen behind the fruit cages.
Rumour and hearsay buzz around Dubai like flies in a jam jar. Speculation, once what developers did, is now what people there do about developers. Answers to the questions, however, that visitors here seem unanimously to be asking – ‘Is it true? Is it over? Has the project failed?’ – are nowhere to be found.
This is perhaps to be expected. We’ve seen again and again the contagious and corrosive power that lapses of confidence can have in financial enterprises around the world, and it is not surprising that people here are keeping their cards close to their chests. Many of the businesses here are owned or controlled by tight-ranked Arab families, who keep considerable distance from the wagging tongues of the cocktail party crowd. Nevertheless, they cannot disguise the fact that, while perhaps half of the buildings in Dubai seem to be unfinished, very little work appears to be going on. Cranes are rarely seen to move. Someone told me that half of the immigrant work force has left the country.
The most conspicuous development is taking place along the Sheikh Zayed Road, a 12-lane highway through the city on each side of which rows of many coloured, many shaped mirrored-glass skyscrapers line up. Driving along the road, it is easy to see that this development is only one block thick – beyond, the buildings are mostly four or five storeys instead of 40 or 50. A taxi driver told me that 20 years ago he remembers playing cricket on this road, the teams only occasionally having to stop play when a car approached through the desert. Now the rush hour traffic is dense and crawling. The half-completed Burj Dubai – for the moment, the tallest building in the world – rises nearby. Further south, past the indoor ski-slope, the Burj al Arab hotel is a landmark, looming out of the sea by Jumeirah Beach (Burj means ‘tower’ in Arabic). One rumour I heard is that it is forbidden to photograph it from the sea, owing to the unfortunate fact that while from land it resembles the billowing spinnaker of a ship, from the water it takes the shape of a massive crucifix. (Forbidden by whom exactly? Enforced how? And who are all these aquatic photographers anyway? The first page of a Google image search reveals this story, like so many here, to be apocryphal.)
Down the road a bit, one reaches the two iconic Palm resorts which pour out into the sea – the second even larger than the first. Still uncompleted and mostly uninhabited, I’m euphemistically told that they’re at their best seen from above, from a distance of a few thousand feet. Other areas try less hard to be flamboyant – particularly around the creek where the city began as a trading port in the 19th century – but throughout, the abundance of empty, sandy lots between buildings are reminders that the city was recently a desert and that, during its planning, the economy of space was never a consideration. There is no pedestrian infrastructure; a car is essential in order to travel between isolated complexes and buildings, which, as Shumon Basar has observed, very often have names that include the words village, city, land or world. Along with a huge number of beery expats, I spent a mercifully brief part of St Patrick’s day in Dubai’s ‘Irish Village’. Everywhere is the smell of high-strength adhesive and quick-drying emulsion.
For those who have never visited Dubai, this description may sound far fetched; for those who know the city however, I’m sure it sounds pedestrian and unimaginative. Also flapping around in the jam jar, however, along with the rumours and hearsay, are big fat clichés. It is clichés, rather than truths, on which the city builds its self-image. Dubai makes such good copy that the same lines get repeated through the international press ad infinitum. Here are three newspaper stories, published within a week of each other, which use almost identical phraseology to describe the notorious abandoned sports cars at Dubai’s airport, with ‘maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield’: The Times ; The New York Times ; The Guardian. For the record, while numbers are impossible to confirm, this phenomenon seems to be true. One brand new Mini Cooper was parked outside my hotel, caked in thick desert dust.
Rem Koolhaas, speaking on the opening day of the March Sessions, the talks programme of the Sharjah Biennial, suggested that the West’s eagerness to announce the failure of Dubai is premature. He admits deep ambivalence about the United Arab Emirates in general; but while he acknowledges its many imperfections, especially the construction industry’s exploitation of thousands of immigrant workers on very low wages, he is drawn to the sense of possibility created by a country with vast wealth and ambition, and an appetite for the new. Mike Davis’ description, in his book Evil Paradises, of Dubai as ‘Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of Araby’, he finds simplistic. Koolhaas looks instead to the city’s reflection of officially sanctioned contemporary architecture – either through second-rate knock-offs of major new buildings around the world, or through a kind of ‘diffusion line’ version by the architect of the original. The result he sees simply as a mirror held up to the West – and hence, however decadent, hubristic or grotesque we may find it, impossible to ignore or dismiss.
Of course, despite this semblance of critical objectivity, Koolhaas is already highly invested in the area. His company, The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has plans to open a branch in Dubai. While one proposal of his – to create a huge, neutral oblong of a building to counter Dubai’s chaotic skyline – was not accepted, Koolhaas has spent a vast amount of his time and energy surveying the city, and analyzing its possible future directions. OMA’s hugely ambitious mixed-use development, Waterfront City, designed to stand on a 1.5-billion-square-foot rectangle of reclaimed land connected by bridges to the mainland, is said to be currently paused.
Also apparently on the shelf is the company’s involvement in the expansion of the Sharjah Art Museum; someone told me that the initial plan was to build ‘the biggest museum in the world’. All the Emirates now seem to be competing with Abu Dhabi, where the museums on the mixed-use Saadiyat Island development include a franchised Louvre (designed by Jean Nouvel), a new Guggenheim (by Frank Gehry) and Norman Foster’s Sheikh Zayed National Museum (Zayed was president of the UAE from its inception in 1971 to 2004). All are currently due to open in 2014. There is a whisper on the wind however that Doha, the capital city of Qatar, is planning to follow up the opening of I.M. Pei’s spectacular Museum of Islamic Art last November with the announcement of a slew of new museums that would eclipse even Abu Dhabi’s. Dubai’s own bid to compete in this game of museum Top Trumps – the Universal Museums project, a multi-disciplinary cultural zone sharing collections with institutions in Germany – is also currently shrouded in secrecy, many people concluding that it too has been halted by the crisis.
Naturally, the concern has been raised that one Guggenheim does not an art world make. On these grounds, the curators of the Sharjah Biennial, the Middle East’s best-established biennial whose host city is unique in the area for having a developed network of practicing cultural producers, decided this year to spend much of their generous budget on new commissions, and a talks and live events programme. Jack Persekian, the biennial’s artistic director, stated that the important thing for him was not so much the exhibition as everything that happened around it. The Dubai Art Fair, which coincided with the opening of the biennial, aims to cultivate Dubai’s rapidly growing art market (there are already around 50 commercial galleries in the city, of widely varying quality and ambition). Despite the expanding market, the dearth of state funding for the arts and high cost of living makes the city an extremely difficult place in which to work professionally as an artist. This year, for the first time, the United Arab Emirates will host a pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Its curator, Tirdad Zolghadr, says he is drawing on the model of a World’s Fair to create a display which aims to present the best of the UAE: a solo exhibition by the Dubai-born photographer Lamya Gargash, a ‘showcase’ of work by major artists from the country, architectural models, videos and text panels.
Not dissimilar is a splinter project by Catherine David for Venice that is being termed the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH) Platform. David however will spread her net across the entire gulf region, concentrating not solely on UAE artists, let alone practitioners from Abu Dhabi, in order to create what she terms a ‘dispositive’ of Arab art. Despite emphatic denials from all concerned, it is not hard to see these parallel enterprises as reflecting the historical and economic rivalry between Abu Dhabi, which is rich in natural oil reserves and which has one eye firmly on its long term future, and Dubai, which relies hugely on foreign investment to fund its frantic expansion. David is dismissive of Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island development, stating that we have entered a ‘post museum culture’. She is far more excited about her own involvement in the planning of an interdisciplinary cultural centre in Qasr al Hosn, an ancient fort in the historical heart of Abu Dhabi. This project will, she hopes, like the Abu Dhabi Platform for Art, directly benefit the cultural production of the area. Unlike the steroid-swollen initiatives in Dubai, this seems a far more organic, prudent and far-sighted way to press forward toward the horizon of the future.
I can’t bear it when artists use technologically advanced digital media to talk about the advancement of digital technology. All those web-based projects and interactive gizmos that are finger-grubby and unresponsive when you come across them in a gallery just don’t do it for me. Thank heavens for Mark Leckey, who used a blackboard and a stick of chalk to illustrate the phenomenon of ‘The Long Tail’ at the ICA last weekend.
The event was part-lecture, part-performance, part-experimental son et lumiere show. Its subject and title were taken from the term Chris Anderson coined to describe the way that the internet caters for the desires of an infinitely long tail of consumers with minority interests who trail behind (but ultimately exceed) the swollen head of the mainstream. Leckey is interested in this well-discussed area, it seems, because of its ramifications for the way in which we fulfil our libidinal desires (when everything is apparently available), and because of the socio-economic possibilities it opens up for communities of people who cut out the middle-man (the distributor) and freely share and exchange data – the new currency – between themselves.
In fairness, Leckey’s media were not limited to just the blackboard (which actually swung dramatically around on hinges at each side). At one point he even attempted to demonstrate the technique used to create the first television broadcast – an image of a figurine of Felix the Cat, turning slowly on a turntable. A homemade contraption consisting of perforated wheels and projected light began to spin, and with a bit of hesitation (and some distinctly fishy tapping on a laptop keyboard) a shaky grey image of Felix did indeed fade into view on a projection screen.
If this ‘abracadabra’ moment did seem to be somewhat over-concerned with effect rather than authentic method, so too did moments later on when Leckey began to race through his script so excitedly that it wasn’t clear whether even he fully grasped the finer points of his material, let alone his audience. However this was partly the point: the evening was (sometimes literally) concerned with smoke and mirrors, with the magic of things appearing and disappearing. Leckey began with a reading of Charles Sirato’s Dimensionist Manifesto (1936) which observed how literature was leaving the line and entering the plane, painting was leaving the plane and entering space, sculpture was stepping into the fourth dimension and finally proposing a ‘completely new art form’: ‘matter-music’, the result of ‘the vaporisation of sculpture’. While he gestures towards the fulfilment of Sirato’s projection, I think Leckey takes too much pleasure in the world of objects to go the whole way. The climax of the show was a huge inflatable head of Felix the Cat that loomed over the blackboard at the back of the stage, in a mist of dry ice. Sometimes you just can’t beat a bit of old-fashioned stagecraft.
What does it mean when an extraordinary series of paintings currently on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt by René Magritte, which look so uncannily fresh and new, were actually produced in a five week period in 1948, in a style that the artist invented purely to confound and annoy the Parisian public? Magritte’s période vache is an anachronism, an exercise in perversity in which was the celebrated artist’s response to the opportunity for a solo show in a city that he’d left in 1931 and with which he’d had a fractious relationship ever since.
These 17 oil paintings and 20 gouaches combine to form a kind of anti-Magritte, an incoherent rattlebag of styles and techniques that through their joyful freedom actually embrace what he so emphatically resisted in the neutral, anonymous painting style for which he is still best known. I am in fact reminded of Rodney Graham’s recent foray into the history of Modernist painting, ‘Wet on Wet – My Late Early Styles’ (2007) – a similarly mischievous digression into dilettantism, and the unapologetically transgressive pleasures that go with it. Tellingly, however, following the exhibition of these works Magritte wrote to his friend Louis Scutenaire that it was primarily his ‘abhorrence of sincerity’ that prevented him taking ‘further steps along this path’.
On reflection, these works are an important (first?) step on a journey through painting that was joined just over two decades later by artists such as Jörg Immendorff and Georg Baselitz in Europe, or Philip Guston in the USA, and then subsequently by artists such Martin Kippenberger, Maria Lassnig, George Condo, Sean Landers and even Paul McCarthy. These figures all like to play in the same mucky sandpit of grotesque figuration, dark comedy and bawdy sexuality. It is pleasing to think of Magritte clearing the space for such an important and fruitful discourse in a brisk two-month career cul-de-sac to which he’d never return. I almost want to say that what is remarkable here is that he achieved this by making paintings that ‘didn’t really mean it’. Remembering however his comment to Scutenaire, what makes the series really extraordinary in the wily artist’s oeuvre is that he meant it too much.
