While Germany wakes up this Monday to a new government, Berlin’s art scene – presumably – wakes up to a big hangover after a crazily busy art week in the city. When last Thursday mayor Klaus Wowereit participated in a panel discussion entitled ‘Does Berlin need a Kunsthalle?’ at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum (coinciding with myriad art events in Berlin, including the art fair, ‘art berlin contemporary’, and tonnes of gallery openings), he confirmed his intention to build one. But whether he’ll still be concerned with this question in the near future is the big question after yesterday’s general election in Germany. His party, the Social Democrats, lost by a landslide, and in Berlin – where Wowereit still had a comparatively strong standing – it didn’t fare much better.
Of course there are bigger questions now, with a coalition of Merkel’s conservatives and the liberal party now in power. But in any case Wowereit’s coalition partner in the Berlin senate, the leftist Die Linke, was significantly strengthened, and they don’t favour a Kunsthalle at all, playing it off against other budgetary commitments. On top of that, given the sorry state of the SPD, it might well happen that Wowereit will turn to bigger tasks at the head of the party.
Given that the plan for a Kunsthalle still seems written in the stars more than anywhere else, there seemed to be one agreement though between most of the panellists – including artists Monica Bonvicini, Olafur Eliasson and art critic Niklas Maak of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – that a new building, rather than using an existing structure, is the way forward, favouring a more adventurous take on contemporary architecture (and the Humboldthafen, a spot just across from Hamburger Bahnhof, right next to the central train station). The question is whether Maak’s argument against pompous landmark gestures à la the Guggenheim Bilbao, favouring instead structures actually suiting the needs of art (which was also confirmed by Bonvicini and Eliasson), really registered with Wowereit, who hasn’t shown much interest to date in listening to artists or art critics. After the change in the political landscape, this might now happen, in order to boost credibility – or the project will get axed all together.
Meanwhile the Temporäre Kunsthalle – a white cube box built by Viennese architect Adolf Krischanitz – attempts a relaunch after months of struggle. The structure – temporarily established last year in the spot where the Hohenzollern palace is planned to be rebuilt in coming years, and financed almost entirely by one patron, Dieter Rosenkranz – had been used for a string of respectable solo presentations by artists such as Simon Starling or Candice Breitz; but what the programme lacked was a real sense of direction. Maybe that was because it didn’t have a proper director who actually would have some surprising ideas and create a sense of coherence. Instead it had a board of too many advising curators. Now it seems to do better without that board, though still without a proper director; in any case, the concept of asking artists to curate shows could prove more rewarding, starting with a nicely odd show entitled ‘Scorpio’s Garden’ by Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff that makes good spatial use of sculptural works by Julian Göthe or Isa Genzken (to be followed by a show curated by Karin Sander). The outside skin of the building also has been used in a simple, but effective way by Bettina Pousttchi who turned it into a black-and-white, ghostly distorted Echo of the Palace of the Republic demolished not so long ago, right next to the spot.
(pt. 2 soon, followed by a slightly delayed write-up of recent art events in Stockholm)
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.
Hugs in an Absolut W..
