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
The shortlist for the second annual Jarman Award has been announced. Launched last year, the winner of the inaugural award was Luke Fowler. The 2009 shortlisted artists are below; follow the links for more about each of them from the frieze archives:
Aside from a useful £10,000 cash prize, the winner of the 2009 award will be commissioned to make four films for Channel 4’s ‘Three Minute Wonder’ series, which will be screened next spring. (Luke Fowler’s can be watched here.)
Included in the recent group exhibition ‘Against Interpretation’ at Studio Voltaire, as well as Nought to Sixty at the ICA last year, Sutcliffe is perhaps the least known of the artists on the list – athough he has a solo show at Cubitt coming up later this year. Seers’ work was included in Altermodern and had a recent show at Matt’s Gallery, while Kirschner & Panos and Martin have had exhibitions at the Chisenhale in the past year.
The winner of the 2009 Jarman Award (coordinated by Film London) will be announced at the Whitechapel Gallery on 22 September, following a short series of screenings at the CCA, Glasgow (10 September), Picture This, Bristol (16 September) and Whitechapel Gallery (19 September).
‘If anyone is on twitter, please set your location to Tehran and your time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/timezone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut access to the Internet down. Cut & paste & pass it on.’
An article from The Wall Street Journal on the sophisticated software provided by Siemens and Nokia that allows the regime in Tehran to monitor the Internet appears here.
This is an interesting article on the whole Tiananmen + Twitter = Tehran equation, on The Daily Beast.
One quick thought on the phenomenon that we get to see television news reports about the situation in Iran with newsroom commentators doing solemn voice-overs to chaotic, frantic YouTube clips. What is almost as disturbing as the footage as such is, when like in this CNN report on the killing of the young student Neda Soltani, it gets edited into loops and odd tracking movements – especially around 1 min 30 into the clip – that are like sadistic scans of the image itself.
Obviously the editing has to do with the lack of footage; same image over and over. But the question as to whether that either leads to numbness or to awareness is besides the point, this really depends – in the spirit of Susan Sontag – on the willingness and ability of the spectator to become a witness. And yet this short news clip shows how this process is complicated, and effectively hindered, if the one who presents and comments on the footage is not the reporter or photographer or camera man, but someone who has no access to its source, and thus reduces a political situation to an exercise in almost ritualist gawking.
It may be a glimpse of hope that information can be spread despite of strong forces trying to shut them down; these images and scenes testify to occurrences of people being injured or killed. But they obviously don’t provide any insight as to what exactly happened; no context, no witness account in the images themselves. And that gets a little lost in the jubilation for the ‘revolution being tweeted’.
As much as the nature of this kind of footage is inevitably a result of the danger and heat of the moment, it also achingly reminds you of the importance of experienced on-the-ground reporters; or – if reporters are prevented from being on the ground as in Iran – the need for social movements to quickly develop a journalistic language, as rudimentary as it might be, that doesn’t leave it all to the newsroom editor who helplessly tries to apply streamlined TV parameters to anarchic Internet sources.
Sat in the cinema the other day, waiting to see Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, I caught an advertisement for Absolut Vodka. In 60 syrupy and platitudinous seconds, we see a sequence of common transactions such as buying a bus ticket or giving money to a busker. Instead of exchanging money, a hug or a gentle peck on the cheek is given for each service or item bought. The range of people and locations is demographically and geographically balanced, in the heavy-handed, focus-group driven sort of way that only expensive advertisements seem able to achieve: good-looking white 20-somethings buying cinema tickets, an elderly Asian man (included, it seems, to represent some notion of kindly serenity in the midst of poverty) hiring out bicycles on a hot dusty road, two motherly Scandinavian-looking women in a market, hugging each other as one hands the other a great big fish. The colour palette of the film is graded in mute, pale tones – the sort that seem intended to convey artsy sensitivity, or, in their washed-out colouring, careworn memories. Accompanying the ad is a wretchedly cloying version of ‘Money Makes the World Go Round’; all cute electronic burbles, sickly sweet female vocals and bloodless, indie-ish guitar riffs. Worst of all, the final icky chorus of the song sounds as if it’s sung by a small child, presumably far too young to consume the gut-rottingly strong spirit the ad is selling.
As the film trailers continued, I thought about how the Absolut advertisement is the just the latest in a line of commercials released over the last few years – including the ‘bouncing balls’ (below) and ‘paint’ ads for Sony Bravia, Ford Mondeo’s floating cars, the rainbow and dance films for Orange, and Barclaycard’s rather more self-consciously bathetic urban waterslide – that form something of an advertising subgenre. Each ad presents a scenario in which we see a number of supposedly ordinary people, in everyday situations, either directly engaged with, or witnessing, some form of extraordinary activity or phenomena; millions of small, coloured balls inexplicably bouncing down the hills of San Francisco; cars floating from balloons above city streets; a household chore that turns into a graceful ballet across sun-dappled lawns; the inhabitants of a local community running a relay race through their streets with rainbow-coloured streamers. Invariably accompanying these ‘magic-realist-lite’ scenarios are emotively epic or gently melancholy songs designed to ramp-up the levels of pathos in the ad. They function as a kind of signal jamming device that helps detach our emotions from the product in question, and reattach our feelings about the brand to some woolly, warm, vague notions of innocent creativity, big ‘life moments’ (birth, marriage, having kids – no death though), community spiritedness and global harmony. Sat in front of the big screen, I slurped on my lemonade and wondered just what it was that these commercials were trying to convey. ‘Don’t worry!’ they seem to be saying. ‘Cars, mobile phones, banks and mass-produced spirits are just like animals, trees and fun, creative, homespun games with your neighbours – they are your friends!’
Eventually the ads ended, I wolfed down the last of my chocolate Maltesers, and settled into my seat to enjoy the main feature. Synecdoche, New York revolves around theatre director Caden Cotard (played by the ever brilliant Philip Seymour Hoffman), a man estranged from his artist wife, Adele, and their daughter, Olive, and in ill health. Covered in pustules, his eyesight malfunctioning, and his self-confidence atomized into a million shards of neuroses, Cotard is at the end of his tether when, out of the blue, he receives a MacArthur Fellowship – nicknamed the ‘genius’ grant – and a huge sum of money with which to work on any project he pleases, no strings attached. Given this new lease of life, he decides to embark upon a hugely ambitious theatrical masterpiece, which he intends to be ‘a work of brutal honesty’. Gathering an ever-expanding cast of actors in a vast warehouse in New York, Cotard sets about reconstructing key episodes in his life. He wanders through an increasingly elaborate replica of New York that fills the warehouse (and which, in turn, is itself replicated, like a Russian doll, inside the warehouse), watching his life being replayed over and over, as he gives actors notes on their performances, analyses his mistakes and regrets, and – in a Borgesian twist – ultimately begins to write himself out of his own life, deferring decisions to those actors playing him. If synecdoche is a literary device whereby a part is used to represent the whole, the ‘parts’ in this particular synecdoche – the actors – literally start to become the whole of Cotard’s life.
What, you’re probably wondering, do my idle ruminations on modern commercials have to do with Synecdoche, New York? Well, the first thing that struck me about the film – as with those of his sometime collaborator, the director Michel Gondry – is how much of a similar aesthetic it shares with the magic-realist-lite advertising subgenre, albeit with a far darker twist. As with Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, co-written with Kaufman and artist Pierre Bismuth), The Science of Sleep (2006) and Be Kind Rewind (2008), Synecdoche, New York is a big-budget film that takes everyday characters, in supposedly ordinary environments, and subjects them to some form of pop-surrealist device. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for instance, Gondry tells the story of two lovers whose memories of a failed affair are scrubbed clean by a brain-wiping machine, and in Be Kind Rewind, that of a man whose body becomes magnetized, thus erasing the contents of all the VHS tapes in the beleaguered video rental shop in which he works, resulting in all its employees having to make their own lovably low-fi versions of all the shop’s missing blockbuster films. In Synecdoche, New York we are first shown Cotard’s creatively frustrating life in suburban Schenectady, before his theatrical Gesamkunstwerk is introduced and we enter his world of actors playing actors acting themselves, and the crazily huge New-York-within-New-York theatre set. I don’t mean to suggest that Kaufman and Gondry’s films are ideological peas-in-a-pod with the magic-realism-lite ads. Their films are, by-and-large, old-fashioned stories about love and loss wrapped up in pop-surrealist form. What is curious, however, is just that: why, now, is this kind of pop-surrealism so popular in cinema and commercial films?
The magic-realism-lite advertising subgenre tends to use three modes, often at the same time. The first is grand spectacle (Ford Mondeo cars floating from balloons, for instance), the second a form of low-fi, homespun whimsy (for example, the rainbow streamers in the Orange ad), and the third – usually by way of music – a kind of epic, epiphanic atmosphere. Both Kaufman and Gondry’s films use similar strategies. (Gondry, interestingly, made a name for himself directing television commercials, and a number of highly acclaimed music videos for the likes of Daft Punk, Radiohead and The White Stripes). Their films oscillate between two poles of spectacular visual drama (in Synecdoche, New York, for instance, we see stunning wide-shots of airships floating slowly through the warehouse, across replicas of New York tenements) and sentimental charm (_Be Kind Rewind_ gives us whimsically homemade interpretations of Ghostbusters or Robocop, whilst Synecdoche, New York depicts Cotard’s artistic masterpiece being lovingly constructed by theatre craftsmen, an old-fashioned experimental theatre world in which technicians and actors labour for nearly 20 years with little complaint, as if such hubristic projects were as commonplace as cars floating on balloons or high-rises exploding with paint). They also make strong use of music. Sony Bravia’s ‘bouncing balls’ commercial was given extra emotive heft through its use of José González’ 2003 acoustic cover of ‘Heartbeats’ by The Knife, and the Orange advert, featuring a couple dancing through their garden, ratcheted up the poignancy levels with Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’ (1978). Grammy award-winning composer Jon Brion has supplied the soundtrack to both Eternal Sunshine… (which also made bittersweet use of the upbeat ‘Mr Blue Sky’, 1977, by Electric Light Orchestra) and Synecdoche, New York; his slow, mournful jazz ballad ‘Song for Caden’ shuffles through much of the film’s second half, juxtaposing melancholy torch-song intimacy against the surreal vistas of Cotard’s theatre set, a heartstring-tugging combination that helps maintain a constant sense of the romantic tragedy of Cotard’s epic but heroic failure as artist, father and husband. (This romanticism is further emphasized by the architecture of his warehouse set, which is that of a notably idealized NYC: brownstones, old warehouses and chicly decrepit apartments. This is the New York of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, 1977, or Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, 2001, the kind of fictionalized New York analyzed here in frieze by Steven Stern).
A number of commentators have remarked upon the bizarre similarity between Synecdoche, New York and writer and artist Tom McCarthy’s 2005 novel Remainder, in which a man receives a vast insurance payout after a freak accident (the equivalent of Cotard’s MacArthur Fellowship windfall), and with the money creates a huge theatrical set in south London where he employs actors and technicians to perpetually reconstruct and re-enact half-remembered vignettes from his life. Kaufman denies having read or even heard of Remainder whilst writing his film, and it’s not for me to say what grist the similarities between the novel and the movie might or might not provide McCarthy for his long-standing interests in repetition, duplication, authenticity and fakery. However, that two works of art so invested in ideas of reconstruction and simulacra should themselves turn out so close to each other is almost too neat to be true. What Synecdoche, New York certainly reminded me of was Alain Resnais’ astonishing 1977 film Providence, (pictured above) in which a dying writer, played by John Gielgud, struggles with both his haemorroids and the plot of his final novel. As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that his nocturnal mutterings and cursings are directly linked to the strange, emotionally cold scenarios being played out by Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn and David Warner against the backdrop of an un-remarked-upon terrorist war, in a non-specific European city (one minute it could be Vienna, the next, London) and all with the help of heroic quantities of chilled white wine. (If you’ve ever tried to play the Withnail and I drinking game, in which viewers match the on-screen characters drink-for-drink, then, I am reliably informed, you’ll probably also enjoy Providence.) Aside from the central ideas of paternalism, creative control and personal determinism explored in Providence – Bogarde, Burstyn and Warner turn out to be Gielgud’s children as well as his creative muses – Synecdoche, New York also borrows from Providence the idea of events played out amidst un-remarked-upon social turmoil (Alan Rudolph’s 1985 film Trouble in Mind also uses a similarly unexplained martial law situation as a backdrop to its plot.). As Cotard and his cast spend year-upon-year immersed in their vast recreation of New York, bomb explosions start to be heard in the background and troops begin to fill the ‘real’ New York streets outside the warehouse, as if to emphasize not only the enormous length of time Cotard spends developing his play (at one point an extra laments ‘When are we going to get an audience in here? It’s been 17 years…’), but also his self-absorption: society descends into violent conflict outside, whilst the artist ascends further up the backside of endless self-analysis, his giant theatre set essentially becoming one big therapy session.
Unfortunately, Cotard’s endless self-analysis is just what prevents Synecdoche, New York from ever achieving much beyond a rather pedestrian level of faux-profundity. Early in the film, as we watch his marriage fall apart, and his health deteriorate, Cotard’s abject self-pity is balanced against amusingly disinterested and disdainful hospital specialists, or the shameless money-spinning of his sexually unhinged therapist. Although Kaufman does not go for out-and-out laughs in the same way he did with his screenplays for Being John Malkovitch (1999) and Adaptation (2002), there are some nice moments of levity, one of my favourites being the hilariously pretentious attempt, by his ex-wife’s American lover, at affecting a German accent after they move to Europe to become the toast of Berlin’s art scene. Over the final third of the film, however, as Cotard is surrounded by people eager to please and take part in his life-imitating-life project, Kaufman lets the dramatic tension go slack, leaving the visually impressive set to shore up trite ruminations on self-determination such as ‘There are millions of people in this world … and none of them are extras. They are all leads in their own story.’ The more interesting possibilities offered up by the script – such as the moments when actors start interacting with the actual characters they are supposed to be playing – are passed over in favour of too many repetitious scenes of Cotard agonizing over his personal and creative neuroses, ultimately rendering him a distinctly unsympathetic, cartoonishly tortured character. As a study of creative narcissism, it works all too well – each character is entirely wrapped up in themselves, unable to communicate with those around them, trapped in prisons of over-privileged self-regard. You sense that if you were to have a conversation with Cotard, he’d be the kind of artist who would never ask you any questions about yourself.
The subject of artistic hubris is certainly interesting, as is the idea of a life that begins to imitate art. However, if Kaufman has missed a trick with Synecdoche, New York, it is in tying these threads into a reflection on the mechanisms of spectacle. The film, for instance, glosses over Cotard’s desire to make a huge theatre piece that shows ‘the truth’, and the implicit assumption that a great work of art necessarily needs to be on a grand scale. It misses the chance to use Cotard’s play as a means to look at how such contemporary phenomena as television talent shows, celebrity gossip magazines or behind-the-scenes documentaries create a false sense of media transparency, whilst simultaneously setting up a false sense of accessibility and ‘you too can be famous’, individualist entitlement. Instead, Kaufman remains too much in thrall to Cotard’s old-fashioned auteur perspective, and as such gets stuck paddling around some rather wanly existential ideas about responsibility and destiny. In Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s undeniably fertile imagination seems to be adrift, like cars floating from balloons, or thousands of balls bouncing wildy down the street.
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.
‘Relational aesthetics’; like it or loathe it, the term coined in 1998 by curator Nicolas Bourriaud has become something of an industry standard. Its meaning used and abused in all manner of ways, the phrase nevertheless seems to have stuck as baggy shorthand for describing a variety of approaches to the way art engages with the broader world. Just how ‘Altermodern’, Bourriaud’s latest unifying theory of art, would manifest itself has therefore been the subject of much anticipation in the build-up to the Tate Triennial 2009, which opened in early February. The merits and demerits of the exhibition and its theme will no doubt be debated at length in the specialist art press. I won’t add my own assessment of the show here – a review will appear in the April edition of frieze – but the speculation surrounding ‘Altermodern’ within the UK art world has led me to wonder what ripples the exhibition might have made in the mainstream British media. Newspaper critics have access to far greater readerships than the specialist art press, and the occasion of large exhibitions such as the Triennial make it worth taking a moment to look at how current developments in art are interpreted and represented to a broader general public.
London was buried beneath a blanket of snow the day ‘Altermodern’ opened. Blizzards had brought the capital to a temporary and beautifully muted standstill. But soon the snow started to melt and the capital’s newspaper art critics began trudging all over ‘Altermodern’ with great big, grit- and sludge-covered boots. Anyone familiar with the art criticism in UK newspapers won’t be surprised by the cynicism with which the Triennial was greeted. With a few notable exceptions, critics tend to use contemporary art as a lightning rod for their disdain of a particular bracket of artists with high media profiles, and anything with a whiff of financial profligacy or conceptualism about it – often all three. The tools of their trade are sweeping generalizations and one-liner insults, thrown left, right and centre with little justification through example or description of the works under attack. Although it does my blood pressure no good, I find this remarkably consistent antipathy interesting it raises a broad range of issues: elitism and populism, specialism and accessibility, models of critical authority, the responsibility of critics, what expectations there are about art’s role in British society (this is a culture that has historically preferred the literary and performing arts over the plastic ones), cultural stereotypes, money, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism.
Reviews of ‘Altermodern’ have been mixed to say the least. Daily Telegraph critic Richard Dorment, whose apoplectic reaction to the Turner Prize last year was so violent it seemed he was in danger of hospitalizing himself, seemed sufficiently engaged by the Triennial to end his decidedly undecided review by stating: ‘My experience of the Triennial wasn’t nearly as satisfying [as ‘Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East’ at the Saatchi Gallery, also reviewed by Dorment], but I’ll return again and again. How’s that for a back-handed compliment?’ Charles Darwent in The Independent , was more positive: ‘some of the work in this show is extraordinarily good’, and with the odd caveat – ‘For a theory that spurns boundaries, Bourriaud’s seems strangely boundaried’ – concludes that it is also ‘a lot of fun.’ Even The Evening Standard’sBen Lewis – normally outspoken in his suspicion of contemporary art – was broadly enthusiastic, declaring that Bourriaud ‘has performed the ultimate curatorial trick, challenging intellectually while entertaining theatrically.’
The Observer‘s Laura Cumming – who recently stated that ‘it is obvious to anyone with eyes that art has become more vulgar and rebarbative during our lifetime, as well as slicker and quicker’ (I’d argue that depends on where you look and how much time you spend looking) – began her review by giving Bourriaud’s new theory the benefit of the doubt, but concluded that it ‘does not work as an idea so much as a web of observations, a web with a weaver at its centre’, which actually seemed to me like a workable definition of what an ‘idea’ is. Theory aside, with the exceptions of Darren Almond, Marcus Coates and Tacita Dean, she did not like any of the actual work in the Triennial, branding Frank Ackermann’s work ‘teeth-grittingly awful’, Katie Patterson’s ‘a dead bore’, Walead Beshty’s box sculptures ‘broken in transit’, Olivia Plender’s installation ‘worryingly simple-minded’, Matthew Darbyshire’s work ‘pastiche décor’ and Gustav Metzger’s liquid crystal projections ‘monotonous’. As for Simon Starling, she ‘couldn’t even begin to describe the inanity’ of his work. But in each case why? Midway through her review, I began to wish she would expand on these remarks: little more than a sentence was spent discussing each artist. Cumming’s off-hand dismissals were, in her own words, ‘worryingly simple-minded’ and ‘monotonous.’
The Guardian’sAdrian Searle, respected within the art world for being the most measured and imaginative of British newspaper art critics, opened his review with an immediate assault on Shezad Dawood, Spartacus Chetwynd and Nathaniel Mellors (an artist who Searle seemed to mistake for two different actors in Mellors’ film and who Dorment, in his review, confused with eminent designer David Mellor). These opening blows would easily have led one to assume ‘Altermodern’ was in for a kicking. Yet, with spleen vented and after (by his own admission) a surprising tangential leap onto the subject of WG Sebald midway through his review, Searle went on to argue that ‘The show has its longueurs, but it is also the richest and most generous Tate Triennial to date. It is also the best-installed. There are clean, elegant rooms as well as clutter, a wide range of objects and installations, dramatic turns and quiet spaces.’
The Times’ Rachel Campbell-Johnston didn’t seem to mind certain aspects of the show, at one point giving the impression of quite enjoying what she understood to be ‘an iconoclastic show’. Unlike Searle, however, she only seemed to see junk and clutter: ‘After Brit Art with its easy one-liners, this confusing junk room of images feels full of possibilities.’ Ultimately, the range of work on display proved wearisome for her. ‘This show is all about distraction. Without any one focus, the eye hops restlessly about. The thoughts shuffle about in your head. At their most engaging, they are making unexpected connections. […] More often they drift off bored by conglomerations of clutter that, quite frankly, feel about as fascinating as a file of student research notes.’ Campbell-Johnston was highly critical of Bourriaud’s theoretical terminology, citing a rather convoluted sentence in his Triennial catalogue essay as an example of the curator’s highfalutin’ approach to art. Yet despite this, towards the end of her review, with no description of what the work in question actually looked like, she slipped in an assessment of Rachel Harrison’s work written in classic art jargon: ‘Rachel Harrison challenges our systems of classification and disrupts the orders of progression.’ Whose systems? What classifications – Dewey Decimal? Premiere League Football? And what on earth are the mysterious ‘orders of progression’? Did someone mention ‘easy one-liners’?
Campbell-Johnston’s review was mild by comparison with Waldemar Januszczak’s bilious and hectoring Sunday Times article. Januszczak opened his review – headlined ‘The Tate: pompous, arrogant and past it?’ – by reminding readers of his critical qualifications: ‘I love modern art. It’s been my life, my career, my sustenance. My wife is a modern artist […]. My children have been fed a diet of modern art ever since they opened their eyes. […] So I’m experienced at modern art; I’m supportive of it; I embrace it. If, therefore, I suggest that it appears to have reached the end of its journey and has begun annoying the bejesus out of me, you can be confident it’s serious.’ He then put the boot into Martin Creed’s recent commission for Tate Britain – Work No. 850 (2008), which involved people running the length of the Duveen Gallery at 30 second intervals each day – describing it as ‘meaningless’ and ‘a gross waste of effort’ – hardly supportive or embracing. (‘Meaningless’ is the favourite lazy put-down of the reactionary art critic, but please will someone explain how anything premeditated such as an art work, whether good or bad, can be entirely without meaning?) For Januszczak, Creed’s work ‘brought into focus how flaccid and indulgent and spoilt and grandiloquent and aimless and bloated and, yes, degenerate British art has become.’ It is sad to see a critic so loudly trumpet his expertise but then use the word ‘degenerate’ to describe an entire nation’s contemporary art. Anyone who has studied 20th-century history will know that ‘degenerate’ is the word used by the Nazis to describe the art included in their 1937 exhibition ‘Entartete Kunst’ (Degenerate Art), a show that featured, amongst many others, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, George Grosz and Piet Mondrian. I would not for a moment argue that this suggests anything sinister about Januszczak’s political beliefs, but I do believe a writer should be responsibly aware of a word’s resonance rather than just its dramatic effect. ‘Degenerate’ is not a term to be used lightly. He declares the art that developed around commercial art gallery Lisson in the early 1980s, along with that of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, to be the last ‘two truly significant modern movements’ to have come out of Britain, and contextualizes them as working in opposition to the Tate, which he conspiratorially denounces as ‘a cultural despot that has the government’s ear’. Januszczak argues that ‘Altermodern’ ‘makes an unanswerable case for the proposition that British modern art is clapped out’, and that the exhibition bored him, citing the inclusion of a number of long video pieces as particularly grievous in this regard. What’s wrong with something being long? One of the guilty films he mentions – Handsworth Songs by Black Audio Film Collective – is not part of ‘Altermodern’ but a separate display of new acquisitions of British art by the Tate. It was also made 23 years ago.
Januszczak’s article contains a comparison that is worthy of mention. At one point he describes Nathaniel Mellors’ Giantbum film as ‘seemingly interminable.’ He goes on to mention the work of Iranian artist Tala Madani, currently exhibiting in the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Unveiled’ show, saying that her paintings display ‘such astonishing courage and punchiness, the Middle East could be a significant location’ for new developments in art. (In the context of art exhibited under the banner of being Iranian, the word ‘courage’ here has patronising Orientalist overtones, almost suggesting that Madani goes to her studio everyday in downtown Tehran hiding paintings under her burqa.) The print edition of Januszczak’s piece was illustrated with a large image from Mellors’ Giantbum and Madani’s painting Holy Light. What neither Januszczak nor the newspaper’s picture researchers evidently know is that Mellors and Madani are partners, and that they exchange ideas and opinions about each other’s work on a daily basis. Admittedly, I have the advantage of insider information here and there is no reason why The Sunday Times should know this too, but the irony of this juxtaposition reinforces the impression that some of our newspaper critics are out of touch with the ways in which young, internationally mobile artists today maintain sophisticated dialogues across a range of media. Things have moved on since the days of the Lisson sculptors and yBas.
Likes and dislikes were one thing, but the facile cultural stereotyping that certain reviewers stooped to in order to make their points was downright ugly. Here’s how Campbell-Johnston saw fit to broach the Triennial’s theme in the Times: ‘So what will this new Altermodern era entail? Don’t expect the catalogue to help you. Bourriard is a Frenchman. He has svelte Gallic looks and a Left Bank aroma of Gauloises. And he seems to have been brought up on Baudrillard and Foucault in the way that the rest of us were brought up on our ABC.’ Does that really deserve to be called art criticism? Darwent described him as ‘co-founder of Paris’s impenetrably au courant Palais de Tokyo’. Translate the French and ask yourself what being impenetrably up-to-date actually means? In explaining his understanding of the term ‘altermodern’, Lewis of the Evening Standard opined that ‘The theory is complex and this is an incredibly uneven exhibition that, like the mind of any French theorist, contains flashes of genius, passages of stomach-churning political correctness, a bit of bean-bag art (art that you enjoy while lying on the bean-bags placed in front of it), and an afternoon’s worth of artists’ movies (some stunning). The whole mélange is served up with the thick buttery sauce of French art theory, and the catalogue essays will give anyone except a curatorial studies MA student a crise de foie.’ I wondered what, based on this line of thinking, someone from outside the UK might say the mind of ‘any’ British theorist contains – an Art & Language catalogue, ten pints of lager and a curry? After the laboured references to French cuisine, he went on to assert that ‘The weakness of Bourriaud’s theory — and of all French theory — is that there’s too much philosophy and not much historical perspective.’ I bow before Lewis’s encyclopedic knowledge of continental philosophy. All French theory? Really? I’d love to see him argue that down at La Sorbonne.
Jonathan Jones, reporting on the behind-the-scenes preparations for the Triennial for The Guardian observed of Bourriaud: ‘He is very French, by which I mean he is unapologetic about big ideas.’ It may be a back-handed compliment, but it nails a certain aspect of the critical hostility to Bourriaud. Skepticism towards ‘big ideas’ can, in some cases, be evidence of a healthy and down-to-earth pragmatism. The flipside, however, is a paranoia about pretension – an anti-intellectual fear of somehow being ‘caught out’ by ‘big ideas’ if, at a later date, they are demonstrated to be worthless. (It’s a position not too far different from the tabloid newspapers complaining that contemporary art is the result of a big conspiracy at the expense of some mythic Great British Public.)
One possible reason for the skepticism towards theory, I think, lies in our education system. In British universities, the teaching of philosophy is dominated by Anglo-American schools of thought, with logical positivists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and AJ Ayer still casting long shadows. Continental philosophy is more likely found in art schools or social science faculties than it is in English and History departments. Anglo-American empiricism does not rub along well with Lacanian psychoanalysis or Deleuzian rhizomes. Of course, this does not fully account for the anti-Gallic subtext running through some of the ‘Altermodern’ reviews – you probably have to go back to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 for clues to that – but it might suggest a reason why British critics are not naturally pre-disposed to Bourriaud’s theoretical framing of art.
Of course you can say that these critics are just doing their job – that it’s all part of the game, of playing the traditional role of bourgeois critic outraged at the excesses of the avant-garde. Maybe they’re being unfair or maybe Bourriaud’s show just doesn’t do it for everyone – either way a few superficial comments about Left Bank intellectuals and lengthy videos aren’t going to stop curators and artists going about the work they believe in. But, as a reader, I felt I learnt little from them about what the show constituted. Scant information was given about simple things such as how many artists were in the show or how many were British and how many were from other countries. Only the most cursory descriptions of what works looked like were given. If a piece of art is really so bad, please tell me why properly – I’d rather read a well-reasoned critique of a work than a haughty barb.
In one sense, I sympathize with these critics. It can be extremely hard to review big sprawling group shows for a print publication where there is only so much page space allotted to each article, and I have probably wronged the odd artist myself by paring a sentence down to the bare bones in order to squeeze more words in. Editors give writers a maximum number of words they can use, and to discuss the work of nearly 30 artists with equal depth is often impossible. And all this is before the newspaper’s subeditors have attacked it with their scissors. The physical restrictions of print publications can make the coverage of contemporary models of exhibition-making (where they include many artists and with different parts of the show occurring in different locations and at different times) a little dysfunctional. Yet the reviews discussed above are by no means brief; the shortest is Charles Darwent’s in The Independent at 743 words, and the longest is Ben Lewis’s in The Evening Standard, which reaches a healthy 1603. The majority are longer than the reviews you’d find in most art magazines. The argument about lack of space therefore begins to look a bit shaky – these are hardly comparable with the short, sharp notices that theatre plays receive after their opening night.
Whether ‘Altermodern’ is successful or a theoretical hotch-potch is almost beside the point here. These critics are perfectly entitled to their tastes and opinions, and I don’t believe contemporary art is beyond criticism. But they have to remember that their readers trust them as experts in their fields. Critics have responsibility to these readers – the responsibility of arguing why something is bad, rather than dismissing it with one withering phrase. The responsibility of conveying facts. The responsibility of describing to readers what a work looks like or actually taking the time to sit through an artists video, no matter how interminable it may be, before criticizing it. The responsibility of balancing skepticism with open-mindedness. The responsibility of being sensitive to someone’s gender, race, age, sexual orientation or nationality rather than using them as an excuse for smuggling prejudice and cheap jibes in under the banner of art criticism.
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.
A few thoughts on the idea of humility halfway between art and politics: Obama’s inaugural address started like this: ‘I stand here today humbled by the task before us’; in his inaugural address of January 2001 George W. Bush’s stated that he wanted to be ‘viewed as a humble person that is not judgmental’.
Fred Barnard’s drawing of Dickens’ Uriah Heep (1870s)
Since enlightenment, the idea of humility is anything but undisputed: from François de la Rochefoucauld who asserted that ‘pride is never better disguised and more deceptive than when it is hidden behind the mask of humility’ to Karl Marx’ statement that, while Christianity preached ‘submissiveness and humbleness’, the proletariat needs ‘its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.’ Charles Dickens’ Uriah Heep, the scheming antagonist of David Copperfield (1850), incessantly saying he was a ‘very ‘umble person’, is the epitome of false modesty.
In Modernism, heroic tabula rasa attitudes allowed for anything but attitudes of humility. There are a few exceptions, like T.S. Eliot’s famous line that ‘humility is endless’, which acknowledges that the idea that age brings wisdom is deceptive (i.e. the humility is vis-à-vis the shock of realizing that knowledge can become worthless). Or in fact, as Jennifer Kabat points out in her piece about the influence of Depression-era posters on current advertising campaigns, the exception of artists, employed by the state, seeing themselves in the service of the common cause. But I guess as a movement, it wasn’t until the 1960s that some – not all! – parts of minimalist, proto-conceptual, post-beat, collectivist-hippie attitudes brought in the idea that the artist’s work can be a humble reflection of the everyday, from Yvonne Rainer’s integration of simple gestures into dance moves to Arte Povera artist Luciano Fabro, who in 1967 covered a piece of floor he cleaned with a square of newspaper pieces, in reference to simple housekeeping habits from his village (_Pavimento (tautologia)_, Floor, tautology). The idea was, simply, that it was about the work, not the artist; as Nietzsche (of all thinkers) put it: ‘There is true modesty (that is the knowledge that we are not the works we create).’
Which brings me back to Obama’s ‘humble’ vs. Bush’s ‘humble’: Obama’s sentence acknowledges that it’s not about him, but about the task, and everyone; whereas Bush, much in line with Uriah Heep, made a statement about himself…
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.
Hugs in an Absolut W..
