This summer has seen an unusual amount of temporary projects springing up across London, from the grassroots pop-ups to the more usual corporate-sponsored affairs. Is it too early to say whether this represents the first stirrings of the DIY projects we’ve been assured would flourish in empty shop-fronts and offices? For the time being, here are some of the highlights:
A temporary boat-like pavilion, built from reclaimed timber and tarpaulins, Frank’s Cafe and Campari Bar (pictured above) is nestled on the top floor of a multi-storey carpark in Peckham. Open until the end of September, the cafe has some of the best views in the city (see top), and has a small menu of cheap simple food – all the more impressive as it’s ten stories up. ‘Bold Tendencies III’, an outdoor exhibition of monumental sculpture organized by the Peckham-based Hannah Barry Gallery, is installed alongside.
As part of the Barbican’s ‘Radical Nature’ survey exhibition (a full review of which will be in the October issue of frieze), Agnes Denes’ 1982 Wheatfield has been reconstructed at Dalston Mill, the first time that the pioneering work has been reconstructed in the UK.
Though only a fraction of the size of the original, Wheatfield has been paired with a new commission from French architecture collective EXYZT, which comprises a scaffold windmill structure that promises to grind the harvested wheat for pizza dough.
A more obvious effect of the recession is the reopening of Roger Hiorns’ 2008 Artangel project Seizure (for which he was nominated for the 2009 Turner Prize). For the commission Hiorns soaked a condemned council flat (151-9 Harper Road, SE1) with 90,000 litres of chemical liquid, leaving it three months until copper sulfate crystals grew, transforming the space into a bright blue cavern. The work was intended to be temporary, as the flats were scheduled for redevelopment, though the developers are stalled and the flats remain derelict. Seizure is open until 18 October.
The Savoy Cafe (240 Graham Road, E8) opened in Hackney in late July and has a busy programme of screenings and talks every Saturday until the end of August. Look out for the UK premiere of Keys to my Heart by Kalup Linzy on 22 August. (Watch excerpts of and read more about Linzy’s work here, first published in the April issue of frieze.)
Designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of Japanese practice SANAA (best known for the New Museum, New York), the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009 is intended to resemble a plume of smoke winding through Kensington Gardens.
The pavilion is open until 18 October and, of the eight pavilions built so far for the annual commission, is certainly one of the loveliest. The Park Nights series runs throughout the summer – highlights include music from Tatsuya Yoshida and Charles Hayward this Friday and a screening of Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare in a few weeks.
Antony Gormley’s One & Other project for Trafalgar Square’s empty fourth plinth – for which a randomly selected applicant from the UK occupies the plinth every hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days – is the most high-profile of these, having become an ongoing story in the broadsheets. Sky Arts is hosting a live feed from the plinth, the surprising success of which today prompted the Guardianto wonder whether this could mean something new for arts TV in the UK. As Sidney Smith pointed out in the March issue of frieze, something surely needs to be done about the current state of arts broadcasting here. Here’s hoping that this recent activity has a lasting effect…
Previewed last week in Risør, a small fishing town on the south coast of Norway that plays host to an annual chamber music festival, Pictures Reframed was a collaboration between South African-born artist Robin Rhode and Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes. The project comprises a staging of Pictures at an Exhibition, Modest Mussorgsky’s well-known piano suite that was written in 1874, inspired by a posthumous show in St Petersburg show of more than 400 works by his friend Viktor Hartmann. The suite depicts an imagined tour of an exhibition, each section title alluding to a specific picture by Hartmann. Berlin-based Rhode’s installation comprises a single-channel film at the back of the stage, though Andsnes is surrounded by five angled screens positioned around the piano. Each of the 35-minute suite’s ten movements – as well as the main theme – are matched by a film or series of stills, around half of which depart from Rhode’s signature stenciled wall-drawings, taking in graphic sections and archive-style black-and-white footage. For the late-evening preview (it only got dark for a few hours) Andsnes, who is artistic director of the festival, performed the piece to a packed house in a disused fish factory by Risør’s harbour. (No footage on YouTube yet, so the clip below – of Evgeny Kissin – will have to do.)
In recent years you wouldn’t have had to look too far to find artists providing visuals for high-profile, newly commissioned pieces – though the results have been mixed. Tal Rosner’s computer-generated abstractions for last year’s premiere of Thomas Adès’ piano concerto, In Seven Days: Piano concerto with moving image, were pretty weak – a distracting screensaver across six screens. Similarly mural-like, Julian Opie’s LED screens for the Royal Ballet’s Infra (2008), a Wayne McGregor-choreographed piece scored by Max Richter, were more successful, though left one wondering what could have been if a more exciting artist had been involved. The impetus for these concert-hall-sized projects is often suspiciously commercial – no automatically bad thing (the costs are enormous), though compromises are often obvious. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the more successful classical/art pairings of recent years – in London, at least – have been commissioned by visual art organisations. Heiner Goebbels’ Stifter’s Dinge, commissioned by Artangel last year, and Tate Modern’s 18-hour performance of Satie’s Vexations (below) – backed by Warhol’s Sleep (1963) on loop – both come to mind. (The latter piece restaged a 1963 performance of the piece which was organized by John Cage – John Cale was one of the performers and Warhol claimed to have been the only member of audience to make it all the way through.)
Pictures Reframed was commissioned by Lincoln Center, New York (where the piece will premiere this November before being toured worldwide), an institution that was also responsible for commissioning Bill Viola to to produce a typically grandiose work version of Tristan und Isolde. (I suppose that Viola is one of the few people that wouldn’t have any qualms with tackling Wagner.) Rhode and Andsnes’ collaboration is certainly better considered and perhaps more attentive than the Viola project. The pair met in Munich two years ago, and the collaboration apparently began with Rhode showing Andsnes Hans Richter films and Fernand Léger’s 1924 Ballet mécanique (below).
Certain aspects of the project carry the fingerprints of record-label involvement though: the title, ‘Pictures Reframed’, feels inaccurate, given that the piece is more concerned with resituating, even unframing, Hartmann’s original pictures, taking them out of the gallery context and expanding them from pre-revolution pictures in Constructivist-inspired films. The film opens not in an exhibition, but on the street, with Promenade, an early section of the collaboration that was shown separately at Who Saw Who, Rhode’s Hayward show last year.
In the short work, the format of which recurs throughout, matched with Mussorgsky’s main theme, Rhode’s trademark black-suited street performer enters the screen upside down, appearing to juggle clusters of rhomboids chalked on the walls with his feet. While Rhode claimed to have not been interested in ‘breaking the code of Hartmann’s pictures’, clear formal correspondences with the originals are maintained, though given a personal twist. ‘Il Vecchio Castle’, for example, Hartmann’s picture of a five-sided castle, becomes ‘Medieval Castle’, a digital fantasy on a building in Cape Town; a section in catacombs corresponds with ‘Ink Strikes’, in which Pollock-like dashes of paint serve as illuminations. Others are more problematic: Mussorgsky’s ‘Two Polish Jews’ section – inspired by Hartmann’s sketches from Warsaw ghettoes – is accompanied by a series of black and white bank logos.
In collaborations such as these there is often a fraught relationship between performance and visuals – when I saw Adès conduct In Seven Days he was wearing headphones, at times frantically trying to sync the players with the visuals via a click-track. At Risør this was ably solved by an musically minded technician who sat off-stage, manipulating Rhode’s films to keep time with Andsnes; while the performance resembled a musical accompaniment, it was actually the opposite. Despite this smooth synthesis, several parts of the visual element posit an antagonistic relationship between the original and the new version: the work finishes with a spectacular scene in which a grand piano is drowned in a rush of water. You wonder about quite how smooth the working relationship between the pianist and artist actually was.
Pictures Reframed is not a big risk for either Rhode or Andsnes. The suite has been attempted by so many others – orchestrated by Ravel, played by Duke Ellington, even surviving a version by Emerson, Lake & Palmer – a new iteration is neither sacriligous nor quite a novelty. It is too much to say that this will make anyone reassess their opinion of Pictures at an Exhibition or of Rhode’s work. (The reputation of Andsnes, who has been performing for more than 20 years, is pretty solid). It remains a brave undertaking, though, and one that doesn’t equate the concert hall environment with grandiosity.
It’ll come as little surprise to readers of Roberto Bolaño’s mammoth final novel, 2666, that what appears to be a sixth section has been found amid the piles of papers and diaries left by the writer, who died in 2003. While the book is probably as structurally tight as anything that tips 900 pages can be, within its vast collection of disappearances plenty of tantalizing gaps certainly remain. Most obvious is the always mysterious title, a date that is briefly referred to in one of Bolaño’s earlier novellas (Amulet) though goes unmentioned in 2666. Perhaps Bolaño had some larger series of connections in mind? His notes claim that the book has a ‘hidden centre’ and that the narrator is intended to be Arturo Belano, a wandering poet who is central to The Savage Detectives (2007) and certainly not too dissimilar from Bolaño himself.
That the possibly missing section was found alongside two previously unseen manuscripts – titled ‘Diorama’ and ‘The Troubles of the Real Police Officer’ – raises a number of questions about the ethics and expediencies of posthumous publishing, sticky issues over the last few years. It is already known that 2666 was not published as Bolaño intended – he meant for the novel to be published as five separate volumes, partly so that they may be read in any order, and partly to provide a steady income for his son. (Bolaño died from complications with his liver that may have been been the result of his earlier heroin habit, and was well aware that the book would be his last.) In this case, his testaments were rightly betrayed, given that, between his death in 2003 and the publication of 2666, Bolaño’s lasting fame had been secured; his editors were surely justified in publishing the epic in its entirety as his son was adequately provided for.
The most notorious literary case of testaments betrayed was of course Max Brod’s decision to go against the will of his friend Franz Kafka. Despite Kafka’s final wishes – ‘Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me [...] is to be burned unread’ – Brod published diaries, manuscripts and correspondence after his death in 1924. It’s generally agreed that, as Brod claimed, Kafka knew that his friend would ignore his will, but what of Dmitri Nabokov’s decision last year to publish his father’s last manuscript, The Original of Laura, a collection of some 50 index cards he was ordered to burn in 1977? While I’m sure these fragments will be of considerable scholarly interest, if The Original of Laura is indeed worthy of a major publication it seems odd that Nabokov Jr. should have waited 30 years to make the call.
This is an argument that is bound to crop up again soon. Recently excerpted in The New Yorker, David Foster Wallace’s long, unfinished final novel – The Pale King – is scheduled for posthumous release next year, some 400 pages thinner than apparently intended. New York magazine uncharitably wondered whether the book, which is about the unfulfilled lives of several IRS agents, will be ‘the most boring book ever.’ Unfair perhaps, but it’s tough to imagine how a truncated version of a Wallace novel would read, given how overstuffed with facts and footnotes his first two novels and several short story collections were.
There is an important difference here though: unlike Nabokov and Wallace, news of the continuing finds chez Bolaño seems quite apt. 2666 is about, as much as anything, getting old, forgotten masterpieces and persistent fragments, obscure geniuses and minor scholars. Writers are omnipresent, but – fittingly – they are always slipping through the cracks. ‘Nothing is ever behind us’, notes the narrator in the first section of 2666, and these recent discoveries suggest that, as far as Bolaño’s legacy is concerned, this may well be the case.
Held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome over the weekend, ‘Functions of the Museum’ was the first in a series of symposia considering exhibitions and audiences in the run-up to the opening of the city’s first contemporary art institution. The Zaha Hadid-designed MAXXI Museum (or the National Museum of XXI Century Art), which will host both an art and an architecture institution, has been in the pipeline since 1998 and is due to open – after what sounds like a fraught gestation period – by early next year. The attitude of many of the speakers to the project was ambivalent. Some wondered whether the symposium would prompt real change in MAXXI’s programme, while the first speaker, historian and critic John Welchman, was most succinct, at one point showing a Monica Bonvicini cartoon of Hadid ordering a naked lackey to ‘cut you dick out and eat it’ alongside construction shots of the museum.
MAXXI will be, by some accounts, a tough place to stage exhibitions, due to a lack of initial guidance, and much discussion focused on the presumed end of the post-Pompidou period of glitzy architecture driven by economic policy rather than the contingencies of display. Held over two days, the event was based around four big-name speakers – Welchman, philosopher Boris Groys and artists Daniel Buren and Jimmie Durham – and two meandering panels, and hoped to offer something in the way of a self-reflexive approach to the museum’s programming.
Welchman, professor of art history in the Visual Arts department at the University of California, provided an authoritative survey of institutional critique that was echoed and referred back to by subsequent speakers. He described the major shortcoming of the Hans Haacke generation as being a too narrow focus on what an ‘institution’ is – going no further than analyzing or ironizing the exhibition space. Welchman presented relational aesthetics as the point at which critique had become institutionalized, the ‘90s being the decade in which the museum was ‘recalibrated as a global delivery system.’ This was a criticism continued by both Federico Ferrari (a professor in Milan) and art critic Giorgio Verzotti, who argued that institutional critique didn’t fade out, it simply continued with different preoccupations, such as the everyday (as with Felix Gonzalez-Torres), though ultimately finishing in hopelessly self-referential mannerism that reached its apogee with the Guggenheim’s ‘theanyspacewhatever’ survey.
Welchman recommended a reinvigoration of the terms of ‘institution’, following John Searle’s and Roland Barthes’ early writing on language as a primarily social institution, a system of contractual values – a line of thinking ignored by the first generation of artists to analyze the museum. Linking this to Foucault’s injunction of studying the state from the ‘bottom up’, Welchman cited Mike Kelley as an example of an artist working along the lines of ‘bottom up’ social formation, with work such as ‘Drawings for Repressed Social Relationships’ dealing with institutional recall, personal memories inscribed in structures other than the museum.
Welchman was followed by a roundtable that ran way over its allotted time, as these things often do, each of the four speakers treating their section as a lecture rather than short presentation. (The entire first day ran close to six hours with just a ten-minute break – not good.) A highlight of this first panel was a short presentation from Wouter Davidts, Professor of Modern Art History at the VU University in Amsterdam, who gave an overview of unbuilt museums in Antwerp, following their influence – or ‘ghost lives’ – on museums that had been subsequently realized elsewhere. With plummeting endowments, the value and purpose of new museums will surely be contested subjects over the next few years, and Davidts’ approach suggested a worthwhile consideration of both past follies and sadly derailed projects.
This sentiment chimed with Joanna Mytkowska’s presentation on the second day. Mytkowska is director of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, an institution still in its design stage (it is due to open in 2014). It will be the first museum to be built in the city since 1938, and is on a similarly grand scale as MAXXI (around 35,000 square metres). Given the bitter reaction to blatant representations of power in post-communist Eastern Europe, Mytkowska emphasized a conflicted approach to the museum as authoritative institution. They are working towards reconfiguring what a ‘public’ space means in this context, and have hung a large neon sign from a demolished public cinema in their temporary space; even if the museum is unsuccessful, Mytkowska sees this preliminary reflexive stage as being productive in itself. The design for the museum was run as an open submission, and the jury – which included Nicholas Serota, Daniel Libeskind and Deyan Sudjic – recommended modesty over iconic showiness. The winning design, by Christian Kerez, is a low-slung, almost Brutalist affair, far from the Guggenheim Bilbao that city government had hoped for – the original director resigned in the ensuing scandal.
Daniel Buren began his enlightening talk with the surprising claim that his writing from the late ‘60s is now largely obsolete, given the degree to which institutions have changed since then. One major shift is the popularization of the museum experience, which has led to a vastly expanded public which is no longer in awe of the institution. Buren also noted that his earlier complaints about the economic power of the museum now seems ‘almost comical’ given how little money public institutions now have.
Opening the second day, Boris Groys was largely optimistic about the future of the museum, continuing his knack for pithy inversion – demonstrated in last year’s Art Power – with a series of unexpected arguments. He began by noting that, pace Beuys, rather than everyone becoming an artist, everyone has become a curator, linking the curatorial role to its etymological root as ‘curer’, nursing the ‘sick’ artwork back to recovery in the hospital-like museum. Groys focused on the points at which the institution’s ‘medical tricks’ cannot be hidden, the points at which the museum both cures the work and contributes to its continuing illness. By way of example, he compared a show of Marcel Broodthaers’ films some years ago, presented on the original equipment, with a more recent survey of Warhol’s films shown on flatscreen televisions. The supporting hardware of the former exhibition triggered a nostalgic response in visitors and meant that attention was diverted from the work itself, while the latter show was presented on means that were completely foreign to its mode of composition. ‘Every mode of presentation is ruinous to the work’, he concluded.
‘I’m going to tell stories, mostly about museums I like’, claimed Jimmie Durham at the beginning of his modest keynote, before noting that he had never visited a museum until the early ‘80s. He mentioned the Prado as his favourite museum, as, after kilometres of bad painting you finally reach the El Grecos and think, ‘Wow, even painting could be art…’ More seriously, Durham singled out Jan Hoet’s tenure at SMAK in Ghent as a model for how an institutional as social rather than educative hub, ‘not where the muses stay but where they might come to.’
A topic that was touched upon by a couple of the speakers, though not fully explored in any single presentation, was how digital and online work can be properly displayed in the museum. Groys told a short anecdote about visiting the first ‘net art’ shows in the late ‘90s and noting that the light of the computer terminals gave visitors the illuminated appearance of some baroque painting. It was only afterwards that he found out that most of the works had crashed so people were just checking their emails. New media of course calls for new approaches to display. Welchman quickly discussed the rise of ‘black box’ presentations of film work in the ’90s (the inverse of the white cube), before noting that new media seems to threaten the institution, its intrinsic qualities appearing to suggest a kind of ‘ubiquitous museum’. How to display works that are freely circulated online? How does independent and potentially infinite choice relate, in this context, to curatorial selection? Does YouTube mean that the collective experience is increasingly coming to be based on simultaneous private experience? These are all questions that MAXXI’s curators claim to be listening to, though we’ll have to wait another year to see how successful their answers are.
Less than two weeks ago, an Israeli musician named Ophir Kutiel, aka Kutiman, posted Thru You, seven tracks spliced together from video clips culled from YouTube. Within a week the project had garnered more than a million views. The tracks took a reputed three months to assemble, putting it some distance from the typical viral hit. (Though I suppose that whole legions of creatives are puzzling over what exactly ‘typical’ means in this context.) Presented on a page designed to look like a hacked, digitally defaced version of YouTube, Thru You asks to be considered aside from sneezing pandas and fat guys dancing to Beyoncé.
So what’s new about Thru You? Inevitably compared to DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…... (1996) (the first album, though correct me if I’m wrong here, to comprise nothing but samples), Kutiel’s project intriguingly coincides with the 20th anniversary rerelease of the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. Panned on its release in 1989, Dust Brothers’ cut ‘n’ paste production work on that album pretty much set the blueprint for modern-day sampling, an approach that stretches up to more recent DJs like Cut Chemist and RJD2. Though Thru You sounds, in places, a little like these crate-diggers, there are crucial differences in approach. Yet, at the other end of the spectrum, neither does Kutiel’s project have much to do with more serious-minded copyright-baiting experiments such as Bay Area audio collagists Negativland (whose extensive sampling on the U-2 EP drew a lawsuit from U2 nearly 20 years ago).
Cory Arcangel has of course made work that also collates clips from segments of YouTube performances: a couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould (2007) was a version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (1741) constructed from individual notes played by amateurs found on YouTube. Arcangel’s installation (not actually posted on YouTube, though there is some installation footage here) was all about cover versions versus definitive versions, lone amateurs against lone geniuses. Gould famously retreated from the concert hall to the studio in order to perfect the piece; most of the YouTube performers, unconsciously emulating the great Canadian pianist, play at home.
While the source of Kutiel’s project is the same as Arcangel’s, Thru You does not seek to reassemble a new version of a canonical work from many recitals of that same piece. Neither are they, as with the web sensation Girl Talk, recognizable samples of pop songs mashed into hideous assemblages for the attention deficient. Instead, seven completely new tracks are made from amateurs playing just about anything. While Kutiel released a well-received solo album on a traditional format through a regular record label last year, Thru You depends upon being watched online. Crucially, it combines its samples visually, moving to split-screen when layering samples. The source of this material is instantly recognizable as YouTube: poorly lit living rooms, nervous glances at the camera, high-school recitals and the occasional close-up of virtuoso guitar skills (Arcangel lingers most on the latter). The question of distribution is obviously touched upon by the title of Kutiel’s viral hit – it’s claimed that the project is linked to no product and was backed by no PR campaign. Instead, Kutiel emailed the tracks to 20 friends and the rest spread through Twitter. Thru You depends on collective distribution as well as collective composition.
Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds (2002)
In a conversation published in the current issue of Artforum, Arcangel and Dara Birnbaum discuss how some ’70s strategies – the isolation and manipulation of popular imagery, for example – have become common practice on YouTube. What once took place within the institutional structure is now happening in the hands of teenagers in middle America. So what are the obstacles that artists working with these means face today? As Mark Leckey discussed in a recent lecture at the ICA, online there is always a niche audience – however small. When there is always an audience, how can an artist ever make a ‘wrong move’? It should be noted that Arcangel aims his work at two audiences, showing in galleries but also releasing clips online (Super Mario Clouds, 2002 was a blog hit way before it was put on the cover of Artforum). But, with computer games now grossing more than Hollywood and millions of home performances ripe for sampling (without fear of copyright-related reprisals), what is at stake when this stuff is claimed as art?
frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.
Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a public sculpture of a 50-metre high white horse has been announed as the winner of a commission for the Ebbsfleet Valley in Kent. Based on a painting by George Stubbs, the proposed work has inevitably been dubbed the ‘Angel of the South’, after Antony Gormley’s 20-metre Angel of the North (1998) in Gateshead. At a cost of £2m, the white horse will be the UK’s most ambitious piece of public art to date and is expected to be seen by some 60 million people every year. The popular proposal beat entries from Christopher le Brun, Daniel Buren, Richard Deacon and Rachel Whiteread.
Somewhat fittingly, on the same day of the announcement Wallinger’s own racehorse, Riviera Red, won its first race – the 2.40pm at Lingfield – after years of bad form. (Riviera Red shouldn’t be confused with A Real Work of Art, the horse that Wallinger bought and named as part of a Turner Prize-nominated exhibition in 1995.)
Wallinger is curating ‘The Russian Linesman’, a group show that will open at the Hayward next week. (From issue eight of frieze, first published in January 1993, read ‘Fools and Horses’, Adrian Searle’s monograph on Wallinger here.)
It’s been a mixed week for public sculpture, as it was announed that B of the Bang, Thomas Heatherwick’s monument to the 2002 Commonwealth games, is soon to be dismantled due to ‘technical difficulties’. Several of its large metal spikes had fallen off or required removing. The ill-fated work was originally delivered two years behind schedule and, at £1.42m, cost twice as much as was originally planned. Heatherwick’s studio eventually paid Manchester city council £1.7m in an out-of-court settlement over subsequent safety problems.
The eighth edition of Manifesta, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art, will take place in the region of Murcia in southern Spain in autumn 2010. This follows previous editions in Rotterdam (1996), Luxembourg (1998), Ljubljana (2000), Frankfurt (2002), Donostia-San Sebastián (2004), Nicosia (2006 – cancelled) and Trentino-Alto Adige last year. The International Foundation Manifesta (IFM) announced that Manifesta 8 will aim to explore the edges of Europe while engaging with Northern Africa. The biennial’s board is not inviting individual art professionals to fill the position of curator – it is instead inviting curatorial groups, artistic and interdisciplinary collectives, as well as institutions to be part of the biennial’s curatorial team.
A fire started by an illegal fireworks show in Beijing engulfed Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren’s CCTV complex on Monday night and was not extinguished until early Tuesday morning. The flames didn’t strike the torqued CCTV tower but an adjacent 34-storey structure in which a Mandarin Oriental Hotel was due to open later this year. A spokesman for Koolhaas’s firm in Rotterdam, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, called the fire ‘a great tragedy.’
Tate has announced that Miroslaw Balka will be the 10th person the receive the annual Turbine Hall commission. The Polish artist will follow Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster divisive TH.2058. Vicente Todoli, director of Tate Modern, described Balka as a ‘master poet’ – several of Balka’s works are already in the Tate’s permanent collection. Twenty million people have visited the Turbine Hall since it opened nine years ago – previous years have seen work by Doris Salcedo, Carsten Höller,Rachel Whiteread, Bruce Nauman, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Juan Muñoz and Louise Bourgeois.
The future of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative is in doubt after a property dispute has added to the troubles of the financially stricken organization. Last month, the New York-based cooperative received an eviction notice from their P.S.1-controlled office space and archive in TriBeCa. The space may be turned over to Alanna Heiss, who founded P.S.1 in 1972 and was its executive director up until last year, who will use the space for Art International Radio, an internet-based radio station. Talking to the New York Times, Jonas Mekas said, ‘We can’t understand why they are giving her so much space for a project that is just being formed and has not proved itself of any service to the arts community, and at the same time throwing out the only organization that independent filmmakers have to distribute their work.’ Founded in 1962 by a group of experimental filmmakers that included Mekas, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative has a collection of some 5,000 works made by some 900 artists.
Following the death of veteran television presenter Tony Hart at the age of 83 last Sunday, frieze asked artist Ryan Gander to consider the influence of Hart’s BBC programmes on him and others of his generation. Between 1954 and 2000, Hart presented a number of TV series – including Playbox (1954–59), Take Hart (1978-84), and Hartbeat (1984-93) – that introduced several generations of children to art. A regular feature of Hart’s TV shows was ‘The Gallery’, in which paintings, drawings and collages sent in by young viewers were displayed and discussed. Hart received two BAFTA awards and was given a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. He retired from regular TV work in 2001.
——————————————————————————————
I met Rolf Harris in a hotel lobby in Sydney last year. It’s funny being in Sydney as an artist working, and accidentally ending up sitting on a sofa chatting with ‘Ken yer see what it is yit?’ himself, waiting for the rain to stop. Rolf asked why I was there and I told him I was in the biennale – ironically he seemed a bit jealous, so I asked him about painting the Queen to appease him.
While I never met Tony Hart, I would say that Take Hart was an important part of my childhood. Since Hart’s sad death last week he has come up in quite a few conversations with friends. Now, as I try to remember him, it’s apparent that I am, in actuality, misremembering him already. That might not be a good thing, but there’s a reason for it.
I remember that Tony Hart wore a cravat and chinos, and I sort of remember chest hair, but I don’t know how much. He was a man with a soft gentle voice and there were normally two or three amazingly beautiful girls assisting him in each programme, though they seemed to be replaced by more amazingly beautiful girls far too regularly, but maybe I am making that up? I remember the little plasticine fella, Morph (pictured above), as well as his sidekick who was a vehicle to visually explain things to the viewer, but Tony was the one with the ideas.
I say I am misremembering him because I seem to be describing a slightly older version of the character Thomas the photographer played by David Hemmings (pictured above) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966). You see, I am building in my mind a picture of what we perceive to be an artist, what we might expect, and that’s confusing for me. It’s dangerous that we could end up remembering this man as an actor, or a cardboard cut-out of a character or TV presenter. I am convinced we should remember him as an artist’s artist.
A friend once told me in a pub that I shouldn’t be so dismissive of clichés, because a cliché is a cliché because everyone agrees on it. That is, because many people think the same thing individually, it’s not contagious – it’s just very, very popular. This means, of course, that most clichés are good images, ideas or relationships. Maybe I’m concerned that Tony Hart will be remembered as a cliché because I think all the really interesting artists are the ones that don’t want to ‘be’ artists, but, in a very simple sense, just ‘make work’ or ‘have ideas’. And similarly for those that ‘make that work’, a worse insult could not be imagined than, ‘it looks like art’.
Take Hart for me as a child – and similarly Hartbeat, which was broadcast between 1984 and 1993 – was purely about ideas: the act of doing and exploring, finding faces in inanimate objects, looking for doppelgängers of shapes, attempting to balance a mobile made from a feather and a brick. Tony Hart filled me with an energy to do and to explore, to look at things upside-down, or inside-out. This creative optimism was undoubtedly a product of Hart, but also a product of an era of British television of a much higher standard to that that we see today. Take Hart‘s successor Art Attack, presented by Neil Buchanan, for example… It’s just not good telly; it’s about making things ‘appear to be’, not ‘making things’.
Hart was a man responsible for millions of 6-to-8 year olds questioning whether they would rather be a fireman, a soldier, a teacher, a vet or an artist – and that’s amazing. And if we did choose artist, lets hope that our ideas are as good to us as we are to them. I get the impression that Tony Hart’s ideas really looked after him.
frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.
A lawsuit has been launched against Richard Prince in which it is claimed that images from his 2008 ‘Canal Zone’ exhibition were lifted from French photographer Patrick Cariou’s photographic survey of Rastafarian culture, Yes Rasta, published in 2000. The Art Newspaperreports that the suit also names dealer Larry Gagosian and publishing house Rizzoli as defendants. In addition to seeking damages for copyright infringement, the lawsuit demands the, ‘impounding, destruction, or other disposition’ of all of the exhibited works and unsold catalogues. Representatives for Prince and Gagosian have declined to comment.
Prince has been incorporating images from advertising campaigns and other sources for more than 30 years, a practice that has previously led to his being sued by photographer Garry Gross over Spiritual America (1983) – the suit was settled out of court. The ‘Cowboys’ series has been similarly controversial, drawing complaints from various commercial photographers involved with the Marlboro campaign.
As Cariou’s lawyers have argued, ‘Canal Zone’ represents a new step for Prince, in that the images were taken from a fully researched photographic project rather than ad campaigns freely available in magazines. If the court deems Prince’s interventions to be ‘transformative’ then the artist could well win the case on the grounds of ‘fair use’. A recent precedent was Blanch v Koons (2006), where fashion photographer Andrea Blanch unsuccessfully sued Jeff Koons for incorporating a photo from one of her shoots.
Tate Modern yesterday announced that many of the 725 works donated to Tate and National Galleries of Scotland by Anthony D’Offay (pictured above) last year will be used in a large-scale touring exhibition. Incorporating work by some 30 artists, ‘Artist Rooms’ will tour to 18 museums throughout 2009, reaching an estimated audience of 9 million people.
The first leg of the tour, due to start in March, will make use of two-thirds of D’Offay’s donation, and will include work by Joseph Beuys, Vija Celmins, Gilbert & George, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, and Gerhard Richter.
S.H. Raza (pictured above), one of the India’s foremost artists, opened an exhibition of his own paintings in Delhi on Saturday only to discover that many were fakes. The Paris-based artist had contributed some works on paper to Dhoomimal Gallery’s retrospective, while the gallery had borrowed around 30 paintings – supposedly his early works – from Raza’s nephew.
‘As I moved from one canvas to the other, I realised that the works were just not mine, they were all fakes,’ the 85-year-old wrote in an Indian newspaper. Uday Jain and Uma Jain, the gallery owners, have apologized to Raza, saying that they had been duped; the exhibition was cancelled half an hour after opening.
frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.
Flying fighter jets, horse riding, skiing and fishing – Vladimir Putin can, it seems, do most things he turns his hand to. The Russian Prime Minister has now directed his not inconsiderable talents towards painting, donating Pattern (2009), a roughly painted wintry scene glimpsed through lacy curtains (pictured above), to a charity auction that will take place this weekend. The Chagall-esque work is said to be on the theme of ‘Night Before Christmas’, a short story by Ukraine-born Nikolai Gogol, the bicentenary of whose birth is celebrated this year. The auction is organized by artist Nadezhda Anfalova, who the Daily Mail cruelly claim may have had a hand in ‘improving’ Putin’s effort. One Russian critic, who understandably wished to remain anonymous, questioned the provenance of Pattern, suggesting that it looks as though ‘it was painted by a sentimental woman.’ The Telegraph‘s Richard Dorment was kind enough to provide a useful critique.
Earlier in the week, Czech artist David Cerny’s installation (pictured above) at the European Council building in Brussels stoked some controversy due to its lampooning of various national stereotypes. Installed last weekend, the 16-tonne Entropa (2009) depicts Romania as a Dracula-based themepark, Bulgaria as a toilet, Germany as a network of motorways that seems to resemble a swastika, while Luxembourg is a lump of gold with a prominent ‘for sale’ sign and France is on strike – the eurosceptic UK is not included. Bulgaria were particularly offended, going so far as to summon the Czech ambassador to Sofia to explain.
Embarrassingly, Entropa was commissioned to celebrate the beginning of the Czech Republic’s presidency of the EU. There seems to have been some degree of confusion in the country: up until the work was unveiled, Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra was under the impression that the work was being produced by artists from all 27 EU states. Cerny admitted that he had deliberately misled ministers, having presented them with a catalogue describing all of his alleged collaborators. The artist noted that the work ‘lampoons the socially activist art that balances on the verge between would-be controversial attacks on national character and undisturbing decoration of an official space.’ Vondra has now officially apologized to Bulgaria, promising that the work would be removed if Sofia insisted.
Bloomberg notes that a similar furore was caused 12 years ago when the UK government held the EU presidency. A panel of 30 kids was given the job of blue-skying ideas for appropriate symbols for each of the then 15 member states. Italy was represented by a slice of pepperoni pizza – Romano Prodi, the then prime minister, raised the matter at an EU summit, suggesting that Leonardo da Vinci may have been a more suitable choice.
The Museo del Prado in Madrid has teamed up with Google Earth on a project that allows the public to zoom into 14 of the museum’s paintings – including Velázquez’s Las Meninas and Goya’s The Third of May – in minute detail. Javier Rodriguez Zapatero, director of Google Spain, announced on Tuesday that the images are 1,400 times as clear as those rendered with a ten-megapixel camera. The project takes a similar approach to the 16-billion-pixel version of The Last Supper that was made available online in 2007. The images can be seen by downloading Google Earth, then visiting the Prado’s website and clicking on the square with the museum’s name once it comes into focus.
Gavin Turk has accused British art schools of giving young artists false expectations about the likelihood of success. Prospectuses focus undue amounts of attention on famous alumni, he claimed. This comes after intake at art schools has expanded considerably more than universities over the last decade. Between 1998-99 and 2006-07, the number of art students at undergraduate level in the UK rose by 23.6%, compared with 20.6% across all subjects. Richard Noble, head of the art department at Goldsmiths, says that criticisms are ‘an absurd caricature’.
Coosje van Bruggen dies at 66, reportsThe New York Times. The critic, art historian and artist was known for the works she created with husband Claes Oldenburg. ‘I belong to the first Conceptual generation,’ she told Artnews in 1990. ‘I was involved when Jan Dibbets dug up the foundations of the Stedelijk and Ger van Elk made a sidewalk out of bathroom tiles. I wanted to push the parameters of art.’ Van Bruggen maintained an independent career as a critic, writing monographs on her husband’s early work as well as that of Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, Hanne Darboven and Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Bilbao.
Czech architect Jan Kaplický dies at 71 – reports the LA Times. Kaplický, who founded Future Systems in London nearly three decades ago, died after collapsing on a Prague sidewalk. His designs included the Selfridge’s department store in Birmingham (pictured above) and didn’t shy from controversy – none more so than his proposed National Library for Prague (pictured below), which was panned by both critics and politicians. Up until his death he was battling to get the library built.
In other News
Following LA MOCA’s troubles and talk elsewhere of possible widespread deaccessioning, The Art Newspaper conducted a survey of around 40 museums. The survey revealed that most institutions have lost at least 20% of the value of their endowments and that budget cuts of up to 20% were planned for 2009. (Elsewhere , LACMA boss Michael Govan discusses the museum’s deaccessioning.)
The Independentreports that paintings shown at a Melbourne gallery turn out to be by a two-year-old girl.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy promises free entry to France’s museums for under-25s.
Getty researchers discover new ways to date photographs – reports the LA Times.
