More than 110 of the world’s leading galleries will participate in the fair, with sections for emerging talent and historical art, the Frieze Artist Award commission, Frieze Film, talks and a Frieze Week festival of culture
I recently went to Gwangju following an invitation to be one of the six female Asian artistic directors of next year’s Gwangju Biennale. As I left Beijing for Korea, I was mindful of the disappearance last month of Ai Weiwei, who is the co-artistic director for 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale (which opens on 2 September). There hasn’t yet been any news about Ai’s condition or contact with his family – it’s as if he has fallen into an unfathomable black hole. At this stage, no one seems to know what is the best thing to do.
Though geographically, my trip was extended due to a transfer from Seoul Airport to Gimpo Airport, where domestic flights from Seoul to Gwangju operate frequently. At Gimpo I met up with Mami Kataoka, Chief Curator of Mori Art Museum and a fellow artistic director for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale. Kataoka had flown in from Tokyo, a city still working through the aftermath of the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear accident. In China, people have been gripped by the fear of nuclear radiation blown in by wind. Despite the countries’ proximity, it has been difficult for us to measure the real effect of this unprecedented disaster on the daily lives of the Japanese. ‘How do people cope with the situation?’ I asked Kataoka. Her answer was surprisingly calm: ‘We try to get on with life as much as possible. We are kind of used to it and we still go to work, try to eat outside, and buy in supermarkets so that the economy of the area can maintain a certain level. We are used to earthquakes so we would be having a coffee in the office and the quake happens and we would say, “there it goes again…“’
Her answer struck me deeply, as, in China, the media’s coverage of the disaster-struck area has been ubiquitously one-dimensional; much of the focus has been on the damage caused and the potential harm on us, rather than on the surviving and the everyday. Speaking to Kataoka I felt immediately closer to Japan and more relaxed about being in Korea, even though friends had warned me about the higher risks of nuclear radiation exposure there.
In Gwangju we met up with Nancy Adajania (an independent critic and curator from Mumbai), Wassan Al-Khudhairi (chief curator and acting director of Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha), Kim Sunjung (a Seoul-based independent curator and professor at the Korea National University of Arts), to be presented to the Biennale’s board of directors for approval of our appointments to be the co-artistic directors of the 2012 Gwangju Biennale. We began our three-day site visit at the Gwangju Museum of Art, which is adjacent to the Biennale building in Jungwoi Park. The museum’s programme is a mixture of exhibitions of traditional, modern or contemporary art and craft, as well as local and international projects, arts and cultural events. When we were there, an exhibition of works concerned with the relationship of human beings with the nature by local artists entitled ‘Dream of Butterfly’ was on view. There was also an intriguing documentary exhibition on Choi Seung-hee, a legendary Korean modern dancer that was born in Seoul, went to North Korea as a member of the Workers’ Party of Korea after the second world war but was purged by the party, and disappeared from public view in 1967. She died in 1969.
We also visited one of the downtown venues of the Gwangju Museum of Art, the Sangrok Gallery (above), the building of which was initially established in 1982 as the official residence of a local governor. Overlooking a beautiful forest, this site was launched as a branch gallery of the Gwangju Museum of Art to provide the people in the city with better access to cultural events. There was another nature-inspired exhibition of local Gwangju artists on display. As we continued our trip, we were to discover the dedication of the city to providing local Gwangju artists with possibilities of work and exhibition is remarkably consistent.
While most of the Biennale’s history is recorded in writing, the Daein traditional market in Gwangju is like a living record of the Bokdukbang Project, which was part of the 7th edition of the Biennale. Curated by Sung-Hyen Park, the project invited artists to set up workshops and initiate events throughout the market. Afterwards, the workshops remained and more artists have since rented small spaces inside the market, among vendors of seafood, vegetable, meat, spices and snacks. Subsidized by the local government, the artist studios are cheap and well managed. They are relatively small, cute and pleasant, funky storefronts blended well with the neatly organized market. We learned that the market was on the edge of closing yet the project brought energy and renewed business interest to the area. Soon after, a local magazine also moved into create their basis there (above). The market has also gradually recovered its liveliness and continued to exist.
We stopped at a shop in front of which an old woman was pealing chestnuts. She pointed at a picture of her with Okwui Enwezor hung in front of her shop. Along the way, we also saw colourful seafood stands that had been painted by artists, as well as a tea vendor whose cart had been painted. We were shown around in the market by Seungki Cho, director of Mite-Ugro, a non-profit organization established by local young artists and curators. Occupying a few places including a basement level exhibition space, a rooftop, a street-level office, Mite-Ugro is more like a community centre for artists working in the market and visiting for residencies at their guesthouse. There, we met a group of young artists (from Thailand, Taiwan, Japan as well as other cities in Korea) who were participating in the Asian Young Artist Festival that was on in Gwangju throughout April. Mite-Ugro was showing a range of interactive installations and sculptural works by five artists working locally. On the roof-top of Mite-Ugro, a number of artists was testing a sound-piece based on recording from the market and would be showing in an event at the Gwangju Kunsthalle over the weekend.
Opened during the last Gwangju Biennale in 2010, the Gwangju Kunsthalle (above) is made up of 29 dark grey and orange cargo containers that provide an airy space. It operates as a platform for interactive and performance-based events, including lectures, music, night markets and new-media projects. It’s located in the middle of the site for the Asian Culture Complex that is currently under construction in downtown Gwangju, a key site of the 1980 civil uprising, and is scheduled to open in 2014. Standing on top of the Kunsthalle, the now derelict provincial office building from the 1980 was still in sight, reminding a turning point in the recent history of Korea. When completed, the ambitious compound will be showcasing many aspects of Asian culture, including music, performance and art. The Gwangju Kunsthalle will also terminate its container-based existence and move into a new venue then.
Hopping onto a 45-minute plane ride to Seoul felt as convenient as a taxi ride. Once there, the visits consisted largely of museums, art centres and commercial galleries, and we were exposed to another scene and dynamic that felt more institutionalized and less street-level than that in Gwangju. Our first stop was the state-of-the-art Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (above), a complex of three connected building annexes, designed by Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas. In Museum 1 was a perfect example of traditional Korean art and antiquity, including many national treasures which worked well with the contemporary architecture. In Museum 2, Korean modern art was displayed next to some of the most recognizable international art stars, the usual suspects such as Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Damient Hirst and so on – an attempt at re-examining the relationship of Korean modern and contemporary art to practices elsewhere in the world, an issue that many curators and institutions have consciously addressed and considered in recent exhibition and research projects. Museum 3 housed an exhibition entitled ‘Korean Rhapsody: A Montage of History and Memory’, a very interesting survey of Korean art in the past 100 years that questions and reconsiders the narrative of Korean Modern history and cultural identity. A commendable effort of the museum to raise more attention of modern Korean art history through a socially and politically engaged narrative, the exhibition was however suffering from uneven qualities and works included more for their political and historical relevance than artistic excellence.
Much of the discussion following the visit revealed a certain desire for self-definition in Korean art, both in the Asian and global contexts. The recent market boom of Chinese art had also inflicted a certain anxiety among the Korean art community to reassert its presence and participation in the international art world. Through this exchange, my Asian colleagues also realized how little we actually knew about each other – much less than what we have learned about our Western counterparts. In an attempt to find out about our own relevance in the world, it’s also equally necessary to learn more about our immediate neighbours and our interrelationships. This issue is probably what makes the choice of six Asian curators for the next Gwangju Biennale timely and necessary.
Here is the Guardian‘s blog about Arts Council cuts, with live updates coming in throughout the day.
Also, congratulations on these new NPOs: Auto Italia, Studio Voltaire/IntoArts, Phoenix Arts, Bow Arts Trust, Peer, Stanley Picker Gallery, The Drawing Room, UP Projects, Workplace Gallery, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Spike Island, Project Space Leeds.
UP
Firstsite, Colchester: 28.2%
Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire: 74.8%
Derby Quad: 13.1%
Nottingham Contemporary: 2.3%
The New Art Exchange, Nottingham: 22.6% Art Monthly: 20.9%
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.
Tate – hardly a stranger to controversy – has this week come under attack from two artist groups, their criticisms centered around Tate Modern’s tenth anniversary celebration No Soul for Sale, which was held over the weekend of 14–16 May.
Making A Living, an anonymous organisation describing itself as ‘a discussion group of arts professionals currently active across the UK’, issued an open letter to the Tate challenging the museum’s treatment of artists during the ‘No Soul for Sale’ event.
The group write: ‘It has come to our attention that many participants are not being paid by Tate Modern for their efforts. In fact, most are self-funding their activities throughout the weekend. Tate describes this situation as a “spirit of reciprocal generosity between Tate and the contributors”. But at what point does expected generosity become a form of institutional exploitation? Once it becomes endemic within a large publicly funded art space?’
Arguing that ‘it is complacent for Tate to believe that their position is comparable to ground level arts activity’ and that it is ‘disingenuous’ for the museum to claim that this ‘spirit of reciprocal generosity’ is ‘somehow altruistic or philanthropic’, Making A Living go on to accuse Tate of not having paid artists ‘for some exhibitions, workshops and events, including last year’s Tate Triennial’, although no specific details are given in the letter.
They end their letter by calling on Tate ‘to make public its policy in regard to artists’ fees’.
A group calling itself Liberate Tate have also confronted the museum, distributing a communiqué during the anniversary weekend calling for the Tate to drop its sponsorship agreement with BP, whom they say are ‘creating the largest oil painting in the world’ following the recent spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In their communiqué Liberate Tate argue that ‘every time we step inside the museum Tate makes us complicit with acts that are harming people and creating environmental destruction and climate change, acts that will one day seem as archaic as the slave trade’. Josephine Buoys, a spokesperson for the group quoted in a press release publicizing Liberate Tate’s activities, says that ‘Tate scrubs clean BP’s public image with the detergent of cool progressive art’. The group state that ‘In March 2010, Tate Modern ran an eco-symposium, Rising to the Climate Change Challenge: Artists and Scientists Imagine Tomorrow’s World on the same day that Tate Britain was celebrating 20 years of BP sponsorship with one of its ‘BP Saturdays’. Incensed by this censorship and hypocrisy, participants in the symposium called for a vote: 80% of the audience agreed that BP sponsorship be dropped by 2012’. Liberate Tate call on the museum ‘to become a responsible, ethical and truly sustainable organisation for the 21st century and drop its sponsorship by oil companies.’
Liberate Tate’s communiqué can be read in full here and Making A Living’s open letter can be found here
The artist list for the seventh edition of the British Art Show – which takes place every five years and tours to four different cities across the UK – has been announced. Curated by Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton (a contributing editor of frieze) , this year’s BAS opens at Nottingham Contemporary (pictured above) and will tour to the Hayward Gallery, then venues in Glasgow and Plymouth. This is apparently the first time in 20 years that the exhibition – which was originally intended to take art to ‘the regions‘ – will be coming to London.
The BAS has kind of a spotty history: the first edition, which opened in Sheffield in 1979 and was selected by the FT‘s art critic, William Packer, was criticized for its predilection for established white male artists; in 1995, a large portion of the show was seen as being too closely aligned with Charles Saatchi’s collection. As Neil Mulholland wrote in friezefour years ago:
‘An attempt to celebrate the resurgence of a ‘British’ art that had allegedly been repressed by the Modern Movement, the BAS was part of a reactionary Postmodernism that included Margaret Thatcher’s sabre-rattling, Merchant–Ivory costume dramas, Peter Fuller’s young-fogey Marxism and working-class girls with Princess Di haircuts. Such dusty ‘British’ values were, of course, specifically rooted in a south-eastern English aristo-bucolic mindset. This arrière-garde was quickly usurped by the New Object Sculpture and New Image of the 1980s (BAS 2) and the Brit Art of the 1990s (BAS 4).’
I’m more hopeful about this year’s edition: the artist list is strong, if low on big surprises. A few quick observations: while the gender balance isn’t quite the 50/50 of Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker’s BAS 6, it’s not bad, and there’s a definite tendency towards film (Duncan Campbell, Emily Wardill, Kirschner & Panos, Otolith, Luke Fowler) and sculpture (Karla Black, Steve Claydon, Roger Hiorns, Ian Kiaer etc) that seems to me fairly reflective of what’s going on in the UK at the moment, despite the relative lack of performance. There are some crossovers with the Tate Triennial – Charles Avery, Spartacus Chetwynd, Matthew Darbyshire, Nathaniel Mellors, David Noonan, Olivia Plender, Tris Vonna-Michell – but not as many as may have been expected (surprising that Ryan Gander hasn’t been featured in either?). The best-represented gallery is, by my count, Hotel, who must be happy with four of their artists on the list (Blightman, Campbell, Claydon and Noonan), while a few prominent London galleries are nowhere to be seen.
This year’s show is subtitled ‘In the Days of the Comet’, after H.G. Wells’ 1906 novel of the same name. According to the curators: ‘The story charts the appearance of a comet over the UK that releases a green gas creating a “great change” in all mankind, turning it away from war and exploitation towards rationalism and a heightened appreciation of beauty. We are interested in the recurrent nature of the comet as a symbol of how each version of the present collides with the past and the future and the work of the artists in British Art Show 7, in many different ways, contest assumptions of how “the now” might be understood.’
Follow links below to articles from the frieze archive:
Luiza Nader (University of Warsaw and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, 2009) / Lukasz Ronduda and Piotr Uklanski (Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw)
Wim Delvoye Cloaca (2010)
Julius Popp Bit.Fall VI (2010)
